The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  In other respects Sunday offered nothing out of the ordinary, apart perhaps from the meals, which, since they could hardly be more sumptuous, were at least marked by a refinement in the cuisine. (Dinner included a chaudfroid of chicken, garnished with shrimps and halved cherries; ices with pastries in little baskets of spun sugar; even fresh pineapple.) After drinking his beer that evening, Hans Castorp felt more exhausted, chilled, and torpid than on any day thus far; he said good night to his cousin a little before nine, quickly slipped in under his comforter, pulling it up over his chin, and fell dead asleep.

  But the very next day, his first Monday up here as a visitor, brought another standard deviation from the routine—and that was one of the lectures Dr. Krokowski gave in the dining hall every two weeks before the entire German-speaking, nonmoribund, adult population of the Berghof. As Hans Castorp learned from his cousin, this was one of a series of popular-scientific talks presented under the general title “Love as a Force Conducive to Illness.” This instructive entertainment took place after second breakfast, and, as Joachim likewise informed him, it was not permitted, or was at the very least frowned upon, for anyone to absent himself—and it was therefore considered an amazing license that Settembrini, who surely was fluent in German as few others were, not only had never attended these lectures, but also vilified them at length. As for Hans Castorp, he had decided at once that he would attend—primarily out of courtesy, but also out of undisguised curiosity. Before the lecture, however, he did something quite perverse and ill advised: he took the notion of going for an extended walk all by himself, which turned out bad beyond all expectation.

  “Now listen”—these had been his first words when Joachim came into his room that morning—“I have decided that things can’t go on like this. I have had my fill of horizontal living—it’s as if my blood were practically falling asleep. Needless to say, it is quite another matter for you—you’re a patient here, and I have no intention of corrupting you. But if you don’t mind, I want to take a real walk this morning right after breakfast, a couple of hours of just walking out into the wide world wherever the path leads. I’ll stick a little something in my pocket for a snack, and I’ll be on my own. And then we’ll see if I’m not a new man when I get back.”

  “Fine,” Joachim said, realizing that his cousin was quite serious about following through on his plan. “But don’t overdo it—that’s my advice. It’s not the same up here as at home. And make sure you’re back in time for the lecture.”

  In reality, there were other reasons beyond the purely physical that had put this idea into young Hans Castorp’s head. It seemed to him that his difficulties in acclimatizing himself had less to do with his flushed face, or the bad taste he usually had in his mouth, or the pounding of his heart, and more with things like the activities of the Russian couple next door, the table talk of someone as sick and stupid as Frau Stöhr, the Austrian horseman’s flabby cough that he heard every day in the corridor, Herr Albin’s opinions, the impression left on him by the social customs of sickly adolescents, the expression on Joachim’s face when he looked at Marusya, and all sorts of similar matters he had observed. He thought it could only do him good to break the grip of the Berghof for once, to breathe deep of the open air, to get some real exercise, and if one was going to be exhausted of an evening, at least to know the reason why. And so after breakfast, he boldly took his departure from Joachim—who dutifully started out on his measured promenade up to the bench beside the water trough—and swinging his walking stick, he now marched off down the main road on his own.

  It was almost half past eight on a cool, cloudy morning. As he had planned, Hans Castorp breathed deeply of fresh, light, early-morning air that went so easily into the lungs and had neither odor nor moisture nor content, that evoked no memories. He crossed the brook and the narrow-gauge tracks, came out on the main road with its irregular pattern of buildings, and left it almost at once for a meadow path, which ran on level ground for only a short while and then led up the slope on his right at a rather steep angle. Hans Castorp enjoyed the climb; his chest expanded, he pushed his hat back from his brow with his cane, and when from a good height he looked back around and saw in the distance the surface of the lake his train had passed on arrival, he began to sing.

  He sang the kind of songs he knew—sentimental folk melodies, the ones you find in the handbooks of sport and business clubs, including one that contained the lines:

  The bards do praise both love and wine,

  Yet virtue still more often—

  and he hummed them softly at first, but soon was singing at the top of his voice. It was a brash baritone, but he found it lovely today, and his own singing inspired him more and more. If he started in too high a key, then he would sing falsetto, and he found that lovely, too. When memory failed him, he made do by singing the melody to nonsense syllables and words, tossing them off into the air with the splendid back-rolled r and well-rounded vowels of opera singers, and at last moved on simply to fantasizing both text and music and accompanying these vocalizations with theatrical gestures. But since it is quite an exertion to both climb and sing, he soon found he was short of breath—and it kept getting shorter. But out of idealism and love for the beauty of song, he ignored his distress and, despite frequent sighs, gave it all he had, until finally he sank down at the base of a thick pine tree—totally out of breath and gasping, half-blind, with only bright patterns dancing before his eyes, his pulse skittering. After such exaltation, his sudden reward was radical gloom, a hangover that bordered on despair.

  Once his nerves had settled a bit again, he got up to continue his walk, but his neck was twitching so violently that, young though he was, his head was wobbling just as old Hans Lorenz Castorp’s once had done. The phenomenon suddenly awakened in him warm memories of his late grandfather, and instead of finding it repulsive, he took a certain pleasure in imitating the venerable chin-propping method that the old man himself had used to control his shaking head and that had so delighted Hans Castorp as a boy.

  He kept climbing along the serpentine path. The sound of cowbells drew him on and he found the herd, too; they were grazing near a wooden hut, whose roof was weighed down with stones. Two bearded men were coming toward him, axes on their shoulders, but then, not all that far from him, they took leave of one another. “Well, fare thee well and much obliged,” the one said to the other in a deep, guttural voice; he now switched his axe to his other shoulder and began to stride down toward the valley, his steps cracking loudly as he forged a path through the pines. It had sounded so strange there in this lonely, remote place, that “fare thee well and much obliged,” like words in a dream brushing past Hans Castorp’s senses, numbed by climbing and singing. He spoke the words softly to himself, trying to imitate the guttural and sober rustic dialect of these mountain men; and he kept climbing for some distance beyond the hut, determined to reach the tree line. But one glance at his watch, and he gave up that plan.

  He followed a path—level at first and then descending—that led around to the left in the direction of town. A forest of tall pines swallowed him, and wandering through it now, he even began to sing a little again, although more prudently—but as he descended his knees shook still more unsettlingly than before. When he emerged from the woods, he was astonished by the splendid view opening up before him—an intimate, closed landscape, like some magnificent, peaceful painting.

  From the slope on his right, a mountain stream swept along a flat, stony bed, then rushed foaming over terraced boulders in its path, and finally flowed more serenely toward the valley, crossed at that point by a picturesque wooden bridge with simple railings. The ground about was blue with bell-like flowers of a lushly growing shrub. Dour spruces, symmetrical and gigantic, stood solitary and in small groups along the bottom of the gorge and farther up the slopes. One of them, rooted in the steep bank of the brook, jutted across the view at a bizarre angle. The murmur of isolation reigned above this beautiful, remote spot. Han
s Castorp spied a bench on the far side of the brook.

  He crossed the wooden bridge and sat down to enjoy the sight of the falling water and rushing foam, to listen to its idyllic chatter, a monotone filled with interior variety. Hans Castorp loved the purl of water as much as he loved music, perhaps even more. But he had no sooner made himself comfortable than his nose began to bleed—so suddenly that he was unable to keep his suit from being stained a little. The flow of blood was strong and persistent and kept him occupied for a good half hour, forcing him to run back and forth between the bench and the brook, rinsing out his handkerchief, sniffing water to rinse his nostrils, then lying down flat on the planks again, the wet cloth over his nose. There he lay quietly until the bleeding finally stopped—his hands clasped behind his head, his knees drawn up, his eyes closed, his ears filled with the rushing of the water. It was not that he felt sick, but rather that the profuse bloodletting soothed him and left him in a state of strangely reduced vitality; he would exhale, and for a long time feel no need to take in new air, but simply lie there, his inert body calmly letting his heart run through a series of beats, until at last he would lazily take another shallow breath.

  And he found himself transported to an earlier stage of life, one which only a few nights before had served as the basis for a dream filled with more recent impressions. And as he was pulled back into the then and there, time and space were abrogated—so intensely, so totally, that one might have thought a lifeless body lay there on the bench beside the torrent, while the real Hans Castorp was moving about in an earlier time, in different surroundings, confronted by a situation that, for all its simplicity, he found both fraught with risk and filled with intoxication.

  He was thirteen years old, a seventh-grader in short pants, and he was standing in the schoolyard talking with another boy about his age, but from a different class—a conversation that Hans Castorp had initiated more or less arbitrarily and that delighted him no end, although it would be a short one, given the limited scope offered by the physical object under discussion. It was during recess between the last two periods of the day for Hans Castorp’s class—between history and drawing. The schoolyard—paved with red bricks and cut off from the street by a high shingled wall with two entrance gates—was filled with pupils, some walking back and forth in little rows, some standing in groups, some leaning or half sitting against the tiled abutments of the school building. There was a babel of voices. Supervising these activities was a teacher in a slouch hat, who now bit into a ham sandwich.

  The boy that Hans Castorp was talking to was named Hippe, Pribislav Hippe—and the remarkable thing was that the r in his first name was pronounced like an sh: he called himself “Pshibislav.” And that outlandish name did not fit badly with his looks, which were not ordinary at all, indeed were decidedly foreign. Hippe, the son of a high-school history teacher—and so a notorious model student—was already a grade ahead of Hans Castorp, although he was not much older. He came from Mecklenburg, and to judge from appearances, he was obviously the product of an ancient mixing of races, the blending of Germanic blood with Slavic-Wendish, or vice versa. He was blond, and his hair was kept trimmed close to his round head. But his eyes, bluish-gray or grayish-blue eyes (a rather indefinite and equivocal color, much like that of distant mountains) had a curious, narrow, and, if you looked closely, slightly slanted shape, and right below them were prominent, strong, distinctive cheekbones—features not at all ill proportioned in his case, but really quite pleasing, although they sufficed for his schoolmates to award him the nickname of “the Kirghiz.” Hippe, by the way, already wore long trousers, plus a blue jacket, gathered at the back and buttoning up to the collar, where a few flakes of dandruff usually lay scattered.

  The thing was that Hans Castorp had had his eye on young Pribislav for a long time, had chosen him from among all the boys in the bustling schoolyard, those he knew and those he didn’t know, had been interested in him, had followed him with his glances—should one say, admired him?—in any case, observed him with ever-growing sympathy. Even when walking to and from school, he looked forward to spotting him among the other boys, to watching him talk and laugh, to picking out his voice from a good distance—that husky, opaque, slightly gruff voice. Granted, there was no sufficient reason for this sympathy—particularly if one disregarded such things as his heathen name, his status as a model pupil (which, indeed, could have played no role whatever), or those Kirghiz eyes, which from time to time, in certain sidelong glances, when gazing at nothing in particular, could darken, almost melt, to a veiled dusky look—but whatever the reason, Hans Castorp did not worry about the intellectual or emotional basis of his reaction, or even what name he would give it if he had to. It could not be called friendship, because he didn’t really “know” Hippe. But from the start, there was not the least reason to give it a name; the furthest thing from his mind was ever to talk about the matter—that would have been most unlike him and he felt no need to do so. Besides, to give it a name would have meant, if not to judge it, at least to define it, to classify it as one of life’s familiar, commonplace items, whereas Hans Castorp was thoroughly convinced at some subconscious level that anything so personal should always be shielded from definition and classification.

  But with or without a reason for them, these feelings, though far from having a name or being shared, were so powerful that Hans Castorp carried them silently about with him for almost a year—approximately a year, since it was impossible to fix their beginnings exactly—which at least spoke for the loyalty and steadfastness of his character, particularly when one thinks what a huge chunk of time a year is at that age. Unfortunately, there is normally some sort of moral judgment involved in identifying traits of character, whether for the purpose of praise or censure, even though every such trait has its two sides. Hans Castorp’s “loyalty” (in which he did not take any particular pride, by the way) consisted—and no value judgment is intended—of a certain stodginess, slowness, and stubbornness of spirit, a sustaining mood that caused him to regard conditions and relationships of long-standing attachment to be that much more valuable the longer they lasted. He also tended to believe in the infinite duration of the state and mood in which he happened to find himself at a given moment, cherished it for just that reason and was not eager for change. And so his heart had become accustomed to this mute, distant relationship with Pribislav Hippe, and he considered it a fundamental, permanent fixture in his life. He loved the surges of emotion that came with it, the tension of whether he would meet him on a given day, whether Pribislav would pass close by him, perhaps even look at him, loved the silent, tender satisfaction that his secret bestowed upon him, loved even the disappointments it sometimes brought, the greatest of which was when Pribislav was “absent”—and then the schoolyard was desolate, the day lacked every spice, but enduring hope remained.

  And so things continued for a year, until that adventurous high-point; and another year passed as well—the result of Hans Castorp’s abiding loyalty. And then it was all over—without his ever noticing the loosening and breaking of the bonds that tied him to Pribislav Hippe, any more than he had noticed their strengthening. Pribislav left the school and the city, too, when his father was transferred. But Hans Castorp barely noticed, he had already forgotten him by then. One might say that the figure of this “Kirghiz” emerged imperceptibly out of the fog and into his life, slowly taking on clarity and palpability, until the moment when he was most near, most physically present, there in the schoolyard, stood there in the foreground for a while, and then gradually receded and vanished again into the fog, without even the pain of farewell.

  But Hans Castorp now found himself transported back to that moment, to that risky, adventurous moment when he had had a conversation, a real conversation with Pribislav Hippe. And this is how it had come about. Drawing class was next, and Hans Castorp noticed that he did not have his drawing pencil with him. All his classmates needed theirs; but he had acquaintances here and the
re among the boys in other classes whom he could have approached for a pencil. But the boy he knew best, he discovered, was Pribislav—he felt closest to him, he was the one with whom he had spent so many silent hours. And on a joyful impulse of his whole being, he decided to seize the opportunity—he even called it an opportunity—and ask Pribislav for a pencil. He wasn’t even aware what an odd thing this was for him to do, since he really didn’t know Pribislav—or maybe he simply did not care, blinded as he was by some peculiar recklessness. And so there he stood in the tumult of the brick schoolyard, face to face with Pribislav Hippe. And he said, “Excuse me, could you lend me a pencil?”

  And Pribislav looked at him out of Kirghiz eyes set above prominent cheekbones and in his pleasantly husky voice and without any astonishment—or at least without betraying any astonishment—he said, “Glad to. But be sure to give it back to me after class.” And he pulled a pencil from his pocket, in a silver-plated holder with a ring you had to push up to make the reddish pencil emerge from its metal casing. As he explained its simple mechanism, both their heads bent down over it.