The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  It turned out that Dr. Krokowski concluded his lecture with a grand advertisement for psychic dissection—he spread his arms wide, and invited them to come unto him. Come unto me, he said, though not exactly in those words, all ye that labor and are heavy laden! And he left no doubt of his certainty that they all, without exception, labored and were heavy laden. He spoke of hidden suffering, of shame and affliction, of the redemptive effects of analysis; he praised the effects of light piercing the dark unconscious, explained that illness could be transformed again into conscious emotion, admonished them to trust, promised recovery. Then he let his arms fall, set his head erect again, gathered up the printed materials that he had used for his lecture, and holding the bundle against his shoulder with his left hand like an ordinary schoolteacher, he exited into the lobby, head held high.

  They all stood up, pushed back their chairs, and began slowly to move toward the same door through which the doctor had left the dining hall. As they gathered in concentric circles from all sides, it was as if they were thronging after him—hesitant, without a will of their own, and yet in dazed unanimity, like a swarm of rats behind the Pied Piper. Hans Castorp stood stock-still in midcurrent, his hand on the back of his chair. “I am only a visitor here,” he thought. “I’m healthy and all this has nothing to do with me, thank God. I won’t even be here for the next lecture.” He watched Frau Chauchat leave—slinking, her head thrust forward. “Does she let herself be dissected, too?” he asked himself, and his heart began to pound. He did not even notice Joachim working his way through the chairs toward him, and he flinched when his cousin spoke to him.

  “You arrived at the last moment,” Joachim said. “Did you go very far? How was it?”

  “Oh, nice,” Hans Castorp replied. “But I did walk rather far. And I must admit it did me less good than I expected. It was perhaps a little too soon for it, or maybe just the wrong idea altogether. I’ll not be doing it again right away.”

  Joachim did not ask him whether he had liked the lecture, and Hans Castorp said nothing about it, either. As if by tacit agreement, neither of them ever mentioned the lecture again.

  DOUBTS AND CONSIDERATIONS

  Tuesday came. Our hero had been up here for seven days now, and when he returned from his constitutional that morning, he found a bill totaling up the charges for his first week—a tidy commercial document in a green envelope, with an exquisite picture of the Berghof at the top of the page and excerpts from the brochure arranged attractively in a narrow column along the left margin, where italicized mention was also made of “psychological therapy by the most modern methods.” The list itself, done in elegant calligraphy, came to almost exactly 180 francs, which was broken down into 8 francs a day for room, 12 francs a day for board and medical treatment, plus separate entries of 20 francs “entrance fee,” and 10 francs for “disinfection of the room,” with the final total rounded out by smaller fees for laundry, beer, and the wine he had drunk at his first supper here.

  Hans Castorp saw nothing to complain about when he and Joachim checked the addition. “True, I make no use of medical treatment,” he said, “but that’s my business. It’s included in the daily rate, and I can’t ask them to deduct it. How could they do that? They’ve overcharged for the disinfection—they couldn’t possibly have gone through ten francs worth of H2CO to smoke out the American woman. But on the whole, I must say I find the rates reasonable—not really expensive, considering what they offer.” And so before second breakfast, they went down to the management office to take care of the bill.

  “Management” was on the ground floor: after crossing the lobby and following the hallway past the cloakroom, kitchen, and housekeeping, you could not miss it, especially given the porcelain sign on the door.

  Hans Castorp’s interest was aroused by the glimpse it offered him into the business side of the establishment. It was a normal, small office where a woman was busy at a typewriter, and three male employees stood bent over lecterns, while in the adjoining room a gentleman with the imposing look of a department head or manager sat working at a freestanding, barrel-like desk and cast his clients a glance just over the top of his glasses, measuring them with cold, practical eyes. While their business was being taken care of—payment made with a large bill, change returned, a receipt written out—they both took on that serious, modest, silent, even subservient look by which young Germans show that their respect for authority applies to all offices, to any room where records are kept and services rendered; but once they were outside and were heading off to breakfast—and later on that day, too—they chatted about the general setup of the Berghof, with Joachim, as the older, more knowledgeable resident, answering his cousin’s questions.

  Director Behrens was neither the owner nor the proprietor of the sanatorium—although one might get that impression. Above and behind him stood invisible forces, made manifest only to a certain degree in the management office: a board of directors, a joint-stock company—and the stock would not be a bad thing to have, because according to Joachim’s trustworthy assertions, juicy dividends were distributed annually to the shareholders, despite the high salaries paid the doctors and some very liberal business practices. The director, then, was not an independent man, but merely an agent, a functionary, an associate of those higher powers—though, of course, the highest and supreme associate here, the soul of the place, the determining factor for the whole organization, including the management office. As the supervising physician, to be sure, he stood far aloof from anything to do with the commercial side of the operation. He came from somewhere in northwestern Germany; and it was general knowledge that he had fallen into the position years ago quite by accident and without any planning on his part. He had been brought here by his wife, whose remains had long since been given over to the cemetery in Davos-Dorf—the picturesque graveyard above the village, on the right-hand slope, toward the entrance of the valley. She had been a very charming woman, if a little cross-eyed and gaunt, to judge from photos you found scattered about the director’s official residence, not to mention oil portraits of her that were hung on the walls—painted by his own amateur hand. After she had presented him with two children, a son and a daughter, they had brought her up to this valley, her body already frail and feverish, and within a few months that body had wasted away entirely. People said that Behrens, who idolized her, had been so overwhelmed by the blow that he had temporarily fallen into a strange melancholy and had been seen walking the streets giggling, gesticulating, and talking to himself. He had not returned to his former life, then, but had stayed on here—in part, to be sure, because he did not want to leave her grave behind; but the deciding, and less sentimental, factor had probably been that he had become slightly infected himself and, in his own professional opinion, actually belonged here. So he had taken up residence as one of those physicians who not only supervised people’s stay here, but also shared their sufferings, who did not battle disease from a position of personal wholeness and independence, but who bore its marks themselves. It was a curious, but certainly not unique situation, with presumably both its beneficial and dubious sides. A warm relationship between doctor and patient is certainly to be welcomed, and there is something to the proposition that only he who suffers can be the guide and healer of the suffering. But can someone truly be the intellectual master of a power to which he is himself enslaved? Can he liberate if he himself is not free? To the average person, the idea of a sick physician remains a paradox, a problematical phenomenon. Instead of being intellectually enriched and morally strengthened by his experience, may he not perhaps find that his knowledge of the disease becomes clouded and confused? He no longer stares down the illness with a hostile eye; he is a biased and hardly unequivocal foe. With all due respect, one must ask whether someone who is part of the world of illness can indeed be interested in curing or even nursing others in the same way a healthy person can.

  In his own way, Hans Castorp expressed some of these same doubts and consideration
s as he chatted with Joachim about the Berghof and its supervising physician; but Joachim countered that one had no way of knowing if Director Behrens was still a patient himself nowadays—presumably he had recovered long ago. It was ages now since he first began to practice here—on his own at first, quickly making a name for himself as both a specialist with a fine ear for auscultation and a surehanded lung surgeon. And then the Berghof had secured his services, and in the course of what would soon be a decade now, his life had become intimately interwoven with that of the sanatorium. His residence was back there, at the far end of the northwest wing—Dr. Krokowski lived close by. That lady of noble lineage, the head nurse of whom Settembrini had spoken so scornfully and whom Hans Castorp had seen only fleetingly a few times, was in charge of the widower’s household. The director lived alone, by the way—his son was studying at a university in imperial Germany and his daughter was already married, to a lawyer in the French part of Switzerland. Young Behrens came home on vacation now and then, and had in fact been there once already during Joachim’s stay; and he told how it had been such a thrill for the ladies of the sanatorium—temperatures rose, little jealousies erupted into spats and skirmishes in the public lounging area, and a press of patients had appeared for Dr. Krokowski’s private consultations.

  The assistant director had a private consulting room, which, like the general examination room, the laboratory, the operating room, and the X-ray room, was located in the well-lit basement of the building. We have called it a basement, but although the stone stairway leading down to it from the ground floor did indeed create the impression of a descent into a basement, this was almost entirely an illusion, the reasons for which were, first, that the ground floor sat rather high, and second, that the whole edifice had been built on a steep, mountainous slope, so that the “basement” rooms faced the front and looked out onto the garden and the valley—a state of affairs countered and negated, as it were, by the effect of the stairway. You had the sense you were descending below ground level, but in fact, once downstairs, you were right back on ground level again, or at most a foot or two below it—an effect that delighted Hans Castorp when he discovered it for the first time that afternoon as he accompanied his cousin “down” to those regions, where Joachim was scheduled to have himself weighed by the bath attendant. It was a realm where clinical brightness and cleanliness held sway, everything done in white on white, the doors glistening with white enamel—even the one to Dr. Krokowski’s reception room, to which one of the learned man’s calling cards had been tacked and which lay two steps lower than the hallway itself, so that the room behind the open door looked rather like a suite. This door was just to the right of the stairway, at the near end of the hall, and Hans Castorp kept his eye on it as he paced up and down the corridor, waiting for Joachim. He saw someone come out, too, a lady who had arrived only recently and whose name he did not know—a small, dainty woman, with curls across her forehead and golden earrings. Gathering her skirts in one hand, she bent low as she took those two steps, and with her other small, heavily ringed hand, she pressed a handkerchief to her mouth—above it, her large, pale, distraught eyes stared at nothing. Still hunched over, she hurried toward the stairway with mincing steps that made her petticoats rustle, stopped suddenly as if pondering something, then began to mince her way up the steps, and vanished up the stairwell—still hunched over, her handkerchief still at her lips.

  Behind her, where the door had opened, it was much darker than in the white hallway—the clinical brightness of these lower rooms apparently did not penetrate that far; Hans Castorp noted that murky twilight, deep dusk, reigned in Dr. Krokowski’s analytical chamber.

  TABLE TALK

  When he sat down to meals in the bright dining hall, young Hans Castorp found to his embarrassment that he was still subject to the grandfatherly tremor he had first noticed on his long, solitary walk. It would start up again with amazing regularity at almost every meal—it was impossible to stop and hard to hide. The venerable chin-propped-against-chest method offered no permanent solution, and so he looked for other ways to disguise his weakness—for instance, he kept his head in motion as much as possible, turning it to the right and left when conversing, or if he was guiding his soupspoon to his mouth, he would press his left forearm firmly against the table to stabilize himself, and he would even put both elbows on the table and prop his chin in his hand between courses, although he considered that boorish and permissible, at best, in the dissolute company of the sick. But it was all an annoyance, and it would not have taken much for him to have given up meals entirely in disgust, although he had come to value them for the sights and tensions associated with them.

  But the fact was—and Hans Castorp knew it only too well—that this deplorable phenomenon with which he was struggling was not merely of organic origin, was not attributable solely to the local air or the strain of adjusting to it, but was also the expression of an inner excitement and was bound up intimately with those same sights and tensions.

  Madame Chauchat almost always came late for meals, and until she arrived Hans Castorp would sit there with fidgeting feet, waiting for the glass door to slam, a sound that inevitably accompanied her entrance; and he knew that he would flinch and his face would suddenly feel cold—and that is what happened almost every time. At first he would whip his head around indignantly each time and with angry eyes follow the latecomer to her place at the Good Russian table, even scold her under his breath, rebuking her between his teeth with a cry of outraged protest. But he had given that up, and now he would bend his head farther over his plate, even bite his lips sometimes, or intentionally and elaborately turn to look the other way; because it seemed to him that he no longer had a right to be angry and was not really free to censure her, but that he was an accessory to the offense and answerable for it to the others—in short, he was ashamed. It would be less than precise to say that he was ashamed for Frau Chauchat; rather, he felt personally ashamed in front of all these people. He could have spared himself that, by the way, because no one in the dining hall cared about either Frau Chauchat’s vice or Hans Castorp’s embarrassment for her—except, perhaps, Fräulein Engelhart, the schoolteacher on his right.

  This pitiful creature had understood from Hans Castorp’s sensitivity about slamming doors that a certain emotional bond was developing between her young tablemate and the Russian woman, and what was more, that the nature of such a bond was less important than that it existed at all, and finally, that his pretended indifference—and given his lack of talent or experience as an actor, he was very poor at pretending—did not diminish but rather strengthened that bond, was a sign that it had moved to a higher plane. Having given up all hopes and pretensions for herself, Fräulein Engelhart was constantly breaking into raptures about Frau Chauchat; and the remarkable thing was that although Hans Castorp recognized and saw through her rabble-rousing—if not at once, then at least over time—and was indeed disgusted by it, he proved no less willing to allow her to influence him and egg him on.

  “Bang!” the old maid said. “That’s her! You don’t even have to look up to make sure who just came in. Of course, there she goes—and what a charming way she has about her—like a kitten slinking to its bowl of milk. I wish you could change seats with me so you could observe her as easily and effortlessly as I can. I do understand that you don’t always want to turn your head to watch. God only knows what she might think if she noticed. Now she’s greeting her table. You really should have a look, it’s so refreshing to watch her. When she talks and smiles the way she’s doing now, a little dimple shows in one cheek—but not always, only when she wants it to. Yes, she’s a darling woman, a spoiled creature, that’s why she’s so careless. We all love people like that, whether we want to or not, because when they annoy us with their carelessness, the annoyance becomes just one more reason for being fond of them. What fun it is to be annoyed at people and yet have no choice but to love them.”

  The teacher whispered all this
behind her hand to keep others from hearing. Her flushed, downy spinster’s cheeks suggested a temperature above normal, and her titillating remarks stirred Hans Castorp’s blood. A certain lack of self-reliance created in him the need to hear confirmed from a third party that Madame Chauchat was indeed an enchanting woman, and the young man also wanted others to encourage him to give himself over to his feelings, when both his reason and conscience were offering unsettling resistance.

  These conversations, however, were much less fruitful when it came to facts, because, for the life of her, Fräulein Engelhart knew little or nothing about Frau Chauchat, no more than was general knowledge in the sanatorium; she did not know her, could not claim even to have any acquaintance in common with her. The only thing that could possibly increase her standing in Hans Castorp’s eyes was that she herself was from Königsberg, a city not all that far from the Russian border, and so could manage a little broken Russian—very meager attributes indeed; all the same, Hans Castorp was prepared to regard them as some kind of extended personal connection to Frau Chauchat.

  “She doesn’t wear a ring,” he said. “I don’t see a wedding ring. Why is that? She is a married woman, you said, did you not?”

  The teacher felt so responsible for representing Frau Chauchat to Hans Castorp that his question embarrassed her—as if she had been driven into a corner and would have to talk her way out of it. “You mustn’t take that all too seriously,” she said. “She is married, most assuredly. There can be no doubt about that. She does not use the title of Madame merely for the greater respect that comes with it, as is common, for instance, among young foreign ladies once they are a little older, but as we all know, she really does have a husband somewhere in Russia—it’s common knowledge here. She has a maiden name, a Russian one, not French, something ending in -avov or -ukov, I did hear it somewhere but I’ve forgotten it. If you’d like I could find out for you. There are surely several people here who know the name. A ring? No, she doesn’t wear one, I have noticed that myself. Good heavens, perhaps it doesn’t become her, perhaps it makes her hand too broad. Or she finds it rather bourgeois to wear a wedding ring, just a plain gold band—all she’d need then is a little basket for her keys. No, she’s certainly too liberal for that. I know it well—Russian women are by their very nature so very free and liberal. And besides, there’s something so cold, so disillusioning about a ring—it is a symbol of a woman’s dependence, it seems to me; it makes a woman seem practically a nun, turns her into a wallflower, a touch-me-not. I’m not at all surprised that Frau Chauchat has no use for it. Such a charming woman, at the very peak of her beauty. I presume she has neither reason nor desire to remind every gentleman to whom she gives her hand of her marital bonds.”