The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  Joachim, then, did not participate in these musical pleasures, and the spicy diversion of smoking was likewise alien to him; but otherwise he, too, lay there on his balcony—safe, secure, content. The day was over, everything was over for now; one could be sure that nothing more would happen—no more upsets, no more unreasonable demands on the musculature of the heart. And at the same time one could be sure that such would also be the case come tomorrow, when, given the favorable probabilities of narrow space and regular schedules, everything would begin all over again. This double sense of security and safety left Hans Castorp feeling very cozy and, together with the music and the rediscovered flavor of his Maria, made his evening rest cure a truly delightful state of affairs.

  This, however, did not prevent the visitor, a frail novice at all this, from catching a very bad cold while outside in his rest cure—if that was where he caught it. A bad case of the sniffles appeared to be in the making. He felt it as a pressure in his sinuses; his throat and uvula were sore and scratchy; air didn’t pass normally through the channel prescribed by nature, but was impeded, and its steady cold draft unleashed fits of coughing; overnight his voice had taken on the hollow timbre of a whiskey bass; and as he told it, he had not slept a wink—he had kept starting up from his pillow because of the stifling dryness in his throat.

  “Very annoying,” Joachim said, “almost embarrassing, really. You should know that colds are not reçus here. It is denied that they exist, they do not occur—the air is officially much too dry here. And you won’t have much success as a patient if you go to Behrens with a cold. But it’s different with you, after all, you have a right to catch cold. It would be good if we could fend off your catarrh somehow—there are the methods practiced in the flatlands. But here—well, I doubt if they’ll be interested up here. It’s better not to get sick here, no one pays you any attention. It’s a well-known fact, but you’re learning it at the end of your stay. When I arrived there was a lady here who kept one hand pressed to her ear for a whole week, complaining of the pain, and finally Behrens took a look at it. ‘You can set your mind at ease,’ he said, ‘it’s not tubercular.’ And that was that. Yes, we’ll have to see what can be done. I’ll mention it to the bath attendant tomorrow morning when he comes for my massage. That’s the usual official channel—he’ll pass it on, and perhaps we can do something for you then.”

  That was Joachim’s advice; and official channels worked. Hans Castorp had no sooner returned from his morning constitutional on Friday than there was a knock at his door, and he was given the opportunity of making the acquaintance of Fräulein von Mylendonk, or Head Nurse Mylendonk, as she was titled. Until now he had seen this evidently very busy woman only from afar—leaving one sickroom and crossing the corridor to a room opposite. Or he had caught a fleeting glimpse of her in the dining hall, or heard her squawky voice. But now she was paying him a personal visit; drawn here by his catarrh, she gave a bony, sharp rap on his door and entered almost before he could say “come in,” although at the threshold she leaned back to make sure she had the right room number.

  “Thirty-four,” she croaked at full voice. “Right. Well, man alive, on me dit, que vous avez pris froid, ich höre, Sie sind erkältet, vy, kazhetsya, prostudilis’, I hear you have caught a cold. Which language do you prefer? German, I see. Ah, young Ziemssen’s visitor, I see. I should be in the operating room. There’s a gentleman who’s to be chloroformed, and he’s gone and eaten bean salad—if I didn’t keep my eyes open . . . And, man alive, you claim you’ve caught a cold here with us, do you?”

  Hans Castorp was taken aback by the old noblewoman’s manner of speech. She seemed to dismiss her own words as she spoke—her head moving about in a restless, looping roll, her nose lifted in the air, searching, like some caged beast of prey. Her freckled right hand was closed in a loose fist, the thumb sticking upward, and by keeping it in constant motion, twisting her wrist back and forth, she seemed to say, “Quick, quick, quick! Don’t listen to what I’m saying, but speak up so I can be on my way.” She was a woman in her forties, with a stunted, shapeless figure under a white, belted clinical smock. A garnet cross dangled at her chest, and sparse tufts of reddish hair stuck out from under her nurse’s cap. Her watery-blue, bloodshot eyes wandered unsteadily, and to make matters worse, one had a sty in a very advanced stage; the nose was turned up, the mouth froglike, the lower lip protruding at an angle and moving like a shovel as she spoke. Hans Castorp gazed at her meanwhile with all the modest, patient, and gullible kindness native to him.

  “What sort of a cold is it, eh?” the head nurse asked now, trying to fix her eyes in a piercing stare—but did not succeed, since they began to wander. “We don’t like these colds. Do you catch cold often? Hasn’t your cousin caught a lot of colds, too? How old are you? Twenty-four? Not an easy age. And so you’ve come up here and caught a cold? Good man alive, one should not speak of ‘colds’ here—that’s twiddle-twaddle from down below.” The word “twiddle-twaddle” sounded ghastly and bizarre when she spoke it, with her lower lip shoveling away. “You have the loveliest catarrh of the upper respiratory tract, I will admit, one can see it in your eyes.” And she made another of her odd attempts to stare directly at him, without any real success. “But catarrhs are not colds, they come from an infection to which one is already susceptible, and the only question is whether what we have here is an innocent infection or one that is less innocent, all the rest is twiddle-twaddle.” (There was that gruesome “twiddle-twaddle” again.) “It is of course possible that you tend to be more susceptible to the harmless type,” she said and seemed to look at him with the well-advanced sty—he was not sure how she managed that. “Here we have a harmless antiseptic. It may do you some good.” And from the black leather bag that hung from her belt she pulled out a little box and put it on the table. It was Formamint. “Though you do look rather hectic, too—as if you had a fever.” And she would not release him from her gaze, although her eyes kept ranging off a little to one side. “Have you measured your temperature?”

  He said he had not.

  “And why not?” she asked, letting her protruding lower lip dangle in the air.

  He had no reply. The good fellow was still young enough that he could respond with the silence of a schoolboy who doesn’t know the answer and so just sits there mutely on his bench.

  “Don’t you ever measure it?”

  “Oh certainly, Nurse Mylendonk. When I have a fever.”

  “Man alive, the point of taking one’s temperature is to find out if one has a fever. And you are of the opinion that you have none, is that it?”

  “I don’t really know, Nurse Mylendonk. It’s hard to tell the difference. I’ve been both a little chilled and flushed since my arrival up here.”

  “Aha! And where is your thermometer?”

  “I don’t have one here with me, Nurse Mylendonk. Why should I? I’m here just as a visitor. I’m healthy.”

  “Twiddle-twaddle! Did you call me because you’re healthy?”

  “No,” he said with a polite laugh, “but because I’ve caught a little—”

  “Cold. We’ve seen colds like that here often enough. Here—” she said and rummaged in her bag again, pulling out two longish leather cases, one black, one red, which she also laid on the table now. “This one costs three francs fifty, and this one five francs. You’ll do better to take the one for five, of course. It will last a lifetime if you take proper care of it.”

  He picked up the red case with a smile and opened it. The glass instrument lay bedded like a precious gem in its red velvet cushion, the indentation exactly matched to its form. The full degrees were marked in red, the tenths in black. The numbers were red; the lower, tapered end was filled with lustrous, glistening mercury. The column stood at a cool low-point, well below normal animal warmth.

  Hans Castorp knew what he owed himself and his social station. “I’ll take this one,” he said, without giving the other so much as a glance. “The one for five francs.
May I use it now?”

  “That settles that!” the head nurse squawked. “Never be niggardly when it comes to important procurements. No hurry—it will be on your bill. Give it to me, we need to shrink him down to nothing, all the way down—like this.” And she took the thermometer out of his hand, thrusting it at the air several times and driving the mercury down even further, below ninety-five degrees. “He’ll climb back up, wander right up the column, old Mercury will,” she said. “Here is your purchase. You do know, don’t you, how we do things up here? We put it under our pretty tongue, for seven minutes, four times a day, and keep our lips nicely tucked around it. Adieu! Good man alive, my best wishes for good results.” And she was out of the room.

  Hans Castorp bowed as she left and stood now beside the table, staring at the door through which she had vanished—and at the apparatus she had left behind. “So that was Head Nurse von Mylendonk,” he thought. “Settembrini doesn’t like her, and there is something disagreeable about her, it’s true. The sty is not pretty, although I don’t suppose she always has one. But why does she keep saying ‘man alive,’ as if she were addressing me? It’s so odd, so slangy. And now she’s sold me a thermometer—always has a couple in her bag. They’re for sale here everywhere, in all the shops, even those you wouldn’t expect to carry them. Joachim said so. But I didn’t have to go to the trouble, it simply fell right into my lap.”

  He took the instrument from its case, examined it and walked restlessly with it back and forth in the room a few times. His heart was beating fast and strong. He looked out through the open door to the balcony, then moved in the direction of the hall door, with the idea of looking in on Joachim, but then gave that up and stood there again beside the table. He now cleared his throat to see just how hollow his voice sounded. He then coughed. “Yes, I do need to see if I have a little fever with my cold,” he said and quickly stuck the thermometer in his mouth, the mercury tip under his tongue, the glass tube jutting up at an angle from one corner, his lips tucked tightly around it to keep air out. Then he looked at his wristwatch—it was 9:36. And he began to wait for seven minutes to pass.

  “Not one second too many,” he thought, “or too few. You can depend on me, whether up or down. They won’t need to exchange mine for a silent sister, like that girl Settembrini was talking about . . . Ottilie Kneifer.” And he walked around the room, keeping the thermometer clamped tightly under his tongue.

  Time crept by—seven minutes seemed endless. Only two and a half had passed when he looked at his watch again, worried that he might have missed the precise moment. He did a thousand things, picked up objects, put them back down, walked out onto the balcony, but not so that his cousin could notice, looked at the landscape of this Alpine valley, his eyes now more than familiar with its shapes and forms—its peaks, ridges, and cliffs; in the background on his left, though somewhat closer, was the jutting Brämenbühl, whose crest fell abruptly toward town and whose flank was thickly covered with coarse grasses; there were the mountain formations on his right, whose names he also knew by now; and then to the south was the Alteinwand, which from here looked as if it closed off the valley. He looked down at the paths and flowerbeds of the level gardens, the grotto, the silver fir, listened to whispers drifting up from the lounging area, where people were taking their rest cure—and turned back into the room, where he tried to correct the way the instrument sat in his mouth. Stretching his arm to free his wrist from its sleeve, he brought his forearm up to his eyes. With much trouble and effort—as if he were shoving, pushing, kicking them—he had got rid of six minutes. But now, standing there in the middle of the room, he fell to daydreaming and let his thoughts wander, and the one remaining minute scurried away on little cat’s feet, until another motion of his arm told him that the minute had secretly escaped and that it was a little late now. Almost a third of the next had passed before he grabbed the thermometer from his mouth, telling himself that it did not really matter, would not alter the results, could not hurt anything—and he stared down at it now with confusion in his eyes.

  He was not immediately the wiser. The sheen of the mercury blended with the refraction of the light in the elliptical glass tube; the column seemed now to reach clear to the top, now not to be present at all. He held the instrument close to his eyes, turned it back and forth—and could make out nothing. Finally, after a lucky turn, the image became clear; he held it tightly and hastily applied his intellect to the task. And indeed Mercury had stretched himself, very robustly. The column had risen rather high, it stood several tenths above the limit of normal body temperature. Hans Castorp had a temperature of 99.7 degrees.

  Between nine-thirty and ten, in the middle of the morning, his body temperature was 99.7 degrees—that was too high, it was a fever, the result of an infection to which he had been susceptible. And now the question was: what sort of infection? At 99.7 degrees—Joachim’s wasn’t any higher than that, nor was anyone else’s, who wasn’t bedridden, terribly ill, or moribund. Not young Kleefeld with her pneumothorax . . . nor Madame Chauchat. In his case, of course, it surely wasn’t anything like that—just the usual fever that went with the sniffles, people would have said down below. But there was no way to differentiate it precisely, to keep the kinds of fever apart. Hans Castorp doubted that the fever had only appeared just now in conjunction with his cold; and he truly regretted not having consulted Mercury before this, right at the beginning, when the director had suggested it to him. It had been very sensible advice, that was apparent now, and Settembrini had been wrong to throw his head back and laugh so scornfully—Settembrini with his republic and his beautiful style. Hans Castorp despised the Italian’s republic and his beautiful style; but he also went on examining the thermometer reading, which he lost several times in the glare, and then recovered after twisting and turning the instrument. It still said 99.7 degrees—and in the middle of the morning.

  He was terribly agitated. He paced the room a few times, still holding the thermometer—horizontally, so as to not disturb the reading by some vertical shake. He then laid it as carefully as possible on the rim of his washstand and decided for now to put on his overcoat and finish his rest cure. He sat down, flung his blankets around him—just as he had learned, from both sides, from below, one after the other, with a skilled hand now—and lay still as he waited for the hour of second breakfast and Joachim’s arrival. Now and then he smiled, and it was as if he were smiling at someone. Now and then his chest gave an uneasy heave, and then he would have to cough his bronchial cough.

  When the eleven o’clock gong sounded, Joachim came by to fetch him for second breakfast and found him still lying there.

  “Well?” he asked, stepping up beside the lounge chair.

  Hans Castorp stared straight ahead in silence for a while. Then by way of reply, he said, “Yes, the latest is that I have a little temperature.”

  “What do you mean?” Joachim asked. “Do you feel feverish?”

  Hans Castorp again waited awhile before answering, but then at last he said with a certain lethargy, “I’ve felt feverish for a long time now, my friend—almost the whole time. It’s no longer a matter of a subjective feeling now, but of precise evidence. I measured it.”

  “You took your temperature? With what?” Joachim cried, stunned. “With a thermometer, of course,” Hans Castorp replied, not without a mixture of severity and scorn. “The head nurse sold me one. Why she keeps saying ‘man alive,’ I really don’t know. It’s very slangy. But she did sell me a first-rate thermometer with utmost dispatch, and if you want to check for yourself what it read, you’ll find it in there on my washstand. It’s only slightly elevated.”

  Joachim did an about-face and walked back into the room. When he returned, he said tentatively, “Yes, it reads ninety-nine point six.”

  “Then it’s gone down a little,” Hans Castorp responded quickly. “It was point seven.”

  “You can’t really call that just slightly elevated, not in the middle of the morning,” J
oachim said. “Now isn’t this a nice mess,” he said, standing beside his recumbent cousin the way one stands beside a nice mess, his hands on his hips, his head lowered. “You need to be in bed.”

  Hans Castorp had his answer at the ready. “I don’t see,” he said, “why I should go to bed with ninety-nine point seven, when you and a lot of other people with temperatures that are no lower are running about just as you please here.”

  “But that’s a totally different matter,” Joachim said. “Yours is acute, but harmless. It’s the fever that goes with a cold.”

  “First,” Hans Castorp replied, dividing his response into a first and second, “I don’t understand why someone with a harmless fever—we’ll assume there is such a thing—with a harmless fever, then, has to stay in bed, but not in the opposite case. And second, I’m telling you that my cold has not made me hotter than I already was. My position remains,” he concluded, “that ninety-nine point seven is ninety-nine point seven. And if you can run around with that, so can I.”

  “But I had to lie in bed for four weeks when I first arrived,” Joachim objected. “And they let me get up again only when it became clear that my temperature wasn’t going away with bed rest.”

  Hans Castorp smiled. “So what?” he asked. “I thought yours was an entirely different problem, was it not? It seems to me you’re getting tangled up in contradictions. First you differentiate the two cases, then equate them. That’s just twiddle-twaddle.”

  Joachim turned on his heels, and when he turned back to his cousin his tanned face was visibly a shade darker. “No,” he said, “I am not equating them—you’re the muddlehead. I’m simply saying that you’ve caught a wretched cold—I can hear it in your voice—and you should go to bed, so that you can be over it sooner, especially since you want to go home next week. But if you don’t want to—I mean, if you don’t want to lie in bed, then you don’t have to. I’m not going to make rules for you. At any rate, we have to go to breakfast now. Come on, we’re late.”