The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  But Director Behrens had finished. “Well, that’s fine, Ziemssen,” he said. “Everything’s in as good shape as can be expected. By next time”—that would be in four weeks—“it’s sure to have improved a little all over.”

  “How long, Director Behrens, sir, do you think—”

  “Are you trying to push me again? You can’t bully recruits about in your lambent condition. I told you six months the other day—and you can count from then if you like. But that’s the minimum. Life’s not all that bad here, after all—and a little courtesy is in order. We’re not a prison ship, you know. We’re not a Siberian salt mine. Or are you trying to say that we resemble anything of that sort? So, that’s fine, Ziemssen. Dismissed! Next—whoever feels up to it,” he shouted, staring into the air. And extending one long arm, he handed his stethoscope to Dr. Krokowski, who stood up and grabbed it, so that he could perform his own little assistant’s post-examination on Joachim.

  Hans Castorp had sprung to his feet as well, and with his eyes fixed on the director, who stood there lost in thought—legs spread, mouth open—he began quickly to get ready himself. He was in too much of a hurry and had trouble getting out of his dotted, French-cuffed shirt, which he slipped over his head. And there he stood—white, blond, and narrow-chested—opposite Director Behrens. His figure certainly looked more civilian than Joachim Ziemssen’s.

  But the director, still lost in thought, let him stand there. Dr. Krokowski had sat back down and Joachim had begun to get dressed again, when Behrens finally decided to take some notice of the person who “felt up to it.”

  “Ah yes, it’s your turn now!” he said; grabbing Hans Castorp’s upper arm with one massive hand, he shoved him into place and gave him a sharp look. But he did not look directly at his face, the way you look at another human being, but at his body. He spun him around, the way you spin an object around, and examined his back as well. “Hmm,” he said. “Well, let’s have a look at what you’re up to.” And he took up his thumping again.

  He pounded everywhere, just as he had with Joachim Ziemssen, but kept coming back to certain spots. For a good while he alternated tapping a spot near the left collarbone and one a little below it, comparing.

  “Hear that?” he called across to Dr. Krokowski. And Dr. Krokowski, sitting five paces away at the desk, showed he had heard by lowering his head—pressing his chin against his chest so earnestly that the tips of his beard curled to points on each side.

  “Breathe deep! Cough!” the director commanded, stethoscope in hand once more; and Hans Castorp worked hard, for perhaps a good eight or ten minutes, while the director listened. He said not a word, but placed the stethoscope here and there and in particular repeatedly listened to the two places where he had lingered when tapping. Then he wedged his instrument under his arm, crossed his hands behind his back, and stared at a spot on the floor between himself and Hans Castorp.

  “Yes, Castorp,” he said—and this was the first time he had ever addressed the young man simply by his last name—“just as I thought, the situation looks rather praeter-propter. I can admit to you now that I haven’t liked your looks from the start, not since the first time I had the undeserved honor of making your acquaintance—and was pretty sure of my guess that you were secretly one of the locals, and would finally come to appreciate the fact yourself, as has many a man before you, who came up here just for the fun of it, looked around with his nose in the air, and one fine day discovered he would do well—indeed, mark my words, would do more than well—to remain on here, for reasons having nothing to do with the seductions of mere curiosity, for a rather more extended stay.”

  Hans Castorp had turned pale, and Joachim, who had been buttoning his suspenders, stopped right where he was and listened.

  “You have a fine, sympathetic cousin there,” the director went on, nodding in Joachim’s direction and rolling back and forth between the balls of his feet and his heels, “of whom we hope someday soon to say that he was ill at one time, but even when that day comes, he will still have been ill—your fine cousin will. And that, as the philosophers say, casts a certain a priori light on your own situation, my good Castorp.”

  “But he’s only a half cousin, Director Behrens.”

  “Now, now, you’re not going to disown your own cousin, are you? Half or whatever, he is still a blood relation. On which side, actually?”

  “On my mother’s side, sir. He’s the son of my mother’s half—”

  “And your dear mother is enjoying life, I hope?”

  “No, she’s dead. She died when I was still small.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of a blood clot, sir.”

  “A blood clot? Well, it was long ago in any case. And your good father?”

  “He died of pneumonia,” Hans Castorp said. “And so did my grandfather,” he thought to add.

  “I see, him too? Well, enough of your forebears. As for yourself—you’ve always been rather anemic, am I right? But don’t really tire all that easily from physical or mental labor? Oh, you do? And your heart pounds sometimes? Has only started that of late? Fine. In addition there is apparently an active proclivity for catarrh in the upper respiratory system. Did you know that you were ill once before?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes—I do mean you. Can you hear the difference?” And the director tapped again, alternating between a spot high on the left side of the chest and one a little lower.

  “It sounds a bit more hollow there,” Hans Castorp said.

  “Very good. You should become a specialist. That is what we call a muffled tone, and muffled tones come from old infections where calcification has set in, a kind of scarring, if you will. You are an old patient, Castorp, but we’ll not lay the blame on anyone for your not having known that before. Early diagnosis is difficult—particularly for my good colleagues in the flatlands. I certainly don’t claim that we have finer ears up here, although our special training does contribute something. But the air helps us to hear better, you see—the thin, dry air up here.”

  “Of course, certainly it does,” Hans Castorp said.

  “Fine, Castorp. And now listen to me, young man, I am about to utter several golden words. Please understand me now—if it were nothing more than muffled tones and scars on your Aeolus’s bellows there, merely some calcified foreign matter, then I would send you packing to rejoin your lares and penates, and not worry one whit more about you. You do understand that, don’t you? But as things stand and on the basis of my examination, and seeing that you are already here—it would not pay for you to return home, Hans Castorp. Because you would be back to see us in very short order.”

  Hans Castorp felt the blood rush to his heart again—it began to pound. Joachim just stood there, his hands resting on the back buttons, his eyes on the floor.

  “Because apart from the muffled tones,” the director said, “you have some roughness at the upper left, which is almost a rattle and doubtless comes from a fresh area. I would not yet call it a focus for softening tissue, but it is certainly a moist spot. And if you were to continue your life just as before down below, my good man, the whole pulmonary lobe would go, willy-nilly, to the devil.”

  Hans Castorp stood there stock-still, though his mouth twitched strangely and his heart hammered visibly against his ribs. He glanced across to Joachim and then back to the director’s face—with its purple cheeks, blue pop-eyes, and little skewed moustache.

  “We find objective confirmation for this,” Behrens continued, “in your temperature: ninety-nine point seven at ten in the morning, which more or less matches our acoustic observations.”

  “I just assumed,” Hans Castorp said, “the fever came from my catarrh.”

  “And the catarrh?” the director retorted. “Where does it come from? Let me tell you something, Castorp, and pay close attention now—you certainly have sufficient gray matter for that, as far as I can see. First and foremost: there’s the air up here. It’s good for fighting off illness, wouldn�
��t you say? And you’d be right. But it is also good for illness, you see, because it first enhances it, creates a revolution in the body, causes latent illness to erupt, and your catarrh—no offense intended—is just such an eruption. I don’t know if you were already febrile down in the plains, but in any case you had a fever your very first day here, and not because of any catarrh—that, at least, is my opinion.”

  “Yes,” Hans Castorp said, “yes, I truly believe that, too.”

  “You felt tipsy right off, I presume,” the director said to prove the point. “That comes from soluble toxins released by the bacteria; they have an intoxicating effect on the central nervous system, you see—which gives you those flushed cheeks. And so first off, Castorp, we’re going to stick you in bed; we’ll see if we can’t get you sobered up with a few weeks of bed rest. And then we shall see what we shall see. We’ll take a pretty interior snapshot of you—it’s always fun to get a look at what’s happening inside your own body. But let me tell you right off: a case like yours is not healed just like that. We don’t promote ourselves with a lot of publicity about miracle cures. I knew at once that you’d be a better patient than visitor, with more talent for being ill than our brigadier general here, who tries to slip away the moment his fever goes down a tenth or two. As if ‘At ease!’ weren’t just as good a command as ‘Attention!’ A citizen’s first duty is to stay calm, and impatience never helps anything. And so I do insist that you not disappoint me, Castorp, or prove me wrong about my knowledge of human nature. And now, forward march!—off to the stall with you both!”

  And the consultation was over, and Director Behrens sat down at his desk—a busy man like him had to make good use of what little time he had before the next examination by taking care of paperwork. Dr. Krokowski, however, stood up and strode over to Hans Castorp; tilting his head to one side and smiling so pithily that it revealed the yellow teeth under his beard, he placed one hand on the young man’s shoulder and with the other offered a hearty handshake.

  CHAPTER 5

  ETERNAL SOUP AND SUDDEN CLARITY

  And now we have a new phenomenon—about which the narrator would do well to express his own amazement, if only to prevent his readers from being all too amazed on their own. The fact is, the account of the first three weeks of Hans Castorp’s stay with “the people up here” (twenty-one days at the height of summer, to which, by all calculation, it was supposed to have been limited) has consumed quantities of space and time that correspond only too well to what the author himself expected, and indeed half confessed; the coverage of the next three weeks of the visit, however, will require about as many lines—or words, or even seconds—as the first three weeks required pages, quires, hours, and working days. We can see it coming—we’ll have those three weeks behind us and laid to rest in no time.

  That may well cause amazement—and yet it is perfectly in order and corresponds to the laws of how stories are told and listened to. Because both good order and the laws of narrative require that our experience of time should seem long or short, should expand or shrink, in the same way it does for the hero of our story, for young Hans Castorp, who quite unexpectedly has found himself impounded by fate. It may also be useful to prepare the reader for other wonders and phenomena that are connected with the mystery of time and that we shall encounter while in his company—quite apart from this striking instance. But for now it is enough for us to remind everyone how quickly a number of days, indeed a great number, can pass when one spends them as a patient in bed. It is always the same day—it just keeps repeating itself. Although since it is always the same day, it is surely not correct to speak of “repetition.” One should speak of monotony, of an abiding now, of eternalness. Someone brings you your midday soup, the same soup they brought you yesterday and will bring again tomorrow. And in that moment it comes over you—you don’t know why or how, but you feel dizzy watching them bring in the soup. The tenses of verbs become confused, they blend and what is now revealed to you as the true tense of all existence is the “inelastic present,” the tense in which they bring you soup for all eternity. But one can’t speak of boredom, because boredom comes with the passing of time—and that would be a paradox in relation to eternity. And we want to avoid paradoxes, particularly if we are to live with our hero.

  Hans Castorp had been confined to his bed since Saturday evening, by order of Director Behrens, the highest authority in this world in which we are encapsulated. There he lay, his monogram on the breast pocket of his nightshirt, his hands clasped behind his head, in his clean, white bed—the American woman’s deathbed and probably that of many others as well—staring up at the ceiling with his ordinary blue eyes, watery now from a cold, considering this strange state of affairs. Which does not mean that if he had not had a cold, his gaze would have been clear and unequivocal, because that was not how things looked on the inside—and however ordinary he might be on the inside, things in there were also very murky, confused, uncertain, and only half-sincere. And as he lay there, one moment the wild laughter of triumph would convulse him, rising up from somewhere deep within, and his heart would stop, aching with an expansive joy and hope he had never known before; and the next moment, he would turn pale with fear and alarm, and the pulsing of his conscience became his heart banging against his ribs in a rapid, fickle rhythm.

  Joachim had left him in peace the first day and avoided any long conversation. He stepped cautiously into the sickroom a few times, nodded to his cousin lying there, and out of courtesy asked if there was anything he needed. And he found it that much easier to acknowledge and respect Hans Castorp’s aversion to any discussion, because he shared it, and indeed considered his own situation even more embarrassing than his cousin’s.

  But on return from his solitary Sunday-morning constitutional, he could no longer put off consulting his cousin about things that demanded immediate attention. Taking a position beside his bed, he heaved a sigh and said, “Yes, well, it’s no use. We have to do something. They’re expecting you at home.”

  “Not yet,” Hans Castorp replied.

  “No, but within a few days—Wednesday or Thursday.”

  “Oh,” Hans Castorp said, “they’re not expecting me on any particular day. They have other things to do besides waiting for me and counting the days till I return. I’ll arrive when I arrive, and Uncle Tienappel will say, ‘So here you are!’ And Uncle James will say, ‘Well, have a good time?’ And if I don’t arrive just yet, it will be a good while before they even notice, you can be sure of that. Though it goes without saying that in due time they will have to be notified.”

  “You can imagine,” Joachim said with another sigh, “how unpleasant the whole affair is for me. What’s going to happen now? Of course I feel more or less responsible. You come up here to visit me, and I introduce you to life up here, and now here you sit, and no one knows when you’ll be able to get away again and start your career. You must realize how terribly embarrassing this is for me.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Hans Castorp said, his hands still clasped behind his head. “What are you getting in such a stew about? That’s simply nonsense. Did I come up here to visit you? Yes, that too. But the primary reason, after all, was to take a vacation, on orders of Dr. Heidekind. Well, and now it turns out that I needed a vacation a lot more than he or any of us dreamed I did. I’m surely not the first person who thought he was just dropping by for a visit, and then had things turn out differently. Just think of Tous-les-deux’s second son, and how it turned out very differently for him, too. I don’t know whether he’s even still alive, perhaps they removed the body during a meal one day. I really am surprised to learn that I’m a little ill, but I’ll just have to get used to being a patient here, to actually being one of you, instead of merely the visitor I’ve been until now. But, then again, I’m not that surprised, either, because I’ve never really felt all that splendidly healthy, and when I think of how both my parents died young—then where was such splendid health supposed to come from?
That you’ve got a little problem yourself—although it’s as good as cured now—why, none of us has ever pretended otherwise. So it may well be that it runs in the family a little—Behrens at least dropped a hint to that effect. At any rate, I’ve been lying here since yesterday asking myself just how I’ve always felt about it all, what my attitudes are, you know, about the whole thing, about life and its demands. I’ve always been rather serious by nature, with a certain aversion to anything loud or robust. We were speaking about the same thing here not long ago, about how I’ve sometimes almost wished I had become a clergyman, what with my interest in sad, edifying things—you know, like a black funeral pall with a silver cross and R.I.P. on it. Resquiescat in pace—that’s the loveliest phrase, and I find it personally much more appealing than something rowdy like ‘he’s a jolly good fellow.’ It all comes, I think, from my having a little problem myself and having understood something about illness from the start—which has all become apparent now. But since that’s how things have turned out, I can only say it was a lucky thing I came up here and got myself examined. You don’t have to reproach yourself for anything. You heard him say yourself that if I had stayed down below and continued my life just as before, it’s quite possible my whole pulmonary lobe would have gone, willy-nilly, to the devil.”