The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  Herr Settembrini coordinated head, shoulders, and hands in a serene, polite gesture to illustrate his question: Yes, well? And what of it?

  “You’re a writer,” Hans Castorp said, “a literary man. You really should be able to understand and appreciate how under such circumstances a person might not be so tough-minded or find it perfectly natural for people to be so cruel—normal people, you know, who stroll about and laugh and make money and stuff their bellies. I don’t know if I’m expressing myself . . .”

  Settembrini bowed. “You wish to say,” he explained, “that early and repeated contacts with death give rise to a basic mind-set against the cruelties and crudities of life as it is thoughtlessly lived out in the world. Or, let us say, it makes one aware of and sensitive to its cynicism.”

  “Precisely,” Hans Castorp exclaimed with genuine enthusiasm. “You’ve put it perfectly, dotted the i and crossed the t, Herr Settembrini. Contacts with death! I know that as a man of letters you . . .”

  Laying his head to one side and closing his eyes, Settembrini held out a hand toward him in a very beautiful and gentle gesture of restraint, a plea to be heard further. He held this pose for several seconds, long after Hans Castorp had fallen silent to wait somewhat awkwardly for what was to come. Finally he opened his black eyes—those organ-grinder eyes—and said, “Permit me, permit me, my good engineer, to tell you something, to lay it upon your heart. The only healthy and noble and indeed, let me expressly point out, the only religious way in which to regard death is to perceive and feel it as a constituent part of life, as life’s holy prerequisite, and not to separate it intellectually, to set it up in opposition to life, or, worse, to play it off against life in some disgusting fashion—for that is indeed the antithesis of a healthy, noble, reasonable, and religious view. The ancients decorated their sarcophagi with symbols of life and procreation, some of them even obscene. For the ancients, in fact, the sacred and the obscene were very often one and the same. Those people knew how to honor death. Death is to be honored as the cradle of life, the womb of renewal. Once separated from life, it becomes grotesque, a wraith—or even worse. For as an independent spiritual power, death is a very depraved force, whose wicked attractions are very strong and without doubt can cause the most abominable confusion of the human mind.”

  Herr Settembrini said no more. He had come to a halt at a generality, but had done so most definitively. He was very serious—he had not spoken in a conversational tone, had refused to allow Hans Castorp any opportunity to pick up the thread or contradict him, and had lowered his voice decisively to mark the end of his statement. He sat there with his mouth closed, his hands folded in his lap, one check-trousered leg crossed over the other, and he gazed sternly at his foot swinging gently in the air.

  Hans Castorp was silent, too. Sitting up against his pillows, he turned his face toward the wall and drummed his fingertips lightly on his comforter. He felt he had been lectured to, corrected, even scolded, and there was a great deal of childish sullenness in his silence. This pause continued for some time.

  At last Herr Settembrini raised his head again, and said with a smile, “Do you remember, my good engineer, how we once had a similar dispute, one could well say, the same dispute? Our conversation that day—I believe we were out walking—was about sickness and stupidity; and out of a respect for illness, you declared the combination of the two a paradox. I called that respect a gloomy notion that dishonored the very idea of humanity, and to my delight you appeared not all that reluctant to take my objections into consideration. We spoke about the neutrality and intellectual hesitancy of youth, of its freedom to choose, its tendency to experiment with all sorts of standpoints, and of how one need not regard such experiments as final, life-determining options. Would you allow me”—and here Herr Settembrini bent forward on his chair, and with a smile he placed both feet on the floor, tucked his folded hands between his knees, and thrust his head forward at a slight tilt—“would you allow me,” he repeated with some emotion in his voice, “to lend you a helping hand in your exercises and experiments and to play a corrective role whenever I see danger looming in the form of some pernicious fixation?”

  “But of course, Herr Settembrini!” Hans Castorp was quick to abandon his uneasy, half-defiant attitude; he stopped drumming on his comforter and turned back to his guest with confused affability. “That’s extraordinarily kind of you. But I really have to ask myself . . . I mean, in my case it would be . . .”

  “Quite sine pecunia,” Herr Settembrini quoted as he stood up. “A man can’t allow himself to be outclassed.” They laughed. They heard the first double door open, and in the next moment they heard the latch of the inner one.

  It was Joachim, back from the evening social. He blushed when he caught sight of the Italian, exactly as Hans Castorp had done; his tanned face turned one visible shade darker. “Oh, you have a visitor,” he said. “How nice. I was delayed. They made me play a game of bridge—at least they tell people it’s bridge,” he said, shaking his head, “but it turned out to be something quite different. I won five marks.”

  “Just so its appeal doesn’t become a vice,” Hans Castorp said. “Yes, yes—Herr Settembrini has done a splendid job of helping me pass the time—though that’s a poor way of putting it. I suppose that could apply as well to your sham game of bridge. Whereas Herr Settembrini really did help me employ my time meaningfully. A respectable man should be trying with might and main to get out of here—particularly when he sees sham bridge games breaking out in his midst. But given the chance to listen often to Herr Settembrini and to have him lend a helping conversational hand, I think I almost might want to stay feverish indefinitely and just sit tight here with you all. It wouldn’t be long before they would have to give me a silent sister to keep me from cheating.”

  “I repeat, my good engineer, you are a wag,” the Italian said. He took leave of them very courteously.

  Left alone with his cousin, Hans Castorp heaved a great sigh. “What a pedagogue,” he said. “A humanist pedagogue, admittedly. He just never stops correcting you, sometimes in the form of stories and sometimes more abstractly. And you end up talking with him about things—that you never would have thought you would talk about or even understand. And if I had run into him down in the flatlands, I’m sure I would not have understood them,” he added.

  Joachim usually stayed awhile with him now, sacrificing two or three quarter hours of his evening rest cure. Sometimes they played chess on Hans Castorp’s bed table—Joachim had brought a set with him from down below. Later he would leave—lock, stock, and thermometer—for his balcony, and Hans Castorp would have to take his temperature one last time while soft music drifted up, now near, now far, from the night-enshrouded valley. At ten o’clock the rest cure would be over; he would hear Joachim stir; he would hear the couple from the Bad Russian table—and then Hans Castorp would turn over on his side, waiting for sleep to come.

  The night was the more difficult half of the day, because Hans Castorp would wake frequently and often even lie awake for hours on end—perhaps because his overheated blood kept him alert or because his fully horizontal mode of life meant the loss of both the desire and the need for sleep. The hours of slumber were, however, animated with varied and lively dreams, and he could go on indulging in them even while lying there awake. Divided as it was into little segments, the day provided him with diversion, but the hours of night, as they marched past in their blurred uniformity, had much the same effect. And when morning drew near, he found it amusing to watch the objects in his room gradually grow visible, emerging from under a veil of gray, to see daylight kindle outside, sometimes only smoldering murkily, sometimes catching bright fire. And before one even thought about it, the moment had come for the robust knock of the bath attendant, announcing that the daily schedule was in force once again.

  Hans Castorp had not brought a calendar along for his little excursion, and so he was never quite sure of the current date. Now and then he wou
ld ask his cousin to tell him, but he, too, was not always certain about the matter. All the same, Sundays, and in particular every second Sunday with its concert, gave Hans Castorp something to hang on to in his present situation. But this much was certain: September was fairly far advanced now, somewhere toward the middle. The gloomy and cold weather that had reigned in the valley outside when Hans Castorp had first taken to his bed had given way to splendid bright summer days, a whole series of such days, which seemed to have no end. Each morning Joachim would appear in his cousin’s room dressed in white flannels, only to find he could not suppress his honest regrets, which sat deep in his soul and young muscles, that Hans Castorp had to forgo such splendid weather. Once he even spoke softly about what a “disgrace” it was that he had to spend it this way—but then, to mollify him, added that he didn’t know himself how to take better advantage of it, since experience had taught him to avoid extensive exercise here. And, after all, the wide-open balcony door allowed his cousin to enjoy something of the warm shimmering light out there.

  But toward the end of Hans Castorp’s prescribed retreat, the weather changed again. It turned foggy and cold overnight, the valley wrapped itself in wet, blowing snow, and the gentle, dry warmth of the radiator filled the room. And it was on that same day, when the doctors came by on their rounds, that Hans Castorp reminded the director that he had been lying there for three weeks now and asked permission to get up.

  “What the—is your time up already?” Behrens said. “Let me think. I do declare, it’s true. Good God, how quickly we do get old. Not that your condition has changed all that much in the meantime. What? It was normal yesterday? Yes, except for the measurement at six in the evening. Well, Castorp, I don’t want to be like that, and so I’ll return you to human society. Arise, go thy way, my good man. Within the prescribed borders and limits, of course. We shall do a portrait of your interior here shortly. Make a note of that,” he said to Dr. Krokowski as they departed, pointing over his shoulder with a giant thumb at Hans Castorp and training his watery, bloodshot, blue eyes on his pallid assistant. And so Hans Castorp left the “stall.”

  In rubber boots and with a turned-up coat collar, he accompanied his cousin again for the first time up to the bench beside the water trough and back. As they walked he could not help remarking that he wondered how long the director would have let him lie there if he had not himself mentioned the time was up. And Joachim, his eyes shifting about and his mouth opening as if to utter a hopeless “oh,” let his hand trail off in a gesture of immeasurability.

  “MY GOD, I SEE IT!”

  A week passed before Hans Castorp received orders from Head Nurse Mylendonk to report to the X-ray laboratory. He had not wanted to press the matter. It was apparent that this was a busy time for the Berghof, that the doctors and staff had their hands full. New guests had arrived in the last few days: two Russian students, both with heads of thick hair and high-buttoned black blouses without a trace of collar or cuff; a Dutch married couple, who were assigned places at Settembrini’s table; a hunchbacked Mexican, who terrified his tablemates with horrible asthma attacks, when he suddenly could not get his breath and would then grab his neighbor, man or woman, in the iron grip of one of his long hands, hold on tight as a vise, and drag his struggling, panicky victim, now shouting for help, down into the pool of dread with him. In short, the dining hall was already as good as full, although the winter season did not begin until October. And Hans Castorp’s case was hardly severe enough, high enough on the scale of illness, for him to have any right to claim special treatment. For all her stupidity and ignorance, Frau Stöhr, for instance, was without doubt much more ill than he, not to mention Dr. Blumenkohl. One would have to lack all sense of decorum or hierarchy not to have exercised restraint in Hans Castorp’s case—particularly since such sensibilities were essential to the spirit of the house. People who were only slightly ill did not count for much—he had often overheard conversations to that effect. They were spoken of disparagingly and considered inferior by local standards, not only by those of higher or highest rank, but also by those who themselves were only “mildly ill”—which allowed them to shrug off their own cases; while at the same time, by subjecting themselves to such standards, they were able to preserve and enhance their own self-esteem. Which is only human. “Oh, him,” they might say about one another, “there’s really not much wrong with him, hardly has the right to be here. Doesn’t even have a cavity.” Such was the spirit of the place—aristocratic in its own special way; and Hans Castorp greeted it out of an inborn respect for law and order of every sort. When in Rome, as the saying goes. Travelers prove their lack of education if they make fun of the customs and values of their hosts, and the qualities that do a person honor are many and varied. Hans Castorp even showed a certain regard and consideration for Joachim—not so much because he was an old-timer here and had served as his guide and cicerone in this world, but more particularly because there was no doubt that he was “seriously ill.” But since this was how things were, it was only understandable if someone made as much of his case as possible, even exaggerated a little to be part of the aristocracy or at least get closer to it. Whenever his tablemates asked about his temperature, Hans Castorp, too, would add a few tenths, and he found it impossible not to feel flattered when they shook their fingers at him as if he were a particularly sly rascal. But even if he laid it on a little thick, he was still low on the ladder, as it were, and so patience and reticence were certainly appropriate behavior.

  He had resumed the mode of life adapted in his first three weeks—the familiar, regular, and perfectly ordered life at Joachim’s side; everything went like clockwork from the first day, as if there had never been an interruption. And indeed it had meant nothing; he became aware of that fact when he first returned to his table. Joachim, who attached definite importance to such tokens, had of course seen to it that a few flowers adorned the returnee’s place setting; but Hans Castorp’s tablemates greeted him with little ceremony, with essentially no more interest than usual, as if he had been gone for three hours and not three weeks—not so much out of indifference to this ordinary, sympathetic fellow or out of self-absorption and preoccupation with their own interesting bodies, but because they were oblivious to the intervening time. And Hans Castorp had no trouble following suit, because when he took his seat again at the end of the table, between the teacher and Miss Robinson, it seemed as if he had been gone for a day at most.

  And if the people at his own table did not make much fuss about the end of his isolation, how could anyone else in the dining hall have done so? Literally no one there had noticed his return—with the sole exception of Settembrini, who came over at the end of the meal to extend a friendly, witty greeting. Hans Castorp, of course, added one further exception of his own, though with what justification we shall have to leave undecided. He told himself that Clavdia Chauchat had noticed his reappearance—the moment she entered, late as always and having first let the glass door slam, her narrow eyes had rested on him, or so it seemed, and had met his own; no sooner had she sat down than she had looked back over her shoulder at him and smiled the same smile he had seen three weeks before, on the day of his examination. And she was so open, even brazen, about it—brazen in regard both to him and to the rest of the guests—that he had not known whether to be overjoyed or, in case it was a mark of disdain, upset. At any rate, his heart had shrunk beneath those looks—which in his eyes had contradicted and denied, in a most flagrant and intoxicating fashion, the reality that he and the sick woman were not so much as social acquaintances—had, in fact, shrunk almost painfully at the first rattle of the glass door, and his breath had come short and shallow as he sat waiting for that moment.

  It should also be noted that Hans Castorp’s innermost relationship to this patient from the Good Russian table, the interest his modest intellect and his senses now took in this Kirghiz-eyed, softly slinking woman of average stature—in brief, his infatuation (and the word is apt, even
though it is a word from “down below,” a word of the plains, and might imply that the little song about “how oft it thrills me” was somehow applicable here)—his infatuation, then, had made considerable progress during his isolation. A vision of her had floated before his eyes as he had watched early dawn slowly unveil his room and dusk thicken again come evening. (It had also been floating there very clearly the evening Settembrini had suddenly entered and set the room ablaze with light—which was why he had blushed at the sight of the humanist.) During each hour of his segmented day, he had thought of her mouth, her cheekbones, her eyes—whose color, shape, and placement cut deep into his soul—of her limp back, the way she carried her head, the neck bones above the collar line of her blouse, her arms a radiant illusion under flimsiest gossamer. And if we did not previously mention that this was how the long hours had passed so effortlessly for him, it was because we sympathize with the qualms of conscience that accompanied the terrifying bliss of these visions and images. Yes, terror and fear were bound up with them; hope, joy, and nameless dread could spill over into boundless uncertainty and total extravagance, but at times they could also suddenly press in on his young heart—that is, his heart in the genuine, physical sense—so that he would put one hand to that organ and the other to his brow, as if to shade his eyes, and whisper, “My God!”

  For behind his brow were the thoughts or half-thoughts that first conferred true cloying sweetness to his visions and images, thoughts that centered on Madame Chauchat’s carelessness and brazenness, on the illness that accentuated and enhanced her body, the illness that embodied her very being and that he now shared with her according to medical dictum. The realization formed behind his brow that Madame Chauchat was taking utter license with those looks and smiles, totally disregarding their not being social acquaintances—as if they were not social creatures at all, as if there were no need for them even to speak to one another. And that was what terrified him, in the same way he had been terrified that day down in the examination room, when he had rapidly shifted his searching glance from Joachim’s naked upper torso to his eyes—the difference being that it was pity and worry that had been the source of his terror then, whereas other factors were involved here.