The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  The three of them did not have to wait long together. The staff inside was apparently in a hurry to catch up and had made short work of Sasha and his mother. Once again the technician in his white smock opened the door. Joachim stood up and tossed his magazine on the table; Hans Castorp followed him, although not without some apprehension, toward the door. Chivalrous scruples stirred within him, tempting him to address Frau Chauchat politely after all and offer to let her go first—perhaps even in French, if he could manage it. And he hastily searched his memory for vocabulary and syntax. But he did not know if such courtesies were usual here, if the schedule of appointments was not considered far more important than acts of chivalry. But Joachim would surely know, and it did not appear as if he were about to defer to the lady present, despite the troubled, earnest look Hans Castorp threw him. And so he followed his cousin past Frau Chauchat, who glanced up fleetingly from her hunched-over position, and they moved through the door to the laboratory.

  He was so numbed by what he had just left behind, by the adventures of the last ten minutes, that he was unable immediately to realign his inner world as he crossed the threshold into the X-ray room. He saw nothing, or only general outlines, in the artificial twilight. He could still hear Frau Chauchat’s pleasant, opaque voice saying, “What time is it. . . . Someone just went in. . . . That is unpleasant . . .,” and the timbre of her voice caused a shudder of sweet excitement to pass up and down his back. He could see her knee outlined under her skirt, the back of her neck bent forward under the short, reddish-blond hairs that hung loose from the tucked-up braid, saw the neck bones sticking out—and the shudder passed over him once again.

  He now saw Director Behrens standing in front of a cupboard or built-in cabinet, his back to them as they entered; he was inspecting a blackish plate that he held out at arm’s length against the dull light of the ceiling lamp. They passed him as they moved deeper into the room, and were themselves passed by the assistant, who was busy getting things ready for the procedure. There was a peculiar odor here—a kind of stale ozone smell in the air. The built-in unit jutted out between the two black-curtained windows, dividing the laboratory into unequal parts. You could make out clinical apparatus of various sorts: glassware, switch boxes, and tall vertical gauges, but also a camera-like box on a rolling stand and rows of glass photographic plates set along the walls. You couldn’t tell if you were in a photographer’s studio, a darkroom, or an inventor’s workshop and sorcerer’s laboratory.

  Joachim began without further ado to strip to the waist. The assistant, a younger, squat, red-cheeked local in a white smock, instructed Hans Castorp to do the same—it would go fast, it would soon be his turn. While Hans Castorp was removing his vest, Behrens stepped out of the smaller recess and joined them in the larger part of the room.

  “Hello there,” he said. “Why, it’s our Dioscuri boys—Castor and Pollux. Please, keep all screams of pain to a minimum. Be careful now, we’re going to look right through you both. I believe you’re afraid to reveal your insides to us, aren’t you, Castorp? You may set your mind at ease—our procedures are quite aesthetic. Look here—have you seen my private gallery?” And grabbing Hans Castorp by the arm, he pulled him over to the rows of dark glass plates; he flipped a switch. Illuminated now, the plates revealed pictures. Hans Castorp saw body parts: hands, feet, knees, thighs, calves, arms, pelvises. But the rounded living contours of these fragments of the human body were phantomlike and hazy; like a fog or a pale, uncertain aura, they enclosed a clear, detailed, and carefully defined core: the skeleton.

  “Very interesting,” Hans Castorp said.

  “Very interesting, indeed,” the director replied. “Useful visual aids for the instruction of the young. Illuminated anatomy, the triumph of the age. This is a female arm, you can tell by its dainty form, you see—the kind they hug you with on intimate occasions.” And he laughed, which set his upper lip and short-cropped moustache a little more askew. The pictures went dark. Hans Castorp turned away to watch the preparations for taking Joachim’s interior portrait.

  These were under way in front of the built-in unit where the director had been standing as they came in. Joachim had sat down on a kind of cobbler’s bench, facing a panel, against which he now pressed his chest, hugging it at the same time with both arms. The assistant helped Joachim improve his position, pushing his shoulders farther forward and massaging his back in a series of kneading motions. He now moved behind the camera, and like a photographer, legs spread wide, bent forward to check the angle; he expressed his satisfaction, and stepping to one side he told Joachim to take a deep breath and hold it until everything was over. Joachim’s back expanded and stayed that way. At the same moment, the assistant flipped the appropriate switches. For two seconds the dreadful forces necessary to penetrate matter were let loose—a current of thousands of volts, one hundred thousand, Hans Castorp thought he had heard somewhere. Barely tamed for their purpose, these forces sought other outlets for their energy. Discharges exploded like gunshots. The gauges sizzled with blue light. Long sparks crackled along the wall. Somewhere a red light blinked, like a silent, threatening eye, and a vial behind Joachim’s back was filled with a green glow. Then everything calmed down; the spectacle of lights vanished, and Joachim expelled his breath with a sigh. It was over.

  “Next culprit,” Behrens said, and poked Hans Castorp with his elbow. “Now don’t pretend you’re too tired. You’ll get a free copy, Castorp. Just think, you’ll be able to project the secrets of your bosom on the wall for your children and grandchildren.”

  Joachim had stepped away; the technician was changing plates. Director Behrens personally showed the novice how he was to sit and hold his body. “Hug it,” he said. “Hug the panel. Imagine it’s something else if you like. And press your chest up tight, as if it meant sweet bliss. That’s it. Breathe deep! Hold it!” he commanded. “Now smile, please!”

  Hans Castorp waited, his eyes blinking, his lungs full of air. The thunderstorm burst behind him, hissing, crackling, popping—and fell quiet again. The lens had peered inside him.

  He dismounted, confused and dazed by what had happened to him, although he had not felt anything at all during the penetration.

  “Well done,” the director said. “Now, let’s have a look for ourselves.” Joachim, being an old hand at this, had moved back toward the exit door to take up a position at an adjustable frame. Behind him stood the broad structure of the apparatus, a glass retort extruding tubes and half filled with liquid visible on its top rear shelf. In front of him, at chest-level, a framed screen dangled from a series of pulleys. To his left, a red-globed lamp sat amid a panel with a switch box. Seating himself astride a footstool placed in front of the dangling screen, the director turned on the lamp. The ceiling lamp went out, and only ruby light illuminated the scene. With one quick motion, the master extinguished that as well, and the laboratory was wrapped in darkest night.

  “Our eyes have to adapt first,” the director’s voice said in the darkness. “We have to wait for our pupils to get nice and big, like a cat’s, in order for us to see what we want to see. I’m sure you can understand that we can’t see properly, just like that, with our normal daylight eyes. For our purposes here, we first have to ban any rousing daylight scenes from our minds.”

  “Oh, but of course,” Hans Castorp said, standing now behind the director. He had closed his eyes, because in the pitch-black night it made no difference if they were open or shut. “We first have to let darkness wash over our eyes to see anything—that’s obvious. I even find it quite appropriate for us to gather together beforehand, in silent prayer, as it were. I’m standing here with my eyes closed and feeling pleasantly drowsy. But what’s that odor?”

  “Oxygen,” the director said. “That’s oxygen that you scent in the air. A gaseous product of our little parlor thunderstorm, if you will. Eyes open!” he said. “Let the exorcism begin.” Hans Castorp obeyed at once.

  They heard a switch thrown. A motor st
arted, its angry hum mounting higher and higher, but suddenly reduced again to a drone at the flip of another switch. The floor vibrated steadily. The little red light, a long vertical slit, stared at them, silent and threatening. A spark crackled somewhere. The milky glow of a slowly brightening window, the pale rectangle of the fluorescent screen, emerged out of the darkness. And before it sat Director Behrens astride his footstool—thighs spread wide, fists propped against them, snub nose close to the screen that gave him a view into the organic interior of another human being.

  “Can you see it, my lad?” he asked.

  Hans Castorp bent down over his shoulder, but first looked up once more into the darkness, to where he assumed Joachim’s eyes were staring out, gentle and sad, just as on that day at his checkup. “Do you mind?” he asked.

  “Oh, please, go ahead and look,” came Joachim’s generous reply out of the blackness. And with the floor vibrating under him and great forces crackling and blustering at play around him, Hans Castorp peered through the pale window, peered into the void of Joachim Ziemssen’s skeleton. His breastbone merged with his spine into one dark, gristly column. The ribs at the front of his rib cage overlapped those at the back, which looked paler. The collarbone curved upward on both sides, and the bones of the shoulder, the joint where Joachim’s arm began, looked lean and angular against the soft halo of flesh. The chest cavity was bright, but one could make out a web of darker spots and blackish ruffles.

  “Sharp picture,” the director said. “That’s the respectable leanness of military youth. I’ve had potbellies here—impenetrable, could recognize next to nothing. They still haven’t invented rays that can get through layers of fat like those. But this is clean work. Do you see the diaphragm?” he asked, and pointed a finger at a dark curve rising and sinking inside the window. “You see this knob here, this little raised spot? That’s from when he had pleurisy at the age of fifteen. Take a deep breath!” he commanded. “Deeper! I said deep!” And Joachim’s diaphragm quivered and rose as high as it would go. The upper parts of the lungs were brighter now, but the director was still not content. “Unsatisfactory,” he said. “Do you see the hilum there? Do you see those adhesions? Do you see these cavities here? That’s where the toxins come from that make him so tipsy.”

  But Hans Castorp was preoccupied with something that looked like a sack, or maybe a deformed animal, visible behind the middle column, or mostly to the right of it from the viewer’s perspective. It expanded and contracted regularly, like some sort of flapping jellyfish.

  “Do you see his heart?” the director asked, lifting his giant right hand from his thigh again and pointing an index finger at the pulsating pendant.

  Good God, it was his heart, Joachim’s honor-loving heart, that Hans Castorp saw. “I can see your heart,” he said in a choked voice.

  “Please, go ahead and look,” Joachim replied again, and he was probably even smiling meekly up there in the dark. But the director ordered him to be silent and not to exchange sentimentalities. He studied the spots and lines, the blackish ruffles in the chest cavity, while his fellow viewer gazed tirelessly at Joachim’s sepulchral form, his dry bones, his bare scaffolding, his gaunt memento mori. He was filled with both reverence and terror.

  “Yes, yes, I see it,” he said several times. “My God, I see it!” He had once heard about a woman, a long-dead forebear on the Tienappel side of the family, who was said to have been endowed or cursed with a troublesome talent that she had borne in all humility and that had caused her to see anyone who would soon die as just a skeleton. Which was exactly how good Joachim now looked to Hans Castorp, although with the aid and under the auspices of physical optics—so that it did not really mean anything and was perfectly normal, particularly since he had expressly obtained Joachim’s permission. And yet he felt some sympathy for the melancholy fate of his clairvoyant great-aunt. He was deeply moved by what he saw, or more accurately, by being able to see it, but he was also stung by secret doubts whether it might not be somehow abnormal after all, doubts about whether it was permissible to stare like this amid the quivering, crackling darkness. A deep desire to enjoy the indiscretion blended with feelings of compassion and piety.

  A few minutes later he himself was standing in the stocks while the little thunderstorm raged, and Joachim, his body closed from view again, began to dress. Once again the director peered through the milky pane, but this time into Hans Castorp’s interior, and from his mutterings—ragtag curses and phrases—it appeared his findings corresponded to his expectations. In response to much begging, he was kind enough to allow his patient to view his own hand through the fluoroscope. And Hans Castorp saw exactly what he should have expected to see, but which no man was ever intended to see and which he himself had never presumed he would be able to see: he saw his own grave. Under that light, he saw the process of corruption anticipated, saw the flesh in which he moved decomposed, expunged, dissolved into airy nothingness—and inside was the delicately turned skeleton of his right hand and around the last joint of the ring finger, dangling black and loose, the signet ring his grandfather had bequeathed him: a hard thing, this ore with which man adorns a body predestined to melt away beneath it, so that it can be free again and move on to yet other flesh that may bear it for a while. With the eyes of his Tienappel forebear—penetrating, clairvoyant eyes—he beheld a familiar part of his body, and for the first time in his life he understood that he would die. And he made the same face he usually made when listening to music—a rather dull, sleepy, and devout face, his head tilted toward one shoulder, his mouth half-open.

  The director said, “Spooky, isn’t it? Yes, there’s no mistaking that whiff of spookiness.”

  And then he put a stop to those great forces. The floor grew quiet, the spectacle of lights faded, the magic window wrapped itself in darkness. The ceiling lamp went on. And while Hans Castorp threw on his clothes, Behrens gave the young people some information about what he had observed, though with proper regard to their abilities as laymen to comprehend it. As for Hans Castorp’s case, the optical and acoustical results corresponded as precisely as one could ever demand of science. Both the old spots and the fresh one had been visible, and there were “strands” that ran from the bronchi well down into the lung itself—“strands with nodules.” Hans Castorp would be able to verify that for himself on the X-ray plate, a copy of which he would soon be given as promised. And so: rest, patience, manly discipline, food, thermometers, sleep—just grin and bear it. He turned his back to them. They departed. First Joachim, then Hans Castorp, who glanced back over his shoulder as they left. Ushered in by the technician, Frau Chauchat was now entering the laboratory.

  FREEDOM

  How did young Hans Castorp actually feel about all this? For instance, did the seven weeks he had demonstrably, indubitably spent with these people here feel like a mere seven days? Or did it seem to him just the opposite, that he had lived here now much, much longer than he really had? He asked himself those same questions, both privately of himself and formally of Joachim—but could not come to any decision. Probably both were true: looking back, the time he had spent here thus far seemed unnaturally brief and at the same time unnaturally long. It seemed everything to him, in fact, except how it really was—always presuming, of course, that time is part of nature and that it is therefore permissible to see it in conjunction with reality.

  In any case, October was close at hand, might arrive any day now. Hans Castorp had no trouble figuring out that much; and besides, he heard mention made of the fact in the conversations of his fellow patients. “Do you realize that it’s only five days till the first of the month?” he heard Hermine Kleefeld say to two young men of her acquaintance, Rasmussen the student and the thick-lipped lad, whose name was Gänser. Dinner was just over, its odors still heavy in the air, and people were lingering among the tables, chatting and putting off their rest cure. “The first of October—I noticed it on the calendar in the management office. This will be the second one I
’ve spent at this cozy resort. Well fine, summer, or what there was of it, is over—we’ve been cheated out of it, just as we’re cheated out of everything else in life.” And she sighed with her half a lung, shaking her head and directing her doltish, sleepy eyes at the ceiling. “Cheer up, Rasmussen,” she then said, slapping her comrade on one drooping shoulder, “and tell us some jokes!”

  “I know only a few,” Rasmussen replied, his hands dangling chest-high like fins. “But I don’t tell them very well—I’m always too tired.”

  “Not even a dog,” Gänser said between his teeth, “would want to go on living like this much longer.” And they laughed and shrugged.

  Settembrini had been standing close by, too, a toothpick between his lips, and as they were leaving he said to Hans Castorp, “Don’t believe them, my good engineer, never believe them when they squawk—and there’s not a one who doesn’t, although they all feel very much at home here. Lead a free and easy life—and then demand you pity them. Think they have a right to bitterness, irony, cynicism. ‘At this cozy resort!’ Well, isn’t it cozy? I would certainly say it is, and in the most dubious sense of the word. ‘Cheated,’ the little minx says—‘cheated out of everything in life at this cozy resort.’ But send her back to the plains and her life down there would leave you in no doubt that her sole object was to get back up here as soon as possible. Ah yes, irony! Beware of the irony that flourishes here, my good engineer. Beware of it in general as an intellectual stance. When it is not employed as an honest device of classical rhetoric, the purpose of which no healthy mind can doubt for a moment, it becomes a source of depravity, a barrier to civilization, a squalid flirtation with inertia, nihilism, and vice. And since the atmosphere in which we live provides very favorable conditions for this swamp plant to flourish, I may hope—or perhaps I must fear—that you do understand me.”