The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  Hans Castorp felt only disdain for the lad’s allowing himself to be repulsed, and he let his disdain be known with a shrug. The poetic adolescent’s delicacy only served to spur him to take the opposite course, to find occasion for paying frequent visits to unhappy Frau von Mallinckrodt and for performing little nursing services that required no special training. He would arrive, for instance, just in time carefully to spoon her midday porridge into her mouth, to help her drink from her spouted cup if a bite got stuck in her throat, or to assist her in shifting position in bed—for, in addition to all her other problems, an incision from an operation made it difficult for her to lie down. He performed these little services when he would drop by on his way to the dining hall or after a walk, telling Joachim to go on ahead, that he was just going to check quickly on the case in room 50; and each time he felt his whole being expand with a joy rooted in a sense of helpfulness and quiet importance, but intermingled with a certain jaunty delight in the spotless Christian impression his good deeds made—an impression so devout, caring, and praiseworthy, in fact, that no serious objections whatever could be raised against it, either from a military or a humanistic-pedagogic standpoint.

  We have not yet mentioned Karen Karstedt, although Hans Castorp and Joachim took special interest in her. She was one of Behrens’s private outpatients, and the director had commended her to the cousins’ charity. She had been up here four years now, was penniless herself and dependent on skinflint relatives, who had already taken her away once—she was going to die anyway—and had sent her back only when the director protested. She lived in an inexpensive boardinghouse in Dorf—nineteen years old, a slip of a thing, with smooth oily hair, eyes that shyly tried to hide a glint that matched the hectic flush of her cheeks, and a distinctively husky but sympathetic voice. She coughed almost incessantly and had bandages on all her fingers, the result of open sores from the toxins in her body.

  The director had pled her cause to the two cousins—since they were such good-hearted lads—and they were now devoted to her. Flowers were sent, this was followed by a visit with poor Karen on her little balcony in Dorf, and then the three of them began to undertake special outings together. They attended an ice-skating contest, a bobsled race—for the winter sport season in our Alpine valley was in full swing. There was a festival week with any number of entertainments—sports events and performances to which the cousins had paid only occasional, fleeting attention until now. Joachim had been averse to all amusements up here. He had not come here for that sort of thing, was certainly not here to enjoy his stay by organizing his life around a variety of diversions, but solely for the purpose of detoxifying his body as quickly as possible, so that he could take up his duties in the plains below, real duties, not just the duties of rest cure—which, even though it was only a substitute, he was loath to slight in any way. It was forbidden to take part in winter sports, and he had no desire to play the gaping onlooker. And as for Hans Castorp, he felt himself to be, in a very restricted and intimate sense, so very much a part of “the people up here” that he wasted not a thought or a glance on people who saw the valley as a sports arena.

  Their charitable interest in poor Fräulein Karstedt, however, brought with it several changes in this respect—and Joachim could not object without seeming un-Christian. On a splendid, frosty, sun-drenched day, they stopped for the sick girl at her modest apartment in Dorf and strolled with her past the elegant shops lining the main street of the English quarter, named for the Hotel d’Angleterre. To the sound of sleigh bells, the idle, pleasure-loving rich from all over the world, residents of the Kurhaus and the other large hotels, promenaded—bareheaded, clad in the latest sports outfits of the most expensive fabrics, and bronzed by the winter sun reflected off the snow. The trio now walked toward the bottom of the valley to the ice rink, which was not far from the resort and in summer served as a soccer field. There was music in the air, the hotel band was playing a concert from a little gallery on the wooden pavilion at the far end of the rectangular rink, behind which snowcapped mountains rose against a deep blue sky. They paid to enter, pushed their way through the crowd assembling on bleachers set up on three sides of the rink, and took their seats to watch. The skaters, wearing brief tricot costumes, the jackets trimmed with fur and braid, swayed to and fro, traced figures, leapt, and spun. A man and a woman, a pair of highly talented professionals ineligible for competition, executed a feat no one else in the world could do—to great applause and a fanfare. The contestants for the race, six young men of various nationalities, sped six times around the wide rectangle—bodies bent low, hands behind their backs, some with a handkerchief pressed to their mouths. A bell rang out while the music played on. From time to time, waves of encouraging cries and applause surged up from the crowd.

  It was a very colorful gathering, and the three patients—the two cousins and their protégée—looked about, taking it all in. Englishmen with very white teeth and Scotch tams conversed in French with ladies drenched in perfume and dressed from head to foot in bright-colored wools, some even in trousers. American men, their hair plastered flat against their small heads, wore their fur coats skin-side out and smoked shag-tobacco pipes. Seated among the Germans and Swiss were bearded, elegant Russians, looking barbarically rich, and Dutchmen with traces of Malayan blood—all intermixed with a sprinkling of indeterminate sorts who spoke French and came from the Balkans or the Levant, a motley set of adventurers for whom Hans Castorp had a certain weakness but whom Joachim spurned as dubious and lacking in character. There were also various crazy contests for children, who hobbled across the rink with a snowshoe on one foot, an ice skate on the other. Little boys had to push little girls ahead of them on snow shovels. There was a race with candles—the winner was the first to arrive at the goal with her flame still burning. There were obstacle courses, and races where the contestants had to carry potatoes on a tin spoon and deposit them in watering cans set at the end of the course. High society cheered. People pointed out the richest, most famous, most charming children: the daughter of a Dutch multimillionaire, the son of a Prussian prince, and a twelve-year-old lad whose name was on the label of a world-famous champagne. Poor Karen cheered as well—and coughed each time. She clapped her hands for joy, despite the open sores on her fingers. She was so grateful.

  The cousins also took her to the bobsled races. As it came down off Schatzalp, the run ended among buildings on Dorf’s western slope, not far from the Berghof, nor from Karen Karstedt’s lodgings. A little hut had been built at the finish line, and inside was a telephone that rang whenever a sled began its run. Steered by men and women in white wool and with sashes in various national colors across their chests, the low, flat frames came shooting down, one by one, at long intervals, taking the curves of the course that glistened like metal between icy mounds of snow. You could see red, tense faces with snow blowing in their eyes. There were accidents, too—sleds crashed and upended, dumping their teams in the snow, while onlookers took lots of pictures. There was music playing here, as well. The spectators sat in a little grandstand or thronged the narrow pathway shoveled free next to the course itself. Farther up, wooden bridges spanned the course, and they, too, were crowded with people who could watch the competing sleds hurtle by under them from time to time. The bodies from the sanatorium on the far slope whizzed down the same course, taking its curves, heading down to the valley, all in the valley, Hans Castorp thought—and remarked on the fact, too.

  They even took Karen Karstedt to the Bioscope Theater in Platz one afternoon, because that was something she truly enjoyed. Being used to only the purest air, they felt ill at ease in the bad air that weighed heavily in their lungs and clouded their minds in a murky fog, while up ahead on the screen life flickered before their smarting eyes—all sorts of life, chopped up in hurried, diverting scraps that leapt into fidgety action, lingered, and twitched out of sight in alarm, to the accompaniment of trivial music, which offered present rhythms to match vanishing phantoms from th
e past and which despite limited means ran the gamut of solemnity, pomposity, passion, savagery, and cooing sensuality. They watched as a rousing tale of love and murder in the court of an Oriental potentate unrolled silently before them; scene after opulent scene sped past, full of naked bodies, despotic lust, and abject servility blind in its zeal, full of cruelty, prurience, and fatal desire—and then suddenly the film slowed to linger revealingly on the muscular arm of an executioner. In short, it had been produced with a sympathetic understanding of its international audience and catered to that civilization’s secret wishes. Settembrini, as a man who formed opinions, would surely have denounced this exhibition as a denigration of humanity, and with honest, classical irony would have castigated the misuse of technology that made such cynical presentations possible—or so Hans Castorp thought, and whispered as much to his cousin. Frau Stöhr, however, who happened to be sitting not all that far from the trio, had apparently abandoned herself to the film; her red, uneducated face was contorted with pleasure.

  But, then, it was much the same with all the faces they could see. When the last flickering frame of one reel had twitched out of sight and the lights went up in the hall and the audience’s field of dreams stood before them like an empty blackboard, there was not even the possibility of applause. There was no one there to clap for, to thank, no artistic achievement to reward with a curtain call. The actors who had been cast in the play they had just seen had long since been scattered to the winds; they had watched only phantoms, whose deeds had been reduced to a million photographs brought into focus for the briefest of moments so that, as often as one liked, they could then be given back to the element of time as a series of blinking flashes. Once the illusion was over, there was something repulsive about the crowd’s nerveless silence. Hands lay impotent before the void. People rubbed their eyes, stared straight ahead, felt embarrassed by the brightness and demanded the return of the dark, so that they could again watch things, whose time had passed, come to pass again, tricked out with music and transplanted into new time.

  The despot was dispatched by a knife, his mouth opened for a bellow that no one heard. They now saw pictures from all over the world: the top-hatted president of the French republic reviewing a long cordon, then sitting in his landau to reply to a welcoming speech; the viceroy of India at the wedding of a rajah; the German crown prince on a barracks drill field in Potsdam. They observed the life and customs of an aboriginal village on New Mecklenburg, a cockfight on Borneo, naked savages blowing on nose flutes, the capture of wild elephants, a ceremony at the Siamese royal court, a street of brothels in Japan with geishas sitting caged behind wooden lattices. They watched Samoyeds bundled in furs driving sleds pulled by reindeer across the snowy wastes of northern Asia, Russian pilgrims praying at Hebron, a Persian criminal being bastinadoed. They were present at each event—space was negated, time turned back, “then and there” transformed by music into a skittering, phantasmagoric “here and now.” A young Moroccan woman dressed in striped silk and harnessed with chains, bangles, and rings, her swelling breasts half-bared, was suddenly brought nearer until she was life-size. Her nostrils were flared wide, her eyes full of animal life, her features vivacious; she laughed, showing her white teeth, held up one hand—the nails seemed lighter than her skin—to shield her eyes, and waved at the audience with the other. People stared in bewilderment at the face of this charming specter, who seemed to see them and yet did not, who was not at all affected by their gaze, and whose laughter and waves were not meant for the present, but belonged to the then and there of home—it would have been pointless to respond. And so, as noted, their delight was mixed with a sense of helplessness. Then the phantom vanished. A bright void filled the screen, the word Finis was projected on it, this cycle of entertainments was over, and the people left the theater in silence as a new audience pushed its way in, eager to enjoy another roll of the reels.

  Urged on by Frau Stöhr, who had now joined them, they stopped by the Kurhaus café just to please Karen, who clasped her hands together in gratitude. There was music here, too. A little orchestra in red jackets was playing under the direction of a Czech or Hungarian violinist, who stood apart from the rest among the dancing couples, belaboring his instrument with ardent writhings of his body. This was the sophisticated life—people walked about with strange drinks in their hands. The cousins ordered refreshing orangeade for themselves and their protégée—it was hot and dusty in the room; Frau Stöhr, however, drank a sweet liqueur. Things were not in full gear yet at this time of day, she said. The dancing would get much more lively as the evening progressed; countless patients from the various sanatoriums and patients living brazenly on their own at the Kurhaus or other hotels would join in later in much greater number than now, and many a serious case had danced his way to eternity here, first tossing back the beaker of life and then hemorrhaging one last time in dulci jubilo. What Frau Stöhr in her ignorance did to the phrase dulci jubilo was quite extraordinary; she pronounced the first word as “dolce,” borrowing it from the Italian musical vocabulary of her spouse, but the second was more reminiscent of “yippee-ay-oh” or God only knew what—and at the sound of her Latin, the two cousins simultaneously made a grab for the straws in their glasses. This did not trouble Frau Stöhr. Instead, obstinately baring her rabbit’s teeth, she attempted by way of allusion and innuendo to get to the bottom of the relationship of these three young people, only one part of which was clear to her: that poor Karen, as she remarked, could not help enjoying the high life chaperoned by two such smart young cavaliers. The situation was much less obvious as regarded the cousins; but despite her stupidity and ignorance, feminine intuition allowed her a certain insight, if only a partial and vulgar one. For she understood, as she insinuated, that the real cavalier here was Hans Castorp and that young Ziemssen was merely his assistant; but since she was also well aware of Hans Castorp’s partiality for Frau Chauchat, she assumed he was chaperoning poor little Karstedt as a substitute for a woman he evidently did not know how to approach. It was a very inadequate insight, based on vulgar intuition and lacking real moral profundity, and so perfectly worthy of Frau Stöhr—which was why Hans Castorp replied only with a tired, disdainful glance when she expressed it in her coarse, bantering way. It was true, after all, that for Hans Castorp the relationship with poor Karen was a kind of substitute, a vaguely useful device—but that was true of all his other charitable enterprises as well. Yet these pious works were, at the same time, an end in themselves, and the satisfaction he found in feeding porridge to sickly Frau Mallinckrodt, in letting Herr Ferge describe his infernal pleural shock, or in seeing poor Karen clap her hands with joy and gratitude, despite the bandaged fingertips, was not only of a vicarious and relative kind, but also genuine and immediate. It arose from an intellectual tradition diametrically opposed to the one represented by Herr Settembrini’s pedagogy, but all the same one quite worthy of the designation “placet experiri”—or so it seemed to Hans Castorp.

  The little house where Karen Karstedt lived was on the road leading into Dorf, not far from the brook and the train tracks, and so it was easy for the cousins to stop for her when setting out on their promenade after breakfast. Continuing toward the main street of Dorf, they saw Little Schiahorn directly before them, and on its right were three crags called the Green Towers, although they, too, now lay under snow glistening in the sun, and still farther to the right was the summit of Dorfberg. A cemetery was visible about a quarter of the way up its slope: the town cemetery, surrounded by a wall, presumably commanding a lovely view—of the lake, more than likely—which made it an obvious goal for a walk. And the three of them did hike up there one beautiful morning—all the mornings were beautiful now, calm and sunny, frosty yet warm, glistening white under a deep blue sky. The cousins, the one with a brick-red face, the other tanned bronze, walked along without overcoats, which would only have been burdensome in the glaring sun—young Ziemssen wearing sport clothes and rubber galoshes, Hans Castorp dresse
d much the same, though in long trousers, since he was not the sort who gave much thought to his physique. It was between the beginning and the middle of February of a new year. Yes, the last number in the date had indeed changed since Hans Castorp’s arrival up here; when you wrote the date, you added another year. One hand on the world’s great chronometer had ticked ahead one space—not one of the largest hands, not the one for millennia for instance, few people then alive would ever see that happen—not the century hand, either, not even the decade hand, no. But the year hand had recently moved one space (although Hans Castorp had not been up here even a year yet, only a little more than half a one), and like some large clocks with a minute hand that jerks only every five minutes, it now stood still and would not advance again soon. The month hand had to move ahead ten more spaces yet, a few more than it had since Hans Castorp had arrived up here. February, however, no longer counted, because once begun, soon finished—once the bill’s broken, the money’s soon spent.