The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  And so the trio also walked to the cemetery on Dorfberg one day—this excursion, too, is recorded here for the sake of rendering a full account. The suggestion had been Hans Castorp’s, and although Joachim had some doubts at first because of poor Karen, he had yielded, admitting that it would have been pointless to play hide-and-seek with her, shielding her out of anxiety, à la cowardly Frau Stöhr, from anything that might remind her of her mortality. Karen Karstedt did not indulge in self-deception about even the final stages of her illness; she knew only too well how things stood and what the necrosis in her fingertips meant. She knew, moreover, that her skinflint relatives would hardly want to hear anything about the expense of transporting her home after her demise and that she would be allotted a modest plot up above for a final resting place. And so one might very well conclude that, as a goal for an excursion, it was more morally fitting than many others—the movie theater or the start of the bobsled run, for instance—particularly since paying a visit to those people up there was nothing more than an act of comradely respect, assuming, of course, that one did not regard the cemetery simply as one of the town’s sights, a standard goal for a standard walk.

  They worked their way slowly up the path in single file, since it had been shoveled wide enough for only one person to pass, left behind the last villas set high on the slope, and, as they climbed, looked back down on the landscape in its winter splendor, opening again now in a slightly shifted perspective. The vista broadened to the northeast toward the entrance to the valley and included the lake, as expected—a frozen, snow-covered circle surrounded by forest. Beyond its farthest shore, several steep slopes appeared to meet, and above them were unfamiliar, snow-clad peaks, overtopping one another against the blue sky. Standing there in the snow beside the little stone gate to the cemetery, they took in the view and then entered, swinging aside the unlocked wrought-iron grill hinged to the stone.

  Here, too, paths had been shoveled between railed-in, snow-covered mounds—gravesites, each containing a series of regular, properly made beds decorated with stone and metal crosses or little monuments adorned with medallions and inscriptions. But not another soul was to be seen or heard. The silence, the solitude, the serenity of the place seemed both deep and secret, in many senses of those words. Among some shrubbery stood a little stone angel or cupid, its snowy cap cocked to one side, its finger to its lips; it might have been taken for the genius of the place—that is to say, the genius of silence, but of a silence that, although it was certainly the antithesis and counterpart of speech, and so a silence of hushed voices, was in no way a silence devoid of substance or incident. This would probably have been an occasion for the two men to remove their hats, had they been wearing any. But they were both bareheaded, even Hans Castorp, and so they merely walked on ahead reverently, in single file behind Karen Karstedt, who led the way, placing their weight on the balls of their feet and making what looked like a series of little bows to the right and left.

  The cemetery was irregularly shaped, beginning as a narrow rectangle facing southward and then opening into two more rectangles, one on either side. It had obviously had to be enlarged several times by the annexation of adjacent fields. All the same, the enclosure seemed to be as good as fully occupied at present, whether along the walls or in the middle, where the less desirable plots were located. It would have been hard to say where anyone else could be buried. The three strangers wandered discreetly for a while along the narrow channels and passageways between the monuments, stopping now and then to decipher a name, the dates of birth and death. The gravestones and crosses were unpretentious affairs placed there at no great expense. As for the inscriptions, the names came from every corner of the earth, were written in English, Russian or other Slavic languages, in German, Portuguese, and many more tongues. The dates, however, had their own delicate individuality—on the whole these life spans had been strikingly short, the difference in years between birth and demise averaging little more than twenty. The field was populated almost exclusively by youth rather than virtue, by unsettled folk who had found their way here from all over the world and had returned now for good and all to the horizontal form of existence.

  Somewhere deep in the press of resting places, toward the midpoint of the meadow, between two mounds whose gravestones were hung with artificial wreaths, was a flat, regular, unoccupied space, the length of a human body—and the three visitors stopped instinctively beside it. There they stood, the young girl a little ahead of her escorts, reading the tender message of the stones—Hans Castorp relaxed, his hands clasped before him, with open mouth and sleepy eyes; young Ziemssen at attention, not merely erect, but even leaning backward a little. The cousins, both at the same moment, cast stolen sidelong glances at Karen Karstedt’s face. She noticed, however, and as she stood there, bashful and demure, she thrust her head forward at a slight tilt and smiled affectedly with pursed lips, blinking her eyes rapidly.

  WALPURGIS NIGHT

  A few days passed, and young Hans Castorp had now spent seven months up here, whereas Joachim, who already had five months to his credit when his cousin first arrived, could now look back on twelve months, one round year—round in the cosmic sense, as well, for in the time since the small, sturdy locomotive had dropped him off up here, the earth had returned to its starting point, having completed one orbit around the sun. It was carnival time. Mardi Gras was upon them, and Hans Castorp inquired of the one-year-old what that was like up here.

  “Magnifique!” responded Settembrini, who had happened to meet the cousins on their morning constitutional. “Splendid!” he said. “As rollicking as in the Prater. You’ll see, my good engineer. And now the dance is taken up, we play gallants most dashing,” he quoted, and went on shooting a volley of taut, satirical words, accompanying his satire with deft gestures of arm, head, and shoulder. “What do you want? Even in the maison de santé they throw balls and galas now and then for the fools and cretins, or so I’ve read—why not here? The program includes various danses macabres. Unfortunately a certain number of last year’s participants won’t be able to appear this time, because the party is over at half past nine.”

  “You mean . . . oh, I see now—how marvelous!” Hans Castorp laughed. “What a jokester you are! ‘At half past nine’—did you hear, cousin? Herr Settembrini is saying that it’s too early for some of ‘last year’s participants’ to spend a little time at the ball. Ha, ha, how spooky. He means the people who have finally put aside all ‘lusts of the flesh’—if you know what I mean. But I really am looking forward to it,” he said. “I’m all for celebrating holidays just as they fall; we should mark the passing of the year in the usual way, its turning points, I mean, so that the monotony gets divided up. Things would be just too strange otherwise. And so we’ve had Christmas, and we marked the New Year, and now Mardi Gras is coming. Then it will soon be Palm Sunday—do they bake special pastries here?—then Holy Week, Easter, and Pentecost, which is only six weeks later, and then before you know it, it’s the longest day, Midsummer Night, you see, and soon you’re into autumn.”

  “Wait! Wait! Wait!” Settembrini cried, lifting his face heavenward and pressing his palms to his temples. “Silence! I forbid you to play so fast and loose with time!”

  “Beg your pardon, I really meant just the opposite. By the way, Behrens will probably decide sooner or later to use injections to try to detoxify me, because I’m constantly at ninety-nine point three, point five, point seven, even point nine. It simply never changes. I am and shall remain one of life’s problem children—not that I’m a long-termer. Rhadamanthus has never saddled me with any sentence, but he says it would be pointless to interrupt my cure too soon, especially since I’ve been up here for so long now—have invested so much time, so to speak. And what good would it do if he were to set a date? It wouldn’t mean all that much, because if he says six months, for example, that’s always a low estimate—you have to be ready for more. You can see that with my cousin here, who was supposed to be
finished by the first of the month—finished in the sense of cured—but at his last checkup Behrens said it would take another four months for him to heal completely. Well, and where are we then? Why, Midsummer Night, just as I said—but not because I wanted to offend you. And then we start heading toward winter. But at the moment we’re about to celebrate Mardi Gras, of course. And as you heard I’m all in favor of that, of celebrating things as they come, just as the calendar dictates. Frau Stöhr mentioned that we can get little toy trumpets at the concierge’s desk, is that right?”

  It was indeed. Already at breakfast on Mardi Gras morning—which was there before you had even got a good bead on it—already at breakfast, the dining hall was filled with the rattling and tootling of all sorts of toy instruments. By noon, streamers were already flying at the table where Gänser, Rasmussen, and Kleefeld sat, and several people—round-eyed Marusya for instance—were wearing paper hats, which were also on sale at the limping concierge’s desk in the lobby. And by evening both in the dining hall and the social rooms the festivities continued to grow until at one point . . . At this juncture we alone know to what these carnival festivities eventually led, thanks to Hans Castorp’s enterprising spirit. But we are not about to let our knowledge of what happened disrupt the deliberate pace of our narrative; instead, we shall give time the honor it is due and not rush into things—perhaps we shall even draw these events out a bit, for we share with young Hans Castorp the same moral scruples that for so long had kept him from precipitating such events.

  More or less everyone made a pilgrimage to Platz that afternoon to see the carnival in the streets. There were people strolling in masks—Punchinellos and Harlequins, flicking whips that rattled—and flurries of confetti burst among the pedestrians and above the heads of masked passengers in the decorated sleighs jingling past. By suppertime, spirits were already very high at all seven tables, with everyone determined to continue the public gaiety in their own closed circle. The concierge had done a good business in paper hats, rattles, and sacks of favors, and Prosecutor Paravant made a start at keeping the buffoonery going by appearing in a kimono and wearing a false pigtail that belonged, or so someone shouted, to Frau Wurmbrandt, the general consul’s wife; he had also used a curling iron to turn his moustaches down, making him look every inch Chinese. Nor was the management taking a backseat to anyone. They had placed a paper lantern on each table, a colorful moon with a candle burning inside, so that when Settembrini entered the dining hall, passing close by Hans Castorp’s table, he had an appropriate quote at the ready:

  Behold bright flames illuminated!

  A merry club has congregated.

  As he said it, he smiled his delicate, dry smile, but kept on strolling toward his seat, where he was received with a barrage of fragile pellets that burst as they struck, dousing their victim in a spray of perfume.

  To put it in a word: the festive spirit was very apparent from the start. Laughter reigned, streamers dangling from the chandeliers wafted in the breeze, confetti floated in the gravy, and soon the dwarf appeared with the first ice-bucket and hurried past with the first bottle of champagne. Lawyer Einhuf set the tone by mixing champagne and burgundy, and now they were all doing it. Once the lights were turned off toward the end of the meal and only the lanterns illumined the dining hall with the soft, colorful glow of a night in Italy, the perfect mood was set. There was general approval at Hans Castorp’s table of a note that Settembrini passed to him by way of Marusya, who was decked out in a jockey’s cap of green tissue paper, on which he had written in pencil:

  But bear in mind, the mountain’s mad with spells tonight,

  And should a will-o’-wisp decide your way to light,

  Beware—its lead may prove deceptive.

  Dr. Blumenkohl, who had been doing very poorly again of late, muttered something to himself—with a look on his face, or better, about his lips, that was peculiarly his own—that indicated the source of these verses. For his part, Hans Castorp felt that he ought to reciprocate tit for tat, that he had to respond by writing a jocular note of his own, though it could have been only some very lightweight quotation. He searched his pockets for a pencil, but could not find one, and neither Joachim nor the teacher had one to lend him. His bloodshot eyes wandered eastward for help, to the far left-hand corner of the dining hall. And it was at once apparent that what had been a fleeting notion had dissipated into a wider circle of associations—he turned pale and completely forgot his original intention.

  There was reason enough for him to turn pale. Frau Chauchat had likewise dressed for the occasion and was wearing a new gown, or at least a gown that Hans Castorp had never seen on her—of thin, dark, almost black silk that sometimes took on a tawny shimmer; the rounded cut of the neck was small, almost girlish, barely deep enough to expose the throat or even a hint of the collarbone—or her protruding neck bones visible beneath a few stray hairs when she thrust her head forward in that special way. But it left Clavdia’s arms bare all the way to the shoulder—her arms, so tender and full at the same time, and cool, one could only presume—so that they stood out extraordinarily white against the dark shadows of silk. The effect was so overwhelming that Hans Castorp closed his eyes and whispered to himself, “My God!” He had never seen a dress cut like that. He was familiar with festive, yet formal ball gowns that revealed, as custom allowed, far more of the human body than this one, yet without causing the least bit of sensation. Poor Hans Castorp—what an error his earlier assumption had been upon first making the acquaintance of those arms through thin gossamer: that once bared, bared against all good reason, those arms would affect him less deeply without the seductive “radiant illusion” of fabric, as he had called it that day. An error, a fatal act of self-deception! The full, heightened, dazzling nakedness of the splendid limbs of a sick, infected organism turned out to be an experience far more potent than that day’s “illusion”—a phenomenon for which there was only one response: he lowered his head again and silently repeated, “My God!”

  A little later, another note arrived, on which was written:

  A party to your heart’s desire,

  With maids who long to marry,

  And bachelors with hearts on fire,

  And hopes extraordinary!

  “Bravo, bravo!” someone shouted. They were drinking their mocha now, served in little earthen-brown jugs, and some had liqueurs as well—Frau Stöhr for example, who simply loved to sip sweet spirits. People began to get up and circulate about the room. They visited one another’s tables. One group of guests had already moved on to the social rooms, while another stayed where they were in order to apply themselves to more burgundy and champagne. Settembrini came over in person now, coffee cup in hand, a toothpick between his lips, and made himself at home between Hans Castorp and the teacher.

  “In the Harz Mountains,” he said, “are towns with names like Schierke and Elend—Imps and Misery. Did I exaggerate, my good engineer? Now here’s a holy mass, I do declare. But just wait, our mirth’s not yet about to fade, we’ve not yet reached our heights—let alone come to an end. To judge from what one hears, still further masquerades await us. Certain persons have already withdrawn—and therefore we are permitted to make all sorts of assumptions. You’ll see.”

  And indeed new costumes arrived now: ladies in men’s clothes, their ample curves making them look as implausible as characters in an operetta, an effect accentuated by black beards drawn on their faces with burnt cork; and vice versa, gentlemen attired in women’s clothes, tripping over their skirts—including Rasmussen the student, who wore a black, jet-trimmed gown, its décolletage revealing a pimply chest and ditto back, both of which he tried to cool with a paper fan. A knock-kneed beggar appeared, leaning on a crutch. Someone had put together a Punchinello costume out of white underwear and a lady’s felt hat—the face powdered so white that the eyes looked quite unnatural, the lips emphasized in bloody-red lipstick. (It was the young fellow with the saltcellar fingernail.) A Greek from
the Bad Russian table strutted about as a Spanish grandee or fairy-tale prince with a cape, paper ruff, and sword—and a pair of purple tights to show off his handsome legs. All these costumes had been hastily improvised after the meal. Frau Stöhr could no longer bear it just to sit there. She vanished, and a short time later reappeared as a cleaning lady, with apron and rolled-up sleeves, the ribbons of her paper hat tied under her chin; she was armed with bucket and broom, which she now put to use, thrusting the wet broom under the table and swabbing between people’s feet.