by Thomas Mann
She both gave it to him and held it back, so that he took it without actually taking hold of it—raising his hand, very close to the pencil, his fingers ready to grasp it, but not actually grasping; and the gaze from his leaden eye sockets shifted between the object and Clavdia’s Tartar face. His bloodless lips were open, and they stayed open, unused, as he said, “You see, I knew it—I knew you’d have one.”
“Prenez garde, il est un peu fragile,” she said. “C’est à visser, tu sais.” And as they both bent their heads down over the pencil, she showed him the standard screw mechanism, from which emerged a very thin, hard needle of graphite that could leave no real mark.
They stood there bending toward one another. He had donned a formal, stiff collar for this evening and so could support his chin on that.
“A poor thing, but thine own,” he said, brow to brow with her, gazing down at the pencil, his lips never moving, so that the two labials were left unsounded.
“Oh, and you are witty, too,” she replied with a brief smile, raising her head now and letting him take the pencil. (Though God only knew how he had managed to be witty—with apparently not a drop of blood left in his head.) “And so go, step lively, draw, draw well, withdraw to draw.” She was sending him wittily on his way, too, it seemed.
“No, you haven’t drawn yet. You must draw now,” he said, leaving out the m in “must” and taking a step back to let her pass.
“Do you mean me?” she said again, and this time her astonishment seemed directed at more than his request. At first she stood there smiling in some confusion, but then, as if pulled by a magnetic force, followed him as he backed away toward the punch table.
But it turned out that the diversion had lost its appeal, was in its last throes. One person was still drawing, but had no audience. The calling cards were covered with nonsense, everyone having given it a helpless try—but the table was as good as deserted, particularly since a current was now flowing in the opposite direction. Once it became clear that the doctors had left, word quickly spread that there would be dancing. The table was shoved to one side. Scouts were posted at the doors to the reading and music rooms and instructed to give the signal if the “boss,” Krokowski, or the head nurse was sighted. A Slavic lad passionately attacked the keyboard of the little walnut piano. The first couples began to spin inside a little circle of spectators seated in chairs and on stools.
Hans Castorp waved good-bye to the table as it drifted away—“Farewell!” he said. He pointed with his chin first to some free chairs he had spotted in the little salon, and then to a sheltered corner just to the right of the portieres. He said nothing, perhaps because the music was too loud. He dragged one chair—this was for Frau Chauchat, almost a reclining throne, with a high, wooden-frame back and plush upholstery—over to the spot he had indicated in his pantomime, and for himself he selected a crackling, creaking wicker chair with scrolled armrests, on which he now sat down beside her, bending forward, his arms on the scrolls, her pencil in his hand, his feet well hidden under his chair. She, however, was forced to lie far back into the plush cushions, with her knees pulled up; nevertheless, she managed to cross one leg over the other and wiggled a foot in the air—her ankle, visible above the rim of her black patent leather shoe, was wrapped in a taut black silk stocking. The people seated in front of them would occasionally get up to dance, making room for those who had tired of dancing. There was a constant coming and going.
“You’re wearing a new dress,” he said, as an excuse for gazing at her. And now he heard her answer.
“New? You are conversant with my wardrobe?”
“I am right, am I not?”
“Yes. I recently had it made here, by Lukaček, the tailor in the village. He does work for many of the ladies up here. Do you like it?”
“Very much,” he said, letting his gaze pass over her again before casting his eyes down. “Do you want to dance?” he added.
“Would you like to?” she asked, her brows raised in surprise, but still with a smile.
“I’d do it, if that’s what you want.”
“You’re not quite as well-mannered as I thought you were,” she said. When he dismissed this with a laugh, she added, “Your cousin has already gone.”
“Yes, he is my cousin,” he confirmed quite unnecessarily. “I also noticed a while ago that he had left. I’m sure he’s taking his rest cure.”
“He is a very rigid, very respectable, very ‘German’ young man.”
“Rigid? Respectable?” he repeated. “I understand French better than I speak it. What you mean to say is that he’s pedantic. Do you consider us Germans pedantic—us other Germans?”
“We are talking about your cousin. But it’s true, you are all a little bourgeois. You love order more than liberty, all Europe knows that.”
“Love . . . love. What is it, exactly? The word lacks definition. What one man has, the other loves, as the German proverb puts it,” Hans Castorp contended. “I have been giving freedom some thought of late,” he continued. “That is, I heard the word mentioned so often, that I started thinking about it. I’ll tell you in French what it is I’ve been thinking. What all Europe refers to as liberty is, perhaps, something rather pedantic, rather bourgeois in comparison to our need for order—that’s the point!”
“You don’t say! How amusing. Was it really your cousin who got you thinking such strange things?”
“No, he is truly a good soul, his is a simple temperament, not prone to dangers, you understand. But he is not a bourgeois, he is a military man.”
“Not prone to dangers?” she repeated with difficulty. “By which you mean to say: a thoroughly steadfast nature, secure in itself? But your poor cousin is seriously ill.”
“Who told you that?”
“We all know about one another here.”
“Did Director Behrens tell you that?”
“Possibly, when he let me see his paintings.”
“Don’t you mean, when he was painting your portrait?”
“Why not? Did you think it successful, my portrait?”
“Oh yes, extremely. Behrens captured your skin perfectly, oh, truly quite lifelike. I would very much have liked to have been a portrait painter myself, if only to have had the chance to study your skin, as he did.”
“Please, sir, speak German!”
“Oh, but I am speaking German, even if I am speaking French. Painting is the kind of study that is both artistic and medical—in a word: it is, you see, a humanist pursuit. So what do you say, wouldn’t you like to dance?”
“Certainly not—how childish. Behind the doctor’s back. The moment Behrens returns, they will all throw themselves on their lounge chairs. How utterly ridiculous it all is.”
“Do you hold him in such high respect, then?”
“Whom?” she asked, pronouncing the word in a strange, clipped way.
“Behrens.”
“Enough of your Behrens already! It’s much too small a space for dancing. And on the carpet besides . . . Let’s just watch the others.”
“Yes, let’s do that,” he concurred, and with her beside him, he turned his grandfather’s blue, thoughtful eyes, framed in a pallid face, to watch the costumed patients skip about in the salon here and in the reading room beyond. Silent Sister was capering with Blue Henry, and Frau Salomon, who was dressed like a gentleman in evening clothes—swallowtail coat, white vest, amply filled shirt, monocle, and painted-on moustache—spun about on her little patent leather high-heeled shoes (which looked very out of place with her long, black men’s trousers) in the arms of her Punchinello, whose lips shone bloody red in his whitened face and whose eyes looked like an albino rabbit’s. The caped Greek moved his legs in their purple tights in perfect harmony with Rasmussen, whose black, low-cut dress sparkled. The prosecutor in his kimono, Frau Wurmbrandt, the general consul’s wife, and young Gänser were dancing as a threesome, their arms thrown around one another. As for Frau Stöhr, she danced with her broom, pressing it to
her heart and caressing its bristles as if they were the hair on a man’s head.
“Let’s do that,” Hans Castorp said mechanically again. And so they went on speaking softly, their conversation covered by the piano. “Let’s sit here and watch, as if in a dream. It is like a dream for me, you know, for me to be sitting here like this—like an especially deep dream, for a man must sleep very heavily to dream like this. What I’m trying to say is: it is a dream I know well, have dreamed for a long time, yes, eternally, sitting here with you as I am now. Behold—eternity.”
“A poet!” she said. “A bourgeois, a humanist, and a poet—behold, Germany all rolled into one, just as it should be!”
“I’m afraid we are not at all, not in the least, as we should be,” he replied. “Not in any way. We are perhaps life’s problem children, that’s all.”
“Nicely put. Tell me . . . surely it would not have been too difficult to dream your dream before now. It is a little late for monsieur to decide to address his words to his humble servant.”
“What good are words?” he said. “Why speak? Speech, discourse—those are nice republican things, I admit. But I doubt if they are equally poetic. One of our fellow residents, who has in fact become something of a friend, Monsieur Settembrini . . .”
“Who just let fly with a few words in your direction.”
“Be that as it may, he is no doubt an eloquent speaker, indeed loves to recite beautiful verses—but does that make the man a poet?”
“I deeply regret never having had the pleasure of making the gentleman’s acquaintance.”
“I can well believe it.”
“Ah! You believe it.”
“What? But that’s just a phrase one uses, with no real significance whatever. As you’ve surely noticed, I barely speak French. All the same, I would rather speak with you in it than in my own language, since for me speaking French is like speaking without saying anything somehow—with no responsibilities, the way we speak in a dream. Do you understand?”
“More or less.”
“That will do. Speech—” Hans Castorp continued, “what a poor business it is! In eternity, people won’t speak at all. Eternity, you see, will be like drawing that piglet: you’ll turn your head away and close your eyes.”
“Not bad! You seem quite at home in eternity, know its every detail, no doubt. I must say I find you a very curious little dreamer.”
“Besides,” Hans Castorp said, “if I had spoken to you before this, I would have had to use the formal pronoun.”
“I see. Do you intend to use only the informal with me from now on?”
“But of course. I’ve used it with you all along, and will for all eternity.”
“That’s a bit much, I must say. In any case, you won’t have the opportunity to use informal pronouns with me for much longer. I’m leaving.”
It took a while before what she had said penetrated his consciousness. But then he started up, looking about in befuddlement, like someone rudely awakened from sleep. Their conversation had proceeded rather slowly, because Hans Castorp’s French was clumsy and he spoke haltingly as he tried to express himself. The piano, which had briefly fallen silent, struck up again, now under the hands of the man from Mannheim, who had taken over for the Slavic lad. He had spread his music out before him, and Fräulein Engelhart now sat down next to him to turn pages. The party was thinning out. The majority of the residents appeared to have assumed the horizontal position. There was no one sitting in front of them now. People were again playing cards in the reading room.
“What are you going to do?” Hans Castorp asked, flabbergasted.
“I am leaving,” she repeated, smiling in apparent amazement at the frozen look on his face.
“It’s not possible,” he said. “You’re joking.”
“Most certainly not. I am perfectly serious. I am leaving.”
“When?”
“Why, tomorrow. After dinner.”
A whole world was collapsing inside him. He said, “And where are you going?”
“Very far away.”
“To Daghestan?”
“You’re not badly informed. Perhaps—for now at least.”
“Are you cured, then?”
“As for that. . . no. But Behrens doesn’t think I can achieve much more here, for the present at least. Which is why I may now risk a little change of air.”
“So you will be coming back?”
“That’s an open question. Or, rather, the real question is when. As for me, you know, I love freedom above all else—especially the freedom to choose my place of residence. I can hardly expect you to understand what it means to be obsessed with independence. It’s in the blood, perhaps.”
“And your husband in Daghestan consents to—your liberty?”
“It is my illness that allows me liberty. You see, this is now my third time here. I’ve been here a year now. I may well return. But you will be far from here long before that.”
“Do you think so, Clavdia?”
“And my first name, tool You certainly do take the customs of carnival very seriously!”
“So you do know how sick I am?”
“Yes—no—the way one knows things here. You have a little moist spot there inside, a bit of fever, isn’t that right?”
“A hundred, a hundred point two in the afternoon,” Hans Castorp said. “And you?”
“Oh, my case is a little more complicated, you see—it’s not that simple.”
“Within the humanist branch of letters called medicine, there is something,” Hans Castorp said, “that they call tubercular congestion in the lymphatic vessels.”
“Ah! You have a spy, my dear, that’s quite clear.”
“And you—please, forgive me! I must ask you something, ask you something very urgent, but in German. That day, six months ago, when I left the table for my checkup—you looked up and watched me go, do you remember?”
“What sort of question is that? Six months ago!”
“Did you know where I was going?”
“Certainly, but only quite by accident.”
“So Behrens had told you, hadn’t he?”
“You and your Behrens!”
“Oh, he rendered your skin in absolutely lifelike fashion. Moreover, he is a widower with glowing cheeks who happens to own a really remarkable coffee service. I can well believe that he knows your body not merely as a doctor, but also as an initiate in another humanistic discipline.”
“You have every reason to say you speak as if in a dream, my friend.”
“That may be. But you must first let me dream anew, now that you’ve awakened me so cruelly with that alarm bell about your departure. Seven months beneath your gaze—and now, when I’ve come to know you in reality, you tell me you’re leaving!”
“And I repeat, we should have chatted long before this.”
“So you would have liked that?”
“Me? You won’t slip out of it that easily, my boy. This is about your interests, about you. Were you too shy to approach a woman with whom you are now speaking as if in a dream, or was there someone else who prevented your doing so?”
“I told you. I didn’t want to address you with formal pronouns.”
“What a fraud. Answer me—the gentleman who speaks so eloquently, that Italian who just left our soiree—what words did he let fly just now?”
“I didn’t understand any of it. The gentleman meant not a whit to me the moment I laid eyes on you. But you forget—it would not have been at all easy to have made your acquaintance in society. Besides, there is my cousin with whom I am involved and who has little or no inclination to amuse himself here; he thinks about nothing except returning to the plains to be a soldier.”
“Poor devil. He is, in fact, more ill than he knows. Your friend the Italian, by the way, is not doing very much better.”
“He says so himself. But my cousin—is that true? You frighten me.”
“It is quite possible that he will die if he tri
es to be a soldier on the plains.”
“That he will die. Death. A terrible word, isn’t it? But it’s strange, the word doesn’t impress me so much today. It was more just a conventional phrase when I said, ‘You frighten me.’ The idea of death doesn’t frighten me. It leaves me calm. It arouses no pity—either for dear old Joachim or for myself—to hear that he may die. If that’s true, then his condition is very much like my own, and I don’t find mine particularly grand. He is dying, and me, I’m in love—fine! You spoke with my cousin once, in the waiting room outside where they take intimate photographs, if you recall.”
“I vaguely recall.”
“It was the same day that Behrens took your transparent portrait!”
“But of course.”
“My God! And do you have it with you?”
“No, I keep it in my room.”
“Ah, in your room. As for mine, I always keep it in my wallet. Would you like me to show it to you?”
“A thousand thanks, but I’m not overwhelmed with curiosity. It is sure to look quite innocent.”
“Well, I have seen your exterior portrait. But I would much prefer to see the interior portrait you have locked up in your room. Let me ask you something else. From time to time a Russian gentleman who lives in town comes to visit you. Who is he? What is his purpose in coming?”
“You’re enormously skilled at espionage, I must say. All right—I’ll give you an answer. Yes, he is an ailing compatriot, a friend. I made his acquaintance at another resort, some years ago. Our relationship? We have tea together, we smoke two or three papyrosy, we gossip, we philosophize, we talk about man, God, life, morality, a thousand things. And with that my tale is ended. Are you satisfied?”
“About morality as well! And what discoveries have you in fact made about morality, for example?”
“Morality? It interests you, does it? All right—it seems to us that one ought not to search for morality in virtue, which is to say in reason, in discipline, in good behavior, in respectability—but in just the opposite, I would say: in sin, in abandoning oneself to danger, to whatever can harm us, destroy us. It seems to us that it is more moral to lose oneself and let oneself be ruined than to save oneself The great moralists have never been especially virtuous, but rather adventurers in evil, in vice, great sinners who teach us as Christians how to stoop to misery. You must find that all very repugnant.”