The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  With only two of his tablemates was he acquainted more personally. The first, his neighbor on the left, was A. K. Ferge, the good-natured martyr from Saint Petersburg, from under whose bushy reddish-brown moustache came anecdotes about the manufacture of galoshes and tales of distant regions, the Arctic Circle, and the perpetual winter at North Cape. Hans Castorp even took his constitutionals with him now and then. The other person, however, who would join up with them whenever he met them along the way and who sat at the far end of the table across from the hunchbacked Mexican, was the man from Mannheim with the thinning hair and bad teeth—his name was Wehsal, Ferdinand Wehsal, a merchant by trade, the same man whose eyes had constantly clung with such gloomy hunger to the charming Frau Chauchat and who, ever since Mardi Gras, had sought out Hans Castorp’s friendship.

  He did so with dogged humility, gazing up out of devoted eyes, a look that Hans Castorp found disgusting and horrible, for he understood its complex meaning, but that he nevertheless struggled to return in a humane, calm fashion. Knowing that the slightest frown was sufficient to terrify and cow the pitiful, sensitive fellow, he tolerated Wehsal’s servile habit of seizing every opportunity to bow and scrape, sometimes allowed him to carry his overcoat on their promenades—and Wehsal would bear it over one arm with a kind of reverence—and even put up with the Mannheimer’s conversation, and very gloomy conversation it was. Wehsal loved to pose questions such as whether there was any point in declaring one’s love to someone who did not even know one was alive—a hopeless declaration of love, what did the gentlemen think of that? For his part, he thought very highly of it, was of the opinion that it brought infinite happiness. Such an act of confession might arouse disgust and entailed much self-abasement; all the same, it established, if only for a moment, intimate contact with the desired object, dragging her into one’s confidence, into the element of one’s passion, and although it meant that everything was over, such eternal loss was not too much to pay for desperate bliss—for confession was a form of violence, all the more enjoyable for the disgust it encountered. At this, Hans Castorp’s face darkened and Wehsal shrank back, but more in response to the presence of good-natured Herr Ferge—who had often emphasized that all higher, more complicated things were utterly foreign to him—than to any judgmental moral rectitude in our hero’s expression. Since our intent all along has been to make him no better or worse than he was, it should also be noted that when poor Wehsal approached him privately one evening and begged with ashen words for God’s sake to please tell him in strict confidence about his experiences that night of the Mardi Gras party, Hans Castorp had complied with calm charity, although, as the reader can well imagine, he did not permit anything the least bit base or frivolous to sully that hushed scene. All the same, we have our reasons for excluding him and ourselves from it, and will merely add that afterward Wehsal bore his friend’s overcoat with twice the reverence.

  But enough of Hans’s new tablemates. The seat on his right was occupied, though only temporarily, for just a few days, by a visitor, just as he himself had once been, by a guest, a relative from the flatlands, an envoy from those regions, one might say—in a word, by Hans’s uncle James Tienappel.

  It was strange suddenly to have sitting beside him a representative and ambassador from home, the scent of an old, vanished, earlier life, of an “upper world” that lay so far below, still clinging fresh to the weave of the man’s English suit. But it had been inevitable. Hans Castorp had been quietly expecting such a raid from the flatlands for a long time now, had even correctly guessed the person who would actually be entrusted with the task of reconnaissance—but that had not been hard to do. Seafaring Peter was more or less out of the question, and as for Great-uncle Tienappel, it was understood that wild horses could not drag him to regions whose barometric pressures he had every reason to fear. No, it would have to be James who was commissioned to check up on the missing family member. Hans Castorp had expected him before this. But once Joachim had returned home alone and spread the news among their relatives of how things stood up here, an attack was due, indeed overdue; and so Hans Castorp had not been the least bit surprised when, barely two weeks after Joachim’s departure, the concierge handed him a telegram, whose content he surmised even as he opened it: an announcement of the imminent arrival of James Tienappel. He had business in Switzerland and had decided to use the occasion to visit Hans on his mountaintop. He would be there the day after next.

  “Fine,” Hans Castorp thought. “Lovely,” he thought. And even silently added something like, “Just as he pleases.” And addressing the approaching visitor, he thought, “If you only knew!” In short, he received the news with great calm, passed word along to both Director Behrens and management, had them ready a room—Joachim’s old one was still available. Two days later, at around eight in the evening, the same time of day that he himself had arrived—although it was dark now—he hired the same hard-riding vehicle in which he had seen Joachim off, to take him to the station in Dorf and fetch the envoy from the flatlands who had come to check up on him.

  Crimson-faced and wearing neither hat nor overcoat, he stood at the edge of the platform as the little train rolled in, stood under the window of his relative’s compartment, and directed him to get off now—he was here. Consul Tienappel—he was a vice-consul, having generously relieved the old man of his honorary duties as well—emerged from his compartment half-frozen and wrapped in his winter coat (because there really was a biting chill to the October evening, its air very close to what one would call clear and frosty, indeed it was sure to freeze by morning), stepped forward expressing his amused surprise in the somewhat spare, but very civilized phrases of a northwestern German gentleman, greeted his nephew, or quasi cousin, emphasizing his satisfaction at how splendid he looked, discovered that the limping attendant had taken care of all his baggage problems, and climbed up with Hans Castorp onto the high, hard seats of the carriage. They drove off under a starry sky; leaning his head back and pointing a forefinger into the air, Hans Castorp elucidated the fields of heaven for his uncle, or quasi cousin, tracing with words and gestures one twinkling constellation here, another there, and calling planets by name; his relative, meanwhile, paid more attention to his companion than to the cosmos, remarking to himself that, although it was certainly possible and hardly crazy to speak here and now about the stars, there were surely several other more obvious topics. Since when was he so well informed about what was up there, he asked Hans Castorp; to which the latter replied that it was knowledge acquired from his rest cure, from lying on his balcony every evening—spring, summer, fall, and winter. What? He spent his nights lying on a balcony? Oh, yes. And the consul would be doing the same—he would not have much choice in the matter.

  “But of course, to be sure,” James Tienappel concurred, somewhat intimidated by his foster brother, who spoke so calmly and in a monotone; the crisp autumn evening was close to freezing, yet there beside him sat Hans Castorp without hat or overcoat. “The cold doesn’t affect you, does it?” asked James, who was shivering despite the inch-thick fabric of his coat; and if there was something both hurried and halting about the way he put his question, it was because his teeth were very close to chattering.

  “We’re never cold,” Hans Castorp replied calmly and curtly.

  The consul could not get his fill of staring at that profile. Hans Castorp did not ask about relatives and acquaintances at home, but James conveyed their regards, including those of Joachim, who had joined his regiment and was glowing with pride and happiness; Hans Castorp calmly accepted these greetings without inquiring further about conditions at home. James felt uneasy about something, though he was not sure whether that something had its origin in his nephew or in his own weariness from travel; looking about him without being able to see much of the Alpine valley’s landscape, he took a deep breath of air and let it out again, declaring it excellent. Certainly, his companion replied, it was not world-famous for nothing. This air had special prop
erties. Although it accelerated the metabolism, the body was still able to store protein. Of course it could heal sickness, but its first effect was greatly to enhance illnesses that everyone carried latent within them, because the impetus and stimulus this air gave the whole organism brought illness to exuberant eruption, so to speak. Beg pardon, exuberant? But of course. Had he never noticed that there is something exuberant about the eruption of illness, as if the body were celebrating? “But of course, to be sure,” his uncle hastened to reply, losing control of his lower jaw; he now explained that he could stay only eight days, or rather, just a week, seven days actually, perhaps even only six. And since, as he had noted, Hans Castorp was looking robust and really quite splendid thanks to his stay at the sanatorium, which had gone on much longer than expected, he assumed that his nephew would be returning home with him now.

  “Well, let’s not be reckless about this,” Hans Castorp said. Uncle James was talking like someone from down below. Once he had been here awhile and looked around a bit and settled in, he would soon see things differently. The point was a total cure, totality was the decisive factor, and Behrens had recently saddled him with another six months. At this point his uncle addressed him as “my boy,” and asked if he was crazy. “Have you gone completely crazy?” he asked. A vacation was what it was, a good year and a quarter long, and now six months more! In God’s good name, a man didn’t have all that much time! At which point, Hans Castorp laughed calmly and gazed briefly at the stars. Yes, time—as for human time, well, James would have to revise any ideas about time he had brought up here with him before they could discuss that topic. Tienappel promised he would have a serious discussion with the director about Hans’s case the next morning. “Do that,” Hans Castorp said. “You’ll like him. An interesting fellow, brash and melancholy at the same time.” And then he pointed to the lights up on Schatzalp and casually mentioned how they used the bobsled run to bring bodies down.

  The gentlemen dined together in the Berghof’s restaurant, after Hans Castorp had shown his guest to Joachim’s room and given him a chance to tidy himself up a bit. The room had been fumigated with H2CO, Hans Castorp said—just as thoroughly as if it had not been a case of a fraudulent departure, but a departure of a very different sort, not an exodus, but an exitus. And when his uncle asked him what he meant, the nephew replied, “Jargon. Our way of putting things. Joachim deserted—deserted to the colors. That’s possible, too. But hurry now, otherwise you won’t get a hot meal.” And so now there they sat across from one another at the raised table in the cozy warmth of the restaurant. The dwarf promptly arrived to serve them, and James ordered a bottle of burgundy, which was placed on the table cradled in a basket. They toasted glasses and let the gentle glow course through them. The younger man spoke about life up here and the change of seasons, about certain people they would see in the dining hall, about pneumothorax, explained about the operation, mentioning good-natured Ferge’s case in particular and expounding on the ghastly nature of pleural shock—the green, brown, and purple faints Herr Ferge claimed to have experienced, the hallucinated odor that was part of the shock, the burst of laughter as he blacked out. He paid for their meal. As was his custom, James ate and drank heartily, his appetite having been whetted even more by the trip and the change of air. But from time to time he broke off taking nourishment; and he would sit there, his mouth full of food he had forgotten to chew, his knife and fork dangling idly at a low angle over his plate, and fix his eyes on Hans Castorp, apparently without even being aware of it—not that his nephew seemed to mind. The veins at Consul Tienappel’s temples, just below his thinning blond hair, were swollen.

  They did not talk about home, said nothing about personal or family affairs, business or civic matters, did not mention the firm of Tunder and Wilms (dockyards, machine works, and boilers), where they were still waiting for their young trainee to join the firm, though they surely had so many other things to do that one might well ask if they were still waiting at all. James Tienappel had mentioned all these matters during their carriage ride, of course, but the topics had fallen away, as good as dead, as if they had bounced off Hans Castorp’s calm, resolute, and genuine indifference, which acted as a kind of immunity that kept anything from touching him, just as he was insensitive to the chill of the autumn evening and could reply, “We’re never cold.” Maybe that was also why his uncle sometimes gazed at him with that fixed stare. Their conversation also included the head nurse, the doctors, Dr. Krokowski’s lectures—it turned out that James would be able to attend one if he stayed eight days. Who had told him, the nephew, that he, the uncle, wanted to attend the lecture? No one. He had simply assumed it, taken it for granted, so calmly, so resolutely, that the mere idea of not participating suddenly appeared in such a strange light to James himself that he hastily added, “But of course, to be sure,” in an attempt to forestall any suspicion that he had, even for a moment, planned something so outrageous. Such was indeed the vague, yet compelling power that caused Herr Tienappel to stare, quite unconsciously, at his cousin—with his mouth open now, by the way, because he could no longer breathe through his stuffy nasal passages, although the consul did not have a cold as far as he knew. He listened to his relative talk about the disease that formed the common professional bond for everyone here, and of people’s susceptibility to it; about Hans Castorp’s own modest, but chronic case, about how the bacillus irritated the cells of the tissue in the bronchi and air sacs of the lungs, about the formation of tubercles and the production of soluble intoxicating toxins, the deterioration of the cells and the process of caseation, which if it continued to petrify into chalky scar tissue meant a beneficial arrest of the disease, but if it went on to build ever-larger soft foci, created cavities that ate away at everything around them and finally destroyed the entire organ. He heard about the accelerated or galloping form of this process, which could lead to one’s exitus within a few months, even weeks, heard about pneumectomy, the director’s skillfully executed craft, about lung resections, like the one that would be performed the next day, or at least very soon, on a recently arrived serious case, a once very attractive Scottish woman, who was now suffering from gangraena pulmonum, gangrene of the lungs, so that a blackish-green infection was raging inside her, forcing her to breathe a vaporized solution of powdered carbolic acid all day just to keep from losing her mind in revulsion at her own body—and suddenly, much to his own surprise and great embarrassment, the consul burst out laughing. The laughter came in loud snorts, until in his dismay he thought better of it and suddenly recovered, coughed, and tried to gloss over his inane conduct by any means possible; but he was relieved to see—a relief that contained the seeds of renewed disquiet—that Hans Castorp had paid no attention at all to what had happened, although he could hardly not have noticed, but simply passed over it with a disregard that did not look like tact, consideration, or politeness, but instead like pure indifference or callousness—a tolerance so vast it was almost eerie, as if he had taught himself long ago not to be surprised by such incidents. But now—and it was unclear whether he hoped to cloak this outburst of levity with common sense and reason, or whether he had something else in mind—quite out of the blue, the consul picked up on a topic one might hear at a men’s club, and with the swollen veins pulsing at his temples, began to talk about a so-called chansonette whom he had heard singing in a café, a quite incredible young thing, who was currently appearing in Sankt Pauli and whose fiery charms, which he described in detail for his cousin, had simply knocked the breath out of all the gentlemen in the city-state they called home. His tongue grew a little thick as he talked, although he need not have let it disturb him, since his companion’s eerie tolerance apparently extended to that phenomenon as well. In any case, the overpowering fatigue of travel, to which he now fell victim, gradually became so obvious that it was not even half past ten when he suggested they end their tête-à-tête; and he was not exactly pleased when, as they crossed the lobby, they ran into the freque
ntly mentioned Dr. Krokowski, who had been sitting with his newspaper right by the door of the reading room and whom the nephew now introduced to his uncle. The consul hardly knew what else to reply to the doctor’s jovial, rugged greeting except, “But of course, to be sure,” and was glad when his nephew announced he would fetch him for breakfast the next morning at eight and he could then proceed by way of the balcony to Joachim’s disinfected room, light his usual bedtime cigarette, and stretch out at last on the deserter’s bed. Dozing off twice with the glowing cigarette between his lips, he only by a hair missed starting a general conflagration.

  James Tienappel, whom Hans Castorp addressed by turns as “Uncle James” or simply “James,” was a long-legged gentleman nearing forty, who wore English suits and linens white as cherry blossoms; he had thinning, canary-yellow hair, very close-set blue eyes, a straw-colored moustache trimmed so close that it was almost not there, and perfectly manicured hands. A husband and father now for several years, he had not, however, been required to leave the old consul’s roomy villa on Harvestehuder Weg. He was married to a woman who had come from his own social circle, a lady as civilized and refined as he, who spoke in the same soft, rapid, pointedly polite fashion. At home he gave the impression of a very energetic, prudent, and—despite his elegance—cold, practical man of business; but when traveling in regions whose customs were strange to him, in the south of Germany, for instance, he was all too quick to be polite and self-effacing and assumed a certain impetuous amiability, which was in no way the result of insecurity about his own culture, but on the contrary reflected both an awareness of its solid integrity and a desire to improve on his own aristocratic tendencies—even amid customs he found simply incredible, he would show no surprise whatever. “Naturally, but of course, to be sure,” he was always prompt to say, so that no one would think that, although he might be quite refined, he was rather narrow-minded. Having come here on a definite practical mission—that is, for the express purpose of having an energetic look around, of checking up on his “lackadaisical” young relative, as he put it, of “prying him loose” and taking him home—he was quite aware that he was operating on foreign soil; and from the first moment, he had been acutely sensitive to a suspicion that he was now the guest of a world, a social community, with a self-assurance as intact as that of the world from which he came, indeed surpassing it in that regard, so that his business energies were at once in conflict with his good breeding—in very serious conflict, because the self-assurance of the world of his hosts turned out to be truly overwhelming.