The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  Naphta, who had cast his coat aside in the snow so that the mink lining was visible, started walking, pistol in hand, toward the outer heel mark as soon as it was drawn, before Ferge was even done with the other lines. Once they were marked off, Settembrini also took up his position, letting his frayed beaver-trimmed jacket hang open. Hans Castorp wrenched himself out of his paralysis and quickly stepped forward once again.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, disconcerted, “let’s not be hasty. Above all else, it is my duty—”

  “Be quiet,” Naphta shouted piercingly. “I want the signal.”

  But no one gave the signal. They had not arranged that part well. Someone was supposed to say, “Go!”—except no one had recalled that it was the neutral party’s task to issue this dreadful invitation, or at least no one had mentioned it. Hans Castorp remained silent and no one jumped in to take his place.

  “We shall begin,” Naphta declared. “Advance, sir, and shoot,” he called across to his opponent and began to advance himself as well, his pistol held out chest-high at arm’s length and directed at Settembrini—an incredible sight.

  Settembrini did the same. After taking his third step—Naphta had already reached the cane barrier, without firing—he raised his pistol high in the air and squeezed the trigger. The crack of the shot raised echoes all around. The mountains reverberated, the valley boomed with it, and Hans Castorp was certain it would bring people running.

  “You shot into the air,” Naphta said, controlling his temper and letting his own pistol sink.

  Settembrini replied, “I shoot in whatever direction I choose.”

  “You shall fire again!”

  “I wouldn’t think of it. It’s your turn.” Lifting his head to gaze at the heavens, Herr Settembrini turned somewhat to one side instead of facing directly ahead—it was a touching sight. It was obvious he had been told one should not offer one’s foe a fully exposed chest and was obeying instructions.

  “Coward!” Naphta screamed, conceding with this very human cry that it requires more courage to shoot than to be shot at, raised his pistol to a position that had nothing to do with the duel, and shot himself in the head.

  What a sorry, unforgettable sight! As the mountains played catch with the sharp crack of his awful deed, he staggered or stumbled a few steps backward, his legs slipping out in front of him, flung his whole body around in one complete turn to the right, and fell on his face in the snow.

  They all stood there frozen in place for a moment. Hurling his gun to one side, Settembrini was the first to reach him.

  “Infelice!” he cried. “Che cosa fai per l’amor di Dio!”

  Hans Castorp helped him turn the body over. They could see the blackish-red hole at the temple. They looked into a face that it was best to cover with a silk handkerchief; they used the one dangling from Naphta’s breast pocket.

  THE THUNDERBOLT

  Hans Castorp remained with “those up here” for seven years—no round number for devotees of the decimal system, and yet a good, handy number in its way, a mythic, romantic bundle of time, one might say, more satisfying to the soul than a plain half-dozen. He had sat at all seven tables in the dining hall, spending approximately a year at each. At the end, his place was at the Bad Russian table, along with two Armenians, two Finns, one Bukharan, and one Kurd. There he sat, sporting a little beard that he had let grow by then, a blond goatee, the color of straw and of rather indefinite shape, which we are forced to interpret as a sign of a certain philosophical indifference to his appearance. Yes, we might go even further and see some connection between his tendency to neglect his own person and a similar attitude on the part of the outside world toward him. Medical authority had ceased to invent diversions for him. Except for the question each morning whether he had slept “well,” which, however, was purely rhetorical in nature and summarily posed, the director no longer addressed him all that often, and even Adriatica von Mylendonk (who had a sty ripe for lancing at the time of which we speak) did not speak to him for days at a time. Indeed, to be exact, they spoke seldom, almost never. People left him in peace—rather like a student who enjoys the peculiarly amusing situation of no longer being asked questions, of not having to do any work, because the decision has already been made to hold him back and so he is no longer in the running—an orgiastic sort of freedom, we may add, while asking ourselves whether there can be freedom of any other sort. In any case, here was a man whom medical authority no longer needed to keep under its watchful eye, because it was certain that no wild and defiant decisions would ever ripen in his breast—a dependable man, here for good and all, who had long since lost track of where else he might go, who was no longer even capable of forming the thought of a return to the flatlands. Did not the simple fact that he had been transferred to the Bad Russian table express a certain carelessness about his person? By which we do not mean to cast any aspersions whatever against the so-called Bad Russian table. There were no tangible advantages or disadvantages to one or another of the seven. It was a democracy of banquet tables, to put it bluntly. The same prodigious meals were also served at the so-called Bad Russian table; moving in rotation, even Rhadamanthus folded his gigantic hands before his plate there; and the people of several nations who dined at it were honorable members of humanity, even if they did not understand Latin and were not excessively dainty about their table manners.

  Time—not the sort that train station clocks measure with a large hand that jerks forward every five minutes, but more like the time of a very small watch whose hands move without our being able to notice, or the time grass keeps as it grows without our eyes’ catching its secret growth, until the day comes when the fact is undeniable—time, a line composed of elastic turning points (and here the late, ill-fated Naphta would presumably have asked how purely elastic points can ever begin to form a line), time, then, had continued to bring forth changes in its furtive, unobservable, secret, and yet bustling way. The boy named Teddy, to take just one example, was no longer a boy one day—though of course that did not happen “one day,” but emerged out of some quite indefinite day. The ladies could no longer set him on their laps on those occasions when he left his bed, exchanged his pajamas for a sporty outfit, and came downstairs. The tables were turned, and no one had noticed. He now set them on his lap on such occasions, which both parties found just as delightful, even more so. He had—we won’t say blossomed, but rather—sprouted into a young man. Hans Castorp had not seen it happen, but then he saw it. Time and sprouting, by the way, did not agree with the young man Teddy, he was not made for such things. Time proved no blessing—in his twenty-first year of life he died of the illness to which he had been susceptible. They fumigated his room. We can relate all this quite calmly, since there was no significant difference between his new condition and his previous one.

  But more important deaths had occurred, deaths down in the flatlands, which were of greater concern to our hero, or would have been of greater concern at one time. We are thinking of the recent demise of old Consul Tienappel, Hans’s great-uncle and foster father, of faded memory. He had most carefully avoided regions of unwholesome barometric pressure and had left it to Uncle James to make a fool of himself there; but in the long run, he had been unable to elude apoplexy; and one day news of his passing, in the form of a brief but delicately considerate telegram (delicate and considerate more in deference to the departed than to the receiver of the message), had reached Hans Castorp as he lay in his splendid lounge chair, whereupon he had purchased black-bordered stationery and written to his uncles or quasi cousins that having been orphaned twice, he now felt as if he had been orphaned yet a third time, and, still more distressing, was prevented, indeed prohibited, from interrupting his present sojourn to pay last respects to his great-uncle.

  It would be disingenuous to speak of mourning, but all the same, for a while the expression in Hans Castorp’s eyes was more pensive than usual. This death, which would never have been of great emotional consequence to Hans Ca
storp—and indeed after an estrangement of so many adventurous little years, all emotional content had been reduced to almost nothing—seemed to him nevertheless very like the breaking of yet another tie, a last connection, to the world below, bringing to perfection what he so rightly called his freedom. In truth, in the recent past of which we speak, there had been a total abrogation of every emotional bond between him and the flatlands. He wrote and received no letters. He no longer ordered his Maria Mancinis from there. He had found another brand up here, one that suited him and to which he was now as faithful as he had once been to his former girlfriend—a brand that would even have helped polar explorers get over their worst hardships in the ice and that when you smoked it made you feel as if you were lying on the beach and would be able to carry on. It had an especially well cured wrapper and was named Oath of Rütli; somewhat stubbier than Maria, mouse gray in color with a bluish band, it was very tractable and mild by nature; it had a snow-white durable ash that still showed the veins of the wrapper. It drew so evenly that it could easily have served as an hourglass for the man enjoying it, and indeed, given Hans Castorp’s needs, did serve as such, for he no longer carried his pocket watch. It had stopped, having fallen from his nightstand one day, and he had refrained from having it put into measuring rotation again—for the same reasons he had long ago dispensed with calendars, whether the kind you tear off each day or the kind that provide an instructive preview of days and feasts, for reasons of “freedom,” that is. It was his way of honoring the stroll by the shore, the abiding ever-and-always, the hermetic magic, to which, once withdrawn from the world, he had proved so susceptible—the magic that had been his soul’s fundamental adventure, in which all the alchemistic adventures of that simple stuff had been played out.

  And so there he lay, and once again, as the height of summer came round for the seventh time since his arrival—but he did not count—the year closed on itself.

  Then came the rumble of thunder—

  But modesty and reserve keep us from turning that thundering rumble into a blustering narrative. No bombast, no rodomontade, here. With appropriately lowered voice, we shall say that the thunderbolt itself (with which we are all familiar) was the deafening detonation of great destructive masses of accumulated stupor and petulance. It was, to speak in subdued, respectful tones, a historic thunderclap that shook the foundations of the earth; but for us it is the thunderbolt that bursts open the magic mountain and rudely sets its entranced sleeper outside the gates. There he sits in the grass, sheepishly rubbing his eyes, like a man who, despite many an admonition, has failed to read the daily papers.

  His Mediterranean friend and mentor had constantly tried to rectify this situation somewhat and made a point of keeping his pedagogic problem child roughly informed about events down below; but he had not been given much of a hearing by his pupil, who while “playing king” had let his mind turn the shadows of such things into one dream or another, but had never paid any attention to the things themselves, primarily out of an arrogant preference for seeing shadows as things, and things as mere shadows—for which one should not scold him too harshly, since that relationship has never been definitively decided.

  Things were no longer as they had been once, when, after first establishing sudden clarity, Herr Settembrini would sit down at the bedside of a horizontal Hans Castorp and attempt to influence him by correcting his opinions about matters of life and death. It was the other way around now; with hands tucked between his knees, the student now sat beside the bed of the humanist in the little garret bedroom or next to the divan in the cozy and private dormered studio, with its Carbonaro chairs and water carafe, kept him company and listened politely to his presentations of the world situation—for Herr Lodovico was seldom on his feet these days. Naphta’s crude end, that terrorist deed committed by a caustically desperate antagonist, had been a terrible blow to his sensitive nature; he had been unable to get over it, had been frail and subject to fainting spells ever since. His contribution to Sociological Pathology, a lexicon of all the works of literature with human suffering for their theme, had come to a standstill, had stagnated, and the league waited in vain for that particular volume of their encyclopedia. Herr Settembrini was forced to limit his contribution to the Organization of Progress to oral reports, and he would have had to have forgone even those had it not been for the opportunity offered by Hans Castorp’s friendly visits.

  He spoke in a weak, but heartfelt voice, and he had much to say about humanity’s self-perfection by way of social reform. His discourses would begin on dove’s feet, but soon, when he turned to liberated peoples uniting for universal happiness, there would come a sound as of the rushing pinions of eagles—not that he wished it or even knew whence it came, though doubtless it originated in the politics he had inherited from his grandfather, which had then blended with the humanistic inheritance of his father to create beautiful literature within him, Lodovico, just as humanity and politics were blended in the lofty idea of civilization, to which he raised a toast, an idea full of the mildness of the dove and the boldness of the eagle and awaiting its day, the dawn of the Day of Nations, when the principle of obduracy would be defeated and a path opened for the Holy Alliance of bourgeois democracy. In short, there were inconsistencies here. Herr Settembrini was a humanitarian, and yet at the same time and bound up with it, he was, as he half admitted, a man of war. He had behaved very humanely in his duel with crude Naphta; but more generally, whenever his enthusiasms blended humanity and politics for the ideal of civilization’s ultimate victory and dominion, whenever the citizen’s pike was consecrated on the altar of humanity, it became doubtful whether, on a more impersonal level, he remained of a mind to hold back his sword from shedding blood. Yes, Herr Settembrini’s own inner state meant that in his world of beautiful views, the element of the eagle’s boldness prevailed more and more over the dove’s mildness.

  It was not unusual for him to be unsettled by his own scruples, to feel divided and perplexed in his attitudes toward the world’s larger constellations. Recently—a year and a half or two years before—the diplomatic cooperation of his own country and Austria in Albania had troubled his discourse, a cooperation that both inspired him, since it was directed against demi-Asia with its lack of Latin, against knouts and Schlüsselburg prison, and tormented him as a misalliance with his country’s sworn enemy, with the principle of obduracy and the bondage of nations. The previous autumn, the immense loan France had made to Russia for constructing railroads in Poland had awakened within him a similar conflict of feelings. For Herr Settembrini belonged to the Francophile party in his homeland, which was in no way astonishing when one recalls that his grandfather had equated the days of the July Revolution with the days of Creation; but a pact between that enlightened republic and Scythian Byzantium was a moral embarrassment to him—his chest felt constricted, but then, at the thought of the strategic significance of those railroads, it would try to expand and take in rapid breaths of hope and joy. Then came the murder of the archduke, which for everyone except our German sleeper served as a storm warning, a word to the wise, among whom we have good cause to count Herr Settembrini. Hans Castorp noticed how as a private, humane man, the Italian shuddered at the awful deed, but he also noticed how that chest rose at the thought that it was committed to free a nation, was directed against the citadel he hated—even though it could also be seen as the upshot of Moscow’s schemes, which then constricted his breathing, and yet did not prevent him from characterizing the ultimatum presented by the Hapsburgs to Serbia only three weeks later as an insult to humanity and a ghastly crime, whose consequences he, as an initiate in such matters, clearly saw and greeted with quick, shallow breaths.

  In short, Herr Settembrini’s reactions were as complex as the cataclysm he saw gathering and to which he tried to open his pupil’s eyes with veiled words; at the same time, however, a kind of patriotic courtesy and compassion kept him from opening up entirely on the matter. In the days of the first mo
bilization, of the first declarations of war, he got into the habit of reaching out both hands to his visitor and squeezing them in his own—which deeply touched the nincompoop’s heart, if not his head. “My friend,” the Italian said, “gunpowder, the printing press—yes, you undeniably invented those. But if you think that we would ever march against revolution—caro . . .”

  During the days of stifling suspense, while Europe’s nerves were stretched on the rack, Hans Castorp did not go to see Herr Settembrini. The wild headlines from below now found their way directly to his balcony door, they sent the Berghof into spasms, filled the dining hall with an odor of sulfur that constricted the chest, seeping even into the rooms of the bedridden and moribund. And it was during those same moments that our sleeper slowly began to sit up in the grass, not knowing what had happened, not rubbing his eyes yet . . . and let us draw the metaphor out in full, so that we may be just to the rush of his emotions. He drew his legs back under him, stood up, looked around. He saw that the enchantment was broken, that he was released, set free—not by his own actions, as he had to admit to his shame, but set free by elementary external forces, for whom his liberation was a very irrelevant matter. But even if his little fate shrank to nothing before universal destiny, was it not, all the same, an expression of some goodness and justice intended personally for him, and thus in some way divine? If life was to receive back her sinful problem child, it could not happen on the cheap, but only like this, in a serious, rigorous fashion, as a kind of ordeal, which in this case did not perhaps mean life so much as it meant three salvos fired in his, the sinner’s, honor. And so he sank back down on his knees, his face and hands raised toward a heaven darkened by sulfurous fumes, but no longer the grotto ceiling in a sinful mountain of delight.