by Thomas Mann
He would never have believed that the essence of music could be so totally alien to his family as it increasingly appeared to be. His grandfather had piped a little on his flute, and he himself enjoyed listening to pretty melodies that had either an easy grace or a quiet melancholy about them, or that perhaps roused him with their cheerful vigor. But if he expressed his preference for anything of that sort, he could be certain that Gerda would shrug her shoulders and say with a sympathetic smile, “How is it possible, my dear? Something so totally lacking in musical value …”
He hated this “musical value,” a term that he could associate with only one thing: chilly arrogance. And he felt compelled to rise up against it, even with Hanno sitting nearby. There had been more than one occasion when he had flared up and exclaimed, “Oh, my dear, your insistence on ‘musical value’ seems to me rather tasteless snobbery.”
And she replied, “Thomas, let me say once and for all that you will never understand music as art, and, as intelligent as you are, you will never see it as anything more than a little after-dinner treat, dessert for your ears. When it comes to music, your normally fine sense for what is banal fails you entirely. And that is the criterion for understanding art. You can see just how foreign music is to you by the fact that your musical understanding does not at all correspond to your usual demands and tastes. What kind of music do you enjoy? Things that have a certain insipid optimism, which, if you found them in a book, would prompt you to cast it with amused anger or total outrage into the nearest corner. The quick gratification of every vaguely aroused wish—prompt, cordial satisfaction before the will has even been engaged. Is that how the world works—like a pretty melody? That’s merely flimsy idealism.”
He understood her, he understood what she said. But his emotions were unable to follow her—he could not comprehend why melodies that cheered him up or moved him were cheap and worthless, or why music that seemed harsh or chaotic should be of the highest musical value. He stood before a temple, and Gerda stood at the threshold adamantly barring his way. And then he watched in pain as she disappeared inside with his child.
He did not let them see the anguish he felt as he watched the apparent estrangement grow between him and his son, and he would have recoiled at even the appearance of currying his son’s favor. He had little leisure time during the day to spend with the boy but sometimes at meals he would banter with him amiably, with just a hint of sternness.
“Well, my lad,” he said, patting him a few times on the back of his head as he sat down beside him at the dining table, across from his wife, “how are things going? What have you been up to? Studying?—Oh, and playing the piano? That’s fine. But not too much, or you won’t have energy for anything else, and you’ll be set back a year come Easter.” Not a muscle in his face betrayed his anxiety as he waited to see how Hanno would react to his greeting, how he would respond; he betrayed nothing of the painful wrenching inside him when the boy simply glanced his way with shy, golden-brown, blue-shadowed eyes that avoided looking directly at him, and then bent down mutely over his plate.
It would have been monstrous to express alarm at the boy’s childish awkwardness. But as they sat there together waiting for the plates to be changed for the next course, it was his duty to show some concern about the boy, to test him a little on facts, to rouse his sense for practical things. What was the population of the town? Which streets led up from the Trave into town? What were the names of the firm’s warehouses? Speak up, now, loud and clear!—But Hanno was silent. Not because he wanted to defy his father, or hurt him. Under normal circumstances, the population, the streets, even the warehouses were matters of complete indifference to him, but the moment they were raised to the status of questions on a test, they filled him with reluctant despair. He could be in a perfectly fine mood, even be enjoying a little chat with his father—but as soon as the conversation took on the least hint of a little oral exam, his mood sank to zero and below and all his powers of resistance collapsed. His eyes lost their sparkle, his mouth took on a despondent pout, and all he could feel was a great pang of regret that Papa had been so careless, because he surely had to know that these tests always turned out badly and spoiled the meal for himself and everyone else. He gazed down at his plate, his eyes swimming with tears. Ida nudged him and whispered the names of the streets and warehouses. But that was pointless, absolutely pointless. She didn’t understand. He knew the names well enough, or at least most of them, and it would have been so easy to oblige Papa and answer his questions, at least in part—if only he could, if only it weren’t for this overwhelming sadness. A stern word from his father and a quick rap of a fork against the cutting board made him flinch. He glanced at his mother and Ida and tried to speak; but the first few syllables were choked with sobs—he just couldn’t. “Enough!” the senator shouted angrily. “Don’t say anything. I don’t want to hear it. You don’t have to answer. You can sit there brooding like a deaf-mute for the rest of your life for all I care!” And they finished their meal in silent rancor.
Whenever the senator voiced his objections to Hanno’s passionate preoccupation with music, he would fix on these very points: the dreamy softness, the weeping, the total lack of vigor and energy.
Hanno’s health had always been delicate. From early on, his teeth in particular had been a source of trouble and the cause of many painful episodes. The fever and convulsions that had come with his first teeth had almost cost him his life, and his gums still tended to become inflamed and form abscesses, which Mamselle Jungmann would lance with a needle when they were ready. And now that his second teeth were starting to come in, his sufferings increased. The pain was sometimes almost more than Hanno could bear, and there were nights when he did not sleep at all, but lay in his bed crying, groaning softly, limp with a fever whose only cause was the pain itself. His teeth, which were as beautiful and white as his mother’s, were unusually soft and brittle; they came in all wrong, crowding each other. And because these complications had to be corrected, little Johann was forced early on to make the acquaintance of a terrible man: Herr Brecht, the dentist who lived on Mühlen Strasse.
The man’s very name reminded Hanno of the horrible sound his jaw made when, after all the pulling, twisting, and prying, the roots of a tooth were wrenched out. The mere mention of that name would jolt his heart with the same fear he felt whenever he had to sit cowering in an armchair in Herr Brecht’s waiting room; with faithful Ida Jungmann directly across from him, he would breathe in the acrid air of the office and leaf through illustrated magazines—until the dentist appeared at the door of the consulting room and said, in a voice equally horrifying and polite, “Next, please.”
The waiting room had one strange, fascinating attraction: an imposing, brightly colored, evil-eyed parrot, which sat in the middle of a bronze cage placed in one corner of the room. For some inexplicable reason it was named Josephus. In the scolding voice of an old woman, it would say, “Take a seat. One moment, please.” Given the circumstances, it sounded like horrible mockery, and yet Hanno Buddenbrook felt a strange attraction for the bird, a mixture of affection and horror. A parrot, a big, brightly colored parrot named Josephus—and it could talk! Perhaps it had escaped from a magic forest or from one of the Grimm’s fairy tales that Ida read to him at home. And whenever Herr Brecht opened the door, Josephus would repeat his “Next, please!” so emphatically that, strangely enough, Hanno would find himself smiling as he entered the treatment room and then sat down in the large, eerie contraption of a chair near the window, and nearer the treadle.
As to Herr Brecht himself, he looked very much like Josephus; he had a beak just like the parrot’s—a stiff, lopsided nose that hooked down over his salt-and-pepper mustache. The worst thing, the really horrible thing about him, however, was that he was nervous and unable to cope with the torment his profession demanded he inflict. “We must proceed to an extraction, Fräulein,” he would say to Ida Jungmann—and then turn pale. And Hanno would sit there in a limp
cold sweat, unable to protest, unable to run away—in a state no different from that of a felon facing execution—and with enormous eyes he would watch Herr Brecht approach, his forceps held against his sleeve, and he could see the little beads of sweat on the dentist’s brow and that his mouth, too, was twisted in pain. And when the ghastly procedure was over—and Hanno would spit blood in the blue bowl at his side and then sit up pale and trembling, with tears in his eyes and his face contorted with pain—Herr Brecht would have to sit down somewhere to dry his brow and drink a little water.
They assured little Johann that what this man did to him was for his own good and that it would prevent much greater pain later on. But when Hanno compared the pain that Herr Brecht caused him with any noticeable positive results, the former outweighed the latter to such an extent that he could only regard these visits to Mühlen Strasse as the most useless and terrible torture imaginable. To make room for the wisdom teeth that would come later, four molars—four new, beautiful, white, and perfectly healthy molars—had to be removed, a procedure that was stretched out over several weeks in order not to overtax the child. And what weeks they were! It was a protracted martyrdom, during which the dread of the next visit set in before he had even overcome the strain of the last—and it proved too much. After the final tooth was pulled, Hanno lay ill in bed for a week—out of pure exhaustion.
His dental problems affected not only his frame of mind but also the function of several vital organs. Because he had difficulty chewing, he had constant digestive problems, including several attacks of gastric fever; and his stomach pains were partly responsible for occasional dizzy spells, when his heart would beat too hard or too weakly and his pulse became irregular. And all the while his old disorder—the one that Dr. Grabow had diagnosed as pavor nocturnus—continued—indeed, grew worse. There was hardly a night when little Johann did not start up in bed at least once or twice, wringing his hands and crying for help or pleading for mercy, exhibiting all the signs of the most awful panic, as if he were being burned alive or strangled, as if something ghastly beyond all description were happening to him. And in the morning he would remember nothing at all. Dr. Grabow attempted to treat this affliction with a glass of blueberry juice before bed—but that did not help in the least.
The afflictions to which Hanno’s body was subject, the pain he had to suffer, could not help making him serious and wise for his age, making him what people call precocious; and although his precociousness was never obtrusive—perhaps in some way it was suppressed by so much talent and good taste—every now and then it would surface as a kind of melancholy condescension. “How are you feeling, Hanno?” one of his relatives would ask—his grandmother or one of the Ladies Buddenbrook from Breite Strasse—and his only answer would be a little resigned smile and a shrug of his shoulders, so prettily outfitted in a blue sailor suit.
“Do you like school?”
“No,” Hanno answered calmly and with a candor that said it was not worth lying about such matters, given life’s more serious problems.
“No? Oh. But you do have to learn reading, writing, arithmetic …”
“And so forth,” little Johann said.
No, he did not like the Old School, the former convent school with its cloisters and Gothic-vaulted classrooms. He was not doing well in his subjects. He was absent too often because of illness and was totally inattentive because his thoughts would linger over some harmonic relationship or some unraveled marvel in a piece of music that he had heard his mother and Herr Pfühl play. The lower grades were taught by assistant instructors and teachers-in-training, narrow-minded men who were negligent about their personal hygiene, and he both feared them and secretly held them in contempt as social inferiors. Herr Tietge, the mathematics teacher, a tiny old man in a greasy coat, had been on the faculty since the days of the late Marcellus Stengel and was impossibly cross-eyed, which he attempted to correct with glasses whose lenses were as round and thick as portholes on a ship. At least once an hour, Herr Tietge would remind little Johann what a diligent, clever student of mathematics his father had been. Herr Tietge’s constant severe coughing spells meant that the floor around his lectern was covered with the mucus he coughed up.
On the whole, Hanno maintained a quite superficial and distant relationship with his classmates. He was pals with only one of them, had been from the very first day of school—and the bond held firm. His friend was named Kai, Count Kai Mölln—a boy from an aristocratic family, but whose appearance was totally unkempt.
He was about Hanno’s height, but instead of a Danish sailor outfit he wore a dingy suit of indeterminate color, with a button missing here and there and a very large visible patch on the seat of his pants. Sticking out from the short sleeves, his hands were always a pale gray, as if impregnated with dust and dirt; but they were narrow and exceptionally fine hands, with long fingers and long, tapering fingernails. He had a head to match those hands—disheveled, uncombed, and none too clean, but endowed by nature with all the marks of a fine and noble pedigree. His reddish-blond hair was carelessly parted down the middle, and when he brushed it back from his alabaster forehead, his deep-set but keen bright blue eyes flashed. He had somewhat prominent cheekbones, and both his mouth with its short upper lip and his nose with its delicate nostrils and narrow, slightly aquiline curve were already distinctive and characteristic.
Before they ever began school together, Hanno Buddenbrook had caught a quick glimpse of this young count once or twice, when he and Ida Jungmann had gone for a walk that took them northward, out through the Burg Gate. Quite a distance out of town—not far from the first village, in fact—was a little farmstead, a tiny, almost worthless piece of property that didn’t even have a name. If you stopped to look inside the gate, the first thing you noticed was a manure pile, then several chickens, a doghouse, and, finally, a wretched cottagelike building with a low-hanging red roof. This was the manor house, the residence of Kai’s father, Count Eberhard Mölln.
He was an eccentric, whom people seldom saw—a recluse who had forsaken the world for this little farm, where he bred chickens and dogs and grew vegetables: a tall, bald man who wore top boots and a green frieze jacket and sported a huge grizzled beard worthy of a troll. He always had a riding crop in his hand, although he did not own a single horse, and there was a monocle clamped in one eye, under a bushy brow. Apart from him and his son, there was no longer a single Count Mölln to be found anywhere in the country. The various branches of this once rich, powerful, and proud family had withered, died, and rotted away, and little Kai had only one aunt who was still alive—and his father was not on speaking terms with her. She published novels, written under a bizarre pseudonym, in various family magazines. What people remembered about Count Eberhard was that, shortly after he had moved onto the farm out beyond the Burg Gate, a sign appeared on the low front door warning salesmen, beggars, or anyone else making inquiries not to bother him; the sign read: “Here lives Count Mölln, all alone. He needs nothing, buys nothing, and has nothing to give away.” The sign had stayed there some time, until it served its purpose and no one bothered him anymore. Then he had taken it down.
Little Kai was motherless—the countess had died giving birth to him, and some old woman kept house for them—and he had grown up like a wild animal among the chickens and dogs; the first time that Hanno Buddenbrook saw him, he watched shyly from a distance as Kai bounded about like a rabbit in a cabbage patch, roughhousing with puppies and frightening chickens with his somersaults.
He met him again in the classroom, and the little count’s savage appearance continued to make him feel a bit nervous at first—but not for long. His sure instincts allowed him to see through the dissheveled exterior and to notice, instead, the white forehead, the narrow mouth, the wide, finely shaped, bright blue eyes that gazed out at the world in a kind of angry astonishment; and Hanno had been filled with a great sympathy for this one classmate, to the exclusion of all others. Nevertheless he was much too reticent to m
uster the courage for the first step, and without little Kai’s rash initiative they would probably have remained strangers. In fact, the eager haste with which Kai struck up a friendship frightened Johann at first. But the little, unkempt fellow went about courting the diffident, elegantly dressed Hanno with such ardor and impetuous, aggressive manliness that there was no resisting him. Granted, he could not help Hanno with his lessons—given his untamed, free-ranging spirit, he felt the same loathing for multiplication tables as dreamy, distracted young Buddenbrook did. But he gave Hanno everything he had to give as presents: marbles, wooden tops, even his small, battered tin pistol—his finest possession. They spent recess hand in hand, and he talked about his home, about the puppies and chickens; and sometimes he was even allowed to join Hanno at lunchtime, although Ida Jungmann always stood waiting at the school gate with a package of sandwiches, ready to take her charge for their midday stroll. On one such occasion he learned that young Buddenbrook was called Hanno at home, and he immediately adopted the nickname and never called him anything else from then on.
One day he had insisted that, instead of walking along the Mühlenwall, Hanno come with him to his father’s farm to see some newborn guinea pigs, and Fräulein Jungmann had finally given in to their pleas. When they arrived at the count’s estate, they first inspected the vegetables, dogs, chickens, and guinea pigs and then entered the house, where in a long, low room on the ground floor they found Count Eberhard eating and reading at a low rustic table; the perfect image of defiant loneliness, he gruffly asked them what they wanted.
Ida Jungmann could not be persuaded to repeat the visit; indeed, she insisted that, if they wanted to be together, it would be better for Kai to visit Hanno. And so, for the first time, the little count entered his friend’s splendid home—and was frank in his admiration, but not the least bit shy. From then on he came more and more often, and only the deepest snows of winter could prevent him from hiking all the way back into town to spend a few hours with Hanno Buddenbrook each afternoon.