by Thomas Mann
They sat together in the large playroom on the third floor and did their homework. There were long arithmetic problems that filled both sides of their slates, and when you were done with all the addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, the answer had to be zero—and if it wasn’t, there must be a mistake somewhere, and you had to search and search until you found the nasty little beast and erased it, and you could only hope that it wasn’t too far back, because otherwise the whole thing had to be done over. Then they had German grammar to do, to learn the rules of comparison and to write the examples in tidy and even rows—things like: “Horn is transparent. Glass is more transparent. Air is most transparent.” And then there were exercises to be studied in their spelling books, such as: “Eve received word that she must leave the garden and grieved that she had believed the serpent and deceived Adam.” The point of this tricky exercise was that you would be tempted to misspell “received” and “deceived” with “ie,” “believed” and “grieved” with “ei,” and “leave” as “leve” and “Eve” as “Eave”—which in fact had been done in every case, and now the task was to correct them all. But when they were finished at last, they put their books away and sat down on the window seat to listen to Ida read.
This good soul read to them about Liza-Kate, about the boy who left home to learn fear, about Rumpelstiltskin, Rapunzel, and the Frog King—all in a deep, unhurried voice and with her eyes half closed. She knew these fairy tales almost by heart—she had read them all too many times over the years—and turned the pages automatically with a moistened index finger.
But now something remarkable happened. Little Kai increasingly showed an interest in developing his own talents, wanted to imitate the book and tell stories of his own; and that was all the more welcome because it was not long before they knew the printed fairy tales, and Ida needed a rest now and then, too. At first Kai’s stories were short and simple; they soon grew bolder, however, and more complicated—and more interesting, because they were not pure fabrications but had some basis in reality, but a reality bathed in a strange and mysterious light. Hanno especially liked to listen to the story about an evil but extraordinarily powerful magician, who tormented everyone with his wicked spells and had changed a handsome and very clever prince named Josephus into a brightly colored bird that he held captive in a cage. But there was a boy in a faraway land, and he had been chosen to become a fearless hero and would grow up one day to lead an invincible army of dogs, chickens, and guinea pigs into battle against the magician, and with a single stroke of his sword he would rescue the whole world and the prince—and especially Hanno Buddenbrook—from the magician’s evil power. And once the charm was broken and he was free, Josephus would return to his kingdom, become a king, and promote Hanno and Kai to high positions.
Now and then Senator Buddenbrook would pass the playroom and see the two friends there together—and he had no objections. It was easy to see that the two were a good influence on one another. Hanno had a calming effect on Kai, he tamed him, almost ennobled him; and Kai dearly loved his friend. He marveled at the whiteness of his hands, and, just to please Hanno, he even let Fräulein Jungmann take a brush and soap to his own. And the senator would have been only too happy to see Hanno acquire a little of the young count’s vitality and ruggedness, because Senator Buddenbrook was well aware that the constant influence of women was not likely to stimulate and develop manliness in the boy.
The loyalty and self-sacrifice of good Ida Jungmann, who had served the Buddenbrooks for three decades now, could never be repaid in gold. She had devotedly tended and nursed the previous generation—but Hanno was the apple of her eye. She wrapped him up in all her tenderness and concern, she idolized him, and at times she carried to absurdity her naïve, unshakable belief that he had an absolute right to his privileged place in the world. When called upon to act in his behalf, she could be amazingly, sometimes embarrassingly brazen. If she happened to be out shopping with him at the pastry shop, for example, she would never forget to reach coolly into one of the bowls of sweets on the counter and hand him something, without even thinking of paying—the baker should take it as an honor, shouldn’t he? And if a crowd was gathered at a display window, she would take her charge by the hand and then, in her friendly but very determined West Prussian dialect, ask people to make way for him. Indeed, in her eyes he was so special that she found hardly any other children worthy of close association. When it came to the little count, her initial mistrust was overcome by the boys’ affection for one another—and his title had dazzled her a bit, too. If she happened to be sitting with Hanno on a bench beside the Mühlenwall, however, and other children with their governesses would sit down next to them, Fräulein Jungmann would get up almost at once and move on after making some excuse about being late or sitting in a draft. The explanations she offered little Johann for this behavior could only lead him to believe that all his contemporaries either were scrofulous or had what she called “evil humors”—and that he was the lone exception. This did not exactly enhance his already somewhat meager sense of confidence and ease in dealing with other people.
Senator Buddenbrook knew nothing about such details; but he saw that his son’s development, whether as a result of nature or external influences, was not, as yet, headed in the direction he would have wished. If only he could take Hanno’s education in hand himself, he could then mold his mind, every hour of every day. But he did not have the time, and he was painfully aware that his occasional attempts at it had failed miserably, making the father-son relationship that much colder and more distanced. He had an image in his mind’s eye and longed to shape his son after it: the image of Hanno’s great-grandfather as he remembered him from his own childhood—a clever, jovial, natural, witty, strong man. Couldn’t Hanno grow up to be like that? Was that impossible? And if so, why? If he could have suppressed and banned the music at least—it was certainly not good for his health, absorbed all his mental energies, and made him ill-suited for the practical side of life. And that dreamy way he had about him—did it not sometimes border on simple-mindedness?
One afternoon Hanno had gone downstairs alone to the second floor almost an hour before dinner, which was always at four. He practiced the piano for a while and then just lounged around the living room. Half lying, half sitting on the chaise longue, he toyed with the knot in his sailor’s tie. His eyes had wandered off to one side, not looking at anything in particular, when he happened to spot an open leather writing case on his mother’s walnut desk—the family documents. He propped his elbows against the cushion behind him, his chin in one hand, and gazed at them for a while from a distance. It was obvious that Papa had been busy with them this morning, after second breakfast, and had left them there to work on them later. There were still some things in the case; other, loose pages had been pulled out, and a metal ruler served as a provisional paperweight. The large gilt-edged notebook lay open among the various papers.
Hanno slid casually from the couch and went over to the desk. The book was open to a place where the family tree of the Buddenbrooks had been plotted out with parentheses, rubrics, and clearly ordered dates, all of it recorded in the hands of his forebears and, most recently, of his own father. Kneeling with one leg on the desk chair and one hand pressed against the soft waves of his light brown hair, he examined the manuscript a little from the side, studying it with a faintly critical, rather contemptuously serious, and completely indifferent, eye; his free hand played with Mama’s gold-and-ebony penholder. His gaze wandered among all those names of men and women, arranged side by side or beneath one another, some written in an old-fashioned hand with curlicues and long, sweeping flourishes, the ink fading and yellowish now, some boldly set down in thick strokes of black ink to which bits of gold-sand still clung. At the very end, recorded directly under his parents’ names, in Papa’s small, neat hand that hurried across the page, he read his own: Justus, Johann, Kaspar, born 15 April 1861. That he found amusing. He straightened up a litt
le, nonchalantly picked up both the ruler and the pen, laid the ruler under his name, and scanned the whole genealogical hodgepodge once more; then, with a passive, dreamy look on his face, he set the gold pen to the page and, with great yet somehow thoughtless and mechanical care, he drew two neat, lovely horizontal lines across the bottom—the upper line a little less thick than the lower, the way he had been taught to do on each page of his arithmetic book. He laid his head critically to one side for a moment, and wandered off.
After dinner, the senator called for him. He scowled and asked him gruffly, “What is this? How did this get here? Did you do this?”
He had to stop and think a moment whether he had or not. But then, shyly and nervously, he said, “Yes.”
“What for? What were you thinking of? Answer me! What made you be so malicious?” the senator shouted, slapping Hanno’s cheek with a lightly rolled-up notebook.
Pulling away and holding his hand to his cheek, little Johann stammered, “I thought … I thought … there wouldn’t be anything more.”
8
OF LATE, when the family sat down to dinner each Thursday, surrounded by the statues of gods smiling calmly down from the wallpaper, there was a new and very serious topic of conversation, which elicited only cool, standoffish looks from the Ladies Buddenbrook from Breite Strasse—and the most excited looks and gestures from Frau Permaneder. With her head laid back and both arms stretched straight ahead or straight up, she spoke out of anger, resentment, out of genuine, deeply felt outrage. She would proceed from the specific case at hand to more general observations about humankind as a whole interspersed with dry, nervous coughs related to her digestive problems; she let out little trumpet blasts of disgust in the throaty voice she always used when she was angry. And it sounded like: “Teary Trieschke! Grünlich! Permaneder!” But the remarkable thing was that a new cry had been added, and she uttered it with indescribable scorn and venom. It sounded like: “The prosecutor!”
But the moment Director Hugo Weinschenk entered the dining room—still dressed in his frock coat and late as always, because he was buried under work—and strode to his chair with an unusually lively swing to his gait, his clenched fists balanced in front of him, his lower lip drooping impudently under his small mustache, the conversation would die, and a painful, stifling silence would hang over the table, until the senator would extricate them from their embarrassment by asking quite casually how the affair was proceeding—as if it were just another normal bit of business. And Hugo Weinschenk would reply that the affair was going quite well—famously, in fact, as was only to be expected—and then would blithely change the subject. He was much more cheerful of late and let his eyes roam about with a certain wild unflappability and frequently asked, though without receiving an answer, about how Gerda’s fiddle was doing. He chatted away merrily about all sorts of things. The only problem was that, in his naïve candor and extraordinary high spirits, he did not pay sufficient attention to what he was saying, and every now and then would tell a story that was somewhat out of place. One of his anecdotes, for example, concerned a wet-nurse who suffered from such an awful case of flatulence that the child she was nursing took ill. And in a manner which he doubtless thought was humorous, he imitated the family physician, who had shouted, “Who is making this stink? Who is making this stink here?”—and he noticed too late, or perhaps not at all, that his wife was blushing terribly, that old Madame Buddenbrook, Thomas, and Gerda sat there like statues, that the Ladies Buddenbrook exchanged pointed glances, that even Rieke Severin, at the far end of the table, looked offended and simply gazed straight ahead, and that only old Consul Kröger managed to splutter softly.
And what was Hugo Weinschenk’s problem? This earnest, industrious, but chipper man with a rough exterior and no social graces whatever, this man who devoted himself to his work with a dogged sense of duty—this man was alleged to have committed a serious offense, not just once, but repeatedly. Indeed, he was accused of, and had been indicted for, having on several occasions engaged in a business maneuver that was not just dubious but contemptible and criminal. And he would have to face trial—the outcome of which was uncertain. And what were the charges against him? There had been fires in various localities, large conflagrations, and each of them would have cost his insurance company, which had underwritten the policies in question, large sums of money. It was claimed, however, that Hugo Weinschenk, having immediately received confidential news of these calamities from his agents, had with fraudulent intent reinsured the policies with other insurance companies, thereby passing the losses on to them. And now the matter lay in the hands of the prosecutor, and the prosecutor was Dr. Moritz Hagenström.
“Thomas,” old Madame Buddenbrook said to her son when they were alone, “tell me, please … I don’t understand. What am I to think of all this?”
And he replied, “Well, my dear Mother, what can I say? Unfortunately there is some doubt whether everything was as it should be. But, on the other hand, I think it unlikely that Weinschenk is guilty to the extent that certain people would have you believe. In business today there are certain practices, they call them ‘usages.’ And a usage, you see, is a maneuver that is not quite all that it should be, not quite in accordance with the letter of the law, and looks rather dishonest from the layman’s point of view, but which by the tacit agreement of the business world is common enough. It’s hard to draw the line between a usage and something much worse. But no matter. If Weinschenk has done something wrong, it is most probably nothing more dreadful than what many of his colleagues have done—and got away with. But that does not mean I think the trial will go in his favor. He might be acquitted in a large city, perhaps. But here, where everything comes down to cliques and personal motives—well, he should have thought of that when he chose his lawyer. We have no outstanding lawyers here in town, no eminent intellect whose oratorical skills are overwhelmingly convincing, who knows all the tricks of the trade and is well versed in even the most ticklish business practices. You see, all our lawyers hang together. They have lunch or dinner together. They have so many interests in common, sometimes even relatives. And they have to show some consideration for each other. In my opinion it would have been wiser if Weinschenk had chosen a local attorney. But what did he do? He felt it necessary—I repeat, felt it necessary, which makes one wonder about how easy he is in his own conscience—to enlist a lawyer from Berlin, Dr. Breslauer, a regular hell-raiser with a smooth tongue, a crafty virtuoso of the law with a reputation for having helped keep any number of shady bankrupts out of prison. And there’s no doubt he will handle the matter with a shrewdness equal to his very high fee. But will it do any good? I can see it coming—our gallant local attorneys will refuse to be impressed by the gentleman, will fight him tooth and nail, and the court will have a much more open ear for Dr. Hagenström’s argument. And the witnesses? As far as his own office staff goes, I don’t think that they are especially devoted to him. What we who wish him well call his rough exterior—he calls it that himself, I believe—has not won him many friends. And so, in short, Mother, I fear the worst. If disaster strikes, it will be very hard on Erika. But I feel sorriest for Tony. You see, she’s quite right when she says that Hagenström was only too happy to take the case on. It involves us all, and if it ends in disgrace, we shall all be affected, because Weinschenk is part of the family after all—he sits at our table. As far as I’m concerned, I can manage. I know how I shall have to conduct myself. Publicly, I shall stand quite aloof from the whole affair. I dare not even attend the trial—although I would be interested in watching Breslauer. But if I am to protect myself from the charge of trying to influence the outcome, I cannot show any concern whatever. But Tony? I don’t even want to think about how sad a conviction would be for her. And when you listen to her loud protests against slander and envious intrigues, what you hear is fear—the fear that, after all the misfortunes she has had to bear, she may have to forfeit this last honorable position in her daughter’s respect
able household. Oh, just watch, her assertions about Weinschenk’s innocence will grow louder and louder, the more she feels herself hemmed in by doubts. Although he may very well be innocent, absolutely innocent. We’ll simply have to wait it out, Mother, and be very tactful when dealing with him and Tony and Erika. But I fear nothing good will come of this.”
THIS WAS STILL the state of affairs as Christmas approached, and with a pounding heart Johann counted the days, tearing them off one by one from the Advent calender Ida had made for him, until the day of days would arrive—the page with a Christmas tree on it.
There were more and more signs of its coming. On the first day of Advent, a colorful, life-size picture of St. Nicholas was hung on the wall in Grandmama’s dining room. One morning Hanno found his bedspread, the rug beside his bed, and his clothes strewn with softly crackling golden tinsel. Then, one afternoon a few days later, as they were sitting in the living room—Papa was stretched out on the chaise longue reading his paper and Hanno was reading the story about the Witch of Endor in Gerok’s Palm Fronds—the maid announced that “an old man was at the door, asking about the little boy.” It was the same every year, and it was always a surprise. The old man was asked to come in, and he shuffled into the room, dressed in a fur cap and a long fur coat turned inside out and covered with tinsel and snowflakes, with black smudges on his face and a huge white beard and unnaturally thick eyebrows, both dusted with sparkling confetti. And just as he did every year, he declared that this sack—on his left shoulder—was for good children who could say their prayers and contained apples and golden nuts, but that this switch—on his right shoulder—was for wicked children. It was St. Nicholas. Well, of course, not the real, absolutely genuine St. Nicholas, perhaps it was actually only Wenzel the barber, dressed in Papa’s fur coat—but if there was such a thing as St. Nicholas, then this was it. And Hanno was thrilled, just as he was every year, and managed with only one or two almost involuntary, nervous sobs to say the Lord’s Prayer, and was permitted to reach into the sack for good children—which, as always, the old man once again forgot to take with him as he left.