The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  “You can’t be sure of that!” Joachim said. “And that’s just it—that you can’t be sure at all. He claims you had some spots before that no one paid any attention to and they healed by themselves, so that all you have left are a few unimportant muffled tones. The same thing might have happened with this moist spot you’ve got now if you hadn’t happened to come up to visit me—you just can’t be sure.”

  “No, you can’t be sure of anything,” Hans Castorp replied. “Which is precisely why no one has any right to assume the worst—about how long I’ll have to stay on here at your spa, for instance. You say that no one knows when I’ll get away and start work on the docks, but you say it from the pessimistic point of view. And that, I think, is premature, precisely because you can’t be sure. Behrens mentioned no dates—he’s a prudent fellow and doesn’t want to play the fortune-teller. And I haven’t even had my picture taken with X-rays yet, and only that will give us an objective view of the facts. Who knows whether anything worth mentioning will even show up, or whether I won’t have rid myself of my fever by then and can bid you all adieu. I’m for not playing this thing up too soon, so that we end up crying wolf back home. It will be enough if we write a letter—I can write it myself with my fountain pen if I prop myself up a little—and tell them I’ve got a bad cold and a fever, that I’m staying in bed and won’t be traveling just yet. And then we shall see what we shall see.”

  “Fine,” Joachim said, “that’s what we’ll do for now. And the rest of it can wait, too.”

  “What rest of it?”

  “Well, just stop and think! You arrived here with a steamer trunk packed for a three-week stay. You’ll need underwear, shirts, winter clothes, and some other footwear. And finally, you’ll need to have more money sent, too.”

  “If,” Hans Castorp said, “if I need it.”

  “Good, let’s wait and see,” Joachim said and began to pace the room. “But we ought not—no, we cannot allow ourselves to have any illusions. I’ve been here too long not to know what’s what. Once Behrens says that you have a rough spot, almost a rattle . . . But, of course, of course, we can wait and see.”

  And that was how they left things for now. The regular schedule, with its weekly and fortnightly deviations, took its course. Even in his present situation Hans Castorp participated in it all—if not by direct enjoyment, then at least through the reports Joachim gave him when he visited and sat down on the edge of the bed for fifteen minutes.

  His Sunday breakfast tea tray was decorated with a little vase of flowers, and they had not forgotten to send along some of the pastries served in the dining hall on Sundays. Later in the morning, things turned lively in the garden and on the terrace. With a fanfare of trumpets and screechy clarinets the fortnightly Sunday concert began, for which Joachim had joined his cousin in his room, taking a seat out on the balcony to listen. Hans Castorp sat half propped up in bed, his head tilted to one side and a blurry look of fond devotion in his eyes, and he listened now to the harmonies drifting in through the open balcony door—though not without a mental shrug at the thought of Settembrini’s babblings about music being “politically suspect.”

  But, as we have noted, when it came to the rest of the day’s sights and events, he had Joachim provide him a report; he asked him about the festive outfits that had been brought out for Sunday, the lace peignoirs and such (although it had turned too cold for lace peignoirs); about whether there had been any afternoon carriage rides (there had indeed—the entire Half-Lung Club had left on an excursion to Clavadel). On Monday, when Joachim looked in on him on his way back from Dr. Krokowski’s lecture and before his afternoon rest cure, Hans Castorp demanded to hear everything that had been said. Joachim proved rather closemouthed and reluctant to report on the lecture—but then, the two of them had not said much about the previous one, either. Nevertheless, Hans Castorp insisted on hearing details.

  “Here I lie, paying full price,” he said, “and I want to get something out of what is offered, too.” He recalled his independent walk on Monday two weeks before and that it had not done him much good; he even expressed a rather definite conjecture that it had created a revolution in his body and caused his silent, latent illness to erupt.

  “And the way the people up here talk,” he exclaimed, “the common people, I mean. It sounds so dignified and solemn, almost like poetry sometimes. ‘Fare thee well and much obliged!’ ” he repeated, imitating the woodsman. “I heard that up in the forest, I’ll never forget it as long as I live. That sort of thing gets caught up with other impressions and memories, you know, and just keeps ringing in your ears till the day you die. And so Krokowski spoke about ‘love’ again, did he?” he asked, grimacing as he said the word.

  “But of course,” Joachim said. “What else? It is his topic, after all.”

  “What did he have to say about it today?”

  “Oh, nothing special. You know yourself from last time the way he puts things.”

  “But what new ideas did he treat us to?”

  “Nothing new, really . . . yes, well, he was selling basic chemistry today,” Joachim reluctantly and patronizingly reported. It was all about a kind of poisoning, about the organism poisoning itself, which, Dr. Krokowski had said, was the result of the decomposition of a certain, still-unidentified substance present throughout the body; the by-products of that decomposition had an intoxicating effect on certain centers in the spinal cord, not all that different from what happens when other poisons, such as morphine or cocaine, are introduced into the body.

  “So that’s what causes flushed cheeks,” Hans Castorp said. “Think of it, that’s something worth learning. The things that man knows! He’s a regular fountain of information. Just wait, someday soon he’ll identify that substance present throughout the body, and he’ll manufacture those by-products himself, the ones with the intoxicating effect on the spinal cord. He can really get folk tipsy, then. It may well be that people knew the trick of it at one time. Listening to him makes you think there’s something to those stories about love potions and the other stuff they talk about in old sagas. Are you going now?”

  “Yes,” Joachim said, “I really have to take my rest cure. The curve on my chart has been rising since yesterday. This problem of yours has definitely had its effect on me after all.”

  And so Sunday, and Monday, passed. And the evening and the morning were the third day of Hans Castorp’s stay in the “stall,” a weekday with nothing to distinguish it—a Tuesday, the day of his arrival. He had been here for three weeks, and so he felt compelled to write a letter home and inform his uncle, however superficially for now, of how things stood. His pillows stuffed behind his back, he wrote on sanatorium stationery about how his scheduled departure had been delayed. He was lying in bed with a fever and a cold, which Director Behrens, being the overconscientious doctor he was, had evidently refused to take all that lightly and instead saw within the larger context of his—the letter-writer’s—general constitution. At their very first meeting, in fact, the supervising physician had found him very anemic, and in consequence of all this, it now appeared that the length of stay that he—Hans Castorp—had originally planned could no longer be regarded as sufficient. Further details as soon as possible. “Just right,” Hans Castorp thought, “not one word too many, and yet it takes care of things for a while, no matter what.” The letter was handed to the porter, who avoided the postal detour of a mailbox, and took it down to meet the next scheduled train.

  This done, our adventurer felt he had put things in general good order and his mind was at ease; and although tormented by the cough and stuffy head of a cold, he lived each day as it came—each normal day, its established sameness divided into little segments, neither diverting nor boring, and always the same. Each morning there would be a robust knock on his door, and the bath attendant would enter, a sinewy fellow named Turnherr, with rolled-up sleeves and heavily veined forearms. In a gurgling voice with a serious impediment, he would address Hans Castorp
—as he did all the patients—by his room number and then proceed to rub him down with alcohol. Not long after he left, Joachim would appear, already dressed by then, to say good morning and ask his cousin about his seven o’clock temperature and inform him of his own. While Joachim was eating his breakfast downstairs, Hans Castorp would sit up, pillows stuffed behind his back, and do the same, with the healthy appetite that a change in life can bring—and would be disturbed hardly at all by the bustling, businesslike invasion of the doctors, who by this time had passed through the dining hall and were now making their rounds, moving at double time through the rooms of the bedridden and moribund. His mouth full of jam, he would announce that he had slept “quite well” and gaze across the rim of his cup at the director, who was standing in the center of the room, one fist braced against the table, hastily scanning the temperature chart; he would respond in a calm, drawling voice as they wished him good morning and departed. He would light a cigarette, and before he had even realized that Joachim was gone, here would come his cousin, already back from his morning constitutional. They would chat about one thing or another, and the time until second breakfast, which Joachim faithfully used for a rest cure, was so brief that even a downright dimwit or lamebrain could not have managed to be bored, whereas it gave Hans Castorp an opportunity to feast on his impressions of the first three weeks up here and to meditate on his current situation and what it perhaps might lead to—so that he had almost no use for the two thick illustrated magazines from the sanatorium library that lay on his nightstand.

  It was the same with the time required for Joachim’s second walk, this time down to Davos-Platz—another easy hour. He would look in again on Hans Castorp and, standing or sitting beside the sickbed for a moment, tell him about whatever he had happened to notice on his walk, then leave to take his noon rest cure. And how long was that? Again, just a brief hour. No sooner had you clasped your hands behind your head to gaze at the ceiling and pursue some passing thought than the gong sounded for those who were not bedridden or moribund to get ready for the day’s main meal.

  Joachim would leave, and the “midday soup” would arrive—soup was the simplified, symbolic name for what came. Because Hans Castorp was not on a restricted diet—why should he have been? A restricted diet, short commons, would hardly have been appropriate to his condition. There he lay, paying full price, and what they brought him at this hour of fixed eternity was “midday soup,” the six-course Berghof dinner in all its splendor, with nothing missing—a hearty meal six days a week, a sumptuous showpiece, a gala banquet, prepared by a trained European chef in the sanatorium’s deluxe hotel kitchen. The dining attendant whose job it was to care for bedridden patients would bring it to him, a series of tasty dishes arranged under domed nickel covers. She would shove over the bed table, which was now part of the furniture, a marvel of one-legged equilibrium, adjust it across his bed in front of him, and Hans Castorp would dine from it like the tailor’s son who dined from a magic table.

  And no sooner had he finished eating than Joachim would return; and then it would be almost two-thirty before he left for his balcony and the silence of the main rest cure settled over the Berghof. Not quite two-thirty, perhaps; to be precise, it was more like a quarter past. But such extra quarter hours left over from nice, round whole ones don’t really count, they are simply swallowed up along the way—at least that is what happens wherever time is managed on a grand scale, on long journeys, for instance, or on train rides that last for hours, or in similar situations when life is emptiness and waiting and all activity is reduced to whiling time away and putting it behind you. A quarter past two—that’s as good as half past; and half past two is the same as half till three, for heaven’s sake. Those thirty minutes can be regarded as a prologue to the full hour from three till four and that takes care of them. That is how it’s done under such circumstances. And so, in the end, the main rest cure was actually reduced to a mere hour—which in turn was abbreviated, contracted, and given an apostrophe, as it were. And the apostrophe was Dr. Krokowski.

  Yes, Dr. Krokowski no longer circumvented Hans Castorp when he made his independent afternoon rounds. Hans Castorp counted now. He was no longer an interval or hiatus, he was a patient; he, too, was questioned, instead of being left lying there to his own devices, as he had been every day until now—much to his slight and secret annoyance. It was on

  Monday that Dr. Krokowski had first materialized in his room—we say “materialized,” because that is the best word for the strange, almost terrifying impression it had made on Hans Castorp, no matter how hard he tried to shake it that day. He had been lying there dozing for fifteen minutes or half an hour, when he was startled awake by the sudden realization that the assistant was in his room, striding toward him, having entered not by way of the door, but from outside. He had not used the corridor, but had moved along the balconies, and had come in now through the open balcony door, creating the impression that he had materialized out of thin air. At any rate, there he had stood beside Hans Castorp’s bed—black and pale, broad-shouldered, stout, the hour’s apostrophe—and visible under his two-pronged beard had been a manly smile and yellowish teeth.

  “You seem surprised to see me, Herr Castorp,” he had said in his gentle baritone; his consciously affected, drawling accent had an exotic, palatalized r—not a rolled r, but simply a single tap of the tongue just behind the upper front teeth. “I am merely fulfilling a pleasant duty in stopping by to see how you are doing. Your association with us has entered a new phase—overnight our guest has become a comrade.” (The word “comrade” had made Hans Castorp feel rather uneasy.) “Who would have thought it!” Dr. Krokowski had joked in a comradely voice. “Who would have thought that evening when I first had the pleasure of greeting you, and you responded to my mistaken view—it was a mistake at the time—by declaring that you were perfectly healthy. I think I expressed something of my doubts at the time, but I assure you that I did not mean this. I do not wish to represent myself as more perspicacious than I am. I certainly wasn’t thinking at the time of a moist spot, my intentions were quite different, more general, more philosophical. I was articulating my doubts that the words ‘human being’ and ‘perfect health’ could ever be made to rhyme. And even today, despite what happened at your examination, from my viewpoint—which is different from that of my distinguished supervisor—this moist spot here”—and he had lightly touched Hans Castorp’s shoulder with the tip of one finger—“cannot be regarded as the primary object of interest. It is merely a secondary phenomenon. Organic factors are always secondary.”

  And Hans Castorp had flinched.

  “So in my eyes at least, your catarrh is merely a tertiary phenomenon,” Dr. Krokowski had added very nonchalantly. “How is that cold, by the way? I’m certain bed rest will soon take care of it. Have you been measuring your temperature today?” And at that point the assistant’s visit had taken on the character of a rather harmless inspection, which continued to be the case in the following days and weeks. Dr. Krokowski would enter by way of the balcony at a quarter till four or a little earlier, greet the recumbent patient in his cheerful, manly way, make a few very elementary medical inquiries, bring the conversation around briefly to more personal topics, and make a comradely joke or two. And although these visits never failed to have a certain dubious aura about them, one can eventually become accustomed to dubious things—if they remain within limits. And Hans Castorp soon found he had no objections to Dr. Krokowski’s regular “materializations.” They simply belonged to the fixed schedule of a normal day, and ended the main rest cure with an apostrophe.

  And so by the time the assistant stepped back out onto the balcony, it was four o’clock—which meant late, late afternoon. Suddenly and before you even realized it, it was late afternoon, which would deepen now seamlessly into oncoming evening. And by the time tea had been taken, both in the dining room below and in room 34, it was very close to five o’clock; and by the time Joachim had returned from
his third obligatory walk and had dropped in on his cousin again, it was so close to six o’clock that, once you rounded it off a little, the time left in the rest cure until supper was reduced to just one hour—and it was child’s play to drive such paltry forces of opposing time from the field of battle, particularly if you had thoughts in your head and an orbis pictus on the nightstand.

  Joachim would look in before leaving for supper. His own tray would be brought in. The valley would long since have filled with shadows, and while Hans Castorp ate, it would grow discernibly darker in the white room. When he had finished, he would sit there propped up against his pillows, his empty dishes and his magic table before him, and gaze out into the quickly falling dusk—today’s dusk, which was hardly distinguishable from yesterday’s, or the dusk of the day before yesterday, or of a week ago. There was evening—and there had just been morning. The day, chopped into little pieces by all these synthetic diversions, had in fact crumbled in his hands, and turned to dust—and he would notice it now, either in cheerful amazement or, at worst, with a little pensiveness, since to shudder at the thought would have been inappropriate to his young years. It seemed to him that he was simply gazing, “on and on.”

  One day, ten or twelve days perhaps after Hans Castorp had taken to his bed, there was a knock on his door at that same hour—that is to say, just before Joachim was due to return from supper and the evening social. And in response to Hans Castorp’s tentative “come in,” Lodovico Settembrini appeared on the threshold. All of a sudden the room was dazzlingly bright—because the visitor’s first gesture upon opening the door had been to switch on the ceiling lamp, and in a flash the room was overflowing with a sudden clarity that was reflected off the white of the ceiling and furniture.