The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  The Italian was the only person among the sanatorium’s residents about whom Hans Castorp had expressly asked during this period. All the same, every time Joachim sat or stood beside his cousin’s bed for ten minutes or so—and that happened ten times a day at least—he would report about all the little events and anomalies in the institution’s daily life, and if Hans Castorp had questions they were always of a more general, impersonal nature. Despite his isolation, his curiosity did not go beyond asking if new guests had arrived or any familiar faces had departed; and he seemed content to learn that only the former was the case. There was one newcomer, a young man with a greenish, sunken face, and he had been given a place at the table to the cousins’ right, between Levi of the ivory skin and Frau Iltis. Well, Hans Castorp could wait to see him with his own eyes. And so no one had left? Joachim replied curtly in the negative, his eyes lowered. But he had to answer the same question several times, every other day really, and finally, with some impatience in his voice, he tried to settle the issue once and for all, declaring that as far as he knew no one was planning to depart—people didn’t normally leave here that abruptly.

  But as for Settembrini, Hans Castorp had expressly asked about him, demanding to know what he had “to say about it.” —About what? —“Why, that I’m lying here, presumably ill.”

  And, in fact, Settembrini had responded, although very briefly. On the day Hans Castorp vanished, he had approached Joachim and asked where their visitor might be, obviously expecting to be told that Hans Castorp had departed. And in reply to Joachim’s account, he had uttered just two words in Italian. The first was, “Ecco!” the second, “Poveretto!”—meaning “There you are!” and “Poor fellow!”—you did not have to understand any more Italian than these young men to grasp the meaning of those two words.

  “But why ‘poveretto’?” Hans Castorp had asked. “Here he sits with his literature, made up of equal parts of humanism and politics, but he can’t do much by way of improving the more mundane issues in life. He shouldn’t be so arrogant about pitying me. I’ll be back down in the flatlands before he is.”

  And now here stood Herr Settembrini in the abruptly illuminated room. Bracing himself on an elbow to turn toward the door and blinking into the light, Hans Castorp recognized him now, and blushed. As always, Settembrini was wearing his heavy coat with the wide lapels, a frayed turndown collar, and checked trousers. He had come directly from supper and, as was his habit, had a wooden toothpick between his lips. Under the handsome upward sweep of his moustache, the corners of his mouth were drawn into the familiar, delicate, dry, critical smile.

  “Good evening, my good engineer. Do the rules allow my looking in on you? If so, we needed some light for it—please forgive my arbitrarily taking care of the matter,” he said, waving one small hand toward the ceiling lamp. “You are engaged in deep contemplation—I certainly don’t mean to disturb you. An inclination to ponder matters would be quite understandable in your situation, and there’s always your cousin if you wish to chat. You see, I am perfectly aware of just how superfluous I am. All the same, one lives in such close proximity, one senses a mutual regard, man to man, a certain sympathy, a sympathy of both the mind and the heart. It is almost a week now since we last saw one another. I had indeed begun to suspect that you had departed when I saw your place vacant down in the refectory. The lieutenant set me to rights—hmm, or should we say, set me to what was wrong, if that does not sound impolite. In short, how are you doing? What are you doing? How do you feel? Not all too depressed, I hope?”

  “It’s you, Herr Settembrini. How kind of you. Ha, ha—‘refectory’? Another one of your jokes. Please, have a chair. You’re not disturbing me in the least. I’ve been lying here musing—and musing is probably an exaggeration. I was simply too lazy to turn on the light. Thanks so much, I’m feeling almost normal, subjectively at least. My cold is almost gone, thanks to the bed rest, but it’s apparently only a secondary phenomenon, or so I’ve been told. My temperature still is not quite what it should be—sometimes ninety-nine point five, sometimes ninety-nine point nine. That hasn’t changed in the past few days.”

  “You’ve been measuring regularly, have you?”

  “Yes, six times a day, just like all of you up here. Ha, ha—excuse me for laughing, I was just thinking about your calling our dining hall a refectory. That’s what they call it in a monastery, is it not? There really is some resemblance—I’ve never been in a monastery, but I can imagine it’s much like here. And I can rattle off the litany of the ‘rule’ and observe it quite faithfully.”

  “Like a pious monk. One might say you’ve ended your novitiate and have taken your vows. My solemn congratulations. You’re already calling it ‘our dining hall,’ yourself. By the way—not that I wish to cast any aspersions on your masculinity—but you almost remind me more of a young nun than a monk, one of those innocent young brides of Christ, her hair newly shorn, with great martyr’s eyes. Whenever I happened to notice those sacrificial lambs, it was never without . . . without a certain flood of sentimentality. Ah, yes, yes, your good cousin has told me all about it. And so at the last moment you let them examine you.”

  “Because I was feverish. What would you have me do about such a cold, Herr Settembrini? I would have consulted our family doctor down in the plains. And up here, with two specialists, where information comes from the horse’s mouth, so to speak—it would have been strange if . . .”

  “Quite so, quite so. And you had been measuring your temperature, too, before anyone instructed you to do so. Although that was suggested to you right from the start. Nurse Mylendonk slipped you a thermometer, am I right?”

  “Slipped me one? Since I needed it, I bought one from her.”

  “I understand. Purely a business transaction. And how many months has the director saddled you with? Good God, I asked you that same question once before. Do you remember? You had just recently arrived. You were very cocky with your answers that day.”

  “I certainly do remember, Herr Settembrini. I’ve had a great many new experiences since then, but I can remember it as if it were yesterday. You were so amusing, even that first day. You turned Director Behrens into one of the judges of hell—Radames? No, wait, that’s somebody else.”

  “Rhadamanthus? It’s possible I might have called him that in passing. I don’t always remember everything that may burst from my lips.”

  “Rhadamanthus, right! Minos and Rhadamanthus! And you even spoke to us about Carducci that first day . . .”

  “If you will pardon me, my friend, we shall leave him out of this. His name sounds all too strange coming from you at the moment.”

  “Fine with me,” Hans Castorp laughed. “But you have taught me a great deal about him, you know. Yes, back then I hadn’t the vaguest, and I told you that I had come for three weeks. How could I have known any different? And Fräulein Kleefeld had just whistled hello to me with her pneumothorax, and I was a little taken aback. Although I felt feverish from the start, too—because the air here is good not only for fighting off illness, but it’s also good for it, sometimes bringing it to eruption. Which is probably necessary in the end, if there’s to be any healing.”

  “An alluring hypothesis. Did Director Behrens also tell you about a certain Russian woman whom we had here for five months last year—no, wait, the year before last? No? He should have. A delightful lady, of German heritage, married, a young mother. She came from somewhere in the Baltic region, anemic, lymphatic, there were perhaps more serious problems as well. Well, she spends a month here and complains of feeling very ill. Just be patient! A second month passes, and she continues to maintain that she’s not getting better, but worse. She is told that the doctor, and the doctor alone, can tell how she is doing; she can merely tell him how she is feeling—and that doesn’t matter much. They are satisfied with her lung. Fine, she says nothing, she continues her rest cure and loses weight with every week. She faints during her four-month checkup. That’s of no concern, Behr
ens says; they are really quite satisfied with her lung. But when by month five she can no longer walk, she writes her husband back by the Baltic, and Behrens receives a letter from him—the envelope is marked “personal” and “urgent” in a vigorous hand, I saw it myself. Yes, Behrens says now with a shrug, it has begun to look as if the climate here does not agree with her. The woman was beside herself. They should have told her that before, she cried, she had felt it all along, and now they had ruined her health entirely! We can only hope that she regained her strength once she joined her husband again by the Baltic.”

  “Excellent. What a way you have with stories, Herr Settembrini—every word is absolutely graphic! I’ve laughed quietly many a time at your story about the girl who went for a swim in the lake and then was given a silent sister. Yes, the things that happen here. Always something new. My own case is still quite uncertain, by the way. The director claims he has found a little something wrong with me. There are some old spots, where I was sick once before without ever knowing it, I heard those myself when he tapped, and now he says he can hear a fresh one—ha, ‘fresh’ sounds quite peculiar in that context. But so far it’s merely a matter of acoustical observation, and we won’t have any real diagnostic certainty until I’m on my feet again and they X-ray me and take an interior snapshot. Then we’ll know for sure.”

  “Do you think so? Did you know photographic plates often show spots that are assumed to be cavities when they are mere shadows, and that sometimes when something is there, it doesn’t show any spots at all? Madonna, the photographic plate! There was a young numismatist here who was feverish; and since he was feverish one could clearly make out cavities on his photographic plate. They even claimed to have heard them! He was treated for phthisis—and died. The autopsy revealed there was nothing wrong with his lungs and that he had died of some coccus infection or other.”

  “Now, listen here, Herr Settembrini, you’re already talking about autopsies. I don’t think I’m that far along just yet.”

  “My good engineer, you are a wag.”

  “And you are a dyed-in-the-wool critic and skeptic, if I do say so! You don’t even believe in exact science. Does your plate show spots?”

  “Yes, it shows a few.”

  “And you really are ill, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, unfortunately I am rather ill,” Herr Settembrini replied and hung his head. There was a pause, broken by his cough. Hans Castorp looked up from his bed at his guest, whom he had reduced to silence. With two very simple questions, it seemed, he had dumbfounded him, refuted every possible argument, even the world republic and beautiful style. For his part, he did nothing to start up the conversation again.

  After a while Herr Settembrini sat up with a smile. “But tell me now, my good engineer,” he said, “how has your family taken the news?”

  “Which news do you mean? About the delay in my departure? Ah yes, my family. My family at home consists of three uncles—a great-uncle and his two sons, who are more like cousins to me. I have no other family than that, since I was orphaned very early. Taken the news? They really don’t know all that much yet. When I first had to take to my bed, I wrote them that I had a bad cold and could not travel. And yesterday, since it has been a little while now, I wrote again and said that in treating my catarrh Director Behrens had become interested in the state of my lungs and insisted I extend my stay until we could achieve some clarity about that. They will have taken it all quite calmly.”

  “And your new position? You spoke of a course of practical activity on which you intended to embark shortly.”

  “Yes, as an unsalaried engineer-in-training. I asked them to excuse me from my duties on the dock for now. You mustn’t suppose they are in any despair about it. They can get along without a trainee for as long as necessary.”

  “Fine, fine. So that from that side, everything is in order. Composure up and down the line. People are generally detached in your native land, are they not? Although they can be energetic, too!”

  “Oh yes, energetic, too, very energetic,” Hans Castorp said. From a distance now, he examined life in his homeland and found that his interlocutor had characterized it correctly. “Detached and energetic, you’re probably right there.”

  “Well,” Herr Settembrini continued, “should you remain somewhat longer, I have no doubt we shall all make your good uncle’s acquaintance—I mean your great-uncle’s. He’s certain to come up and check on your situation.”

  “Out of the question!” Hans Castorp cried. “Under no circumstances! Wild horses couldn’t get him here. My uncle is very apoplectic, you see—stout, hardly any neck. No, he requires sensible barometric pressure. He would do worse here than the Russian lady from the Baltic region. He’d be in an awful mess.”

  “What a disappointment. Apoplectic, you say? What good are detachment and energy in that case? Your good uncle is a rich man, I take it? And you are rich, too, aren’t you? People are generally rich where you come from.”

  Hans Castorp smiled at Herr Settembrini’s literary generalization and from his bed he looked again into the distance, to the world at home from which he was now removed. He thought back, trying to judge impersonally, and found that distance helped him to do so.

  “Some people are rich, yes,” he answered now, “and some are not. And if not—so much the worse. And me? I’m no millionaire, but what I have is well invested. I’m independent, have enough to live. But let’s leave me out of it. If you had said one has to be rich back there—I would have agreed with you. Because let us assume you are not rich, or stop being rich—you are in a sorry state! ‘Him? Does he still have some money left?’ they ask. Those are their very words, and that’s the face they make. I’ve heard those words often enough, and I realize now that they are engrained in my mind. And so they must have struck me as rather strange even though I was used to hearing them—otherwise they would not be engrained in my mind. Don’t you think? No, I don’t suppose that as a homo humanus you would feel at home with us. Even for someone like me whose home it is, it all seems rather crude sometimes—though I must add I’ve never personally had to suffer under it. If someone doesn’t make sure that the best, most expensive wines are served at his dinners, people simply don’t go, and his daughters end up old maids. That’s how people are. As I lie here now and look at it all from a distance, it does seem crude to me. What were the terms you used—detached and . . . And energetic! Fine, but what does that really mean? That means hard, cold. And what does hard and cold mean? It means cruel. The air down there is cruel, ruthless. Lying here and watching from a distance, it almost makes me shudder.”

  Settembrini listened, nodding. He nodded again when Hans Castorp finished his critical remarks for now and fell silent. Then he heaved a sigh and said, “I will not attempt to gloss over the specific forms life’s natural cruelty takes in your society. Be that as it may—the charge of cruelty is a rather sentimental charge. You would hardly have been able to make it there among your own people, for fear of looking ridiculous even to yourself. You have rightly left the making of that charge to life’s shirkers. For you to make it now is proof of a certain alienation that I would not like to see take root. Because a man who gets used to making that charge can very easily be lost to life, to the form of life for which he was born. Do you know what that means, my good engineer: ‘to be lost to life’? I know, I do indeed. I see it here every day. Within six months at the least, every young person who comes up here (and they are almost all young) has nothing in his head but flirting and taking his temperature. And within a year at the most, he will never be able to take hold of any other sort of life, but will find any other life ‘cruel’—or better, flawed and ignorant. You love stories—let me supply you with one. Let me tell you about a young man, someone’s husband and son, who was here for eleven months, whom I got to know. He was a little older than you, I believe—several years older in fact. He improved and was released on probation. He returned home and was received with open arms by his fami
ly—not just uncles, but a mother and a wife. He lay around the whole day with a thermometer in his mouth and paid no attention to anything else. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘You have to have lived up there to know how things really are. You people down here lack the basic concepts.’ It finally came to the point where his mother declared, ‘Go back up. There’s no living with you here.’ And he came back up. He returned to his ‘home.’ You do know, don’t you, that people call this ‘home’ once they’ve lived up here? He was a total stranger to his young wife, she likewise lacked the ‘basic concepts’—and decided not to join him. She realized he would stay on and find a lady friend at ‘home’ whose ‘basic concepts’ agreed with his own.”

  Hans Castorp had apparently been only half listening. He went on staring at the incandescent clarity of his white room, as if gazing into the distance beyond. His laugh came a little late now and he said, “He called it home, did he? That’s really rather sentimental, as you put it. Yes, you do know an endless number of stories. I was still considering what we were saying about hardness and cruelty. I’ve been mulling over the same thing in one form or another for the last few days. You see, a person probably needs a rather thick skin to be in perfect natural agreement with the way people think down there in the flatlands, asking questions like ‘Does he still have some money left?’ and making those faces they make. I never found it all that natural, even if I’m not a homo humanus. It has always struck me that way, although I’ve only noticed it just now, after the fact. Maybe my own unconscious tendency to illness had something to do with my finding it unnatural. I heard those old spots myself, and now Behrens has evidently found a fresh minor problem. It was something of a surprise, I suppose, and yet I really wasn’t all that astonished, either. I’ve never felt all that robust, actually; and besides, both my parents died so young—I was orphaned twice as a child, you know.”