The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  Hans Castorp replied that the director had taken the words right out of his mouth, had suggested precisely what he had wanted to ask. He would gratefully accept the offer. But who was this woman, this “Lady Overblown,” and how was he supposed to take the name?

  “Literally,” the director said. “No metaphors intended. You can let her tell you herself. “ A few steps, and they were at “Lady Overblown’s” room. Ordering his companion to wait, the director thrust his way through both doors. As Behrens entered, there was a burst of bright, merry laughter inside the room, but any words were broken off as the door closed. The visitor was greeted by the same laughter when, a few minutes later, he was allowed to enter and Behrens introduced him to a blond woman half sitting up in bed, with pillows stuffed behind her, her blue eyes gazing at him with curiosity. She seemed fidgety and laughed incessantly—a very high, silvery-bright, bubbly laugh that left her fighting for breath, which only made her seem that much more nervous, excited, and titillated. She also laughed at the director’s distinctive turns of phrase as he presented the visitor and then turned to leave. Waving good-bye, she called out “adieu” and “many thanks” and “see you soon” several times. She now sighed a musical sigh and laughed a silvery arpeggio, pressing her hands to her chest heaving beneath her batiste nightshirt—she was also apparently having difficulty keeping her legs still. Her name was Frau Zimmermann.

  Hans Castorp knew her vaguely by sight. She had sat at the same table with Frau Salomon and the gluttonous student for a few weeks, and was always laughing. Then she had vanished without the young man’s paying much attention. She might have left the Berghof, he thought—that is, if he gave any thought at all to her disappearance. Now he found her here, under the name of “Lady Overblown”—and was still waiting for an explanation of that.

  “Ha ha, ha ha,” she bubbled gleefully, her breast fluttering. “A terribly funny man, our Behrens, a fabulously funny, amusing man—laugh till your sides split. Do have a seat, Herr Kasten, Herr Carsten, or whatever your name was. You do have a funny name, ha ha, hee hee. You must excuse me. Do sit down on that chair at the foot of the bed, but pay no mind if my legs start kicking, I really can’t . . . ha ha, aaah”—she sighed with an open mouth and then went on bubbling—“really can’t seem to help it.”

  She was almost pretty, had clear, rather too defined, but agreeable features and a little double chin. But her lips were bluish, and the tip of her nose had taken on the same hue, evidently from a lack of oxygen. Her hands were thin and looked very attractive against the lace cuffs of her nightshirt, but she could keep them still no more than she could her feet. Her neck was girlish, with dimples at the collarbone, and her breasts appeared soft and young under the linen sheets, kept in constant shallow motion by both laughter and the struggle for air. Hans Castorp decided he would send her a potted plant, too, or bring her a dewy, fragrant bouquet, imported from the nurseries of Nice or Cannes. With some misgivings, he joined Frau Zimmermann in her volatile, edgy good cheer.

  “So you’re visiting high-ranking patients, are you?” she asked. “How amusing and kind of you, ha ha, ha ha. But you should know that I don’t rank very high on the fever chart—which is to say, I had almost none, really, until recently. Until this little adventure. Just listen, and tell me if it isn’t the funniest thing you’ve ever heard in your life.” And now, struggling for air and laughing with many a trill and grace note, she told him what had happened to her.

  She had come up here only slightly ill—but ill, all the same, otherwise she would never have come; perhaps more than just slightly, but closer to that than seriously ill. Pneumothorax—the new surgical technique that had quickly gained such widespread popularity—had proved marvelously effective in her case. The operation had been a complete success; Frau Zimmermann’s condition had improved most gratifyingly. Her husband—for she was married, though she had no children—was told he could expect her home in three to four months. And so, just for the fun of it, she had made a little trip to Zurich—for no other reason than to amuse herself. And she had done so to her heart’s content; meanwhile, however, she became aware that she needed a refill and had entrusted a local doctor with the job. A nice, funny young man—ha ha ha, ha ha ha—and what had happened? He had overblown her! There was no other way to put it, the word itself said it all. He had meant well, too well, but had not really understood his task. The upshot was that she had come back up here in an overblown state, with constriction of the heart and shortness of breath—ha! hee hee hee—and Behrens had sworn like a trooper and sent her straight to bed. Because she was now seriously ill—not a patient of highest rank, but one whose case was botched and bungled. Ha ha ha—look at his face, what a funny face! And pointing a finger at Hans Castorp, she laughed so hard at the face he was making that her forehead began to turn purple. But the funniest thing of all, she said, had been the way Behrens had turned the air blue with his ranting and raving. From the moment she had realized she was overblown, just picturing what he would do had set her laughing. “You are literally hovering between life and death,” he had shouted, not bothering to mince words. What a bear he was—ha ha ha, hee hee hee—Herr Carsten really must excuse her.

  It was not clear why the director’s comments had sent her into gales of laughter. Was it because he had “turned the air blue” and she did not really believe him—or that she did believe him, as she surely must, but found the state of “hovering between life and death” too funny for words? Hans Castorp had the impression that the latter was the case and that these sparkling trills and grace notes of laughter were due solely to childish giddiness and silly ignorance—and he did not approve. He sent her flowers all the same—but never saw gleeful Frau Zimmermann again, either. For after being kept under oxygen for several days, she had died in the arms of her husband, who had been called to her bedside by telegram. “A jumbo-size goose,” the director had volunteered in summary when he told Hans Castorp the news.

  But even before her death, Hans Castorp—in a spirit of sympathetic enterprise and with the help of the director and the nursing staff—had made the acquaintance of other seriously ill patients in the sanatorium, and Joachim had to come along. He had to come along to visit Tous-les-deux’s son, the one still left her—the other’s room had long since been turned upside down and fumigated with H2CO. There was also a boy named Teddy, whose condition had recently turned so serious that he had been transferred here from a boarding-school sanatorium called the “Fridericianum.” Then there was a Russo-German insurance agent named Anton Karlovitch Ferge, a good-natured martyr; and the unhappy, but very flirtatious Frau von Mallinckrodt, who like the others received flowers and whom Hans Castorp had even fed porridge on several occasions, with Joachim looking on. By now they had gained the reputation of Good Samaritans and Hospitallers.

  The day came when Settembrini broached the topic with Hans Castorp. “Zounds, my good engineer. I’ve been hearing the most curious things about your behavior. You have thrown yourself into deeds of mercy? Are you pursuing justification by good works?”

  “Nothing worth mentioning, Herr Settembrini. Nothing to it, really, nothing to make a fuss over. My cousin and I . . .”

  “Oh, leave your cousin out of this. Though you both may have become the topic of conversation, it is you we are concerned with, that much is certain. The lieutenant is a respectable fellow, but his is a simple temperament, not prone to spiritual dangers—the sort that never perturbs a teacher. You’ll not convince me he’s in charge here. You are the more important personality—and the one in greater danger. You are, if I may put it that way, one of life’s problem children, a fellow whom others must look after. And you did once tell me that I might look after you.”

  “I most certainly did, Herr Settembrini. Once and for all. It’s very kind of you. And ‘life’s problem children’ is prettily put. The things you writers come up with! I don’t rightly know if I should consider myself flattered by the term, but it does sound pretty, I must say.
Yes, well, I have been concerning myself somewhat with ‘death’s children’—that’s probably what you mean. Now and then, when I have time, just in passing, as it were, and not that I neglect my own rest-cure duties, I look in on the serious and critical cases—you know, the ones who come here not for their own amusement and a loose life, but to die.”

  “It is written, however: let the dead bury their dead,” the Italian said.

  Hans Castorp raised his arms and made a face that said that a great many things were written, on both sides of the question, and that it was difficult to decide what was right and abide by it. But of course, the organ-grinder would voice a disruptive point of view—that was to be expected. Yet even though Hans Castorp was prepared, as he had been all along, to lend him an ear, to consider his lectures worth listening to—quite noncommittally—and to let himself be pedagogically influenced, that in no way meant that, on the basis of a strictly educational point of view, he should desist from his enterprise, which still seemed to have an important impact, to be beneficial in some vague way—despite Madame Gerngross and her talk about a “nice little fleert,” despite the businesslike personality of poor young Rotbein or the foolish trillings of Lady Overblown.

  Tous-les-deux’s son was named Lauro. He had also been sent flowers—violets from Nice, heavy with the scent of earth—“from two fellow patients, with best wishes for recovery”; anonymity, however, had now become merely a matter of form, and everyone knew from whom such gifts came. And so when Tous-les-deux—the pallid, black-clad mother from Mexico—happened to meet the cousins in the corridor, she expressed her gratitude, chiefly by a series of mournfully becoming gestures, and in her clanking French asked for them to receive in person the thanks of her son—de son seul et dernier fils qui allait mourir aussi. They did so at once. Lauro turned out to be an astonishingly pretty young man with glowing eyes, an aquiline nose with flared nostrils, and splendid lips above which sprouted a black moustache; but he carried on in such a dramatic, boastful way that the visitors—Hans Castorp no less than Joachim Ziemssen—were both happy to close the patient’s door behind them again. During their visit, Tous-les-deux—wrapped in her black cashmere shawl, a black veil knotted under her chin, her narrow brow creased by a frown, enormous bags of skin drooping under her jet-black eyes—had paced the room with knees slightly bent; now and then she would approach the two cousins sitting beside the bed and, with her careworn mouth turned down at one corner, repeat her one tragic, parrotlike sentence: “Tous les dé, vous comprenez, messiés . . . Premièrement l’un et maintenant l’autre.” Meanwhile, pretty Lauro had gushed on and on in surging, clanking, and unbearably high-flown French phrases about how he intended to die a hero’s death, comme héros, à l’espagnol, just like his brother, de même que son fier jeune frère, Fernando, who likewise had died a Spanish hero. And he went on like that—speaking with broad gestures, ripping back his shirt to expose his yellow chest to the fatal blow—until a coughing fit stifled his rodomontade, bringing delicate, rusty-colored froth to his lips and giving the cousins an excuse to withdraw on tiptoe.

  They said nothing further about their visit with Lauro, and even in the quiet of their own rooms, they refrained from judging his behavior. They both enjoyed, however, their visits with Anton Karlovitch Ferge from Saint Petersburg, a fellow with a huge good-natured moustache and a protruding Adam’s apple that somehow seemed equally good-natured; he lay there in his bed, recovering very slowly and with great difficulty from an attempted pneumothorax, which, Herr Ferge said, had come within an inch of costing him his life. It had been a severe shock to his system, a pleural shock, which was known to happen sometimes during the fashionable operation. His had been an exceptionally dangerous pleural shock, a total collapse, an alarming swoon—in a word, so severe that the operation had to be broken off and postponed for now.

  Whenever Herr Ferge spoke about these events, his good-natured gray eyes grew wide and his face grew pallid—it must have been horrible. “With no general anesthetic, gentlemen. Fine, it’s not permitted in cases like ours, we can’t handle that—which is understandable, and so as a reasonable man you reconcile yourself to the fact. But the local does not go deep, gentlemen, it numbs only the outermost layer of muscle, you feel them make the incision, although only as a bruising pressure. I’m lying there with my face covered so I can’t see anything, and the assistant is holding me on the right and the head nurse on the left. It’s as if someone is pressing me, bruising me—it is the muscle tissue that they open up and hold back with clamps. And then I hear the director say, ‘So!’ And at that same moment, gentlemen, he begins to explore the pleural lining with a blunt instrument—it has to be blunt so it doesn’t puncture too soon; he explores to find the right place to make his puncture and let in the gas, but the way he does it, the way he rubs the instrument around the pleural lining—gentlemen, gentlemen, that’s what did me in. It was all over for me—simply indescribable. The pleural lining, gentlemen, should never be touched—it ought not, cannot, be touched. It is taboo. The pleural lining is covered by flesh, isolated, inaccessible—for good and all. And now he had exposed it, was exploring it. Gentlemen, it made me sick to my stomach. It was ghastly, gentlemen. I never in my life thought that such a totally hideous, filthy feeling could even exist, except perhaps in hell. I fainted dead away, fell into three faints at once—a green, a brown, and a purple. And it stank at the bottom—the pleural shock affected my sense of smell, gentlemen. There was the unbearable stench of hydrogen sulfide, just like hell itself must stink. And as I blacked out, I heard myself laughing—not a human laugh, but the most indecent, disgusting laugh I’ve ever heard in my life. Because when they explore your pleural lining, gentlemen, it’s as if you are being tickled in the most infamous, intense, inhuman way—that’s just what the damn, disgraceful torment feels like. That’s what pleural shock is, and may the good Lord spare you the experience.”

  Anton Karlovitch Ferge came back again and again—and always with that same pallor of horror—to his “filthy” ordeal, reliving many of its torments every time he told about it. He had explained from the start that, being an ordinary man, “higher things” were utterly foreign to him. They shouldn’t make any special intellectual or emotional demands of him, and he wouldn’t make any of them. But once that was settled, he could tell some very interesting tales about the life he had led before illness wrenched him out of it—the life of a traveling fire-insurance salesman. With Petersburg as home base, he had traveled the length and breadth of Russia, visiting insured factories and ferreting out those in dubious financial condition—because statistics showed that fires occurred most often in factories where business was going badly. Which was why he was sent to investigate each factory on some pretext or other, and report back to his bank, so that they could have time to prevent serious losses by reinsuring or spreading the risk. He told about trips across the great empire in winter, about traveling all night in the incredible cold, stretched out in a sleigh under sheepskins, and when he awoke he could see the eyes of wolves glowing like stars out there in the snow. He had brought boxes of provisions with him, frozen cabbage soup and white bread, which he would thaw out and enjoy whenever they stopped to change horses, and the bread would be as fresh as on the day it was baked. The worst thing was if a sudden thaw set in—then the chunks of cabbage soup he had brought along would melt and leak.

  And so Herr Ferge would tell his tales, occasionally interrupting himself to heave a sigh and remark how everything was quite fine now—if only they didn’t try to perform another pneumothorax on him. He never spoke of “higher things,” but simply stuck to the facts, and it was a delight to listen to him—particularly for Hans Castorp, who thought it useful to hear about the Russian Empire and the life lived there, about samovars, piroshki, Cossacks, and wooden churches with so many onion-shaped steeples that they looked like mushroom colonies. He also had Herr Ferge tell them about the people who lived there, people from the Far North—and so all the more exot
ic in Hans Castorp’s eyes—with Asia in their blood, prominent cheekbones, and a Finno-Mongolian set to their eyes. He listened to it all with anthropological interest, even asked to hear some Russian spoken as well; and the muddy, barbaric, boneless tongue from the East flowed swiftly out of Herr Ferge’s good-natured protruding Adam’s apple and from under his good-natured moustache. And youth being what it is, Hans Castorp felt all the more entertained because he was now romping in pedagogically forbidden territory.

  They often dropped by to spend fifteen minutes with Anton Karlovitch Ferge. From time to time they also visited Teddy, the boy from the Fridericianum, an elegant, refined, blond fourteen-year-old, who had a private nurse and wore white silk tie-string pajamas. He was an orphan, but rich, as he himself admitted. He was waiting now for a serious operation—they hoped to remove some of his worm-eaten parts—but on days when he was feeling better he would sometimes leave his bed for an hour, put on a handsome, sporty outfit, and join the social whirl downstairs. The ladies liked to tease him, and he enjoyed listening to their conversations—when, for example, the talk turned to Einhuf the lawyer, the young lady in bloomers, and Fränzchen Oberdank. Then he would go lie down again. And so Teddy idled his time away elegantly, making it clear that he expected nothing more of life than this.

  In room number 50 lay Frau von Mallinckrodt—Natalie was her first name. She had black eyes and wore golden earrings; a flirt who loved her finery, she was nevertheless a perfect Job, a Lazarus in a female body, whom God had visited with every sort of affliction. Her organism seemed to be so inundated by toxins that she was ravaged by numerous illnesses, sometimes alternately, sometimes all at once. Her skin was a particular problem, great portions of it subject to a tormenting itch that erupted here and there into the open sores of eczema, even around the mouth—which was why she found it difficult to use a spoon. Frau von Mallinckrodt suffered by turns from various internal inflammations—of the pleura, the kidneys, the lungs, the periosteum, even of the brain, which would cause her to lapse into unconsciousness; a weak heart, the result of fever and constant pain, was her greatest worry, for it sometimes resulted in food becoming lodged at the top of the esophagus, making it difficult for her to swallow normally. In short, the woman’s life was a horror. She was all alone in the world, too, having left her husband and children—as she freely admitted to the cousins—for another man (still half a boy), only to be left in turn by her lover. She now had no home, although she was not penniless—her former husband saw to that. She did not take herself seriously and therefore did not let false pride prevent her from making full use of his decency—or was it enduring love? Well aware that she was a faithless and sinful woman, she bore all the plagues of Job with amazing patience and poise, with a fiery female’s elemental powers of resistance; she triumphed over the misery of her dark-skinned body, even turned a white gauze bandage, which she was forced to wear wrapped around her head for some awful reason, into a becoming piece of attire. She was constantly changing her jewelry—beginning each morning with corals and ending each evening with pearls. She had been delighted by the flowers Hans Castorp had sent, regarding them as a gesture more of gallantry than charity, and she invited the two young men for tea at her bedside—drinking hers from a spouted cup; her fingers, including thumbs, were adorned to the knuckles with opals, amethysts, and emeralds. With golden rings dangling at her ears, she quickly told the cousins what had happened to her: about her respectable, but boring husband, her equally respectable and boring children, who had turned out just like their father and whom she had never especially warmed to, and about the half-grown boy with whom she had run off and whose poetic displays of affection she praised at length. But by ruses and coercion, his family had taken him away from her—and the lad had probably been. repulsed by her illness, too, which by then had begun to evidence itself in various violent eruptions. Were the gentlemen repulsed by it, too? she asked coquettishly; and her fiery femininity triumphed over the eczema covering half her face.