The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  “And here alone comes Baubo now,” Settembrini quoted, and added the next line, too, in his clear, graphic voice—its rhyme was “sow.” Frau Stöhr heard that—called him an Italian turkey, told him to keep his “filthy jokes” to himself, and, availing herself of the license of carnival, used familiar pronouns. But then, that form of address had gained general usage during the meal. Settembrini was about to reply, when he was interrupted by the racket of loud laughter coming from the lobby. Everyone in the dining hall looked up.

  Followed by other guests emerging from the social rooms, two curious figures now made their entrance—they had apparently only just finished with their costumes. The one was dressed in a deaconess’s black uniform, but with white horizontal stripes sewn onto it from collar to hem—short stripes, set close together, with a few longer ones here and there, like the markings on a thermometer. She kept one forefinger pressed to her pale lips and carried a fever chart in her right hand. The second person was costumed all in blue—eyebrows and lips tinted blue, the whole face and neck in fact painted blue, a blue woolen cap pulled down over one ear, and a case or slipcover of glazed blue linen, all one piece, pulled down over him, then tied with a string at the ankles and stuffed with pillows to round things off at the stomach. They recognized these two as Frau Iltis and Herr Albin. Both had paper signs hung around their necks, on which were written “Silent Sister” and “Blue Henry.” Paired together and moving in a kind of waddle, they circled the room.

  To great applause—and clamoring cheers! Frau Stöhr, her broom tucked under one arm, put both hands on her knees and broke into unrestrained, vulgar laughter—her role as a charwoman gave her such license. Only Settembrini showed no response. He cast the winning costumes one quick glance, and then his lips grew very thin beneath the lovely upward sweep of his moustache.

  Among those who had found their way back from the social rooms in the wake of Mr. Blue and Miss Silent was Clavdia Chauchat. Accompanied by frizzy-haired Tamara and her tablemate with the concave chest, a Bulgarian in evening dress, she crossed the room, moving toward the table where Gänser and Kleefeld were sitting—and brushing past Hans Castorp’s table in her new dress. She stopped now to chat, her hands behind her back, her narrow eyes laughing; her escorts, however, joined the allegorical spooks and followed them out of the room. Frau Chauchat had donned a carnival hat as well—not one she had bought, but the kind children make, a simple tricorn of folded white paper set rakishly to one side—and it looked quite marvelous on her. The skirt of her dark golden-brown silk dress reached only to her ankles and was slightly bouffant. We shall say nothing more about her arms—which were bare to the shoulder.

  “Look closer now, my lad!” Hans Castorp heard Herr Settembrini say, as if from some great distance—his eyes were following her as she now left the dining hall by way of the glass door. “’Tis Lilith.”

  “Who?” Hans Castorp asked.

  The question delighted the man of literature. He replied, “The first wife Adam had. You’d best beware . . .”

  Besides the two of them, only Dr. Blumenkohl was still in his seat, at the far end of the table. The rest of the diners, including Joachim, had moved on to the social rooms.

  “You’re full of poetry and verses this evening,” Hans Castorp said. “What’s all this about Lilli? You mean Adam was married twice? That’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

  “According to Hebrew tradition he was. Lilith then became a wraith who haunts young men by night—her beautiful hair makes her particularly dangerous.”

  “Why, how disgusting! A wraith with beautiful hair. You simply can’t stomach things like that, can you? And so here you come and turn the lights back on, so to speak, so you can set young men back on the right path—isn’t that what you’re up to, Lodovico?” Hans Castorp said giddily. He had drunk quite a bit of burgundy and champagne.

  “Now listen—that’s enough of that, my good engineer!” Settembrini commanded with a scowl. “You will please use forms of address appropriate to the educated West. No first names. Formal pronouns, if you please. What you are trying to do there doesn’t suit you at all.”

  “But why not? It’s Mardi Gras! It’s common practice on an evening like this.”

  “Yes, just to add a little uncivil excitement to things. For people to use informal pronouns or first names when they have no real reason to do so is a repulsively barbaric practice, a slovenly game, a way of playing with the givens of civilization and human progress, against both of which it is directed—shamelessly, insolently directed. Please, do not presume that in calling you ‘my lad,’ I was addressing you in that fashion. I was merely quoting a passage from the masterpiece of your national literature. I was speaking poetically, as it were.”

  “So was I. And I’ll go on speaking more or less poetically, too—because the moment seems to call for it, that’s why I am speaking this way. I’m not saying I find it all that natural and easy to use familiar pronouns. On the contrary, I have to overcome my own resistance, give myself a poke just to be able to do it. But now that I’ve given myself a poke, I’ll go on using them quite happily, with all my heart.”

  “With all your heart?”

  “With all my heart, yes, please believe me. We’ve been up here together for so long now—seven months, if you stop to count—which isn’t all that much by our standards up here, but when viewed from down below, now that I think back on it, it’s quite a long time. Well, and so we’ve spent it here with one another, because life has brought us together here, have seen one another almost every day and had interesting conversations, some on subjects I would not have understood anything about down below. But I certainly have up here—they were very important and relevant, so that whenever we discussed something I paid strict attention. What I mean is, whenever you as a homo humanus were explaining things to me—because I didn’t have all that much to contribute, of course, given my previous inexperience, and could only feel that everything you said was well worth listening to. About Carducci—but that was the least of it. For instance, about how the world republic is bound up with beautiful style or how time and human progress are related—because if there were no time there couldn’t be any human progress, and the world would be just an old water hole, a stinking pond. What would I have known about all that without you! And so I’m simply addressing you with personal pronouns, I can’t really help it, you’ll have to excuse me—I didn’t know how to go about it any other way. I’m not good at that. There you sit and here I am speaking to you like this, and that’s that. You’re not just anybody, a face with a name, you’re a representative of something, Herr Settembrini, a representative here and now and at my side—that’s what you are,” Hans Castorp declared, slamming the palm of his hand on the tablecloth. “And now I want to thank you,” he went on, shoving his glass of champagne and burgundy up against Herr Settembrini’s coffee cup, as if to toast him there on the table, “to thank you for having been so kind as to look after me for the past seven months—a young donkey with all sorts of new experiences coming at me—for lending a helping hand in my exercises and experiments and trying to play a corrective role in my life, quite sine pecunia, sometimes with stories, sometimes more abstractly. I have the clear feeling that the moment has come to thank you for all that, and to ask for your forgiveness for the times I was a poor student, one of ‘life’s problem children,’ as you put it. I was very touched by your saying that, and it still touches me whenever I think of it. A problem child, that’s certainly what I’ve been for you and your pedagogic streak—you spoke about that the very first day. And of course, that’s one of the connections you’ve taught me about—between humanism and pedagogy. And I would come up with even more if you gave me a little time. Forgive me, then, and don’t think badly of me. To your health, Lodovico—I wish you long life. I empty my glass in honor of your literary efforts to eradicate human suffering!” he concluded, and throwing his head back, he downed his burgundy and champagne in two great gulps. “And now
let’s go join the others.”

  “My good engineer, whatever has got into you?” the Italian asked, his eyes full of amazement, rising to leave the table as well. “Those sound like words of farewell.”

  “No—why should it be a farewell?” Hans Castorp said, ducking the issue, not just in a metaphorical sense with his words, but also physically, swinging his upper body around in a wide curve and taking the arm of Fräulein Engelhart, who had come to fetch them. The director was personally tapping a bowl of carnival punch that had been donated by the management, she reported. The gentlemen, she said, would have to come with her at once if they hoped to have a glass of it. And so they left together.

  And indeed, there in the middle of his guests, all holding out their little punch glasses to him, Director Behrens was standing beside a round table with a white tablecloth, ladling steaming liquid from a large bowl. He, too, had spruced up his appearance a little for Mardi Gras, for in addition to his white clinical smock, which, as a man ever on professional call, he wore today as always, he had donned a genuine Turkish fez, scarlet red with a black tassel dangling over one ear—costume enough to lend his already striking appearance an even more curious and outlandish look. The white smock emphasized the director’s height; and if you took into account the arched neck and pictured him instead pulled up to full height, he seemed a man almost larger than life, topped by a small, colorful head with very peculiar features. At least Hans Castorp thought that face had never looked so odd as it did this evening under its foolish headgear: that snub-nosed, flat physiognomy, purplish and hectic, with blue, watery eyes bulging beneath very blond brows, and a pale, skewed, short-cropped moustache above the hitch of his lips. Bending back from the steam eddying up from the punch bowl, he let the brown liquid—a sugary arrack punch—fall in long arcs from the ladle into the glasses held out to receive it, gushing the whole time in his high-spirited jargon, so that the process was greeted by salvos of laughter all around.

  “Old Scratch himself atop them all,” Settembrini explained softly, gesturing toward the director—and then was dragged away from Hans Castorp’s side. Dr. Krokowski was on hand as well. Short, stout, and stolid, his black shiny smock draped over his shoulders so that the sleeves hung empty in domino fashion, he twisted his wrist around and held his glass up at eye-level as he chatted merrily with a group of cross-dressed masqueraders. Music was struck up. The girl with the face of a tapir played Handel’s Largo on the violin, accompanied on the piano by the man from Mannheim. This was followed by a Grieg sonata—salon music of a Nordic nature, which met with polite applause, even from the costumed and uncostumed patients seated now, bottles in ice-buckets at their sides, at the two bridge tables that had been set up. The doors stood open, and several guests were standing out in the lobby as well. One group next to the round punch table was watching the director, who was introducing them to a parlor game. He stood there bent down over the table, but with his head held to one side so that everyone could see that he had his eyes closed, and drew blindly with a pencil on the back side of a calling card; and without any help from his eyes, his massive hand traced an outline, the profile of a pig—more simplified and slightly idealized than realistic, but it was undoubtedly a rudimentary pig that he managed to assemble under such handicapped circumstances. It was a clever stunt, and he did it well. The little squinty eye had ended up in approximately the correct position, a little too far back from the snout, but more or less in place; and the same could be said of the pointed ear atop the head or the little legs dangling from the rounded belly; and the opposing arch of the spine continued in the charming little spiral ringlet of a tail. When he finished, people cried, “Ah!” and crowded forward to try it, eager to emulate the master. The problem was that few of them could have drawn a pig with their eyes open, let alone closed. And what monsters were born! They lacked all coherence. The eyes landed outside the head, the legs inside the paunch, which did not come close to joining the rest, and the tail spiraled off alone into nowhere—an independent arabesque, with no organic connection to the amorphous body. They laughed so hard they almost burst. Others joined the group. The cardplayers took notice and came over now, curious, still holding their cards in their hands like fans. The onlookers watched the eyelids of each contestant, making sure there was no peeking, which several were tempted to try in their helplessness; they giggled and snorted while each candidate blundered blindly at the task, then crowed with laughter when he finally opened his eyes and gazed down at his absurd botched job. Seduced by overconfidence, everyone had to try his hand. The calling card, although large, was soon so full on both sides that the abortive attempts overlapped. But the director sacrificed a second one from his case, on which Prosecutor Paravant, after thinking the task through, tried to draw his pig in one continuous line—with the result that his failure exceeded all others. The decorative design he produced did not even vaguely resemble a pig—or anything else in this world, for that matter. Hulloos, laughter, and raucous congratulations! Someone brought a menu from the dining hall, so that several people, both men and women, could try at once, and for each contestant there was an audience keeping a close eye out and someone waiting to grab the pencil being used. There were only three pencils, belonging to various guests, and people snatched them out of one another’s hands. Having introduced his parlor game and seeing that it was a hit, the director departed with his aide-de-camp in tow.

  Hans Castorp joined the crowd to watch a contestant, stood looking over Joachim’s shoulder, propping one elbow against it while holding his chin tight in all five fingers, his other hand braced at his hip. He talked and laughed. He wanted to draw, too, demanded loudly he be allowed to, and was given the pencil, already just a stump of a thing that you could barely hold between your thumb and forefinger. He cursed the pencil, raised his head toward the ceiling and closed his eyes; loudly damning the useless pencil again and cursing just in general, he hastily drew some atrocity on the paper, at one point missing it entirely and ending up on the tablecloth. “That doesn’t count!” he shouted amid well-deserved laughter. “How can I possibly draw with a thing like that—to hell with it!” And he tossed the offending stump into the punch bowl. “Who has a decent pencil? Who’ll lend me one? I have to try again. A pencil, a real pencil! Does anyone have a pencil?” he called out to all sides, keeping his left forearm propped against the tabletop, but raising his right hand and shaking it in the air. No one had a pencil for him. He turned around and walked back into the room, continuing to shout—headed directly toward Clavdia Chauchat, who, as he well knew, was standing just beyond the portieres in the little salon, smiling and watching the goings-on around the punch bowl.

  Behind him he heard someone calling him—in melodious foreign words: “Eh! Ingegnere! Aspetti! Che cosa fa! Ingegnere! Un po’ di ragione, sa! Ma è matto questo ragazzo!” But he drowned out the voice by shouting even more loudly himself, and Herr Settembrini could now be seen flinging one hand above his head at the end of an extended arm, a common enough gesture in his homeland (but one whose meaning is hard to put into words). And uttering a long drawn-out “Ehh—!” he left the Mardi Gras festivities.

  Hans Castorp, however, was standing in the brick schoolyard, staring from close up into a pair of blue-gray-green, epicanthic eyes above prominent cheekbones; and he said, “Do you have a pencil, perhaps?”

  He was pale as death, as pale as on the day when he had returned from his solitary walk, still splattered with blood, to attend the lecture. Nerves controlling the blood vessels to his face were so successful at their task that the skin of his young face was drained of blood, turned pallid and cold, making the nose pinched and the area under his eyes so leaden that he looked almost like a corpse. But Hans Castorp’s sympathetic nerves kept his heart thumping so hard that regular respiration was out of the question, and a shudder ran over the young man, the work of his body’s sebaceous glands, which stood erect now, along with their hair follicles.

  The woman in the paper t
ricorn looked him up and down—and her smile betrayed neither pity nor concern for his ravaged condition. Her sex knows no pity or concern when staring at the horrors of passion, an elemental emotion with which the female is apparently much more familiar than the male, who is not at all at ease with it—and if she finds him in that state, she never fails to greet him with mockery and schadenfreude. But then, he would certainly not have thanked her for either pity or concern, either.

  “Do you mean me?” the bare-armed patient replied, in response to the familiar pronoun in his question. “Yes, I might.” At most, her smile and voice suggested the kind of excitement that comes when the first words in a long, silent relationship are spoken at last—a subtle excitement secretly incorporating into this one moment everything that has happened until now. “You are very ambitious . . . You are . . . very . . . eager,” she said, likewise using personal pronouns, continuing to mock him in her exotic accent with its strange r and stranger open e, and stressing the word “ambitious” on the first syllable, so that in her opaque, pleasantly husky voice it sounded like a word from her mother tongue. She rummaged in her leather handbag, peered down into it, first pulled out a handkerchief, from which she then extracted a silver pencil-holder, a slight, fragile trinket, never intended for serious use. That pencil long ago, the first one, had been more straightforward, handier.

  “Voilà,” she said and picked the little pencil up by the tip, holding it between thumb and forefinger and waggling it back and forth.