by Thomas Mann
How often had he looked at it and pressed it to his lips during the time that had passed since then, bringing forth its changes—changes, for instance, like getting used to life up here without Clavdia Chauchat present in a shared space. And it had happened more quickly than one would have thought: time here was especially conducive to it, was purposely organized so that you got used to things—if only used to not getting used to them. The rattling slam at the start of each of the five sumptuous meals could no longer be reckoned with, it happened no more; and now, somewhere terribly far away, Frau Chauchat was slamming doors—it was an expression of her character, intermingled and bound up with her existence and her illness, much as time was bound up with bodies in space. Perhaps that, that alone, was her illness. But although she was invisibly absent, at the same time she was also invisibly present in Hans Castorp’s mind—as the genius and guardian angel of the place, whom he had known and possessed for one wicked, riotously sweet hour, an hour quite incongruous with some delicate little song from the flatlands, and whose interior silhouette he now bore next to a heart that had been sorely overtaxed for the last nine months.
During that hour his twitching lips had stammered, in a half-stifled, half-unconscious way, a great many riotous things, some in a foreign tongue, some in his own: suggestions, proposals, mad plans, and ambitions, which had quite rightfully been totally rejected—for instance, that he might hope to accompany this guardian angel, travel with it beyond the Caucasus, to the place its free spirit had chosen as its next abode, never to be separated from it again, along with a good many other similar irresponsible ideas. The only thing this prosaic young man had retrieved from his hour of adventure, however, had been the shadowy token of a pledge—the possibility, bordering on a probability, that Frau Chauchat would return here, sooner or later, for a fourth stay, just as the illness, which indeed gave her such freedom, might dispose. But whether sooner or later, Hans Castorp would in any case “be gone long before that,” as she told him again as they parted; and the note of sarcasm in her prophecy would have been even harder to bear had he not understood that some prophecies are made not so that something may come true, but as a kind of spell to prevent it from coming true. By predicting what form the future will take, prophets of this sort mock the future by shaming it into not taking that form. And if in the course of both conversations, recorded and unrecorded, the genius of the place had called him, Hans Castorp, a “joli bourgeois au petit endroit humide”—in its way, a translation of Settembrini’s phrase “problem child of life”—the question then was: which part of this mixed character would prove the stronger, the bourgeois or the other? And the genius had likewise failed to take into consideration that, just as it had departed and returned on several occasions, so, too, Hans Castorp might also return at just the right moment—though, to be sure, the only reason he was still sitting here now was so that he would never have to return again, that being, after all, as for so many people up here, the point of his sojourn.
One mocking prophecy from Mardi Gras had been fulfilled: Hans Castorp’s fever chart had taken a turn for the worse; he had solemnly traced the initial steep, jagged upward curve, the few halting steps back down, and the steady high plateau that undulated gently above its previous standard level. It was a fever which, in its stubbornness and seriousness, was out of all proportion to any medical finding, or so the director said. “More toxic than we gave you credit for, my friend,” he declared. “Well, let’s give injections a try! Those will do the trick. In three or four months you’ll be fit as a fiddle, if the undersigned has anything to do with it.” And so from then on, twice a week, right after his morning constitutional on Wednesday and Saturday, Hans Castorp had to report to the lab for his shot.
Both doctors administered the drug, sometimes the one, sometimes the other, although the director was a virtuoso at it, inserting the needle and squeezing the syringe in one flourish. He paid no attention, however, to where he was sticking the needle, so that it could hurt like hell, leaving a little hardened spot that stung for a long time. The injections were also very hard on the entire system, as much a shock to the nerves as a major athletic feat would have been, which was a token of their inherent potency, likewise evidenced by an immediate, though momentary, rise in temperature. The director had predicted it all, and it all happened as per regulation, with no deviations from the norm worth mentioning. When it finally came your turn, the procedure was quickly taken care of; quick as a flash the antitoxin was under your skin, either in the thigh or arm. Now and then, when the director was in the mood and not melancholy from tobacco, he might actually use the occasion of an injection for a little conversation, which Hans Castorp knew how to steer along the following lines:
“I still enjoy thinking back to that pleasant little chat we had quite by happenstance over coffee in your rooms that day last autumn, Director Behrens. Why, only yesterday, or maybe it was the day before, I was reminding my cousin of it.”
“Seven on the Gaffky,” the director said. “Latest results. The lad simply will not detoxify. And all the same, pesters and badgers me worse than before to let him go dangle a sword at his side, the nincompoop. Carries on about his fifteen months as if they were eons he had to kill. He is determined to leave, one way or the other—has he told you that, too? You should give him a talking-to, speak your mind, straight out. It will be the ruin of the lad if he starts filling that spot on the upper right with your lugubrious fog too soon. A swashbuckler like that doesn’t need a great deal of gray matter, but as the steadier of the two, the civilian, the man with a solid education, you should set his head square on his shoulders before he does anything stupid.”
“But I do that, Director Behrens,” Hans Castorp replied, keeping the reins in his hands. “I do it whenever he kicks up a row, and I do think he’ll listen to reason. But the examples we have here before our eyes are not always the best ones, and that’s what does the damage. People are constantly leaving—leaving for the flatlands, all on their own and without permission, and there’s even a little celebration, as if it were a genuine departure, which can be tempting for someone of weaker character. Just recently, for example . . . who was it that left just recently? A lady, from the Good Russian table, Madame Chauchat. Took off for Daghestan, I heard. Well, I don’t know about the climate in Daghestan, although I’m sure it’s less detrimental than up on the coast. But by our definition up here it is the flatlands, even if it may have mountains, in the strict geographic sense—I’m not all that well informed. But how is anyone who’s not really cured supposed to live there, where the basic concepts are lacking and no one understands the rules we have up here—and what about rest cures and measuring your temperature? Although she does plan to return, or so she happened to mention to me—now how did we get started talking about her? Ah yes, we ran into you in the garden that day, if you recall, Director Behrens, or better, you ran into us, because we were sitting on a bench, I still know which one, I could even point it out to you, and there we sat smoking. Which is to say, I was smoking, because my cousin for some inexplicable reason doesn’t smoke. And you happened to be smoking, too, and we exchanged brands with one another, it just occurs to me again. And I thought your Brazil was excellent, but it has to be handled like a young, spirited colt, otherwise the same thing might happen that happened to you with those two little imported cigars, when your chest started heaving and you almost kicked the bucket—but it turned out all right, so we can laugh about it now. I recently ordered another two hundred Maria Mancinis from Bremen, by the by, I’m really very attached to that bit of merchandise, find it congenial in every way. Although the customs duties and postage do hit rather hard, and if you start adding any more to my bill, I am perfectly capable of converting to some local weed—there are some lovely items in the shop windows. And then we were permitted a look at your paintings—it seems like only yesterday, and what a pleasure it was. I was absolutely dumbfounded by the risks you take with oils, I would never have the courage
. We also saw Frau Chauchat’s portrait and the first-class way you handled the skin—it was simply inspiring, I must say. But at the time I didn’t know your model, or just by sight and name. Since then, shortly before her recent departure, in fact, I’ve had the chance to become personally acquainted with her.”
“You don’t say!” the director replied, much as he had—if we may remind the reader—when Hans Castorp had declared before his first examination that he had a little fever. And that was all he said.
“Yes, indeed, I did,” Hans Castorp confirmed. “It’s been my experience that it isn’t all that easy to make acquaintances up here, but it just worked out that way for Frau Chauchat and me at the very last minute and we sort of fell into conversation and . . .” Hans Castorp pulled air in between his teeth. The needle struck home. “Fff!” he sucked in. “That’s a critical nerve you happened to hit there, Director Behrens. Oh, yes, yes, hurts like hell. Thanks, a little massage does help. And so got to know one another, conversationally, I mean.”
“So! And—?” the director said, nodding as he asked, with the expression on his face of someone expecting a favorable reaction, the tone of the question implying he was awaiting praise that corroborated his own experience.
“I suppose my French was a little weak,” Hans Castorp said evasively. “But how could it be all that good, really? Somehow a few things do come to you at just the right moment, and so we managed to communicate fairly well.”
“I can well believe it. And—?” the director said, pressing him again. And now he volunteered something of his own: “Rather nice, eh?”
Buttoning his collar now, Hans Castorp stood there with legs and elbows spread, his face turned up to the ceiling. “It’s the old story,” he said. “Two people, or two families, spend weeks together under the same roof at a resort somewhere, always keeping their distance. And one day they become acquainted, find they like one another, but at the same time it turns out one party is about to leave. Regrettable things like that happen often, I suppose. But nevertheless, one would like to keep in touch, hear something of one another, by mail I mean. But Frau Chauchat . . .”
“Ah, but she doesn’t want to, does she?” the director said with a genial laugh.
“No, she wouldn’t hear of it. Doesn’t she even write you now and then, from her other places of residence?”
“Heaven forbid!” Behrens replied. “She’d never think of it. First because she’s too lazy to write, and then, how could she? I can’t read Russian—I manage to jabber it a little if need be, but I can’t read a word. And you can’t either, I’m sure. Well, and the little pussycat can meow some very pretty French and a little stilted High German—but write?
She’d be in completely over her head. Spelling, my dear friend! No, we’ll just have to console ourselves, my lad. She’s sure to come back, sooner or later, always has. It’s a matter of skill, or of temperament, as I’ve often said. Some people leave now and then and have to come back, and others remain for as long as it takes until they don’t need to come back. If your cousin leaves now, and you can tell him this for me, it may very well happen that you’ll still be here to witness his solemn return.”
“But, Director Behrens, how long do you think that I—”
“That you? I’m talking about him!—that he’ll not last down there as long as he’s been up here already. That is my humble personal opinion, and I’m commissioning you to give him the message, if you’d be so kind.” And that was more or less how their conversations went—cleverly steered by Hans Castorp, but with results that were either nonexistent or ambiguous—ambiguous in terms of how long he would have to stay until someone who left too soon returned again, and as good as nil when it came to the vanished lady. Hans Castorp would hear nothing more from her as long as time and space separated them; she would not write, or give him the chance to do so, either. And when he stopped to consider the matter, how could it have turned out any differently? Had his notion that they ought to write one another not been very bourgeois, very pedantic—particularly when all along he had felt it was unnecessary, even undesirable for them to speak to one another? And as he sat beside her that Mardi Gras evening, had he actually “spoken” with her in the manner appropriate to the educated West? Or had he not, instead, prattled on in a foreign tongue, in the less civilized fashion of a dream? And so why write a letter, or even a postcard, like the ones he sometimes sent home to the flatlands to report about the ups and downs in the results of his checkups? Wasn’t Clavdia right to feel excused from writing, simply because her illness gave her that freedom? To speak, to write—indeed that was a splendid humanistic and republican achievement, like that of Signore Brunetto Latini, who had written a book about virtue and vice, had given the Florentines their polish and taught them both how to speak and the fine art of guiding their republic by the rules of politics.
Which brought Hans Castorp’s thoughts around to Lodovico Settembrini—and he blushed, just as he had blushed the day that the writer had unexpectedly entered his sickroom and suddenly illumined it. Hans Castorp could just as easily have directed his questions about transcendental riddles to Herr Settembrini, if only as a way of challenging him and quibbling, but certainly not in the expectation of receiving an answer from a humanist whose sole concern was this earthly life. But ever since the Mardi Gras party and Settembrini’s heated departure from the music room, a coolness had reigned between Hans Castorp and the Italian, the result both of the former’s bad conscience and the latter’s deep pedagogic indignation, so that they avoided one another and had not exchanged a single word for weeks now. Was Hans Castorp still one of “life’s problem children” in Herr Settembrini’s eyes? No, he had probably been given up for lost in the eyes of a man who sought morality in reason and virtue. And Hans Castorp’s heart hardened against Herr Settembrini; he scowled and pursed his lips whenever their paths crossed—and Herr Settembrini’s flashing black eyes would rest on him in silent reproach. And yet that hardened heart softened at once the first time the literary man spoke to him again—after weeks, as noted—though it was only in passing and in the form of a mythological allusion, which to be understood required an education in the traditions of the West. It occurred after dinner; they ran into one another at the door that no longer slammed. Catching up with the young man, but with the intent of moving right on past him, Settembrini said, “Well, my good engineer, how did you like the pomegranate?” Hans Castorp smiled in confused delight. “I’m sorry—what did you say, Herr Settembrini? Pomegranate? We haven’t had any pomegranates, have we? I don’t think I’ve ever . . . no, wait, I did once drink some pomegranate juice and soda. It was too sweet for me.”
Already past him now, the Italian looked back over his shoulder and carefully stated: “The gods and mortals have on occasion visited the realm of shades and found their way back. But those who reside in the nether world know that he who eats of the fruits of their realm is forever theirs.” And he walked on, wearing those everlasting pastel checked trousers, leaving Hans Castorp behind, presumably “cut to the quick” by so much trenchant significance—and to some extent he was, although he was also vexed and amused by the notion that he was supposed to be. He muttered to himself, “Latini, Carducci, bibbi-boobi-trappi, just leave me in peace!”
All the same, he was touched and glad that the ice had been broken; for despite his trophy, the macabre gift that he wore next to his heart, he was very fond of Herr Settembrini, set great store by his presence, and the thought of being totally rejected and abandoned would have weighed down on him more heavily than had the feeling of being a schoolboy no longer in the running and enjoying the advantages of disgrace, just like Herr Albin. And yet he did not have the courage to speak to his mentor, and several more weeks passed before Herr Settembrini once again approached his problem child.
