The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  They laughed at their mistake, laughed for joy at the miracle before their eyes, this charming mimicry of snow by organic life hesitantly finding its way back into the world. They picked a few, examined them, studied their delicate chalices, made boutonnieres of them, wore them home, put them in water glasses in their rooms—for the valley’s inorganic paralysis had lasted a long, long time, despite its diversions.

  But the snow flowers were soon covered again by real snow, and the same thing happened to the blue soldanella and the red cowslips that had next appeared. Yes, what a very difficult time spring had making any headway in its conquest of winter. It was thrown back ten times before it finally gained a toehold up here—until the next burst of winter, with white flurries, icy winds, and warm radiators. At the beginning of May (for May arrived while we were talking about snowdrops), it was absolute torment to sit out on the balcony and try to write a postcard to the plains, your fingers aching from the raw November damp; and the half-dozen hardwoods in the valley were as bare as flatland trees in January. The rain went on for days, it poured one whole week, and without the compensations of the lounge chair it would have been very hard to spend so many hours reclining out there, your face numbed and wet from the damp murk of clouds. But ultimately, it proved to be a clandestine spring rain, and more and more, the longer it lasted, disclosed itself as such. Almost all the snow melted away beneath it; there was no white left, only patches of dirty ice-gray here and there, and now the meadows truly began to turn green.

  What a comforting sight those green meadows were after an infinity of white. And another green appeared as well, its delicate, tender softness far exceeding the green of new grass—young clusters of needles on the larches. When taking his constitutionals, Hans Castorp could not help caressing them and brushing them against his cheek—their softness and freshness were so irresistibly enchanting. “It’s enough to make a botanist of you,” the young man said to his companion. “A man could really and truly decide to become a scientist from the pure joy of watching nature reawaken after one of our winters up here. That’s gentian you see there on that slope, my man, and right there is a kind of little yellow violet I don’t recognize. But here we have buttercups, no different from the ones down below, from the family Ranunculaceae, a compound flower, as I recall, an especially charming plant, bisexual, you can see the great number of stamens and several pistils, the androecium and gynoecium, if I remember correctly. I really think I shall add some botanical tomes to my collection, just to become somewhat better informed about this part of life, this realm of knowledge. Yes, just look at the world’s colorful variety.”

  “It gets even better in June,” Joachim said. “The valley’s famous for its wildflowers. But I don’t think I’ll wait for them. Your wanting to study botany—picked that up from Krokowski, did you?”

  Krokowski? What did he mean? Oh, that’s where he got it—because Dr. Krokowski had recently been carrying on botanically in his lectures. (It would be quite a mistake, in fact, to assume that just because time had brought forth so many changes, Dr. Krokowski was no longer giving his lectures.) Dressed in his frock coat—though no longer in sandals, which he wore only in summer and so would soon be wearing again—he delivered them, as before, every two weeks, every second Monday in the dining hall, just as on that day when Hans Castorp, early in his stay, had arrived late, splattered with blood. The psychoanalyst had spoken for nine months about love and illness—never too much at once, always in small portions, little talks of half or three-quarters of an hour, in which he displayed the treasures of his knowledge and thought; and everyone was under the impression that he would never have to stop, that it would go on like this forever. It was kind of a biweekly Thousand and One Nights spun out at random, and, like Scheherazade’s stories for a curious prince, each lecture was calculated to please its audience and prevent acts of violence. In its very boundlessness, Dr. Krokowski’s theme recalled an enterprise to which Settembrini was devoting his labor, the encyclopedia of suffering; and like that project, it proved equally rich in its applications—as witnessed by the lecturer’s recent digression into botany, or more precisely, fungi. He had, by the way, changed his topic somewhat perhaps—it was now more a discussion of love and death, which led to numerous reflections of a half poetic, half ruthlessly scientific nature. And it was in this context that the scholar had come around to speak—in his drawling East European accent with its r produced by a single tap of the tongue—of botany, or better, of mushrooms: those rank, fantastic creatures from life’s twilight world, fleshly by nature, so similar to animal life that products of animal metabolism, proteins and glycogen, an animal carbohydrate, were found in their chemical makeup. And Dr. Krokowski had spoken about one fungus, famous since classical antiquity for its form and the powers ascribed to it—a morel, its Latin name ending in the adjective impudicus, its form reminiscent of love, and its odor, of death. For the stench given off by the impudicus was strikingly like that of a decaying corpse, the odor coming from a greenish, viscous slime that carried its spores and dripped from the bell-shaped cap. And even today, among the uneducated, this morel was thought to be an aphrodisiac.

  Well, that had been a little much for the ladies, declared Prosecutor Paravant—who was managing to survive the thaw with the moral assistance of the director’s propaganda. And even Frau Stöhr, who as a woman of principle had likewise held her ground and met head-on every temptation to make her own wild departure, had remarked to her tablemates that Krokowski had really been rather “obscure” today with his classical mushroom. The unfortunate woman actually said “obscure”—disgracing her illness with her unspeakable malapropisms.

  What Hans Castorp found amazing, however, was that Joachim would refer at all to Dr. Krokowski’s botany, for they spoke as little of the psychoanalyst as they did of Clavdia Chauchat or Marusya—they never alluded to him, passing over his ways and works in silence. But now suddenly Joachim had mentioned the assistant by name—in an ill-tempered tone of voice, just as his remark that he would not be waiting for the wildflowers to bloom had sounded quite ill-tempered, too. Dear old Joachim—of late he appeared to be close to losing his equilibrium. There was an edgy quaver to his voice whenever he spoke, and he was not at all his old gentle, prudent self. Was it orange-blossom perfume that he lacked? Was their teasing him with Gaffky numbers driving him to despair? Could he not resolve in his own mind whether to stay here until autumn or to depart on a fraudulent basis?

  In reality, it was something entirely different that brought the edginess to Joachim’s voice and made him mention the recent lecture on botany in such a sarcastic tone. Hans Castorp knew nothing at all about it—or rather, he did not know that Joachim knew; for as a man who had kicked over the traces, as a pedagogic problem child of life, he himself knew what that something was only too well. In a word, Joachim was onto his cousin’s tricks, he had accidentally eavesdropped on an act of betrayal, much like the one Hans Castorp had committed on the evening of Mardi Gras—a new treachery, exacerbated by the indisputable fact that it had become a habit with him.

  One part of the eternal monotony of time’s rhythm, of the diverting, standard segmentation of the normal day, which was always the same, to the point where each day was so confusingly like, so identical with, the next that it could be taken for it, a fixed eternity that made it hard to understand how time could ever bring forth changes—one part of the undeviating schedule (as our readers will recall) was that Dr. Krokowski made his rounds every day between half past three and four o’clock, moving from room to room, or rather balcony to balcony, lounge chair to lounge chair. And the Berghof day had itself come round many times now since that day when Hans Castorp, lying there in his horizontal position, had felt hurt because the assistant had made a detour around his room, leaving him to his own devices. The visitor in August had long ago become a comrade—Dr. Krokowski frequently called him that when he stopped to check on him, and although, as Hans Castorp remarked to Joachim, that mil
itary word, with its exotic r, a single palatalized tap of the tongue, sounded dreadful coming from the assistant, it did not fit all that badly with his rugged, virile, jovial manner, which both demanded your cheerful trust and yet at the same time had its dubious side, since it was always contradicted somehow by his black pallor.

  “Well, comrade, how’s it going, how’s it coming?” Dr. Krokowski said, arriving from the Russian barbarians’ balcony and stepping up to the head of Hans Castorp’s lounge chair; and as on every other day, the patient lying there with his hands folded across his chest smiled up in amiable vexation at the ghastly word “comrade” and gazed at the doctor’s yellow teeth revealed beneath his black beard. “Had a fine rest, did we?” Dr. Krokowski continued. “Fever chart on the decline or on the rise today? Well, doesn’t mean much—it’ll be fine by your wedding day. My regards.” And with that farewell, which likewise sounded ghastly, since he pronounced it like “d’gods,” he would move on, heading for Joachim’s balcony. These were merely his rounds, no more than a quick check on things.

  Sometimes, to be sure, Dr. Krokowski might stay a little longer, standing there broad-shouldered, smiling his manly smile, chatting with his “comrade” about this and that—the weather, departures and arrivals, the patient’s general mood, good or bad, and about his personal affairs, too, his home, his prospects—until he would finally say, “My d’gods,” and move on. Hans Castorp, hands clasped behind his head for a change, would respond with a smile of his own to all the questions—with a pervasive sense of revulsion, to be sure, but with a ready answer to everything. They would lower their voices to chat, and although the glass partition did not completely separate the balconies, Joachim next door could not make out what they were saying—did not even try for that matter. He would hear his cousin get up from his lounge chair and walk back into the room with Dr. Krokowski, presumably to show him his fever chart; and then the conversation might continue a while longer, to judge from the delay before the assistant appeared at Joachim’s door by way of the hall.

  And what were these comrades chatting about? Joachim did not ask; but if one of us chose not to follow his example and posed the question, then, by way of general observation, it might very well be noted that considerable material was available for an intellectual exchange between such men and comrades, both of whose basic perspectives bore an idealistic stamp—one of them having educated himself to believe that matter is the spirit’s Original Sin, a nasty rank growth in response to a stimulus, whereas the other, as a doctor, was accustomed to teaching that organic illness was a secondary phenomenon. Yes, we might note that there was much to discuss and share: about matter as a disreputable degeneration of the immaterial, about life as an impudency of matter, about illness as life’s lascivious form. With the ongoing series of lectures as a basis, the conversation could then have moved from love as a force conducive to illness, to the nonphysical nature of its indications, to “old” and “new” areas, to soluble toxins and love potions, to light piercing the dark subconscious, to the blessings of psychoanalysis and the transference of symptoms—but then what do we know, since for us this is all merely guesswork, a hypothetical answer to the question about the subject of the chats between Dr. Krokowski and young Hans Castorp.

  Moreover, they no longer chatted—that was all over, it had lasted only a brief while, a few weeks. More recently, Dr. Krokowski treated this patient no differently from the way he treated all others. On his rounds, he generally confined himself to “Well, comrade?” and “My d’gods.” But Joachim had made a discovery—of the aforementioned act he considered a betrayal on Hans Castorp’s part. Although it should be said that, as a military innocent, he made it quite accidentally, without resorting to any sort of spying. He had simply been summoned one Wednesday morning, in the middle of his first rest cure, to be weighed by the bath attendant in the basement—and that was when it happened. He was coming down the stairs, with their tidy linoleum steps and a view to the door of the general consulting room, which stood between the two X-ray rooms—the organic one on the left, and around the corner on the right, two steps lower, the psychoanalytical one, with Dr. Krokowski’s visiting card on the door. Halfway down the stairs, Joachim stopped in his tracks when he saw Hans Castorp suddenly emerge from the consulting room where he had just been given his injection. Quickly closing the door with both hands and without looking around, Hans Castorp turned now to the right, toward the door with the thumbtacked calling card; with a kind of forward rocking motion, he reached it in a few soundless strides. He knocked, bending forward and holding his ear next to his rapping fingers. And then Joachim heard the word “Enter!” in the resounding baritone of the occupant, with that exotic, tapped r sound and a diphthongized distortion of the vowel—and saw his cousin vanish into the twilight of Dr. Krokowski’s analytical pit.

  SOMEONE ELSE

  Long days, the longest, in terms of hours of sunlight—objectively speaking, that is, since their astronomical length has nothing whatever to do with whether they seem to pass swiftly or can divert us. The vernal equinox now lay three months in the past, the summer solstice had arrived. But the natural year followed the calendar only very reticently up here; only now, within the last few days, had spring definitely arrived, a spring without any hint of summer’s oppressiveness—with spicy, light, thin air, with a radiant, silvery-blue sky and blossoming meadows as colorful as a child’s paint box.

  Hans Castorp found the slopes full of flowers, the same ones that had just been ending their bloom when Joachim had gathered a few to put in his room as a friendly greeting—yarrow and bluebells. It was a sign that the year was coming full circle. But along with new emerald-green grass, what a wealth of organic life had now emerged from the soil on the slopes and wide meadows—stars, chalices, bells, and whimsies that filled the sun-drenched air with subtle fragrances: great masses of Alpine campion and wild pansies, daisies, marguerites, cowslips in red and yellow—much larger and more beautiful than any Hans Castorp remembered seeing in the flatlands, that is, to the extent that he had ever paid attention to them—plus nodding soldanella, little ciliated bells of blue, purple, and pink, a specialty of the region.

  He gathered up these delights, brought bouquets home, but for serious purposes—less to decorate his room than to follow through on his plan and study them with a strictly scientific eye. He had bought some paraphernalia for his project: a book on general botany, a handy trowel for digging up plants, a herbarium, a powerful magnifying glass; and the young man went to work on his balcony, dressed for summer again now, in one of the suits he had brought with him at the very start—this, too, another token that the year had come full circle.

  Fresh flowers stood in several water glasses on various surfaces provided by the furniture in his room, even on the little lamp table next to his splendid lounge chair. Half-faded flowers, wilting but not yet dry, were strewn across the balcony floor and scattered along the railing; others had already been carefully spread out between sheets of blotting paper that absorbed their moisture and were weighted down with stones, so that once the specimens were dry, Hans Castorp could paste them in his album with strips of gummed paper. There he lay, his knees pulled up, one leg crossed over the other, his field guide facedown on his chest, the spine forming a little gable; he held the thick beveled circle of his magnifying glass up to his ordinary blue eyes and examined a blossom, whose corolla he had partly removed with his pocketknife so that he could study its receptacle, which now swelled to a bizarre fleshy structure under the powerful lens. The anthers on the tips of filaments spilled their yellow pollen, the pitted pistil stood up rigid from the ovary, and if you cut through it, you could see the delicate channel down which a sugary excretion flushed grains and bags of pollen into the receptacle itself. Hans Castorp counted, probed, and compared; he investigated the structure and placement of sepals and petals, of male and female sex organs, compared them to diagrams and illustrations, determined to his satisfaction that the structures of pla
nts he knew were scientifically correct, and then proceeded to those whose names he did not know, identifying them with his Linnaeus according to class, cohort, order, family, genus, and species. With so much time on his hands, he put comparative morphology to work and made considerable progress in botanical taxonomy. Under each of the dried plants in his herbarium, he wrote in a fine calligraphic hand the Latin names humanistic science had gallantly bestowed upon them, plus a list of their distinguishing characteristics. He showed this to good Joachim, who was quite amazed.