The Magic Mountain Page 13

The seamstress was not a seamstress, but a teacher at a public school for well-bred young ladies in Königsberg, and that was why she chose her words so precisely. Her name was Fräulein Engelhart. As for the chipper old lady, Joachim had never learned her name in all the time he had been there. In any case, she was the great-aunt of the yogurt-eating girl, and both were permanent residents of the sanatorium. The sickest person at the table was Dr. Blumenkohl, Leo Blumenkohl from Odessa—the young man with the moustache and the worried, self-absorbed look. He had been up here for years now.

  They were now walking on a city sidewalk—it was immediately apparent that this was the main street of an international resort. The strolling tourists they met were mostly young people, the gentlemen in sport coats and without hats, the ladies in white skirts and also without hats. You heard Russian and English spoken; to both left and right were rows of shops with elegant displays in the windows. Hans Castorp’s curiosity was now seriously battling his flushed exhaustion, and forcing his eyes to take it all in, he lingered awhile outside a men’s clothing shore, just to make sure that his own wardrobe was up to snuff.

  Then came a rotunda with a covered gallery where a little band was playing. This was the Kurhaus, the spa hotel. Several games were in progress on the tennis courts. Long-legged, clean-shaven young men wearing freshly pressed flannels and rubber-soled shoes had rolled up their shirtsleeves to play opposite tanned young ladies in white, who kept reaching boldly up toward the sun in order to hit the chalk-white ball out of the air. A kind of floury dust drifted over the well-kept courts. The cousins sat down on an unoccupied bench to watch and critique the play.

  “You’ve not been playing up here, I take it?” Hans Castorp asked.

  “I’m not allowed to,” Joachim answered. “We have to rest, always lying at rest. Settembrini says we live horizontally—we’re the horizontals, he says, it’s another one of his rotten jokes. Those are healthy people playing there, or they’re disobeying their doctors’ orders. Anyway, they’re not playing serious tennis—it’s more for the outfits. And as far as not obeying orders goes, lots of forbidden games are played here—poker, you know, and petits chevaux in certain hotels. We can be discharged for playing that, they say it’s the most unwholesome of all. But there are plenty of people who sneak past the guards in the evening and come down here to gamble. They say the prince who gave Behrens his title of Hofrat did it constantly.”

  Hans Castorp was hardly listening. His mouth was hanging open, because he couldn’t breathe through his nose right, although he didn’t have a cold. He dimly noticed the disconcerting effect of his heart’s pounding out of time to the music. And feeling confused and at odds with himself, he was just dozing off when Joachim suggested they needed to start back.

  They covered the distance in almost total silence. Hans Castorp stumbled a few times on the level pavement, at which he merely shook his head and smiled wistfully. The elevator operator who took them up to their floor was the man with the limp. Exchanging a brief “till later,” they parted outside room number 34. Hans Castorp steered his way across the room and out to the balcony, where he let himself fall into his lounge chair, just as he was, and without changing his position once, he fell into a dull semistupor, broken now and then by the annoyance of his rapidly beating heart.

  BUT OF COURSE—A FEMALE!

  How long that lasted he didn’t know. At the appropriate time, the gong rang out. But, as Hans Castorp was aware, it was not the call for dinner itself, merely the warning to get ready for it; and so he lay there for a while until the metallic rumble swelled and fell away a second time. When Joachim came through the room to fetch him, Hans Castorp wanted to change first, but Joachim said it was too late and wouldn’t let him. He hated unpunctuality. How could you ever make any progress and become healthy enough for military service again, he said, if you were so weak-willed that you couldn’t make it to meals on time. He was right, of course, and Hans Castorp could only point out that he wasn’t the one who was sick, although he certainly was incredibly sleepy. He just washed his hands quickly; and they walked down to the dining hall, for the third time.

  The guests were streaming in through both entrances. Some were even coming through the veranda doors that stood open opposite, and soon they were all sitting around the seven tables as if they had never left them. That at least was Hans Castorp’s impression, a purely dreamy, irrational impression of course, which he could not get out of his befuddled brain for the moment and which even gave him a certain pleasure—such pleasure, in fact, that he tried to recapture it several times during the course of the meal and, indeed, was able to recreate the illusion perfectly. The chipper old lady was once again keeping up a steady stream of blurry Russian directed diagonally toward Dr. Blumenkohl, who listened with a careworn face. Her skinny grandniece finally ate something other than yogurt: the gooey cream of barley soup that the dining attendants had served in large plates—but only a few spoonfuls, and then she let it stand. Pretty Marusya kept pressing her little handkerchief, fragrant with orange perfume, to her mouth to stifle her giggles. Miss Robinson was reading the same letter in the same rounded hand that she had been reading that morning. Apparently she could speak not a word of German and did not wish to. Joachim struck a chivalrous pose and said something to her in English about the weather, to which, while still chewing, she gave a monosyllabic reply and then fell silent again. As for Frau Stöhr in her Scotch-plaid woolen blouse, she had had her checkup that morning and reported about it in her affected, uneducated way, drawing her upper lip back from her rabbitlike teeth. She complained of a rattle on the upper right, and her breathing was reduced just under her left shoulder blade, and the “boss” had told her she would have to stay another five months. In her unlettered fashion, she called Director Behrens the “boss.” Moreover, she declared her outrage that the “boss” was not sitting at their table again today. The “retardation” schedule (she apparently meant “rotation”) demanded that the “boss” should be sitting at their table for dinner today, whereas the “boss” was once again sitting at the table on their left (and indeed there sat Director Behrens, his gigantic hands folded in front of his plate). Though to be sure, that was also where fat Frau Salomon from Amsterdam was seated, and she came to dinner every day of the week in a low-cut dress, apparently quite to the “boss’s” liking, although she, Frau Stöhr, could not understand it, because, after all, he could see however much of Frau Salomon he wanted at every checkup. A little later she told them in an excited whisper that yesterday evening the lights had been turned out in the upper common lounging area—the one on the roof—for purposes that Frau Stöhr described as “transparent.” The “boss” had noticed it and gone into such a rage that you could hear him all over the building. But of course once again he had not located the guilty party, although one didn’t have to have a university degree to guess that, of course, it had been Captain Miklosich from Bucharest, for whom it could never be dark enough when he was in the company of ladies—a man lacking in every refinement, although he did wear a corset, and who was no better than a beast of prey—yes, a beast of prey, Frau Stöhr repeated in a smothered whisper as beads of sweat appeared on her brow and upper lip. Why, all of Dorf and Platz, too, knew the nature of his relationship with Frau Wurmbrandt from Vienna, the general consul’s wife—one could hardly call it clandestine anymore. It wasn’t enough that the captain frequently paid morning visits to Frau Wurmbrandt in her room, with her still lying in bed, and stayed there the whole time she dressed, but last Tuesday he had not left Wurmbrandt’s room until four o’clock the next morning—the nurse looking after Franz in room 19, the boy whose recent pneumothorax operation had turned out so badly, had run into him in the hall, and had been so embarrassed that she got her doors mixed up and found herself in the room of Prosecutor Paravant from Dortmund. And finally Frau Stöhr held forth at length about a “cosmological salon” down in town, where she bought her mouthwash. Joachim stared down at his plate.

  Th
e dinner was as splendidly prepared as it was lavish. Including the nourishing soup, it consisted of no fewer than six courses. The fish was followed by a superb roast with vegetables, which was followed by a salad, then roast fowl, a dumpling dessert in no way inferior to the one Hans had eaten the night before, and, finally, cheese and fruit. Each item was offered twice—and not without good effect. People filled their plates at all seven tables—they ate with the appetites of lions here in these vaulted spaces. Theirs was a hot hunger that it would have been a joy to observe, if its effect had not at the same time seemed somehow eerie, even repulsive. Not only the more lively among them displayed such hunger as they chatted and pelted one another with little pills of bread—no, but also the silent, gloomy ones, who between courses would put their heads in their hands and stare into space. At the next table on their left was an adolescent boy—still of school age, to judge by his appearance—whose coat sleeves were too short, and who wore thick, circular glasses; he chopped up everything heaped on his plate until it was a pasty hodgepodge, then bent over it and wolfed it down, now and then pushing his napkin up behind his glasses to dry his eyes—it was unclear whether this was to wipe away sweat or tears.

  During this major meal of the day, two incidents occurred to attract Hans Castorp’s attention, insofar as his condition allowed. First, the glass door slammed shut again—just as the fish course was being served. Hans Castorp flinched in irritation and told himself indignantly that this time he really must find out who the culprit was. He didn’t merely think it—he was so in earnest that he spoke it out loud. “I have to know!” he whispered with exaggerated fervor, so that both Miss Robinson and the teacher glanced at him in amazement. And turning his whole upper body to the left, he opened his bloodshot eyes wide.

  It was a lady who crossed the hall now, a young woman, a girl really, of only average height, in a white sweater and brightly colored skirt, with reddish-blond hair, which she wore in a simple braid wound up on her head. Hans Castorp saw only a little of her profile—almost nothing, in fact. In quite marvelous contrast to her noisy entrance, she walked soundlessly, with a peculiar slinking gait, her head thrust slightly forward, and proceeded to the farthest table on the left, set perpendicular to the veranda doors—the Good Russian table. As she walked she kept one hand in the pocket of her close-fitting wool jacket, while the other was busy at the back of her head, tucking and arranging her hair. Hans Castorp looked at that hand—he had a good eye and a fine critical sense for hands, and it was his habit always first to direct his gaze at them whenever he made a new acquaintance. The hand tucking up her hair was not particularly ladylike, not refined or well cared for, not in the way the ladies in young Hans Castorp’s social circle cared for theirs. It was rather broad, with stubby fingers; there was something primitive and childish about it, rather like the hand of a schoolgirl. Her nails had clearly never seen a manicure, and had been trimmed carelessly—again, like a schoolgirl’s; and the cuticles had a jagged look, almost as if she were guilty of the minor vice of nail-chewing. Hans Castorp only surmised all this, however, more than he actually saw it—she was really too far away. Her tablemates greeted the latecomer with nods; as she took her seat on the near side of the table—her back to the room and right beside Dr. Krokowski, who was presiding—she turned, her hand still at her hair, and looked back over her shoulder at the assembly. And Hans Castorp caught a fleeting glance of her broad cheekbones and narrow eyes—and at the sight, a vague memory of something or somebody brushed over him.

  “But of course—a female!” Hans Castorp thought, and again muttered it so emphatically to himself that the teacher, Fräulein Engelhart, understood what he had said. The shriveled old maid smiled in sympathy.

  “That is Madame Chauchat,” she said. “She’s so careless. A charming lady.” And Fräulein Engelhart’s fuzzy cheeks turned a shade rosier—which was the case, actually, whenever she opened her mouth. “French?” Hans Castorp asked sternly.

  “No, she’s Russian,” said the teacher. “Perhaps her husband is French, or of French extraction, I can’t say for sure.”

  Still incensed, Hans Castorp asked if that was her husband there, and pointed to a gentleman with hunched shoulders sitting at the Good Russian table.

  “Oh no, that isn’t he,” the teacher responded. “He’s never been here even once, he’s quite unknown to us.”

  “She should learn to close a door properly,” Hans Castorp said. “She always lets it slam. It’s really very impolite.”

  But since the teacher meekly accepted his rebuke as if she were the guilty party, nothing more was said about Madame Chauchat.

  The second incident consisted of Dr. Blumenkohl’s leaving the room—it was no more than that. Suddenly the slightly disgusted look on his face heightened and he gazed even more worriedly at some particular point in space. Then he slid his chair back in one decisive motion and left the room. At this juncture, however, Frau Stöhr displayed her poor upbringing in the most garish light, because—apparently out of some crude satisfaction that she was less ill than Blumenkohl—she accompanied his departure with a few half-sympathetic, half-contemptuous remarks. “The poor man,” she said. “He’s on his last legs. He’s off to have a talk with his Blue Henry again.” With a stubborn, obtuse look on her face, she uttered the grotesque term “Blue Henry” without the least hesitancy, and Hans Castorp felt an urge both to laugh and to shudder as she said it. Dr. Blumenkohl, by the way, returned after a few minutes, carrying himself in the same diffident fashion as when he left, took his seat again, and went on eating. He, too, ate a great deal, and with a worried, self-absorbed look on his face mutely took a second helping from each course.

  Then dinner was over; but thanks to the capable service—and their dwarf in particular was marvelously fleet of foot—it had lasted only a little more than an hour. Breathing heavily and not rightly knowing how he had got there, Hans Castorp found himself lying in the splendid lounge chair on his balcony—because there was a rest cure between dinner and tea, the most important of the day, in fact, and rigorously enforced. He lay there between the opaque glass walls that separated him from Joachim on one side and the Russian couple on the other; his heart pounded as he dozed, and he drew air in through his mouth. When he used his handkerchief, he found red traces of blood, but he did not have the energy to think much about it, although he was easily inclined to worry about himself and tended by nature to play the hypochondriac. He had lit another Maria Mancini and smoked it to the end this time, despite the taste. Feeling dizzy, anxious, and dreamy, he thought how very strangely things were going for him up here. Two or three times he felt his chest shaken by suppressed laughter at the gruesome term that Frau Stöhr had used in her ignorance.

  HERR ALBIN

  Down in the garden the fantasy flag with the caduceus lifted now and then in a light breeze. The sky had clouded over completely again. The sun was gone, and there was an almost inhospitable chill in the air. It appeared that the lounging arcade was crowded—the area below was filled with conversations and giggles.

  “I beg you, Herr Albin, do put that knife away, put it in your pocket before there’s an accident!” a high, wavering female voice fretted.

  “My dear Herr Albin, spare our nerves and remove that dreadful lethal object from view!” a second voice chimed in.

  And then a blond young man, sitting sideways on a lounge chair clear at the front, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, replied in a flippant voice, “Wouldn’t think of it. You ladies will surely allow me to play with my knife a little. Yes, I’ll grant, it’s a particularly sharp knife. I bought it in Calcutta from a blind magician. He would swallow it, and then his boy would immediately dig it up some fifty paces away. Would you like to see it? It’s much sharper than a razor. You only have to just touch the blade, and it goes right into the flesh as if it were butter. Wait a moment, let me show you up close.” And Herr Albin stood up. General shrieks. “No, I think I’ll go fetch my revolver,” Herr Albin said. “T
hat would interest you all more. A damn fine weapon. Packs quite a punch. I’ll get it from my room.”

  “No, Herr Albin, don’t. Herr Albin, don’t do it!” several different voices wailed. But Herr Albin was already emerging from the arcade, heading for his room—very young, with a shambling gait, a rosy childlike face, and narrow sideburns at his ears.

  “Herr Albin,” a woman called after him, “you’d do better to get your coat—put it on as a favor to me. You lay bedridden with pneumonia for six weeks, and here you are sitting without an overcoat, without even a blanket, and smoking cigarettes. That’s tempting Providence, Herr Albin, I swear it is.”

  But he only laughed derisively as he walked away, and within a few minutes he returned with his revolver. This aroused even more silly shrieks than before, and you could hear several ladies stumble as they tried to jump up from their chairs and got tangled in their blankets.

  “Look how small and shiny it is,” Herr Albin said, “but if I press right here—it will bite.” New shrieks. “It’s loaded with live ammunition, of course,” Herr Albin continued. “There are six cartridges in this cylinder here, which moves ahead one chamber with every shot. And by the by, I don’t keep this thing just for fun,” he said, noticing that the effect was wearing off. He slipped the revolver back into his breast pocket, sat back down on his chair, crossed his legs, and lit another cigarette. “Definitely not just for fun,” he repeated, pressing his lips together.

  “But why? Why do you have it, then?” several trembling voices asked with foreboding. “How horrible!” one voice suddenly cried—and Herr Albin nodded.

  “I see you’re beginning to understand,” he said. “And in fact, that is why I keep it handy,” he went on lightly, after first inhaling and then exhaling a great quantity of smoke, despite his recent bout with pneumonia. “I keep it at the ready for the day when all this malarkey here gets too boring and I shall have the honor of paying my final regards. It really is very simple. I’ve studied the matter at some length, and I have a very clear idea about how best to pull it off.” (Another shriek in response to the words “pull it off.”) “The region of the heart is out of the question—it’s rather awkward to aim there. And besides, I prefer snuffing out the conscious mind on the spot, and can do so by applying one of these pretty little foreign objects to this interesting organ . . .” And Herr Albin pointed with his index finger to his close-cropped blond head. “One aims here”—Herr Albin pulled the nickel-plated revolver from his pocket again and tapped the barrel against one temple—“here, just above the artery. Slick as a whistle, even without a mirror.”