The Magic Mountain Page 9

  He had been a little afraid of the dreadful effect all this might have on him, but found himself disappointed in that—the dining hall atmosphere was quite congenial, one had no sense of being in a place of misery. Well-tanned young people of both sexes entered humming a tune, spoke with the dining attendants, and weighed into breakfast with a robust appetite. There were more mature people as well, married couples, a whole family with children, including teenage boys, all speaking Russian. Almost all the women wore close-fitting jackets of wool or silk, called “sweaters,” in white or bright colors, with shawl collars and side pockets; it looked very pretty when they just stood there chatting, both hands buried in their sweater pockets. Photographs were passed around at several tables—recent shots they had taken themselves, no doubt; at one table they were trading postage stamps. The talk was of the weather, of how one had slept and what one’s “oral measurement” had been that morning. Most of them were cheerful—for no particular reason presumably, but simply because they had no immediate cares and were assembled in considerable numbers. A few people, to be sure, sat at the table with heads propped in their hands, staring straight ahead. People let them stare and paid them no attention.

  Suddenly Hans Castorp flinched—he was annoyed and offended. A door, the one to his left that led to the lobby, had banged shut—someone had simply let it slam, or perhaps even slammed it intentionally, and that was a noise that Hans Castorp absolutely could not tolerate, he had always hated it. Perhaps it was a learned dislike, perhaps an inborn idiosyncrasy—whatever it was, he abhorred banging doors and could have slapped anyone guilty of slamming one within earshot. In this case, the door was divided into little glass panes, which only heightened the shock: it was a bang and a rattle. “Damn it,” Hans Castorp thought angrily, “what kind of sloppiness is that?” Since the seamstress had said something to him at the same moment, he had no chance to determine who the malefactor was. But as he answered the seamstress, there were deep furrows between his blond eyebrows and his face was wrenched with distress.

  Joachim asked whether the doctors had been through yet. Yes, they had been there once already, someone replied, but had left the dining hall at almost the same moment the cousins arrived. Then they might as well not wait, Joachim said. There would be an opportunity in the course of the day to make the introductions. But at the door they almost collided with Director Behrens, who came striding through it at high speed, followed by Dr. Krokowski.

  “Whoops, heads up, gentlemen!” Behrens said. “That could have meant some badly trodden corns for all parties.” He spoke with a strong Lower Saxon accent, chewing his words broadly. “So, you’re the fellow,” he said to Hans Castorp, after Joachim clicked his heels together and made the introductions. “Well, my pleasure.” And he extended a hand as big as a shovel. He was a bony man, a good three heads taller than Dr. Krokowski, with a shock of white hair; his neck vertebrae stuck out, and his watery, bloodshot blue eyes protruded; he had a snub nose above a little short-cropped moustache, which sat slightly askew because his upper lip was turned up at one corner. What Joachim had said about his cheeks proved to be the absolute truth—they were purple, making his head look that much more colorful against his belted, white surgical smock, which fell just below the knees, revealing striped trousers and colossal feet in a pair of yellow, rather worn, laced boots. Dr. Krokowski was in professional uniform as well, except that his smock was more shirtlike, with elastic at the wrists, and of a black, shiny fabric that only emphasized his pallor. He played the role of the perfect assistant, taking no part whatever in the exchanged greetings—although the tense, critical way he held his mouth suggested that he found his subordinate position a little absurd.

  “Cousins?” the director asked, gesturing with his hand, pointing now at one, now at the other, and looking down out of bloodshot blue eyes. “Well, is he going to march to the pipe and drum like you?” he asked Joachim, nodding his head toward Hans Castorp. “Ha, God forbid—right? I spotted it at once.” And now he spoke directly to Hans Castorp: “There’s something so civilian, so comfortable about you—no rattling sabers like our corporal here. You would be a better patient than he, I’d lay odds on that. I can tell right off whether someone will make a competent patient or not, because that takes talent, everything takes talent, and this Myrmidon here hasn’t the least talent for it. For military drill, maybe, I can’t say as to that, but none for being ill. He constantly wants to leave, can you believe it? Forever asking to leave, pesters and badgers me and simply can’t wait to live a life of drudgery down below. What a zealot! Won’t give us six months of his time. Even though we have such a lovely place here—you must admit, Ziemssen, it is lovely here, isn’t it? Well, your good cousin will know better how to appreciate us, he’ll be able to amuse himself. There’s no shortage of ladies—we have the most adorable ladies here. Many of them quite picturesque—viewed externally, at least. But you’ll have to improve your color somewhat, too, otherwise the ladies will give you the cold shoulder. ‘The golden tree of life is green,’ true, but a green face is really not quite the thing. Totally anemic, of course,” he said, and mechanically stepped up to Hans Castorp, extended two fingers, and pulled an eyelid down. “No doubt of it, totally anemic, just as I said. Do you know what? It was not all that stupid of you to leave your Hamburg to fend for itself for a while. A highly commendable institution, your Hamburg. Always sends us a nice contingent, what with its intoxicatingly damp meteorology. But if I might use this opportunity to give you some modest advice—quite sine pecunia, of course—as long as you’re here with us, why don’t you do just what your cousin does? In a case like yours, there’s no wiser course than to live for a while as if it were a slight tuberculosis pulmonum, and build up your protein a little. It’s very curious, you see, the way protein is metabolized up here. Although one’s general metabolism increases, the body stores the protein. Well, and you slept well, did you, Ziemssen? Fine, fine. But now, do get on with your promenade! But no more than half an hour. And make sure you stick the old mercury cigar in your mouth afterward. And always jot down the results, right, Ziemssen? Conscientiously doing one’s duty. I’ll want to see your chart come Saturday. And your good cousin should measure, too. Measuring never hurts. Morning, gentlemen. Have a good time. Morning, morning . . .” And Dr. Krokowski joined him as he sailed off, swinging his arms, palms turned clear around to the back, tossing his question right and left as to whether people had slept well, which was universally answered in the affirmative.

  TEASING/VIATICUM/INTERRUPTED MERRIMENT

  “Very nice man,” Hans Castorp said as they walked out the front door, with a friendly nod to the limping concierge, who was sitting in his office sorting letters. The main door was on the southeast side of the large white building, whose middle section rose one story higher than the two wings and was crowned by a clock tower roofed with slate-colored sheet iron. Leaving the building by this exit, you did not approach the garden, but came out facing directly onto an open slope of mountain meadows, dotted with a few tallish firs and several low mountain pines that hugged the ground. The path they took—actually it was the only one available other than the main road that descended to the valley—led them gently up the rise to their left, past the rear of the sanatorium, where the kitchens and offices were located and steel garbage cans lined the railing beside the cellar stairs, and held to that direction for a good distance, then made a sharp hairpin to the right and began a steeper ascent up the sparsely wooded hill. It was a firm earthen path, reddish in color and a little damp, with boulders here and there along the edge. The cousins quickly learned that they were not alone on their walk. Guests who had finished breakfast shortly after them followed on their heels, and coming toward them were whole groups of people on their way back, stomping the way people tend to do walking downhill.

  “Very nice man,” Hans Castorp repeated. “Has such an easy way with words, it’s fun just to listen to him. ‘Mercury cigar’ for ‘thermometer’ is really qui
te splendid, I caught on right away. But I’m going to light a real one now,” he said, coming to a halt. “I can’t stand it any longer. I’ve not had a decent smoke since yesterday noon. Excuse me a moment.” And from a buff leather etui monogrammed in silver, he extracted one of his Maria Mancinis—a lovely specimen from the top of the box, flattened on just one side the way he especially liked it—trimmed the tip squarely with a small tool that hung from his watch chain, produced a flame from his pocket lighter, and after a bit of concentrated puffing managed to light the rather long, blunt-ended cigar. “There!” he said. “Now we can get on with our promenade, for all I care. Of course, being a zealot, you’re not smoking these days, are you?”

  “I’ve never smoked,” Joachim replied. “Why should I start up here, of all places?”

  “I don’t understand,” Hans Castorp said. “I don’t understand how someone can not be a smoker—why it’s like robbing oneself of the best part of life, so to speak, or at least of an absolutely first-rate pleasure. When I wake up I look forward to being able to smoke all day, and when I eat, I look forward to it again, in fact I can honestly say that I actually only eat so that I can smoke, although that’s an exaggeration, of course. But a day without tobacco—that would be absolutely insipid, a dull, totally wasted day. And if some morning I had to tell myself: there’s nothing left to smoke today, why I don’t think I’d find courage to get up, I swear I’d stay in bed. You see, if a man has a cigar that burns well—and obviously it can’t have any breaks or draw badly, that’s really terribly annoying—what I’m saying is, that if a man has a good cigar, then he’s home safe, nothing, literally nothing, can happen to him. It’s the same as when you’re lying on the beach, because there you lie on the beach, you know? and you don’t need anything else—no work, no other amusements. Thank God, people smoke all over the world, there’s nowhere you could possibly end up, as far as I know, where tobacco’s unknown. Even polar explorers lay in a good supply of smokes to get them over their hardships—that’s always struck a sympathetic chord in me whenever I’ve read about it. Because things can go very badly—let’s assume, for instance, that things would go miserably for me—but as long as I had my cigar, I’d carry on, that much I know, it could bring me through anything.”

  “All the same, it’s a sign of a rather weak will,” Joachim said, “to be so dependent on tobacco. Behrens is quite right—you’re a civilian. He meant it more in praise, to be sure, but you are an incurable civilian, that’s the point. And besides, you’re healthy and can do what you like,” he said, and a weary look came into his eyes.

  “Yes, healthy except for anemia,” Hans Castorp said. “That was a bit much, though, when he told me that I look green. But he’s right, it’s even obvious to me that in comparison to you folks up here I’m downright green—whereas I never really noticed it at home. And that really was very nice of him to just go ahead and offer some advice, quite sine pecunia as he put it. I’ll be happy to do as he says, and I hereby resolve to adapt my habits to yours—what else can I do as long as I’m up here with all of you? And it can’t hurt me, for heaven’s sake, to build up my protein, although that does sound disgusting, you must admit.”

  Joachim coughed a couple of times as they walked—the climb was taxing for him, it seemed. When he started coughing a third time, he stopped and scowled. “Go on ahead,” he said. Hans Castorp first hurried on without looking back. Then he slowed his pace and almost came to a stop, assuming that by now he had a considerable lead on Joachim. But he did not look back.

  A party of guests of both sexes was coming toward him—he had noticed them moving along a level stretch of path about halfway up the slope, and now they were tramping downhill, moving directly toward him, and he could hear the babble of voices. There were six or seven people of various ages, from very young things to a few who were somewhat further along in years. Still thinking about Joachim, he tilted his head and looked them over. They were all bareheaded and tanned, the ladies in colorful sweaters, the gentlemen without overcoats for the most part, even without walking sticks—they looked as if they had just stepped out the door for a breath of air, hands in their pockets. Since walking downhill is not a matter of strenuous exertion but more a sport, where you brace your legs and apply the brakes to keep from tripping or running—nothing more than helping yourself fall, really—there was a kind of nimble frivolity to their gait, which spread even to their faces, until the whole effect might very well have made you want to join their party.

  They were just ahead of him now, and Hans Castorp took a close look at their faces. They were not all tanned, two of the ladies were conspicuously pale: the one thin as a rail, with an ivory complexion; the other shorter and plump, her face blemished by moles and freckles. They all looked at him, all smiling the same cheeky smile. A tall young girl in a green sweater, her hair in untidy disarray and with doltish, half-closed eyes, brushed past Hans Castorp, so close that she almost touched him with her arm. And whistled—no, that was just too crazy! She whistled at him, but not with her mouth; her lips weren’t puckered at all, were tightly closed in fact. The whistle came from inside, and all the while she stared at him, with her doltish, half-closed eyes. An extraordinarily unpleasant whistle, harsh, intense, and yet somehow hollow, an extended tone, emerging inexplicably from somewhere in her chest and falling off toward the end—it reminded him of the music you get from those inflatable rubber pigs you buy at a carnival, the way they wail mournfully when you squeeze the air out. And then she and the rest of her party had moved on.

  Hans Castorp stood there aghast, staring straight ahead. Then he quickly turned around and decided that the horrid sound must have been a joke, a prearranged prank—that much at least was clear now, because as they moved off he saw their shoulders jiggling with laughter, and one stocky lad with thick lips, his hands stuck in his pants pockets, hitching his jacket up in a rather unbecoming way, blatantly turned to look back—and laughed. Joachim had caught up by now. He greeted the party in his usual chivalrous way, bowing and clicking his heels, almost standing at attention, and there was a gentle look in his eye as he joined his cousin.

  “What sort of face is that you’re making?” he asked.

  “She whistled!” Hans Castorp answered. “She whistled from her stomach as she passed me by. Would you kindly explain that to me?”

  “Oh,” Joachim said, laughing dismissively. “Not from her stomach, what nonsense. That was the Kleefeld girl, Hermine Kleefeld, who can whistle with her pneumothorax.”

  “With her what?” Hans Castorp asked. He was terribly agitated, but he didn’t quite know in what sense. Wavering between laughter and tears, he added, “You can’t expect me to understand your jargon.”

  “Let’s move on,” Joachim said. “I can just as easily explain it while we walk. You look like you’ve struck root. As you might guess, it has to do with surgery, an operation that they perform up here. Behrens is quite an expert at it. When one lung has been badly ravaged, you see, but the other is healthy or relatively healthy, the infected one is relieved of its duties for a while, given a rest. Which means that they make an incision here, somewhere along the side here—I don’t know precisely where they cut, but Behrens has it down perfectly. And then they let gas in, nitrogen, you see, and that way the caseated lobes of the lung are put out of commission. The gas doesn’t last that long, of course, and has to be replaced twice a month or so—they more or less pump you up, that’s how you have to picture it. And after they’ve done that for a year or so, if all goes well, the lung will have rested long enough to heal. Not always, of course, it’s really rather risky business. But they say they’ve had some nice successes with their pneumothorax. All the people you just saw have had it done. Frau Iltis was with them—the one with the freckles—and Fräulein Levi, the skinny one, if you recall—she was confined to bed for a long time. They’ve formed a group—something like pneumothorax brings people together, naturally—and call themselves the ‘Half-Lung Club,’ that�
�s the name everyone knows them by. But the pride of the club is Hermine Kleefeld, because she can whistle with her pneumothorax—it’s her special talent, it’s certainly not something everyone can do. Not that I can tell you how she manages it, she can’t explain it clearly herself. But if she’s been walking rapidly, then she can whistle from inside, and of course she uses it then to startle people, especially newly arrived patients. I presume, by the way, that she’s wasting nitrogen by doing it, because she has to get a refill every week.”

  And Hans Castorp was laughing now; during Joachim’s explanation, his agitation had resolved into mirth, and as he walked along, bent forward and shading his eyes with his hand, his shoulders were convulsed by his soft, rapid giggles.

  “Has the club been registered?” he asked, though he found it hard to speak, and it sounded more like a whine or whimper from suppressed laughter. “Do they have bylaws? What a shame you’re not a member, Joachim, because then they could include me as an honorary guest—or associate member. You should ask Behrens to put you temporarily out of commission. Maybe you’d be able to whistle, too, if you really set your mind to it, after all it must be something you can learn. That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” he said, taking a deep breath. “You’ll have to forgive me, really, for talking like this, but they were in a merry mood themselves, your pneumatic friends. Here they come walking up . . . and to think that it was the Half-Lung Club! ‘Tweeet’ she whistles at me—what a harum-scarum! What absolute devil-may-care. And I’m sure you can tell me just why they’re so devil-may-care, can’t you?”