The Magic Mountain (12 page)
“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 quite 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?”
Joachim searched for an answer. “My God,” he said, “they’re so
free
. I mean, they’re young and time plays no role in their lives, and they may very well die. Why should they go around with long faces? I sometimes think that illness and death aren’t really serious matters, that it’s all more like loafing around, and that, strictly speaking, things are serious only down below in real life. I think maybe you’ll come to understand that in due time, after you’ve been up here with us a little longer.”
“Certainly,” Hans Castorp said, “I’m certain I shall. I’m already taking a great deal of interest in all of you up here, and once one is interested, why then understanding follows as a matter of course, doesn’t it? But what’s wrong with me—this doesn’t taste good,” he said, looking at his cigar. “I’ve been asking myself the whole time what was the matter, and now I realize that my Maria is the problem. I swear to you, it tastes like papier-mâché, exactly as if I had a terribly upset stomach. It’s really quite incredible! I did eat an unusually large breakfast, but that can’t be the reason, because when you eat a lot, it always tastes especially good at first. Do you think it can be because I slept so restlessly? Perhaps that’s thrown me off track. No, I’m simply going to have to toss it away,” he said after trying once more. “Every puff is a disappointment; there’s no point in forcing it.” He hesitated for a moment and then flicked the cigar down the slope among the wet pines. “Do you know what I’m convinced is to blame?” he asked. “I am thoroughly convinced that it has something to do with this damned flushed face of mine—it’s been bothering me again ever since I got up. Damned if it doesn’t feel as if I’m constantly blushing in embarrassment. Was it the same with you, too, when you first arrived?”
“Yes,” Joachim said, “I felt rather strange, too, at first. Don’t worry about it. I told you, if you remember, that it’s not all that easy to get used to our life up here. But you’ll soon be back on track. Look there, that bench has a nice view. Let’s sit down for a bit and then head home—I need to take my rest cure.”
They were now about a third of the way up the hill, but the path had leveled out, heading now in the direction of Davos-Platz. From between the tall firs and a few stunted ones bent by the wind, the view looked down on the village, which lay white under a brighter sky. The rudely fashioned bench on which they sat had its back to the steep slope. Water fell in an open wooden trough beside them, gurgling and splashing on its way to the valley.
Pointing with the tip of his alpenstock, Joachim set about teaching his cousin the names of the cloud-topped peaks that appeared to close off the valley to the south. But Hans Castorp was bent forward, glancing up only fleetingly while drawing figures in the sand with the silver-trimmed knob of his citified cane. And now he demanded to know other things.