The Magic Mountain (86 page)

They had walked together all the way to the Berghof; and then the three who lived there accompanied the other two back to their little house, where they all stood outside in the snow for a long time while Naphta and Settembrini continued their argument—for pedagogic purposes, as Hans Castorp well knew, in order to shape the impressionable minds of youth in search of light. All these things were much too high for Herr Ferge, however, and Wehsal proved less interested once the subject was no longer flogging or torture. Hans Castorp probed the snow with his cane, hung his head, and pondered the great confusion.

At last they parted. They could not stand there forever—and their subject was boundless. The three Berghof residents turned homeward, and the two pedagogic rivals were forced to enter their little house, the one climbing to his silken cell, the other to his humanist’s garret with its lectern and water carafe. Hans Castorp, however, retired to his balcony—his ears full of the hubbub and alarums of two armies, one from Jerusalem, the other from Babylon, advancing under the
dos banderas
and joining now in the confused tumult of battle.

Five times a day, the diners at all seven tables expressed unanimous dissatisfaction with this year’s winter. They were of the opinion that it was very negligent in fulfilling its duties as an Alpine winter and had failed to provide the meteorological medicine for which these regions were famous, in the quantities promised by the brochure, familiar to long-termers, and envisioned by newcomers. A massive deficit in sunlight—a significant factor in the cure—was noted; without those helpful rays, recuperation was doubtless retarded. And whatever Herr Settembrini might think of the sincerity with which these mountain guests went about getting well so that they could leave “home” and return to the flatlands, they did at any rate demand their rights, wanted full value for the money spent by their parents or spouses; and so they grumbled in the dining hall, the elevator, and the lobby. And management proved quite sensible about accommodating its guests and compensating for their losses. Another apparatus for “artificial sunlight” was purchased, since the two in service could not meet the demands of those who expected electricity to help them get a tan—a color that flattered the young girls and women and gave the men a splendidly, irresistibly athletic look despite their horizontal lifestyle. That look reaped its rewards in reality, too; the women, although fully aware of the purely cosmetic and technical origin of such virility, were foolish—or hardened—enough that they gladly chose to be deceived, to be carried away by the illusion, to let it capture their feminine hearts. “My God,” a red-haired, red-eyed patient from Berlin remarked one evening in the lobby. It was Frau Schönfeld, and she was speaking about a cavalier with long legs and a sunken chest—he had already undergone pneumothorax—whose calling card read “
Aviateur diplômé et Enseigne de la Marine allemande
” and who always appeared at dinner in formal dress, though never at supper, as per navy regulations, or so he claimed. “My God,” she said, voraciously eyeing the ensign, “what a marvelous tan the fellow has from the sunlamp. Looks as if he’s been out hunting eagles, the devil does.” And in the elevator he gave her goose bumps, bending down to her ear and whispering, “Just wait, you nymph! You’ll pay for that devastating glance you shot my way!” And skirting the glass panels of balconies, the devil and eagle-hunter found his way to the nymph.

All the same, it was generally felt that such artificial rays did not really compensate for the year’s deficit in genuine sunlight. Two or three days of full sunshine a month—even when they burst so splendidly out of the blur of foggy gray and thick cloud cover, spreading a deep, deep velvet blue behind the white peaks, scattering sparkling diamonds, and delightfully searing your face and the back of your neck—two or three such days over the course of so many weeks were not enough to help the mood of people whose fate justified their making extraordinary demands in the way of consolation and who presumed that in return for having renounced the joys and torments of flatland humanity, they had signed on for an easy and enjoyable, if rather lifeless life—on perfectly favorable terms, until time itself was abrogated. Nor did it help for the director to remind them that even under such circumstances life at the Berghof bore little resemblance to a stay on a prison ship or in a Siberian salt mine, or for him to praise the advantages of the local air, so thin and light, which like the pure ether of the spheres lacked all earthly admixtures, good or bad, and protected them from the fumes and vapors of the plains even without the sun; gloom and protest spread, threats of wild departures were the order of the day, and some were even carried out, despite sad examples like Frau Salomon, recently returned from her willful stay in windy, wet Amsterdam, whose case had once been stubborn but not serious, but now looked very much like a life sentence.

Instead of sun, there was snow, great, colossal masses of snow, more snow than Hans Castorp had ever seen in his life. The previous winter had truly not lacked for snow, but its output had been puny in comparison with this year, which produced it in monstrous, reckless quantities, reminding you of just how bizarre and outlandish these regions were. It snowed day after day, and on through the nights, in light flurries, in heavy squalls—but it snowed. The few paths still passable were like tunnels, with snow piled man-high on both sides, forming walls like slabs of alabaster, grainy with beautiful sparkling crystals, a surface guests found useful for drawing pictures or writing messages—news, jokes, ribaldries. And between the walls, the snow was packed so thick, despite all the shoveling, that here and there you came across holes and soft spots where you could suddenly sink in, sometimes up to the knee. You had to pay close attention to keep from accidentally breaking a leg. The benches had vanished, had sunk beneath the snow—here and there the back of one might stick up out of its white grave. Down in town, street level had shifted oddly until shops had become cellars you entered by descending stairways of snow.

And more snow kept falling on top of the rest, day in, day out, drifting down softly through the moderately cold air (five to fifteen above zero), which did not freeze you to the bone—you barely noticed, it felt more like twenty or twenty-five degrees; the air was still and so dry it took the sting out. The mornings were very dark; they ate breakfast by the light of the artificial moons in the dining hall with its cheerfully stenciled arches. Outside was gloomy nothing, a world packed in grayish-white cotton, in foggy vapors and whirling snow that pushed up against the windowpanes. The mountains were invisible, although over time something of the nearest evergreen forest might come into view, heavily laden with snow, only to be quickly lost in the next flurry; now and then a fir would shake off its burden, dumping dusty white into gray. Around ten o’clock the sun would appear like a wisp of softly illumined vapor above its mountain, a pale spook spreading a faint shimmer of reality over the vague, indiscernible landscape. But it all melted into a ghostly delicate pallor, with no definite lines, nothing the eye could follow with certainty. The contours of the peaks merged, were lost in fog and mist. Expanses of snow suffused with soft light rose in layers, one behind another, leading your gaze into insubstantiality. And what was probably a weakly illumined cloud clung to a cliff, motionless, like an elongated tatter of smoke.

Around noon the sun broke halfway through, struggling to melt the fog into blue, an attempt that fell far short of success. Yet there was a momentary hint of blue sky, and even this bit of light was enough to release a flash of diamonds across the wide landscape, so oddly disfigured by its snowy adventure. Usually the snow stopped at that hour of the day, as if for a quick survey of what had been achieved thus far; the rare days of sunshine seemed to serve much the same purpose—the flurries died down and the sun’s direct glare attempted to melt the luscious, pure surface of drifted new snow. It was a fairy-tale world, childlike and funny. Boughs of trees adorned with thick pillows, so fluffy someone must have plumped them up; the ground a series of humps and mounds, beneath which slinking underbrush or outcrops of rock lay hidden; a landscape of crouching, cowering gnomes in droll disguises—it was comic to behold, straight out of a book of fairy tales. But if there was something roguish and fantastic about the immediate vicinity through which you laboriously made your way, the towering statues of snow-clad Alps, gazing down from the distance, awakened in you feelings of the sublime and holy.

Afternoons, between two and four, Hans Castorp would lie on his balcony—wrapped up nice and warm, his head propped neither too high nor too low, but just right, against the adjustable back of his splendid lounge chair—and look out over the pillowed railing to the forests and mountains. Laden with snow, the greenish-black pine forest marched up the slopes, and between the trees every inch of ground was cushioned soft with snow. Above the forest, mountains of rock rose into whitish gray, with vast surfaces of snow broken occasionally by dark, jutting crags and ridges gently dissolving into mist. Snow was falling silently. Everything grew more and more blurred. Gazing into cottony nothing, eyes easily closed and drifted into slumber, and at just that moment a shiver passed over the body. And yet there could be no purer sleep than here in this icy cold, a dreamless sleep untouched by any conscious sense of organic life’s burdens; breathing this empty, vaporless air was no more difficult for the body than non-breathing was for the dead. And upon awakening, you found the mountains had vanished entirely in the snowy fog, with only pieces of them, a summit, a crag, emerging for a few moments and disappearing again. This soft, ghostly pantomime was extremely entertaining. You had to pay close attention to catch each stealthy change in the misty phantasmagoria. Freed of clouds, a huge, primitive segment of mountain, lacking top and bottom, would suddenly appear. But if you took your eye off it for only a minute, it had vanished again.

There were blizzards that prevented you from staying out on the balcony, when the wind drove great masses of white before it, covering the floor, furniture, everything, with a thick layer of snow. Yes, it could storm, even in this high, peaceful valley. The empty air would riot, until it was so full of whirling flakes that you could not see one step in front of you. Gusts that could suffocate you drove flurries in wild, driving, sidelong blasts, pulled snow up from the valley floor in great eddies, set it whirling in a mad dance—it was no longer snowfall, it was a chaos of white darkness, a beast. The whole region went on a monumental, unbridled rampage, and only the snow finches, which could suddenly appear in flocks, seemed to feel at home in it.

And yet Hans Castorp loved life in the snow. He found it similar in many ways to life at the shore: a primal monotony was common to both landscapes. The snow, a deep, loose, unblemished powder, played the same role here as yellowish-white sand did down below; both felt clean to the touch; you shook the dry, icy white from your shoes and clothes just as you brushed off the crushed stones and shells from the bottom of the sea—neither was dusty, neither left a trace behind. And wading through snow was just as difficult as wading through sand dunes, except when the sun melted the surface during the day and it froze hard again at night: then you moved across it as lightly as across a parquet floor—it was the same easy, pleasant feeling you got walking over the smooth, firm, springy, salt-rinsed sand at the edge of the sea.

But this year the massive accumulation from so many snowfalls had seriously limited everyone’s movement in the open—except for skiers, of course. The snowplows did their work; but they had trouble keeping open even the town’s main street and most frequented paths, and the few free passageways, all of them ending in impassable drifts, were crowded with the traffic of the healthy and sick, locals and hotel guests from around the world; pedestrians, however, were constantly in danger of being toppled by sledders, ladies and gentlemen who came sweeping, swerving, and careering down the slopes on their childish vehicles, leaning far back, feet outstretched, yelling warnings in tones that revealed just how importantly they took the enterprise; and no sooner had they reached the bottom than they turned around, grabbed the rope, and pulled their fashionable toys back uphill.

Hans Castorp was fed up with such promenades. He had only two great wishes: the first, and stronger, was to be alone with his thoughts to “play king,” and his balcony permitted him to do that, at least perfunctorily. His other wish, however, bound up with the first, was to enjoy a freer, more active, more intense experience of the snowy mountain wilderness, for which he felt a great affinity; but as long as he remained a mere unarmed, uncharioted pedestrian, his wish could never be fulfilled; and had he attempted it, he would have found himself up over his chest in snow the moment he pressed on beyond the shoveled paths, all of which quickly came to an end.

And so one day during his second winter up here, Hans Castorp decided he would buy skis and learn how to use them—well enough at least for his practical purposes. He was no athlete, had never been interested in sports, did not pretend he was, the way many Berghof guests did—the ladies in particular, who decked themselves out in sporty outfits to match the spirit of the place. Hermine Kleefeld, for example—although her lips and the tip of her nose were blue from shallow breathing—loved to appear at lunch in woolen trousers, and after the meal she would loll about, knees spread wide, in one of the wicker chairs in the lobby. If Hans Castorp had asked the director for permission to carry out his eccentric plan, he would have been rebuffed in no uncertain terms. Athletic activities were strictly forbidden to all members of their society up here, both at the Berghof and at similar institutions; for although the air seemed to fill the lungs so easily, it made great demands on the heart; and in Hans Castorp’s case, his clever remark about “getting used to not getting used” to things was as valid as ever, and his fever, which Rhadamanthus traced to a moist spot, persisted stubbornly. Why else would he even be here? His wishes and plans were both inconsistent and prohibited. But let there be no misunderstanding here—he had no ambition to emulate fresh-air dandies and rakish athletes, who if fashion had demanded it, would have been just as fanatic about playing cards in a stuffy room. He certainly felt that he was part of a different, more restricted society, was anything but a tourist; and his more recent, broadening perspective had brought with it attenuating duties and a dignity that distanced him from others, so that he was not of a mind to join them in their romps or to roll in the snow like a fool. He was not interested in escapades, he would proceed in moderation. Rhadamanthus might very well have authorized such plans, but house rules would have required him to forbid them. And so Hans Castorp decided to proceed behind his back.