“You’re wearing a new dress,” he said, as an excuse for gazing at her.
And now he heard her answer.
“New? You are conversant with my wardrobe?”
“I am right, am I not?”
“Yes. I recently had it made here, by Lukaček, the tailor in the village. He does work for many of the ladies up here. Do you like it?”
“Very much,” he said, letting his gaze pass over her again before casting his eyes down. “Do you want to dance?” he added.
“Would you like to?” she asked, her brows raised in surprise, but still with a smile.
“I’d do it, if that’s what you want.”
“You’re not quite as well-mannered as I thought you were,” she said.
When he dismissed this with a laugh, she added, “Your cousin has already gone.”
“Yes, he is my cousin,” he confirmed quite unnecessarily. “I also noticed a while ago that he had left. I’m sure he’s taking his rest cure.”
“He is a very rigid, very respectable, very ‘German’ young man.”
“Rigid? Respectable?” he repeated. “I understand French better than I speak it. What you mean to say is that he’s pedantic. Do you consider us Germans pedantic—us other Germans?”
“We are talking about your cousin. But it’s true, you are all a little bourgeois. You love order more than liberty, all Europe knows that.”
“Love . . . love. What is it, exactly? The word lacks definition. What one man has, the other loves, as the German proverb puts it,” Hans Castorp contended. “I have been giving freedom some thought of late,” he continued. “That is, I heard the word mentioned so often, that I started thinking about it. I’ll tell you in French what it is I’ve been thinking. What all Europe refers to as liberty is, perhaps, something rather pedantic, rather bourgeois in comparison to our need for order—that’s the point!”
“You don’t say! How amusing. Was it really your cousin who got you thinking such strange things?”
“No, he is truly a good soul, his is a simple temperament, not prone to intellectual dangers, you understand. But he is not a bourgeois, he is a military man.”
“Not prone?” she repeated with difficulty. “By which you mean to say: a thoroughly steadfast nature, secure in itself? But your poor cousin is seriously ill.”
“Who told you that?”
“We all know about one another here.”
“Did Director Behrens tell you that?”
“Possibly, when he let me see his paintings.”
“Don’t you mean, when he was painting your portrait?”
“Why not? Did you think it successful, my portrait?”
“Oh yes, extremely. Behrens captured your skin perfectly, oh, truly quite lifelike. I would very much have liked to have been a portrait painter myself, if only to have had the chance to study your skin, as he did.”
“Please, sir, speak German!”
“Oh, but I am speaking German, even if I am speaking French. Painting is the kind of study that is both artistic and medical—in a word: it is, you see, a humanist pursuit. So what do you say, wouldn’t you like to dance?”
“Certainly not—how childish. Behind the doctor’s back. The moment Behrens returns, they will all throw themselves on their lounge chairs. How utterly ridiculous it all is.”
“Do you hold him in such high respect, then?”
“Whom?” she asked, pronouncing the word in a strange, clipped way.
“Behrens.”
“Enough of your Behrens already! It’s much too small a space for dancing. And on the carpet besides . . . Let’s just watch the others.”
“Yes, let’s do that,” he concurred, and with her beside him, he turned his grandfather’s blue, thoughtful eyes, framed in a pallid face, to watch the costumed patients skip about in the salon here and in the reading room beyond. Silent Sister was capering with Blue Henry, and Frau Salomon, who was dressed like a gentleman in evening clothes— swallowtail coat, white vest, amply filled shirt, monocle, and painted-on moustache—spun about on her little patent leather high-heeled shoes (which looked very out of place with her long, black men’s trousers) in the arms of her Punchinello, whose lips shone bloody red in his whitened face and whose eyes looked like an albino rabbit’s. The caped Greek moved his legs in their purple tights in perfect harmony with Rasmussen, whose black, low-cut dress sparkled. The prosecutor in his kimono, Frau Wurmbrandt, the general consul’s wife, and young Gänser were dancing as a threesome, their arms thrown around one another. As for Frau Stöhr, she danced with her broom, pressing it to her heart and caressing its bristles as if they were the hair on a man’s head.
“Let’s do that,” Hans Castorp said mechanically again. And so they went on speaking softly, their conversation covered by the piano.
“Let’s sit here and watch, as if in a dream. It is like a dream for me, you know, for me to be sitting here like this—like an especially deep dream, for a man must sleep very heavily to dream like this. What I’m trying to say is: it is a dream I know well, have dreamed for a long time, yes, eternally, sitting here with you as I am now. Behold—eternity.”
“A poet!” she said. “A bourgeois, a humanist, and a poet—behold, Germany all rolled into one, just as it should be!”
“I’m afraid we are not at all, not in the least, as we should be,” he replied. “Not in any way. We are perhaps life’s problem children, that’s all.”
“Nicely put. Tell me . . . surely it would not have been too difficult to dream your dream before now. It is a little late for monsieur to decide to address his words to his humble servant.”
“What good are words?” he said.
“Why speak? Speech, discourse—those are nice republican things, I admit. But I doubt if they are equally poetic. One of our fellow residents, who has in fact become something of a friend, Monsieur Settembrini . . .”
“Who just let fly with a few words in your direction.”
“Be that as it may, he is no doubt an eloquent speaker, indeed loves to recite beautiful verses—but does that make the man a poet?”
“I deeply regret never having had the pleasure of making the gentleman’s acquaintance.”
“I can well believe it.”
“Ah! You believe it.”
“What? But that’s just a phrase one uses, with no real significance whatever. As you’ve surely noticed, I barely speak French. All the same, I would rather speak with you in it than in my own language, since for me speaking French is like speaking without saying anything somehow—with no responsibilities, the way we speak in a dream. Do you understand?”
“More or less.”
“That will do. Speech—” Hans Castorp continued, “what a poor business it is! In eternity, people won’t speak at all. Eternity, you see, will be like drawing that piglet: you’ll turn your head away and close your eyes.”
“Not bad! You seem quite at home in eternity, know its every detail, no doubt. I must say I find you a very curious little dreamer.”
“Besides,” Hans Castorp said, “if I had spoken to you before this, I would have had to use the formal pronoun.”
“I see. Do you intend to use only the informal with me from now on?”
“But of course. I’ve used it with you all along, and will for all eternity.”
“That’s a bit much, I must say. In any case, you won’t have the opportunity to use informal pronouns with me for much longer. I’m leaving.”
It took a while before what she had said penetrated his consciousness. But then he started up, looking about in befuddlement, like someone rudely awakened from sleep. Their conversation had proceeded rather slowly, because Hans Castorp’s French was clumsy and he spoke haltingly as he tried to express himself. The piano, which had briefly fallen silent, struck up again, now under the hands of the man from Mannheim, who had taken over for the Slavic lad. He had spread his music out before him, and Fräulein Engelhart now sat down next to him to turn pages. The party was thinning out. The majority of the residents appeared to have assumed the horizontal position. There was no one sitting in front of them now. People were again playing cards in the reading room.
“It’s not possible,” he said. “You’re joking.”
“Most certainly not. I am perfectly serious. I am leaving.”
“When?”
“Why, tomorrow. After dinner.”
A whole world was collapsing inside him. He said, “And where are you going?”
“Very far away.”
“To Daghestan?”
“You’re not badly informed. Perhaps—for now at least.”
“Are you cured, then?”
“As for that. . . no. But Behrens doesn’t think I can achieve much more here, for the present at least. Which is why I may now risk a little change of air.”
“So you will be coming back?”
“That’s an open question. Or, rather, the real question is when. As for me, you know, I love freedom above all else—especially the freedom to choose my place of residence. I can hardly expect you to understand what it means to be obsessed with independence. It’s in the blood, perhaps.”
“And your husband in Daghestan consents to—your liberty?”
“It is my illness that allows me liberty. You see, this is now my third time here. I’ve been here a year now. I may well return. But you will be far from here long before that.”
“Do you think so, Clavdia?”
“And my first name, too! You certainly do take the customs of carnival very seriously!”
“So you do know how sick I am?”
“Yes—no—the way one knows things here. You have a little moist spot there inside, a bit of fever, isn’t that right?”
“A hundred, a hundred point two in the afternoon,” Hans Castorp said. “And you?”
“Oh, my case is a little more complicated, you see—it’s not that simple.”
“Within the humanist branch of letters called medicine, there is something,” Hans Castorp said, “that they call tubercular congestion in the lymphatic vessels.”
“Ah! You have a spy, my dear, that’s quite clear.”
“And you—please, forgive me! I must ask you something, ask you something very urgent, but in German. That day, six months ago, when I left the table for my checkup— you looked up and watched me go, do you remember?”
“What sort of question is that? Six months ago!”
“Did you know where I was going?”
“Certainly, but only quite by accident.”
“So Behrens had told you, hadn’t he?”
“You and your Behrens!”
“Oh, he rendered your skin in absolutely lifelike fashion. Moreover, he is a widower with glowing cheeks who happens to own a really remarkable coffee service. I can well believe that he knows your body not merely as a doctor, but also as an initiate in another humanistic discipline.”
“You have every reason to say you speak as if in a dream, my friend.”
“That may be. But you must first let me dream anew, now that you’ve awakened me so cruelly with that alarm bell about your departure. Seven months beneath your gaze— and now, when I’ve come to know you in reality, you tell me you’re leaving!”
“And I repeat, we should have chatted long before this.”
“So you would have liked that?”
“Me? You won’t slip out of it that easily, my boy. This is about your interests, about you. Were you too shy to approach a woman with whom you are now speaking as if in a dream, or was there someone else who prevented your doing so?”
“I told you. I didn’t want to address you with formal pronouns.”
“What a fraud. Answer me—the gentleman who speaks so eloquently, that Italian who just left our soiree—what words did he let fly just now?”
“I didn’t understand any of it. The gentleman meant not a whit to me the moment I laid eyes on you. But you forget—it would not have been at all easy to have made your acquaintance in society. Besides, there is my cousin with whom I am involved and who has little or no inclination to amuse himself here; he thinks about nothing except returning to the plains to be a soldier.”
“Poor devil. He is, in fact, more ill than he knows. Your friend the Italian, by the way, is not doing very much better.”
“He says so himself. But my cousin—is that true? You frighten me.”
“It is quite possible that he will die if he tries to be a soldier on the plains.”
“That he will die. Death. A terrible word, isn’t it? But it’s strange, the word doesn’t impress me so much today. It was more just a conventional phrase when I said, ‘You frighten me.’ The idea of death doesn’t frighten me. It leaves me calm. It arouses no pity —either for dear old Joachim or for myself—to hear that he may die. If that’s true, then his condition is very much like my own, and I don’t find mine particularly grand. He is dying, and me, I’m in love—fine! You spoke with my cousin once, in the waiting room outside where they take intimate photographs, if you recall.”
“I vaguely recall.”
“It was the same day that Behrens took your transparent portrait!”
“But of course.”
“My God! And do you have it with you?”
“No, I keep it in my room.”
“Ah, in your room. As for mine, I always keep it in my wallet. Would you like me to show it to you?”
“A thousand thanks, but I’m not overwhelmed with curiosity. It is sure to look quite innocent.”
“Well, I have seen your exterior portrait. But I would much prefer to see the interior portrait you have locked up in your room. Let me ask you something else. From time to time a Russian gentleman who lives in town comes to visit you. Who is he? What is his purpose in coming?”
“You’re enormously skilled at espionage, I must say. All right—I’ll give you an answer. Yes, he is an ailing compatriot, a friend. I made his acquaintance at another resort, some years ago. Our relationship? We have tea together, we smoke two or three papyrosy, we gossip, we philosophize, we talk about man, God, life, morality, a thousand things. And with that my tale is ended. Are you satisfied?”
“About morality as well! And what discoveries have you in fact made about morality, for example?”
“Morality? It interests you, does it? All right—it seems to us that one ought not to search for morality in virtue, which is to say in reason, in discipline, in good behavior, in respectability—but in just the opposite, I would say: in sin, in abandoning oneself to danger, to whatever can harm us, destroy us. It seems to us that it is more moral to lose oneself and let oneself be ruined than to save oneself The great moralists have never been especially virtuous, but rather adventurers in evil, in vice, great sinners who teach us as Christians how to stoop to misery. You must find that all very repugnant.”
He fell silent. He was still sitting just as at the start—bending toward the woman reclining there in her paper tricorn, his intertwined feet far back under his creaking chair, her pencil between his fingers—and from lowered eyes, Hans Lorenz Castorp’s blue eyes, he looked out into the room, which was empty now. The guests had scattered. The piano in the far corner across from them tinkled softly, disjointedly; the patient from Mannheim was playing with just one hand, while the teacher at his side paged through the music, which she now held on her knees. As the conversation between Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat died away, the pianist stopped playing altogether, laying the hand with which he had been doodling back in his lap. Fräulein Engelhart went on thumbing through the music. Only these four were left now from the Mardi Gras party—they sat there motionless. The stillness lasted several minutes. Slowly it weighed down on the couple at the piano until their heads sank deeper and deeper, the Mannheimer’s toward the keyboard, Fräulein Engelhart’s toward her music. Finally, almost simultaneously, as if by some silent agreement, they stood up circumspectly; ingeniously avoiding any glances toward the other occupied corner of the room, with heads tucked low and arms stiff to their sides, the man from Mannheim and the teacher softly vanished together on tiptoe by way of the reading room.
“They’re all retiring to their rooms,” Frau Chauchat said. “Those were the last; it’s getting late. Ah yes, our carnival festivities are over.” And she raised both arms to remove her paper hat from her reddish hair, wound in a braid around her head. “You know the consequences, monsieur.”
But Hans Castorp rejected this, keeping his eyes closed and not changing his position in the least. He replied, “Never, Clavdia. Never will I address you formally, never in life or in death, if I may put it that way, and surely I may. That form of address, as cultivated in the West and in civilized society, seems terribly bourgeois and pedantic to me. Why, indeed, use such forms? Formality is the same thing as pedantry! All those things you have established in regard to morality, you and your ailing compatriot—do you seriously suppose they surprise me? What sort of dolt do you take me for? So then tell me, what do you think of me?”
“That is a subject requiring little thought. You are a decent, simple fellow from a good family, with handsome manners, a docile pupil to his teachers, who will soon return to the flatlands in order to forget completely that he ever spoke in a dream here and to help repay his great and powerful fatherland with honest labor on the wharves. And there you have your own intimate photograph, taken with no apparatus at all. You do find it a good likeness, I hope?”
“It lacks some of the details that Behrens found there.”
“Ah, the doctors are always finding something, it’s what they’re good at.”
“You sound like Monsieur Settembrini. And my fever? Where does it come from?”
“Oh, go on, it’s an episode of no consequence that will pass quickly.”
“No, Clavdia, you know perfectly well that what you say is not true and is spoken without conviction, of that I am certain. The fever in my body and the pounding of my exhausted heart and the trembling in my hands, it is anything but an episode, for it is nothing but”—and he bent his pale face deeper toward hers, his lips twitching—“nothing but my love for you, yes, the love that overwhelmed me the instant I laid eyes on you, or better, the love that I acknowledged once I recognized you—and it is that love, obviously, that has led me to this place.”
“What foolishness!”
“Oh, love is nothing if not foolish, something mad and forbidden, an adventure in evil. Otherwise it is merely a pleasant banality, good for singing calm little songs down on the plains. But when I recognized you, recognized my love for you—it’s true, I knew you before, from days long past, you and your marvelously slanting eyes and your mouth and the voice with which you speak—there was a time long ago, when I was still just a schoolboy, that I asked you for a pencil, just so I could meet you at last, because I loved you with an irrational love, and no doubt what Behrens found in my body are the lingering traces of my age-old love for you, proof that I was sick even back then.” His teeth banged together. While he fantasized, he had pulled one foot out from under his creaking chair, and shoving it out in front of him and letting his other knee touch the floor, he was now kneeling beside her, his head bent low, his whole body quivering. “I love you,” he babbled, “I have always loved you, for you are the ‘intimate you’ of my life, my dream, my destiny, my need, my eternal desire.”
“Come, come!” she said. “If your teachers could only see you—”
But in his despair he merely shook his head, his face still directed toward the carpet, and replied, “I don’t care, I don’t care about Carducci and the republic of eloquence and human progress over time, because I love you!”
She softly stroked the short-cropped hair at the back of his head with one hand. “My little bourgeois!” she said. “My handsome bourgeois with the little moist spot. Is it true that you love me so much?”
Thrilled by her touch—on both knees now, head thrown back, eyes closed—he went on, “Ah, love, you know. The body, love, death, are simply one and the same. Because the body is sickness and depravity, it is what produces death, yes, both of them, love and death, are carnal, and that is the source of their terror and great magic! But death, you see, is on the one hand something so disreputable, so impudent that it makes us blush with shame; and on the other it is a most solemn and majestic force—something much more lofty than a life spent laughing, earning money, and stuffing one’s belly—much more venerable than progress chattering away the ages—because it is history and nobility and piety, the eternal and the sacred, something that makes you remove your hat and walk on tiptoe. In the same way, the body, and love of the body, too, are indecent and disagreeable; the body’s surface blushes and turns pale because it is afraid and ashamed of itself. But at the same time it is a great and divine glory, a miraculous image of organic life, a holy miracle of form and beauty, and love of it, of the human body, is likewise an extremely humanistic affair and an educating force greater than all the pedagogy in the world! Ah, ravishing organic beauty, not done in oils or stone, but made of living and corruptible matter, full of the feverish secret of life and decay! Consider the marvelous symmetry of the human frame, the shoulders and the hips and the breasts as they blossom at each side of the chest, and the ribs arranged in pairs, and the navel set amid the supple belly, and the dark sexual organs between the thighs! Consider the shoulder blades shifting beneath the silky skin of the back, and the spine descending into the fresh doubled luxuriance of the buttocks, and the great network of veins and nerves that branch out from the trunk through the armpits, and the way the structure of the arms corresponds to that of the legs. Oh, the sweet inner surfaces of the elbow and the hollow of the knee, with their abundance of organic delicacies beneath the padding of flesh! What an immense festival of caresses lies in those delicious zones of the human body! A festival of death with no weeping afterward! Yes, good God, let me smell the odor of the skin on your knee, beneath which the ingeniously segmented capsule secretes its slippery oil! Let me touch in devotion your pulsing femoral artery where it emerges at the top of your thigh and then divides farther down into the two arteries of the tibia! Let me take in the exhalation of your pores and brush the down—oh, my human image made of water and protein, destined for the contours of the grave, let me perish, my lips against yours!”
When he finished speaking, he did not open his eyes; he remained just as he was—his head thrown back, his hands stretched out before him, still holding the little silver pencil —quivering and swaying there on his knees.
She said, “You are indeed a gallant suitor, one who knows how to woo in a very profound, German fashion.” And she set her paper hat on his head. “Adieu, my Carnival Prince! I can predict that you’ll see a nasty rise in your fever chart this evening.”
Then she glided out of her chair, glided across the carpet to the door, where she stopped and turned halfway back to him, one bare arm raised, a hand on the hinge. Over her shoulder she said softly, “Don’t forget to return my pencil.”
And she left.
