The Magic Mountain (52 page)

An empty room, a room that had been “vacated”—with its furniture turned topsyturvy, and both doors standing wide, as one saw it in passing, on the way to the dining-room or one’s daily walks—was a most significant, and yet withal such an accustomed sight that one thought little of it, especially when one had, in one’s time, taken possession of just such a “vacated” room, and settled down to feel at home in it. Sometimes you knew whose room it had been, and that indeed gave you to think. Thus a week later Hans Castorp passed by and saw Leila Gerngross’s room in just that condition; and in this instance his understanding rebelled for the moment against what he saw. He stood and looked, perplexed and startled, and the Hofrat came that way, to whom he spoke.

“I see it is being turned out here. Good-morning, Herr Hofrat. Then little Leila—”

“Ay,” answered Behrens, and shrugged his shoulders. After a pause for the meaning of the gesture to take effect, he added: “So you paid court to her in form, just before the doors were shut? Decent of you, to take an interest in my lungers, considering you are relatively sound yourself. Shows a pretty trait of character—no, no, don’t be shy, quite a pretty trait. Shall I introduce you a bit here and there, what? I have all sorts of jail-birds in their little cells, if you want to see them. Just now, for instance, I am on my way to visit my ‘Overfilled.’ Want to come? I’ll introduce you as a sympathetic fellow sufferer.”

Hans Castorp replied that the Hofrat had taken the words out of his mouth, and offered him what he was on the point of asking. He would gratefully accept the permission to accompany him; but who was the ‘Overfilled’ and how did Hofrat

Behrens mean him to understand the title?

“Quite literally,” said the Hofrat. “Quite exactly, no metaphors. She’ll tell you about herself.” A few paces brought them before the room, and the Hofrat entered, bidding his companion wait.

As the double doors opened, the visitor heard the sound of clear and hearty laughter, which yet sounded short-winded, as though the person within were gasping for breath. Then it was shut away; but he heard it again when, a few minutes later, he was bidden to enter, and Behrens presented him to the blonde lady lying there in bed and looking at him with curiosity out of her blue eyes. She lay half sitting, supported by pillows, and seemed very restless; she laughed incessantly, struggling the while for breath: a high, purling, silver laughter, as though her plight excited or amused her. She was amused too, very likely, by the Hofrat’s turns of phrase in introducing the visitor, and called out repeated thanks and good-byes as he went off; waved her hand at his departing back; sighed melodiously, with runs of silver merriment, and pressed her hand against her heaving breast under the batiste night-gown. Her legs, it seemed, were never still.

The lady’s name was Frau Zimmermann. Hans Castorp knew her by sight; she had sat for some weeks at the table with Frau Salomon and the lad who bolted his food; then she had disappeared, and so far as Hans Castorp may have troubled about it, he supposed that she had gone home. Now he found her again, under the name of the “Overfilled,” and awaited an explanation.

“Ha ha, ha ha!” she carolled, in high glee, holding her fluttering bosom. “Frightfully funny man, is Behrens; killingly funny, makes you die of laughing. But sit down, Herr Kasten, or Garsten, or whatever your name is; you have such a funny name—ha ha, ha ha! You must please excuse me; do sit down on that chair near my feet, but please don’t mind if I thrash about with my legs, I cannot help it.”

She was almost pretty, with clear-cut, rather too well-defined though agreeable features, and a tiny double chin. Her lips and even the tip of her nose were blue, probably from lack of air. Her hands had an appealing thinness; the laces of the nightdress set them off; but she could keep them quiet no more than her feet. Her throat was like a girl’s, with “salt-cellars” above the delicate collar-bones; and her breast, heaving and struggling under the night-gown with her laughter and gasping breaths, looked tender and young. Hans Castorp decided to send or bring her flowers, a bouquet from the nurseries of Nice and Cannes, dewy and fragrant. With some misgiving he joined in her breathless and volatile mirth.

“And so you go round visiting the fever cases?” she asked. “That’s very amusing and friendly of you! But I’m not a fever case; that is, I wasn’t in the least, until just now—until this business—listen, and tell me if it isn’t just the funniest thing you ever heard in all your life!” And wrestling for air, amid trills and roulades of laughter, she related her story.

She had come up a little ill—well, ill, of course, for otherwise she would not have come; perhaps not quite a slight case, but rather slight than grave. The pneumothorax, that newest triumph of modern surgical technique, so rapidly become popular, had been brilliantly successful in her case. She made most gratifying progress, her condition was entirely satisfactory. Her husband—for she was married, though childless—might hope to have her home again in three or four months. Then, to divert herself, she made a trip to Zürich—there had been no other reason for her going, save simply to amuse herself—she had amused herself to her heart’s content, but found herself overtaken by the need to be “filled up” again and entrusted the business to a physician where she was. A nice, amusing young man—but what was the result? Here she was overtaken by a perfect paroxysm of laughter. He had filled her too full! There were no other words to describe it, that said it all. He had meant too well by her, he had probably not too well understood the technique; the long and short of it was, in that condition, not able to breathe, suffering from cardiac depression, she had come back—ah, ha, ha, ha! and Behrens, cursing and storming with a vengeance, had stuck her into bed. For now she was ill indeed, not actually in high fever, but finished, done, made a mess of—oh, what a face he was making, how funny he looked, ha, ha, ha! She pointed at Hans Castorp and laughed so hard that even her brow grew blue. The funniest thing of all, she said, was the way Behrens raved and reviled—it had made her laugh, at first, when she discovered that she was overfilled.

“You are in absolute danger of your life,” he had bellowed at her, just like that, without making any bones of it. “What a bear—ah, ha, ha, ha!—you really must please forgive me.”

It remained unclear what aspect of Behrens’s outburst had made her laugh; whether his brusqueness, and because she did not believe what he said, or whether she did believe it—as indeed she must, it would seem—and quite simply found the fact of her imminent danger “too funny for words.” Hans Castorp got the impression that it was the latter; and that she was pealing, trilling, and cascading with laughter only out of childish irresponsibility and the incomprehension of her birdlike brain. He disapproved. He sent her some flowers, but never again beheld the laughter-loving lady—who, indeed, after she had sustained life upon oxygen for some days, expired in the arms of her hurriedly summoned husband. “As big a goose as they make them,” the Hofrat called her, in telling Hans Castorp of her death.

But the young man had by then made further connexions among the serious cases, thanks to the Hofrat and the house nurses; and Joachim had to accompany him on the visits he made; for instance to the son of Tous-les-deux—the second, for the room of the first had long since been swept and garnished and fumigated with H2CO. They paid visits as well to Teddy, a boy who had lately been sent up from the “Fridericianum”—as the school below was called—because his case proved too severe for the life there; to Anton Farlowitsch Ferge, the Russo-German insurance agent, a good-natured martyr; and to that unhappy, and yet so coquettish creature, Frau von Mallinckrodt. She, like all the foregoing, received flowers, and was even fed more than once from the hands of Hans Castorp, in the presence of Joachim. They gradually acquired the name of good Samaritans and Brothers of Charity; Settembrini thus referred to their activities one day to Hans Castorp.

“
Sapperlot
, Engineer! What is this I am hearing of your activities? So you have thrown yourself into a career of benevolence? You are seeking justification through good works?”

“Nothing worth mentioning, Herr Settembrini. Nothing to make a fuss about. My cousin and I—”

“Don’t talk to me about your cousin. When the two of you make yourselves talked about, it is you we are dealing with. Your cousin’s is a good and simple nature, most worthy of respect; exposed to no intellectual perils, the sort that gives a schoolmaster not one anxious moment. You’ll not make me believe he is the moving spirit. No; yours is the more gifted, if also the more exposed nature. You are, if I may so express myself, life’s delicate child, one has to trouble about you. And moreover you have given me permission to trouble about you.”

“Certainly, Herr Settembrini—once and for all. Very kind of you. ‘Life’s delicate child,’ why, that’s very pretty—only an author would think of it. I don’t know if I’ve to flatter myself over the title, but I like the sound of it at least, I must say that. Yes, I do occupy myself rather with the ‘children of death,’ if that is what you refer to. I look in here and there among the serious cases and the dying when I have time, the service of the cure doesn’t suffer from it. I visit the ones who aren’t here for the fun of the thing, leading a disorderly life—the ones who are busy dying.” “And yet it is written: ‘Let the dead bury their dead,’ ” said the Italian.

Hans Castorp raised his arms, to signify that there was so much written, on both sides, it was hard to know the rights of it. Of course, the organ-grinder had voiced a disturbing point of view, that was to be expected. Hans Castorp was ready, now as ever, of his own free will to lend an ear to Settembrini’s teachings, and by way of experiment to be influenced by them. But he was far from being prepared to give up, for the sake of a pedagogic point of view, enterprises which he vaguely, despite Mother Gerngross and her phrases, despite the uninspiring young Rotbein and the cachinnations of the “Overfilled,” found somehow helpful and significant.

Tous-les-deux’s son was named Lauro. He too received flowers, earthy, heavenlysmelling violets from Nice, “from two sympathetic housemates, with best wishes for recovery”; and as this anonymity had by now become purely formal, since everyone knew the source whence such attentions came, Tous-les-deux herself thanked the cousins when they chanced to meet in the corridor. The pale, dark Mexican mother begged them, with a few incoherent words, and chiefly by means of a pathetic gesture of invitation, to come and receive in person the thanks of her son—
son seul et dernier
fils
,
qui allait mourir aussi
. They went at once. Lauro proved to be an astonishingly handsome young man, with great glowing eyes, a nose like an eagle’s beak, quivering nostrils, and beautiful lips, with a small black moustache sprouting above them. But his bearing was so theatrical and swaggering that Hans Castorp, this time no less than Joachim Ziemssen, was glad when they closed the invalid’s door behind them. Tousles-deux had ranged forlornly up and down the room, with her long, bent-kneed stride, in her black cashmere shawl, with the black scarf knotted beneath her chin, her forehead crossed with wrinkles, great pouches of skin under the jet-black eyes, and one corner of her large mouth pathetically drooping. Sometimes she approached them as they sat by the bed, to reiterate her parrotlike speech: “
Tous les dé
,
vous
comprenez
,
messiés—premièrement l’un et maintenant l’autre.”
And the handsome Lauro delivered himself of rolling, ranting, intolerably bombastic phrases, also in French, to the effect that he knew how a hero should die and meant to do it:
comme
heros
,
à l’espagnol
, like his young brother,
de même quo son fier jeune frère
Fernando, who likewise had died like a Spanish hero. He gesticulated, he tore open his shirt to offer his yellow breast to the stroke of fate; and continued thus, until an attack of coughing, which forced a thread of red foam to his lips, quenched his harangue and gave the cousins an excuse to go out, on tiptoe.

They did not mention the visit to Lauro’s bedside; even to themselves they refrained from comment on his behaviour. But both were better pleased with their call upon Anton Karlowitsch Ferge from St. Petersburg, who lay in bed, with his great good-natured beard and his just as good-natured-looking great Adam’s apple, recovering slowly from the unsuccessful attempt which had been made to install the pneumothorax in his interior economy, and which had been within a hair’s breadth of costing Herr Ferge his life on the spot. He had suffered a frightful shock, the pleurashock—a quite frequent occurrence in cases where this fashionable technique was applied. But Herr Ferge’s shock had been exceptionally dangerous, a total collapse and critical loss of consciousness, in a word so severe an attack that the operation had been broken off at once, and was indefinitely postponed.

Herr Ferge’s good-natured grey eyes grew large and round, his face went ashen coloured, when he came to speak of the operation, which must have been horrible indeed. “No anesthesia, my dear sir. In this case it doesn’t do, a sensible man understands that and accepts the situation as it is. But the local doesn’t reach very far down, it only benumbs the surface flesh, you feel it when they lay you open, like a pinching and squeezing. I lie there with my face covered, so I can’t see anything: the assistant holds me on one side and the Directress on the other. I feel myself being pinched and squeezed, that is the flesh they are laying back and pegging down. Then I hear the Hofrat say: ‘Very good’; and then he begins, with a blunt instrument—it must be blunt, not to pierce through too soon—to go over the pleura and find the place where he can make an incision and let the gas in; and when he begins moving about over my pleura with his instrument—oh, Lord, oh, Lord! I felt like—I felt it was all up with me—it was something perfectly indescribable. The pleura, my friends, is not anything that should be felt of; it does not want to be felt of and it ought not to be. It is taboo. It is covered up with flesh and put away once and for all; nobody and nothing ought to come near it. And now he uncovers it and feels all over it. My God, I was sick at my stomach. Horrible, awful; never in my life have I imagined there could be such a sickening feeling, outside hell and its torments. I fainted; I had three faintingfits one after the other, a green, a brown, and a violet. And there was a stink—the shock went to my sense of smell and I got an awful stench of hydrogen sulphide, the way it must smell in the bad place; with all that I heard myself laughing as I went off—not the way a human being laughs—it was the most indecent, ghastly kind of laughing I ever heard. Because, when they go over your pleura like that, I tell you what it is: it is as though you were being tickled—horribly, disgustingly tickled—that is just what the infernal torment of the pleura-shock is like, and may God keep you from it!”