The Magic Mountain (54 page)

They even took Karen, one afternoon, to the Bioscope Theatre in the Platz—she loved it all so very much. The bad air they sat in was offensive to the three, used as they were to breathing the purest; it oppressed their breathing and made their heads feel heavy and dull. Life flitted across the screen before their smarting eyes: life chopped into small sections, fleeting, accelerated; a restless, jerky fluctuation of appearing and disappearing, performed to a thin accompaniment of music, which set its actual
tempo
to the phantasmagoria of the past, and with the narrowest of means at its command, yet managed to evoke a whole gamut of pomp and solemnity, passion, abandon, and gurgling sensuality. It was a thrilling drama of love and death they saw silently reeled off; the scenes, laid at the court of an oriental despot, galloped past, full of gorgeousness and naked bodies, thirst of power and raving religious selfabnegation; full of cruelty, appetite, and deathly lust, and slowing down to give a full view of the muscular development of the executioner’s arms. Constructed, in short, to cater to the innermost desires of an onlooking international civilization. Settembrini, as critic, Hans Castorp thought, and whispered as much to his cousin, would doubtless have sharply characterized what they saw as repugnant to a humanistic sense, and have scarified with direct and classic irony the prostitution of technical skill to such a humanly contemptible performance. On the other hand, Frau Stöhr, who was sitting not far from our three friends, seemed utterly absorbed; her ignorant red face was twisted into an expression of the hugest enjoyment.

And so were the other faces about them. But when the last flicker of the last picture in a reel had faded away, when the lights in the auditorium went up, and the field of vision stood revealed as an empty sheet of canvas, there was not even applause. Nobody was there to be applauded, to be called before the curtain and thanked for the rendition. The actors who had assembled to present the scenes they had just enjoyed were scattered to the winds; only their shadows had been here, their activity had been split up into millions of pictures, each with the shortest possible period of focus, in order to give it back to the present and reel it off again at will. The silence of the crowd, as the illusion passed, had about it something nerveless and repellent. Their hands lay powerless in face of the nothing that confronted them. They rubbed their eyes, stared vacantly before them, blinking in the brilliant light and wishing themselves back in the darkness, looking at sights which had had their day and then, as it were, had been transplanted into fresh time, and bedizened up with music. The despot died beneath the knife, with a soundless shriek. Then came scenes from all parts of the world: the President of the French Republic, in top-hat and cordon, sitting in a landau and replying to a speech of welcome; the Viceroy of India, at the wedding of a rajah; the German Crown Prince in the courtyard of a Potsdam garrison. There was a picture of life in a New Mecklenburg village; a cock-fight in Borneo, naked savages blowing on nose-horns, a wild elephant hunt, a ceremony at the court of the King of Siam, a courtesans’ street in Japan, with geishas sitting behind wooden lattices; Samoyeds bundled in furs, driving sledges drawn by reindeer through the snowy wastes of Siberia; Russian pilgrims praying at Hebron; a Persian criminal under the knout. They were present at all these scenes; space was annihilated, the clock put back, the then and there played on by music and transformed into a juggling, scurrying now and here. A young Moroccan woman, in a costume of striped silk, with trappings in the shape of chains, bracelets, and rings, her swelling breasts half bared, was suddenly brought so close to the camera as to be life-sized; one could see the dilated nostrils, the eyes full of animal life, the features in play as she showed her white teeth in a laugh, and held one of her hands, with its blanched nails, for a shade to her eyes, while with the other she waved to the audience, who stared, taken aback, into the face of the charming apparition. It seemed to see and saw not, it was not moved by the glances bent upon it, its smile and nod were not of the present but of the past, so that the impulse to respond was baffled, and lost in a feeling of impotence. Then the phantom vanished. The screen glared white and empty, with the one word
Finis
written across it. The entertainment was over, in silence the theatre was emptied, a new audience took the place of that going out, and before their eager eyes the cycle would presently unroll itself again.

Incited by Frau Stöhr, who joined them at the exit, they paid a visit to the café at the Kurhaus, Karen clapping her hands in delighted gratitude. Here too there was music, a small, red-uniformed orchestra, conducted by a Bohemian or Hungarian first violin, who stood apart from the others, among the dancing couples, and belaboured his instrument with frantic wreathings of his body. Life here was
mondaine:
strange drinks were handed at the tables. The cousins ordered orangeade for the refreshment of their charge and themselves, while Frau Stöhr took a brandy and sugar. The room was hot and dusty. At this hour, she said, the café life was not yet in full swing, the dancing became much livelier as the evening advanced, and numerous patients from the sanatoria, as well as dissipated folk from the hotels and the Kurhaus, many more than were here as yet, came later to join the fun. More than one serious case had here danced himself into eternity, tipping up the beaker of life to drain the last drop, and
in
dulcí jubilo
suffering his final hæmorrhage. The
dulci jubilo
became, on her unlettered lips, something extraordinary. The first word she pronounced
dolce
, with some reminiscence of her musical husband’s Italian vocabulary; but the second suggested
jubilee
, or an attempt to yodel, or goodness alone knew what. The cousins both devoted themselves assiduously to the straws in their glasses, when this Latin was given out—but Frau Stöhr took no offence. She began, drawing back her lips and showing her rodent-like teeth, to drop hints and make insinuations on the subject of the relations of the three young people. As far as poor Karen was concerned, it was all pretty obvious, and, as Frau Stöhr said, she could not but enjoy being chaperoned, on her little outings, by such fine cavaliers. But the other side was not so easy to come at. However, ignorance and stupidity notwithstanding, the creature’s feminine intuition helped her to a glimpse, even though a partial and vulgarized one, of the truth. For she saw, and even teasingly aimed at the fact, that Hans Castorp was the cavalier, and young Ziemssen merely in attendance; further—for she was aware of the state of Hans Castorp’s feeling toward Madame Chauchat—that he was playing the gallant to poor little Karstedt because he did not know how to approach the other. It was a simple guess, lacking profundity and not actually covering all the facts of the case—in short, it was only too worthy of Frau Stöhr, and when she came out with it, flat-footed, he did not even answer, save by a faint smile and an impenetrable stare. So much was true, after all, that poor Karen did afford him a substitute, an intangible yet real support, as did the rest of his charitable activities. But at the same time they were an end in themselves too. The inward satisfaction he experienced whenever he fed the afflicted Frau Mallinckrodt her broth, or suffered Herr Ferge to tell him once more the tale of the infernal pleura-shock, or saw poor Karen clapping her ravaged and mortifying hands in grateful joy, was perhaps of a vicarious and relative kind; yet it was none the less pure and immediate. It was rooted in a tradition diametrically opposed to the one Herr Settembrini, as pedagogue, represented—yet seemed to him, young Hans Castorp, for all that, not unworthy of having applied to it the
placet
experiri.

The little house where Karen Karstedt lived lay near the railway track and the watercourse, on the way to the Dorf, quite conveniently for the cousins to fetch her after breakfast for the morning walk. Going thence toward the village, to arrive upon the main street, one had before one the little Schiahorn, and on its right three peaks which were called the Green Towers, but were now covered like the rest with snow that gleamed blindingly in the sun. Still further to the right came the round summit of the Dorfberg, and a quarter of the way up its slope was visible the cemetery of the Dorf, surrounded by a wall, obviously commanding a fine view, very likely of the distant lake, and thus suggesting itself naturally as the goal of a promenade. Thither they went, one lovely morning—indeed, all the days now were lovely; with a hot sun, a sparkling frost, a deep-blue, windless air, and a scene that glittered whitely all abroad. The cousins, one of them brick-red in the face, the other bronzed, walked without overcoats, which would have been intolerable in this sunshine: young Ziemssen in sports clothes, with “arctics,” Hans Castorp in arctics as well, but with long trousers, not feeling worldly enough to don short ones. This was the new year, between the beginning and middle of February—yes, the last figure in the date had changed since Hans Castorp came up here, it was written now with the next higher digit. The minute-hand on time’s clock had moved one space further on: not one of the large spaces, not one which measured the centuries or the decades; it was only the year that had been shoved forward by one figure; though Hans Castorp had been up here not a whole year yet, but scarcely more than half a one, it had jerked itself on, as does the minute-hand of certain large clocks, which only register by five minutes at a time; and was now pointing motionless, awaiting the moment to move forward again. But the hand that marked the months would have to move on for ten spaces more, only two more, in fact, than it had moved since he came up here; for February did not count, being once begun—as money changed counts as money spent.

To the graveyard then, on the slope of the Dorfberg, the three wended their way— we tell it to complete the tale of their excursions. It was Hans Castorp’s idea; Joachim probably had scruples at first, on the score of poor Karen, but in the end agreed that it was useless to pretend with her, or to carry out Frau Stöhr’s cowardly policy of shielding her from all that could remind her of her end. Karen Karstedt was not yet so far on as to display the self-deception that marks the last stage. She knew quite well how it stood with her, and what the necrosis of her finger-tips meant: knew too that her unfeeling relatives would not hear of the unnecessary expense of having her sent back home, and that it would be her lot, after her exit, to fill a modest space up yonder. In short, it might even be said that such an excursion was more fitting, morally spoken, than many another, than the cinematograph or the bob-sleigh races, for example—and surely it was no more than proper to make those lying up there a visit once in a way, as a comradely attention, provided one did not regard it as in the same class with an ordinary walk or excursion to a point of interest.

Slowly they went, in single file, up the narrow path that had been made in the snow, leaving the highest villas behind and below them, and watching the familiar scene unroll in its winter splendour, a little altered in perspective, and opening out to the north-west, toward the entrance of the valley. There was the hoped-for view of the lake, now a frozen and snow-covered round, bordered with trees; the mountains seemed to slope directly down to its farther shore, while beyond these again showed unfamiliar peaks, all in full snow, overtopping each other against the blue sky. The young folk looked at the view, standing in the snow before the stone gateway to the cemetery; then they entered through the ironwork grille, which was on the latch. Here too they found paths shovelled between the small enclosures, each of which was surrounded with its railing, each containing a number of graves. The snow rounded over and built up each smooth and even elevation, with its cross of stone or metal, its small monument adorned with medallions and inscriptions. No soul was to be seen or heard, the quiet remoteness and peace of the spot seemed deep and unbroken in more than one sense. A little stone angel or cupid, finger on lip, a cap of snow askew on its head, stood among the bushes, and might have passed for the genius of the place—the genius of a silence so definite that it was less a negation than a refutation of speech. The silence it guarded was far from being empty of content or character. Here it would have been in place for our two male visitors to take off their hats, had they had any on. But they were, even Hans Castorp, bare-headed; and could only walk reverently, their weight on the balls of their feet, making instinctive inclinations on one side and the other, single file in the wake of Karen Karstedt, as she led the way.

The cemetery was irregular in shape, having begun as a narrow rectangle facing the south, and then thrown out other rectangles on both sides. Successive increases in size had evidently been necessary, and ploughed land had been taken in. Even so, the present enclosure seemed fairly full, both along the wall and in the less desirable inner plots; one could hardly see or say just where another interment was to take place. The three wandered for some time discreetly along the paths, among the enclosures, stopping to decipher a name or date here or there. The tablets and crosses were modest affairs, that must have cost but little. The inscriptions bore names from every quarter of the earth, they were in English or Russian—or other Slavic tongues—also German, Portuguese, and more. The dates told their own sad story, for the time they covered was generally a short span indeed, the age between birth and death averaging not much more than twenty years. Not crabbed age, but youth peopled the spot; folk not yet settled in life, who from all corners of the earth had come together here to take up the horizontal for good and all.

Somewhere in the thick of the graves, near the heart of the acre, lay a small, flat, levelled place, the length of a man, between two rounded mounds with wreaths of everlasting hanging on their headstones. Involuntarily the three paused here, the young girl first, to read the mournful inscriptions; Hans Castorp stood relaxed, his hands clasped before him, his eyes veiled and his mouth somewhat open, young Ziemssen very self-controlled, and not only erect, but even bending a thought backward; and both the cousins stole a glance at Karen’s face. She stood there, aware of their glance, with modest and shamefaced mien, her head bent on her shoulder, blinking her eyes and smiling a strained little smile.