The Magic Mountain (116 page)

Hans Castorp helped him turn the body over. They saw the blackened red hole in the temple. They looked into a face that one would do well to cover with the silk handkerchief, one corner of which hung out of Naphta’s breast pocket.

SEVEN years Hans Castorp remained amongst those up here. Partisans of the decimal system might prefer a round number, though seven is a good handy figure in its way, picturesque, with a savour of the mythical; one might even say that it is more filling to the spirit than a dull academic half-dozen. Our hero had sat at all seven of the tables in the dining-room, at each about a year, the last being the “bad” Russian table, and his company there two Armenians, two Finns, a Bokharian, and a Kurd. He sat at the “bad” Russian table, wearing a recent little blond beard, vaguish in cut, which we are disposed to regard as a sign of philosophic indifference to his own outer man. Yes, we will even go further, and relate his carelessness of his person to the carelessness of the rest of the world regarding him. The Authorities had ceased to devise him distractions. There was the morning inquiry, as to whether he had slept well, itself purely rhetorical and summary; and that aside, the Hofrat did not address him with any particularity; while Adriatica von Mylendonk—she had, at the time of which we write, a stye in a perfect state of maturity—did so seldom, in fact scarcely ever. They let him be. He was like the scholar in the peculiarly happy state of never being “asked” any more; of never having a task, of being left to sit, since the fact of his being left behind is established, and no one troubles about him further—an orgiastic kind of freedom, but we ask ourselves whether, indeed, freedom ever is or can be of any other kind. At all events, here was one on whom the authorities no longer needed to keep an eye, being assured that no wild or defiant resolves were ripening in his breast. He was “settled,” established. Long ago he had ceased to know where else he should go, long ago he had ceased to be capable of a resolve to return to the flat-land. Did not the very fact that he was sitting at the “bad” Russian table witness a certain abandon? No slightest adverse comment upon the said table being intended by the remark! Among all the seven, no single one could be said to possess definite tangible advantages or disadvantages. We make bold to say that here was a democracy of tables, all honourable alike. The same tremendous meals were served here as at the others; Rhadamanthus himself occasionally folded his huge hands before the doctor’s place at the head; and the nations who ate there were respectable members of the human race, even though they boasted no Latin, and were not exaggeratedly dainty at their feeding. Time—yet not the time told by the station clock, moving with a jerk five minutes at once, but rather the time of a tiny timepiece, the hand of which one cannot see move, or the time the grass keeps when it grows, so unobservably one would say it does not grow at all, until some morning the fact is undeniable—time, a line composed of a succession of dimensionless points (and now we are sure the unhappy deceased Naphta would interrupt us to ask how dimensionless points, no matter how many of them, can constitute a line), time, we say, had gone on, in its furtive, unobservable, competent way, bringing about changes. For example, the boy Teddy was discovered, one day—not one single day, of course, but only rather indefinitely from which day— to be a boy no longer. No more might ladies take him on their laps, when, on occasion, he left his bed, changed his pyjamas for his knickerbockers, and came downstairs. Imperceptibly that leaf had turned. Now, on such occasions, he took them on his instead, and both sides were as well, or even better pleased. He was become a youth; scarcely could we say he had bloomed into a youth; but he had shot up. Hans Castorp had not noticed it happening, and then, suddenly, he did. The shooting-up, however, did not suit the lad Teddy; the temporal became him not. In his twenty-first year he departed this life; dying of the disease for which he had proved receptive; and they cleansed and fumigated after him. The fact makes little claim upon our emotions, the change being so slight between his one state and his next.