It is unpleasantly banal to say that; and yet, in this moment, it was not banal. For this blue was not a natural blue, it was a blue that was composed of light and chemistry, a blue that looked so innocent that it almost became moral. Hans Castorp stepped to the edge. His toes felt the cool stone which, although it was kept warm, still carried within it the coldness of matter. He held on to the railing, a white metal bar that rose above the water as if it were the hand of an orderly, and he slowly stepped in.
Water receives you when you step into it. It presses, it encloses, it carries. And Hans Castorp, who at this altitude and in this life had so often had the feeling that everything was pressing on him – regulations, morality, past – felt how the pressure of the water was something else: not oppressive, but even. He breathed. The sounds of the hall were muffled. Thinking became heavier, feeling lighter.
He swam a few strokes, not athletically, but like someone who moves in an element that is not his element. He saw, beneath the surface, the patterns of the pool floor; and he thought how orderly everything is here, even the chaos of the waves. Order, he thought, is perhaps only fear that has groomed itself – and the water, here, was fear in blue.
When he reached the edge again and leaned against the stone, he heard a voice behind him.
“Excuse me.”
He turned around.
A man was standing at the edge of the pool, also in a white bathrobe, his hair still a little damp, his glasses fogged up, as if the warmth had clouded his eyes. He had a face that was at once tired and determined – a face that looks as if it had laughed in the night and in the morning had decided that the laughter had not been everything.
And Hans Castorp recognized him.
Not immediately as a person – one often only recognizes people when one can supply them with a name – but as a figure. It was the man from the photo booth: the dinner jacket, the light wig, the donkey’s head with the yellow grin. The man who had made himself into an animal in order, for a moment, not to have to be human.
Now he was human.
