And near the pool there were loungers: woven, padded, striped. On one lay a blanket, on another an open booklet – a glossy magazine whose pages shone in colors that did not occur up here: sea blue, sand yellow, a red that tasted of the South. Next to one lounger stood a glass in which there was water – water with a slice of lemon and a few green little leaves that pretended to be nature, although in this artificial warmth they rather seemed like an alibi: Look here, I am healthy.
Hans Castorp stopped for a moment and regarded this arrangement, this modern form of the rest cure, and – not as a thought, but as a feeling – the memory came to him of the Berghof, of blankets, of thermometers, of the order of time. Here it was similar and different: one did not lie in order to recover, one lay in order to optimize. One no longer measured temperature, one measured steps; and if temperatures were measured after all, it did not happen with a glass rod in the mouth, but with small devices on the wrist that registered every movement without ever blushing.
Hans Castorp sat down on one of the striped loungers.
He did not take the booklet. He only looked at it. He saw the pictures without reading them, and he thought how unedifying it is that the world today turns everything into images, even that which has not yet been experienced; you can buy the South before you freeze, and you can consume the sea while snow is falling outside.
He took a sip of the lemon water, although it was not his glass; and he did it so carefully that one could not see the transgression on him. The citric acid tingled on his tongue like a clean severity.
Then he drew, almost involuntarily, his hand into the pocket of the bathrobe – and found, as one finds a ridiculous secret, the little wooden stick.
It was still there. It was light. It was nothing. And yet in its presence there was something indecent, because it reminded him of the night, of the woman, of the “Voilà”, of the word “dangerous”, which had been spoken in a way that did not sound like danger, but like permission.
He held the little stick between his fingers and looked at it. The thought came to him that today so much is done with little sticks: you stir, you stab, you mark, you click, you tap on glass. You write without writing. And he felt how this modern writability, this blurring, had something to do with him, who, as we know, lived between name and alias.
He put the little stick back in.
And then he went to the water.
The water was blue.
