Hans Castorp told himself the story of the chameleon and of Peter, the boy with the golden crown pin, who spoke of another planet and of a queen named Alice. He told himself the mountain, the wall, the mountain lake, the deck chairs. And while he was telling it, something strange happened: the story began to mix with the lecture.
The mountain lake grew larger, grew shallower, became a lagoon.
The deck chairs became gondolas.
The grand piano in the music room became black and shiny, became long, became – and this was so dismally logical that one might want to laugh, if one were not asleep – the gondola itself.
The red columns of the music room suddenly no longer stood on the parquet floor, but in the water, like piles, like markers, like those columns of which travel brochures say they are “iconic”. The room was no longer room, but city. And the city did not smell of wood and carpet, but of water that is old.
Hans Castorp did not know in the dream that this was Venice; but he felt it. For Venice, esteemed reader, dear reader, is less a place than a state: water, beauty, decay, and a faint, sweet feeling that one is staying too long.
A man was sitting on one of the gondolas.
He was well-groomed, but the grooming had something strenuous about it, as if he had wrested it from himself. His face was pale, and around his eyes there was something like powder; not much, but enough to betray that he not only fears decay, but fights it – with means that are themselves already decayed. He held a notebook in his hand.
Gustav von A.
He looked up, and his gaze was the gaze of a person who is used to seeing beauty and dying in the process.
“Recommendations,” he said, without Hans Castorp knowing why he heard it, “are the gentlest form of command.”
The sentence fell into the water and made no waves. That is how sentences are in dreams.
Next to Gustav von A. stood – and this was the second, quiet bit of comedy – Prof. Zieser, but not as Zieser, rather as a kind of gondolier of optimization. He had no oar, but a barbell bar, which he held like an oar. He said nothing new; he only said his phrases as if they were strokes of the oar:
“Measure what matters.”
“Keep it simple.”
“Right here, right now.”
And the gondola moved, not through water, but through repetition.
On the shore stood Tonio.
Tonio, this dark, sensitive person who always stands at the edge because he loves the center and yet does not fit into it. He was not wearing a coat, but something that looked more like a suit; he was well-groomed, and yet there was something unhomed in his posture. He looked at the gondolas, at the optimizing people, at the gleaming water surfaces, and in his gaze lay that mixture of longing and mockery that is peculiar to the artist when he looks at bourgeois life: I envy you, and I despise you, and I want to kiss you.
“You are healthy,” said Tonio, and the word “healthy” sounded like an accusation. “You are in the program.”
Hans Castorp wanted to answer him, but he could not. For in dreams one is often only gaze, not voice.
Tonio stepped closer, looked at Hans, and Hans felt that Tonio meant him, although they had never met: the person of feeling who is drawn into programs.
“You believe,” said Tonio, “you must be productive in order to be allowed to count.”
Create.
Hans Castorp thought of Zieser’s logbook. Of the phrases. Of the numbers. Of the ring. Of writing as remaining.
“Who writes, remains,” said Tonio – and here it was as if Zieser’s quote had lost its way into Tonio’s mouth, as if it had always been there.
In the sky above the lagoon, far below, the vehicles of the thought highway whizzed by, those glowing letter-cars that Dr. AuDHS had placed in his story. They drove, restlessly, in lines, and Hans Castorp saw that each car bore a number: 10,000, 2,500, 600, 1,000. Calories. Steps. Deficit. Surplus. Thoughts had become bookkeeping.
And then – as if the carnivalesque, which never quite disappears from Hans Castorp’s life, also had to make itself known in the dream – a figure appeared wearing a donkey mask.
It stepped out of one of the side passages of the lagoon city, shook water from the ears of the mask and said in a voice that sounded both exhausted and determined:
“I don’t want to be the donkey anymore.”
It was Philipp Morgenstern.
He tugged at the mask as if he wanted to get rid of it, but it sat tight; not because it was tied on, but because masks in dreams are not made of fabric, but of story.
“I no longer want to claim,” he said, “that the grass is blue.”
Then Hans Castorp saw – and this was the real stab – his hand.
The ring was glowing.
Not glaring, not like a piece of jewelry, but like a small, discreet eye. On the ring there was a circle, a progress circle, and this circle was blue.
Blue.
The grass on the shore was green. The water was greenish. The sky was gray-gold. But the circle was blue.
Morgenstern saw it too. He laughed, and the laughter was bitter and comical at the same time.
“Do you see?” he said. “One can want the truth – and then a display appears.”
And in this moment, esteemed reader, dear reader, it was as if the dream took a moral turn, as dreams sometimes do, because the mind, even in sleep, still delivers a little sermon.
Peter, the boy with the crown pin, stepped out of the grass. He did not look sad. He only looked quiet.
The chameleon sat on his shoulder. It was no longer green, no longer yellow, no longer brown; it changed, like a screen, between colors. It was, if you will, the animal of modernity: adaptable to the point of dissolution.
Peter sat down on a deck chair, which suddenly was a deck chair again, by the mountain lake, which suddenly was a mountain lake again, and the lagoon withdrew as if it had only been a film.
“It is too loud here,” said Peter, and he pointed downward: there the thought highway drove, far away but visible.
“We are going higher,” said the chameleon – and its voice was the voice of Dr. AuDHS, without Hans Castorp being surprised by it. In dreams one is not surprised. One recognizes.
They walked.
Hans Castorp walked with them, and as he walked, he felt – strange enough – his steps. As if steps were not only activity, but path. Not number, but movement.
Up by the lake they sat down.
Peter fell asleep.
The chameleon stayed awake.
And Hans Castorp, the person of feeling, suddenly felt something he had not felt for a long time: calm.
The thought highway drove far below. It drove, and it did not matter.
