Next to the domes stood a cart, black and gold, with a glass container in which popcorn lay – popcorn! – this thin-walled, explosively unfolded grain that crackles so innocently and yet, fundamentally, is nothing other than the playful brother of terror. For here too – and that is the irony that Hans Castorp could not name but felt – the principle of explosion reigned: in the grain, in the cork, in the sky.
The cart had a roof, and underneath people in dark clothing were working; they scooped the white, puffed grain and handed it out as if one were distributing snow to eat. Hans Castorp smelled it; and the smell was warm. Warm in this cold, warm like memory.
He walked, hands in his pockets, collar turned up – not because he was cold, but because the collar is a gesture of defense that has become as self-evident to modern man as the hat was to the man of old. He walked toward the water.
For there was, a little further on, a basin – blue, still, unreal blue beneath the sky, which in turn was so blue as if someone had turned up the saturation –, and on this water floated spheres, large, iridescent bubbles that shone in rainbow colors and broke the light into pastels. They lay there like oversized soap bubbles, like planets, like balloons, like alveoli – and perhaps this last association was the truest, inasmuch as the highland, the spa, the world of breathlessness and promise of breath has always been a world of bubbles: bubbles in the lung, bubbles in the champagne, bubbles in the bathing world.
The spheres cast shadows on the water, long, dark shadows, as if they had weight. And Hans Castorp thought that everything that shines has shadows; a thought that is banal and therefore correct.
At the edge stood people, in coats and caps, and looked at these bubbles, and he could not say whether they were amused or reverent. For modernity has invented a new form of reverence: reverence for the effect.
Behind him, higher up on the terrace, the ice bar had been set up. They had made a counter out of ice, smooth and transparent, and into this ice words had been cut which – because they stood in the ice – suddenly seemed like something final, unalterable, although they, in the next sun, in the next air, in the next hour, had to become water: “New Year’s Eve 2025–2026”. Beneath it a laughing sun symbol, friendly, round, brand-like.
It was, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, as if the calendar itself had been cast into a material that displays transience. Our age loves symbolism so much that it supplies it at once; one only has to read it off, as one reads everything off today.
On the ice stood glasses: slender, tall ones, and next to them champagne bottles lay in coolers, and a woman in a dark coat was handling them as if they were instruments. Men in the background also wore dark coats and stood with their heads together in that way men put their heads together when they are either doing business or consoling one another. Hans Castorp took a glass – not greedily, rather testingly – and felt the cold of the glass draw into his fingers. He drank; and the bubbles rose to his head like a light, elegant impatience.
He smiled. He smiled because he knew that he was smiling; and that is always a sign of distance.
For he was not really there. He was there with a name that was not his name. He was there with a past he was not allowed to speak. He was there as a luxury guest and as a refugee. And precisely for that reason this night – this between-the-years night, this modern carnivalesque night – had something seductive for him: it was a masquerade that came to meet him.
Inside, in the warm light, a photo booth had been set up – a small theater of self-presentation that is no longer called “photography” but, dreary enough, “photo box”. A backdrop of shimmering foil hung there, blue and iridescent, like frozen water; and in front of it people in evening dress crowded together, but with props that made the whole thing ridiculous and thereby permitted it.
There Hans Castorp saw how a woman – slender, with a bare neck, in a dress that sparkled at the shoulder – wore glasses whose lenses were heart-shaped; and he thought how much our age strives to turn feeling into a sign so that it becomes presentable. Next to her a man in a dinner jacket, but with a wild, light wig, as if he wanted to say: I am groomed and unbound at the same time. In front of them children, groomed like dolls, but with crowns and pixel glasses that gave them a feigned coolness while their mouths were open with laughter. In the next picture then: the same dinner jacket, but above it a donkey’s head, a mask with big ears and a yellow grin, and the hand of the masked man raised as if greeting the audience. It was funny. It was touching. And it was – if one is strict – a picture of the world: man in his ceremonial clothing who makes himself into an animal in order, for a moment, not to have to be human.
