Hans Castorp stood for a moment behind these people and regarded them with that gentle, slightly melancholic irony that is peculiar to the spectator. Then, without really knowing why, he stepped closer. Not because he wanted to be photographed; he did not want to be captured, least of all in a world in which every capturing is at the same time a spreading. But he felt drawn to the idea of the mask.
“Do you want to?” someone asked – a girl, perhaps; a voice, young, quick. And one hand held out one of the glasses to him, another a golden plastic wreath. Hans Castorp did not take the wreath. Instead, he took a plain, black mask that lay at the edge, inconspicuous between hearts and donkeys – a piece of fabric that covered half the face and thus suddenly appeared very serious. He held it briefly in his hand. Fabric. Rubber. A smell of new material, of manufacture.
“You are old-fashioned,” said a voice beside him.
He turned around.
She stood there, a little apart, and wore nothing conspicuous, no wig, no ears; but her eyes had that expression that is at once tired and mocking, and her mouth – narrow, drawn up a little – betrayed a readiness for malice that Hans Castorp had always perceived as grace.
“Old-fashioned?” he repeated.
“Oui,” she said, and the Oui was not French in the textbook sense, but French as a gesture, as a quiet removal from the German order. “You still want to believe that a mask must be fabric. Whereas today everything is a mask.”
He did not know whether he knew her. He only knew that he knew her. For one knows, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, not only persons; one knows gestures, one knows rhythms, one knows that way of setting a sentence as if it were half a taunt, half a kiss.
She looked at the hand in his, at the black mask.
“You are very… correct,” she said, and the word “correct” had in her mouth something that was like a small, secret laugh. “Un peu bourgeois.”
Hans Castorp felt himself grow warm, not from the champagne, but from this old, unpleasantly young feeling that someone is touching him at a place that is not visible.
“Order,” he said slowly, “is perhaps only a fear that has groomed itself.”
“Ah,” she said. “Now you are becoming philosophical. Watch out – that is dangerous.”
“Dangerous,” he repeated, and did not mean the thought.
They went outside because there was too much laughter inside. Outside, in the cold, the laughter was muffled, and instead one heard the crunching of shoes on the frosty pavement, the soft clinking of glasses, the distant hum of the unit that was producing warmth somewhere, as if warmth were a service.
At one of the tables with the sweets she stopped and took a wooden stick from the glass – a simple, light stick, as basically everyone knows it, and yet it was, in her hand, suddenly an object with meaning because she was holding it. She stuck it into a marshmallow, this pastel-colored foam, and held it up as if she were presenting a small piece of sky.
“You want some?” she asked.
Hans Castorp shook his head. He was not hungry for sugar. He was hungry for something else.
She looked at him.
“Do you have a pen?” he asked. And he heard himself with a sense of wonder, as if it were not he who was speaking, but someone who had once been him.
She laughed softly.
“A pen?” she said. “What do you need a pen for, my dear? You have pens everywhere. In your devices. In your watches. In your… apps.”
He did not answer. He only pointed, almost childishly, to a small station that had been set up next to the photo booth theater: There sat a man – or a figure, one could not really say –, all in black, and his head was stuck behind a clear, angular pane, as if he were wearing a glass helmet. In front of him lay a white sheet, and with a brush or pen he drew brown lines on it, hesitant, artful, as if he were not writing letters but destinies. A child stood next to him and held something up, perhaps a picture, perhaps a frame – and watched with that reverence that children sometimes show toward craftsmanship.
“He writes names,” said Hans Castorp.
“Names?” She raised her eyebrows. “You mean: identities.”
He felt a small stab. Yes. Identities.
“I would like,” he said, “him to write my name for me.”
“Which one?” she asked.
Hans Castorp was silent. And in this silence lay everything: the war, the withdrawal, the rescue, the shame, the luxury, the lie, the weariness.
She looked at him, for a long time.
Then she handed him the wooden stick – not the marshmallow, just the stick, empty, light, ridiculous.
“Voilà,” she said. “Take it. Write with it.”
“You can’t write with that.”
“Yes, you can,” she said. “You can write with anything if you are prepared for it to smudge.”
And that was, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, a truth so simple that it was dangerous.
