They went back to the ice bar because the hour was drawing near. People began to count, to laugh, to shout; someone handed out little paper tubes that spit confetti; and Hans Castorp thought how much this modern world has mechanized the moment: the transition has to be announced, it has to be counted down, it has to be documented, because otherwise people do not trust it.
The glasses clinked. The ice gleamed. The words in the ice – “New Year’s Eve 2025–2026” – stood there like a verdict, and yet little drops were already running along the edges, as if the calendar were crying.
Then it happened.
The sky, which had just been black, was suddenly torn apart by light, by white and red lines, by sparkling stars that spread out and faded, and smoke drifted like a gray curtain over the scene. It was beautiful. It was loud. It was – if one is honest – unsatisfying. For fireworks are the game with war, and war is fireworks without the game.
Hans Castorp flinched, quite involuntarily, quite physiologically; the body recognizes certain sounds before the mind interprets them. He felt his heart skip a beat and then make up two, as if it wanted to prove that it was still there; he felt the cold in his lungs, although he was not freezing; he felt how the bubbles in the champagne now seemed to him less light, less elegant – as if they were suddenly related to the bubbles in the sky.
She laid her hand on his sleeve, just for a moment.
“C’est fini,” she said softly. “It is over. Here it is only… celebration.”
Only celebration. Only.
He looked at her, and in her face there was an expression that was at once mocking and tender, as if she knew that there is no “only”.
They went, without consulting each other, to the dome, to the glass bubble in which the white fur lay and the little flame flickered. The dog was still sitting at the entrance, like a guardian, and looked at them, serious and patient. They stepped inside, and the world outside – the sky with smoke, the people with glasses, the spheres on the water – was muffled and distorted by the skin of the dome, as if one saw everything through a memory.
Inside it was quieter. On the table stood glasses, one half empty, one completely empty, and the lantern cast shadows on the fur, soft as breath. Hans Castorp sat down, and she sat down opposite him, but not really opposite; she sat down so that the distance was no longer bourgeois.
“You are getting old,” she said.
“I stay,” he answered.
“You always stay,” she said. “That is your talent. You stay while everything else… goes.”
He thought of the words in the ice, of the drops, of the melting; he thought of the bubbles in the water, of their iridescent, thin glow; he thought of the orange lifebuoy in the snow, on which the sun-word was written, as if one had to be rescued even in the sun.
“Are you afraid?” she asked.
He smiled. He wanted to say: No. He wanted to say: Yes. Instead he said:
“I am hungry.”
And that was, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, not a lie.
