He stood in the morning – it was one of those clear but not yet warm spring days on which the sun already pretends to be summer while the shadows are still playing winter – in the bathroom of his suite and looked at himself.
This is, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, an activity that should not be underestimated. To look at oneself does not only mean: to check the face, the belly, the neck; it means: to take oneself as an object. And for a man who for years did not want to be an “object” – not for the military, not for the state, not for morality – this kind of viewing has always been ambiguous.
The mirror showed him in a way that neither flattered nor insulted: clear, cold, penetrating, like the light of an examination room – only that here it did not fluoresce but fell from a window on whose frame there still lay a touch of night chill.
Hans Castorp was, one may say, in top form.
Not “massive”, not “broad” – that would, in his case, have been a lie – but wiry and compact; a body that does not impress through fullness but through clarity. The shoulders stood like two small, taut hills; the chest was no longer the soft, bourgeois surface that hides behind shirts, but a tense form in which one could sense the work of the months: bench press, shoulder press – the programmatic pressing against gravity, against giving in.
The belly was flat, not ascetic but reined in; the lines of the musculature ran like fine map strokes across the white of the skin. And this skin – yes, it was still white, that North German, somewhat pale white that quickly reddens in the high-altitude air and quickly freezes in the coolness; but in it now lay something that had previously been missing: a kind of vitality that does not come from the blood but from the tone.
The arms finally – and here, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, it becomes unedifying, because with the body one easily lapses into the ridiculous – the arms had taken on that vein pattern that, if one speaks in modern terms, is called “vascular”, as if one had turned the human being into a city map. One saw how the blood knew its paths. One saw that it no longer merely flowed but was governed.
Around his right upper arm he wore a black band, a sensor strap that Zieser had pressed into his hand as if, alongside bar, plates, and logbook, these were the insignia of a new affiliation. The band sat tight; not painfully, but firmly – like a small, private command. It had a silver edge that briefly flashed in the light, and Hans Castorp thought involuntarily of how quickly an ornament becomes a device, and a device becomes morality.
On his finger – more inconspicuous but more significant – sat the ring. Dr. Porsche’s ring. The discreet eye.
The ring was not beautiful. It was not ugly either. It was, like everything technical today, designed so that one should neither admire nor despise it. And precisely thereby it becomes dangerous: It becomes self-evident.
Hans Castorp turned his hand a little, looked at the ring from different angles, as if he were not examining metal but a promise. The device lay on the skin, cool, smooth, without warmth – and yet it was capable of telling him whether he had slept, whether he moved, whether he was calm, whether he tended toward “normally high”, whether his body – this old, unruly ape in a suit – was behaving.
He raised his arm, tensed his biceps, quite involuntarily, like someone who wants to convince himself that what he sees really belongs to him.
The muscle stood out, not grotesque but neat; perhaps a little too neat.
“A strong back knows no pain,” Zieser had once said, half as a joke, half as evangelical truth.
Hans Castorp thought: A strong body knows no doubt.
And noticed how wrong the thought was, because he was doubting at that very moment.
He let his arm sink.
“Who writes, remains,” Zieser also said.
Hans Castorp looked at the small notebook that lay on the washbasin next to the toothbrush, as if it were a hygiene article. In it were numbers, sentences, repetitions – and also the blood pressure, which in the evening was measured with the cuff and entered, as if one had turned the body into a ledger.
He took the book, leafed through it.
The pages were not full. They were not empty either. They were, like so much in his life, in between: neatly filled in, and yet with spaces. White between the lines, white at the margin.
He ran his finger over a spot where yesterday, in haste, he had written nothing – only a stroke, as an indication: there was something, but I did not record it.
It was a small mistake.
And he felt – quite unedifyingly – a small joy.
