He walked on, into the back part of the gallery, where a table stood.
And there sat Gustav von A.
One did not recognize him by the fact that he looked “famous” – fame, esteemed reader, dear reader, is rarely a face, more often a posture –, but by the fact that he was not reading the way people read in hotels, namely to relax or to adorn themselves, but as if reading were work. Next to him lay a notebook. He wrote in it, not hastily, but without that sluggishness that vacationers display, as if they wanted to prove to themselves that today they “don’t have to do anything”.
Hans Castorp stopped.
It was as if he saw a form of legitimation that he lacked.
Gustav raised his gaze.
He looked at Hans Castorp, not curiously, not scrutinizingly, rather with that unobtrusive alertness that some people have who are not easily deceived because they have deceived themselves too often.
“You are up again,” said Gustav.
Hans Castorp nodded.
“I am…” he began – and realized how ridiculous it is to say something about being in a hotel.
Gustav smiled briefly.
“You are very…” he said, and he seemed to search for the word that Zieser and Porsche and AuDHS would equally like to use. “…optimized.”
Hans Castorp had to smile. The word had something comical, because it is so technical and yet is meant to be so human.
“It is a program,” he said.
“Yes,” said Gustav. “Programs are always right. They are built that way.”
Hans Castorp sat down, not directly opposite, but slightly offset – the bourgeois distance that he kept again and again, even when he longed for closeness.
He looked at the notebook.
“You are writing,” he said.
“I must,” said Gustav. “Otherwise I will not remain.”
Hans Castorp thought of Zieser: Whoever writes, remains. A saying from the gym, up here suddenly literature.
“And what,” asked Hans Castorp, cautiously, “are you writing?”
Gustav raised his shoulders.
“White spots,” he said.
Hans Castorp felt a small blow in his chest, as if someone had briefly tightened the ring.
“How do you mean?” he asked.
Gustav tapped with the pen on a spot in the notebook that was indeed empty: a paragraph, a gap.
“That,” he said. “The unwritten. The unsaid. That which one does not fill, because one knows that every filling would be a lie.”
Hans Castorp looked at the emptiness, and he felt how unpleasant it is – and how necessary.
“Our time,” Gustav continued, “has an obsession with completeness. It wants to measure everything, tell everything, show everything. And if something is missing, it is not accepted as a limit, but as a mistake. You know that.”
Hans Castorp involuntarily raised his hand, looked at the ring.
Gustav saw it.
“Ah,” he said softly. “The eye.”
Hans Castorp would have liked to say something ironically learned, something Settembrini-like perhaps, but he was not Settembrini. He was Hans Castorp, and Hans Castorp instead said:
“It calms.”
Gustav nodded.
“Calming is a great power,” he said. “It can also be a great lie.”
He leaned forward a little.
“Don’t let yourself be improved too much,” he then said, and the sentence fell so plain, so un-pathetic, that precisely thereby it sounded like a command.
Hans Castorp smiled, because he knew the sentence – and because he still did not understand it.
“How is one supposed to improve oneself,” he asked, “without…?”
Gustav raised his hand.
“I am not saying: do not improve yourself,” he said. “I am saying: leave a hole. Leave a margin. Leave something that is not controlled. Otherwise at some point you are no longer human, but…” He searched briefly. “…a perfect file.”
Hans Castorp thought of his alias. Of the papers. Of the doors that had closed before anyone realized who had passed through. He thought: I saved myself because I was a gap.
“You mean,” he said slowly, “that the gap…”
“…protects you,” said Gustav. “And forces you. Both.”
He leaned back.
“A sentence,” he said, “lives from the white. It is not only letters. It is also spacing. Pause. Breath.”
Hans Castorp looked at him.
“And a life?” he asked.
Gustav smiled again, briefly, and it was a smile that neither comforted nor hurt.
“A life too,” he said.
Then he fell silent, and the silence was not a lack, but a space.
Hans Castorp felt that he wanted to do something – not think, not feel, but do.
He stood up.
“Thank you,” he said.
Gustav nodded, as if thanks were not necessary here, because it was not about kindness, but about truth.
Hans Castorp walked down the stairs, under the chandelier, and the chandelier burned above him like a proper sun.
