In the evening, when the sun was already lower and the house – the Sonnenalp – lay in that warm, golden light that makes everything look more precious, Hans Castorp returned.
He walked through the lobby, under the chandelier, and he felt how dismal it is when a chandelier that only wants to be decor suddenly works like an eye. The candlelights burned quietly, evenly, without flickering; and Hans Castorp thought that the even brightness has something supervisory about it. The old candle flickers, it has flaws, it has white in between. The electric light is seamless.
Upstairs, in his suite, he put the ring on the table.
It lay there like a small, closed circle.
A circle that wants to close everything.
Hans Castorp sat down on the bed, took the cuff – the machine that comes in the evening, like a properly dressed messenger – and looked at it.
He could have measured. He could have written. He could have entered the value into the logbook like a host.
He did not do it.
Not out of defiance, but from an impulse that lay deeper: the desire, for once, not to be complete.
He got up, went to the bathroom, showered, put on the bathrobe – the bathrobe as the modern uniform of being healthy – and then went, almost mechanically, to the fakir mat that Dr. AuDHS had sent him: the mat that pricks, the neck roll that presses, the “psychosomatic meditation,” as AuDHS had called it.
He lay down on it.
The pricking was there immediately, that small pain that does not injure but reminds. It was as if the body were saying: I am here. I am not just a number.
Hans Castorp breathed.
He thought of the story with the chameleon at the mountain lake, of the thought highway, of the glass that shatters, of the deck chairs by the water. He thought of Peter, who can sleep because he dreams himself away.
He thought: If I do not wear the ring, no one will know whether I am sleeping.
And then, quite involuntarily, he thought: No one will know that I exist.
It was an old thought. A thought from the war. A thought from the desertion.
He felt himself growing cold, not outwardly, but inwardly. Fear is always colder than snow.
He closed his eyes.
He tried to think slowly.
A white spot, he thought. Just one evening. A hole. An edge.
He did not know whether he was allowed to do that. And precisely for that reason he did it.
He stayed lying on the mat until the pain transformed into something else: into warmth. Then he got up, lay down in the bed – without cuff, without ring, without logbook.
He lay in the dark.
Outside, somewhere, snow crunched from a roof – the last winter that did not yet want to surrender.
Inside no chandelier was burning. Inside there was only the darkness that is not supervised.
Hans Castorp heard his breathing.
He waited for the device to tell him: you are sleeping.
No device said it.
And finally, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, he slept.
Not deeply. Not long. But – and that is the real provocation – without proof.
