The dining hall – it bore a name that sounded like international comfort and yet, like so many names here, was only a label on something age‑old: eating – was on the ground floor, with large windows looking out onto meadows that were no longer wintry white, but almost shamelessly green. The golf courses, that geometric, bourgeois form of nature, shone as if freshly combed; behind them stood dark spruces, and further behind, as if the whole thing were only a stage, the mountain backdrop rose, blue and gray, with snow in its folds.
The buffet was set up as always: correct, plentiful, with that moral ambivalence that a luxury breakfast always radiates. It is a celebration and a confession at the same time. You take as if you had earned it, and you look as if you had to justify yourself. Here lay the eggs, there the salmon, here the bread, there the fruit; and over everything lay a smell of coffee, butter, and the quiet, never quite fulfilled promise that this day would be “good”.
Hans Castorp helped himself, as he had now learned to do, not to “everything” but to “the right things”: a little protein, a little fat, vegetables, perhaps a handful of berries. Like so many guests in this house, he had internalized the morality of eating; he no longer ate according to hunger, but according to concept. And it is disheartening, esteemed reader, that in this morality one recognizes at the same time a new form of fear: the fear of the body, which has groomed itself, as he had once said.
He looked for a place at the edge – for he liked to sit at the edge, even when he was at the center – and just as he sat down, he heard a voice addressing him, not loud, but firm, with that mixture of friendliness and energy that people have who are used to mediating in conflicts.
“Castorp!”
He looked up and saw Philipp Morgenstern.
Morgenstern came toward him, and behind him – and this was new – came two small figures clinging to his jacket, and beside him walked a woman whose face was at once tired and beautiful, as faces are that grow tired not from lack of sleep but from responsibility.
“This is my wife,” said Morgenstern, and in the way he said “my wife” there was something that moved and pricked Hans Castorp, the man of the in‑between spaces, at the same time: possession and protection, self‑evidence and obligation, all in two words.
The woman smiled politely. She had clear eyes, and in them lay that kind of alertness that is not mistrust but care. She held out her hand to Hans Castorp.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Good morning,” said Hans Castorp, and felt how his politeness suddenly took on a different color. It is strange: you can shake a hundred hands in hotels, and they remain, like hotel linen, clean and meaningless; and then comes a hand that is not “guest” but “life”, and suddenly you are again a human being who can make mistakes.
The two girls – they might have been six and nine, or seven and ten; children have a different reckoning of time in hotels, they are always “small” and yet always “already big” – looked at him, first shyly, then curiously.
“This is Hans,” said Morgenstern, and he said it as if Hans were a friend, not just a fellow guest. “A friend of Papa.”
The older girl nodded, as if taking note of it, like a small protocol. The younger half hid behind her mother’s leg and peeped out.
“We said we’d go out after breakfast,” Morgenstern said to Hans, as they sorted themselves around the table, as if suddenly, in the middle of the dining hall, a small private order were emerging. “You’re coming too, aren’t you? And the doctor…” – he made an indistinct movement with his hand, as if Dr. AuDHS did not need to be invited, only allowed – “…he’s coming too.”
Hans Castorp nodded, and he did not quite know why he nodded, for he was not the man for family outings, not the man for children’s voices, not the man for little jackets and water bottles. But he nodded, because in this nod there was something he had rarely practiced: participation.
They sat down. The mother – Frau Morgenstern – took the napkin from the younger child, who had already crumpled it in its lap, smoothed it out, and in this small movement there lay a whole world of patience.
Morgenstern ordered coffee, asked for cocoa for the children – cocoa, that word that Hans Castorp had not heard since Walpurgis Night without thinking of winter sun and marshmallows – and then, scarcely had the cups been set down, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled something out.
It was no device, no ring, no cuff; it was a piece of paper.
“I have it with me,” he said, and he said it with a mixture of pride and shame, as one speaks of something one takes seriously but fears others will find ridiculous.
Hans Castorp looked at the paper. It was folded, a little worn, and on it, in neat handwriting, stood five words, one under the other, each with a period, as if it were a sentence in itself.
Frau Morgenstern saw it and did not sigh, did not smile mockingly; she only nodded, very slightly. That was, esteemed reader, perhaps the most astonishing thing: that such a list in a marriage is not automatically comical, but – if it is meant seriously – a form of humility.
“Respect,” Hans Castorp read softly.
“Compassion,” said Morgenstern.
“Responsibility,” said Frau Morgenstern, almost as an addition, as if to show: I have heard it, and I will remind you of it without humiliating you.
“Safety,” said Morgenstern, and in doing so he looked at his two children, as if this word were not abstract but physical.
“Partnership,” he said at last, and it sounded as if this long word had to be pronounced particularly gently so that it would not break in the air.
Hans Castorp was silent. Not out of incomprehension, but out of a feeling he could not name: a kind of Tonio‑like melancholy. For Tonio – if we may call him into this scene, esteemed reader, although he is not here – would have been silent in just the same way: with admiration and with pain. Admiration for the bourgeois form that dresses itself up as morality; pain that one does not quite belong oneself, even when one is sitting at the table.
“I have the leeches inside me,” said Morgenstern, and now his voice grew quieter, almost private, although they were sitting in the dining hall, between jars of jam and croissants. “So… the things I’ve done, those…” He searched for a word that did not sound too harsh. “…jabs. The irony. Wanting to be right. I have…” He tapped the paper. “…addressed that.”
Frau Morgenstern briefly laid her hand on his forearm. One second. No pathos. A gesture of partnership that does not say “team” but is a team.
“But outside,” Morgenstern continued, “outside there are still some.” He raised his eyes, looked at Hans Castorp, and in this look lay the plea to be understood without dramatizing it. “People who…” He made a movement as if something were hanging on him. “…who use my good nature. Always. And I notice it – and then I argue. And then I become…” He laughed briefly, bitterly. “…a tiger.”
Hans Castorp thought of the fable, of the donkey, the tiger, the lion. He thought of how Dr. AuDHS had said: It is illogical to argue with a donkey, and even more illogical to trouble the lion with it. He also thought of how modern this fable is: a little didactic play about the energy economy of the mind.
“And now,” said Morgenstern, “I don’t want to be a tiger anymore. And I don’t want to be a donkey anymore. I want…” He looked at the list as if it were a handrail. “…I just want…” He laughed again, this time almost shyly. “…to be normal.”
Normal. This word, esteemed reader, has always been a dangerous word in the Magic Mountain context. For “normal” there is either the valley – and the valley is war – or it is an illusion one affords oneself as long as one is up above. Here, on the Sonnenalp, “normal” is again a marketing term: the normal value, the normal range, the “normally high”. And yet Morgenstern meant something else: the normality of the good, the normality of respect, the normality of a marriage that does not bleed all the time.
Hans Castorp nodded, and again he did not quite know why he nodded. Perhaps because he wanted it too, without wanting it.
Then Dr. AuDHS arrived.
