“Why are you showing me this?”, he asked.
Kautsonik looked at the screen for a moment, then back at Hans.
“Because the gentleman might stay,” he said.
Hans Castorp felt the air in the room change.
“Stay?”, he repeated.
Kautsonik nodded.
“Long-term guests,” he said. “You know: one comes for three nights and stays. It is the rule. Not the exception. And when one stays, then one becomes…” He searched for a word that did not sound brutal. “…part of the house.”
Part of the house. That sounded like belonging. And like imprisonment.
“And,” said Kautsonik, “when one becomes part of the house, then it is better if one knows how the house works.”
Hans Castorp looked at him.
“So you believe…”, he began.
Kautsonik raised his eyebrows.
“I don’t believe anything,” he said. “I register.”
Register. A word that can be both friendly and police-like at the same time.
Hans Castorp felt an old, cold shadow run down his back. Not the shadow of the war itself, but the shadow of the lists. The shadow of the names. The shadow of that German passion for order, which always pretends to be harmless until it no longer is.
“Gestapo,” he thought, without thinking it; and he was immediately ashamed of the thought, because he knew that Kautsonik was not a Gestapo man, but an old concierge. But modernity, dear female reader, dear male reader, likes to work with harmless faces.
Kautsonik looked at him as if he had heard the word, although it had not been spoken.
“It is not evil,” he said softly. “It is only… consistent. A house like this lives on knowledge. And knowledge,” he pointed to the monitor line, “is always digital today. Digital means: copyable. And copyable means: no longer in your hand.”
Hans Castorp nodded slowly. System two, he thought. Think slowly. Don’t panic.
He looked back at the screen.
He saw his profile, and suddenly he felt something that Tonio set resonating in him: a longing, touching and unsatisfying at the same time. Because there stood, among all the fields, something like care. They had remembered that he wanted quiet. They had remembered that fireworks frightened him. They had remembered that he did not want to be disturbed at night. That was – if one is lenient – loving.
And that was exactly the danger. Because love makes one dependent.
“What about the one who stays?”, Hans Castorp asked quietly, more to himself than to Kautsonik.
Kautsonik smiled as if he had been expecting the question for years.
“The one who stays,” he said, “has no line on the wall. He has work. He has routine. He has…” He paused briefly. “…attachment.”
Attachment. The word sounded, in this room, like handcuffs made of velvet.
He stepped up to the wall on which the sentence, in cursive script, also hung here in the back office in smaller form – as if it had been copied to the inside so that the employees would not forget what they have to play.
Joy to him who comes. Joy to him who goes.
Kautsonik took a pen from the drawer. Without hesitating, he wrote under the sentence, very small, almost invisible:
And duty to him who stays.
He stepped back.
“There,” he said.
Hans Castorp stared at the new line. It was not art, it was not literature, it was only a correction. And yet Hans Castorp felt that in this correction there was more truth than in many a lecture in the music room.
“Are you allowed to do that?”, he asked.
Kautsonik shrugged his shoulders.
“I am retired,” he said. “A retiree. A rented retiree. I am allowed more than the young ones think. And less than I would like.”
Hans Castorp smiled, but it was a smile without joy.
“And you want… to stay,” he said.
Kautsonik looked at him, and in his gaze there suddenly lay, very briefly, something soft. A crack. Humanity.
“I want to stand,” he said.
Hans Castorp did not understand at once. Then he understood. For Kautsonik had already said it, on New Year’s Day, between stollen and champagne: that he wanted to die standing in the reception hall, if it were up to him.
“Why?”, asked Hans Castorp.
Kautsonik looked at his hands. The hands were thin, but they were neat. He looked at his legs – and Hans Castorp saw that the movement, the little tug at the trouser leg, had not only been a habit. It was a pain. Or a pressure. Or a sign.
“Because sitting,” said Kautsonik, and here for a moment he sounded like Zieser, “is the new dying. You sit, you sink, you disappear. I don’t want to disappear by sinking.”
Hans Castorp was silent. He thought: A house that sells longevity has a man who understands dying as a posture.
Kautsonik closed the folder, turned the monitor back.
“Come,” he said. “Enough backdrop. The operation is waiting.”
