Hans Castorp stood at a staircase.
One underestimates, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, the staircases in hotels. They are not, like the staircases in bourgeois houses, honest connections between above and below; rather, they are decorated decisions, discreet tests, questions embedded in wood and carpet: Do you really want to go? Do you really want to move? – and not in that hygienically standardized way that the ring on your finger logs as steps, but in that other, far more improper way in which a step is no longer counted as a number, but as fate.
The staircase in front of which he stood led up from the lobby – or down, depending on where one inwardly imagines oneself to be at the moment –, and above it hung the chandelier, that large, closed bundle of light whose wreath shape had appeared to him for weeks like a friendly reproach: circle, circle, circle. Ring on the finger. Ring in the snow, the orange lifebuoy outside, which was advertisement and morality at the same time. Ring light in the photo booth. Everything ring-shaped, everything recurring, everything pretending as if there were no break.
And yet the break was there.
It was not loud. It was not dramatic. It was, like most changes in a person, unsatisfyingly inconspicuous.
Hans Castorp paused for a moment, not from tiredness – tiredness had, since he had been training, become a clear concept, a muscle condition, a time in the logbook –, but from that kind of hesitation that has nothing to do with the body, but with the name. For what had occupied him more, since Kautsonik had shown him the drawers of the house in that dry-comic manner, than vascular stiffness, was no longer the question of how high his diastole was, but how deep his entry.
In such houses one enters everything.
First the name, then the room number, then the credit card, then the preferences (pillow hard, pillow soft), then the intolerances (gluten-free, conflict-free), then the wishes (sea view, mountain view, not to be seen). And finally, without it being explicitly stated, one also enters the deviations: the small irregularities in behavior, the glances that do not fit, the brief pause before someone says “Yes”. The register is not just paper; it is perception.
And Hans Castorp, who had for years lived with a name that he no longer felt to be a lie, but a kind of polite assertion, suddenly felt again – very quietly, but clearly – how thin the paper is on which one writes oneself.
He placed his foot on the first step.
And at that moment he heard behind him the voice that functions like a bell in this house: not because it is loud, but because it has been sounding at the threshold for decades.
“Sir.”
Kautsonik stood at the counter, upright, although his body had long been making other suggestions. He wore, as always, his dark jacket with the light seams, as if the principle of order had been sewn directly onto the fabric; at the collar the small red shone, that discreet festive sign that says: Service, too, is a life.
In his hand he held an envelope.
Not big. Not official. No window, no stickers; just paper, which in the modern world already possesses a slight indecency because it cannot be tracked as long as it is not scanned.
“This is for you,” said Kautsonik.
Hans Castorp took a step back, away from the beginning of the stairs – and one could, if one wanted to be poetic, say: He left the decision lying there once more.
“From whom?” he asked.
Kautsonik shrugged his shoulders minimally.
“From a gentleman,” he said, and you could hear that he still takes the word “gentleman” seriously, while others already treat it as a cliché. “He did not say very much. But he… ” – Kautsonik paused briefly, as if he wanted to check whether he should really utter this sentence – “he said your name.”
Hans Castorp felt the ring on his finger – that faithful little eye – grow warm for a moment, as if it had registered an excitement that Hans himself would not have admitted. He took the envelope.
It was light.
That is, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, the uncanny thing about messages: They weigh almost nothing, and yet they shift entire bodies.
“Thank you,” said Hans Castorp.
Kautsonik nodded.
“Joy to the one who comes,” he said, and it sounded like a routine greeting.
Hans Castorp looked at him.
“And joy to the one who goes,” Kautsonik added, dryly.
Hans Castorp smiled, but the smile was no longer merely polite. Beneath the politeness it had a stab of relief, as if someone had allowed him to think of something he had until then only felt to be presumption: of going away.
“You do not like to go,” said Kautsonik, as if stating a finding.
“I never go,” said Hans Castorp.
“That is the same thing,” replied Kautsonik.
And then, as if everything had thereby been said, he turned to the next guest, who had a pillow request, and was once again all service, all presence, entirely “there”. Being there is his profession, he had said. And Hans Castorp thought that being-there might be the highest form of loyalty – and that going away can be the highest form of disloyalty without therefore having to be wrong.
He stepped aside, near a red column that supported the lobby like a blood-red thesis. He opened the envelope, slowly, as if he had to give the paper time to decide what it wanted to be: invitation, threat, nullity.
Inside there was no letter. No long written message. Gustav von A. was, as one now knew, not a man of circumstances; he was a man of sentences, and he treated even circumstances like sentences: terse, compelling, with an inexorable rhythm.
It was only a strip of cardboard, torn off as if someone had ripped it from a folder in passing. On it, in handwriting so disciplined that it was almost unsympathetic, stood three lines:
Library. Today. 4 p.m.
And below that, set alone, like a verdict, like a promise:
South.
Hans Castorp looked at the word.
It was ridiculous that four letters and an umlaut could move so much in him.
But ridiculous is often only the first name for what is true.
