They drove to the railway.
The station was modern and at the same time old, like all stations: glass and steel, but beneath that this smell of iron, oil, past. People pulled suitcases. Rolling suitcases is the new gait.
Hans Castorp did not carry his suitcase. He rolled it. It was comfortable. It was unsatisfying. For rolling is a form of relief that takes away your dignity in carrying something.
Gustav von A. walked ahead, without hurrying, but purposeful, as if he were not a traveler, but a kind of function.
They boarded the train.
The train was, inside, warm.
The seats were soft, but not too soft. Perhaps someone, somewhere, had thought of Kautsonik.
Hans Castorp sat down by the window.
Gustav von A. sat down opposite him.
They were silent, and the silence was not unpleasant. It was working calm. It was the calm of two people who leave for different reasons, but do not want to speak the same reason.
The train started.
Slowly.
Then faster.
The landscape began to glide.
Hans Castorp saw mountains, saw fields, saw villages, saw roads on which cars drove like thoughts. He thought of the thought-highway, of the chameleon, of Dr. Peter at the mountain lake. He thought of how the thoughts drive down there, and how you sit above and see them only as threads of light.
Now he was on the train, and deep below – or beside them – a real highway ran. Vehicles glided. Lights flickered. Thoughts.
He pulled the hand-apparatus out of his pocket, that flat device that in recent months had become as much a second skin to him as the pencil at the Berghof once had been. He looked at it, and he had to smile, despite everything: the machine knew immediately that he was traveling. It showed “Travel Mode”, as if it had a feeling.
He turned it over.
Not because he was virtuous, but because, in this moment, he needed a small white spot: a gap in which he is alone.
The train drove.
The hours passed.
They changed trains at a station.
They drank coffee.
They ate something that tasted like plastic and yet was filling.
Hans Castorp secretly took a sip of hibiscus white tea in a toilet room from a bottle that he had had filled for himself in the morning. The tea was deep red.
He held the bottle up to the light.
Red.
Water.
Time.
He thought of Gustav: water is the only thing that really is time.
He thought of Venice, without knowing it.
And while he was thinking like this, he felt something shift inside him: not the blood pressure, not the vascular stiffness, not the muscle tension – but the way he looks at himself.
For until now he had looked at himself like a project.
Now he began to look at himself like a character.
This, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, is a dangerous transition. For a character has fate. A project has only goals.
