When they had left the Alps behind them, something happened that cannot be measured.
The air became different.
Not suddenly, not dramatically; more like a sentence that, in the middle of being written, imperceptibly shifts into another key. It was no longer that clear, dry cold that sharpens the body. It was a softer warmth, a hint of moisture, a trace of a smell that was not of forest, but of earth and plant and – yes – of something that one can, without making a fool of oneself, only call “south”.
Hans Castorp looked out of the window.
The green became darker.
The houses became different.
The people at the station stood differently.
It is, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, a strange experience when one realizes that culture shows itself not only in books, but in postures: in the way someone holds a cigarette, the way someone speaks, the way someone waits for something.
Gustav von A. looked out of the window, and one could tell that this was not his first time traveling south. He did not seem curious. He seemed determined.
“You know the way,” said Hans Castorp.
Gustav von A. nodded.
“One does not know,” he said, “the way. One knows the temptation.”
Hans Castorp swallowed.
“And what is the temptation?” he asked.
Gustav von A. looked at him.
“That one believes,” he said, “one can find down below something that was missing up above.”
Hans Castorp smiled, bitterly.
“And can one?” he asked.
Gustav von A. shrugged his shoulders.
“One can,” he said, “always find something. The only question is whether it is the right thing.”
Hans Castorp looked at his ring.
The ring showed steps.
Many.
He already had more than ten thousand today.
He had done nothing but walk, stand, sit.
Sitting is the new smoking, Zieser had said. But sitting is unavoidable on the train. The human being is not a running animal, Zieser had said. He is a walking-trotting animal. And now he sat there, a walking-trotting animal in a steel cage, letting himself be carried.
He thought: The ring counts steps. But it does not count that I let myself be carried.
He thought: The ring counts that I go. But it does not count that I go away.
He looked at the notebook.
He took it out.
Without thinking long, he wrote a sentence that occurred to him, as one would once have noted a temperature:
The mountain comes along.
Then he paused.
He crossed out the sentence.
He wrote underneath:
The mountain stays.
Then he paused again.
He crossed out this sentence as well.
Finally, he wrote, small, as if it were not allowed to be loud:
The mountain is in me.
Gustav von A. did not see it.
Or he pretended not to.
The train went on.
And then, after a curve, after a tunnel, after a moment of darkness in which one briefly loses oneself, something suddenly appeared on the horizon that Hans Castorp had not expected – and yet had expected, ever since Gustav had written this word:
Water.
Not a river, not a lake.
A surface.
A smooth, gray-green surface so large that it no longer seems like a thing, but like a condition.
The lagoon, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, is not a place. It is a principle.
Hans Castorp saw it only briefly, because the train went on, because houses and posts and tracks slid in between. But in this brief glance there was something that struck him as if it were an old motif that had finally found its object.
He smelled, very faintly, a smell that did not smell of mountain.
He smelled salt.
Or he imagined it.
Imagination is, as we know, one of the most reliable realities.
The ring on his finger gleamed.
It showed, unmoved, the time.
It showed, unmoved, the heart rate.
It showed, unmoved, the steps.
Hans Castorp looked at the ring and thought, very slowly, very clearly:
It counts everything.
Just not that.
And outside, beyond the window, lay the water, and it did what water always does: It reflected without guaranteeing. It erased time without asking.
The south, thought Hans Castorp, is here.
And he felt that, despite all peak form, despite all bestforming rituals, despite all the yellow and green powders, he was not prepared.
That was the truth.
And it was beautiful.
And unsatisfying.
