They got into a boat.
In this city, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, one can hardly go down a flight of stairs without getting into a boat; and that is one of those facts that, if one is inclined, one immediately begins to allegorize, because it is so easy. For whoever gets into a boat gets into something that cannot be held on to. A boat is movement. It is trust. It is a means of transport that, unlike the train, does not pretend to be a machine; it is a floating promise that can fall back into the water at any time.
The boat – a vaporetto, broad, practical, full – smelled a little of people. It rocked. There were small jolts when it docked, and in these jolts there was, for Hans Castorp, a familiar, unpleasant echo: the body that remembers that shock is not always solid, but sometimes war.
He did not sit down.
He stood, as he had often stood in hotels, at an edge, as if he wanted to show that he did not belong, even though he had long since belonged. Gustav von A. stood next to him, did not hold on, although one should hold on. He did not look at people. He looked at the houses.
And the houses, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, looked as if they had not been built, but left over.
They stood there, with their facades, their windows, their balconies, their peeling paint, their stucco that comes loose like skin, and they were reflected in the water, but not in the way a person is reflected in the mirror – clear, unambiguous, confirming. They were reflected broken, trembling, blurred. The water was a bad mirror. Or perhaps it was the most honest. For it said: Nothing is solid. Everything is only like this for a moment.
Hans Castorp thought, without wanting to, of Dr. AuDHS, of whose gaze could be both: strict and soft.
“Do you believe,” he had said, “that what you will see down there is not automatically truth just because it is beautiful.”
Hans Castorp looked at the beauty of the city.
And he felt how the warning worked in him like a small, cold tool.
