The next day they went.
For in Venice one walks.
One does not walk in order to arrive somewhere; one walks because walking here is the only form of orientation, and because orientation here, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, does not consist in straight lines, but in detours. One walks over bridges one does not need; one walks through alleys that lead to nowhere; one walks past doors behind which one senses life, and yet never sees it. One walks and walks, and the water is always somewhere, like a quiet, green eye.
Hans Castorp walked with Gustav von A.
Gustav walked fast.
Not out of haste, but out of discipline.
He walked as if he had to, through walking, execute a sentence.
Hans Castorp walked beside him.
He no longer walked heavily. His body had, as he had learned in the Sonnenalp, become efficient. The steps were quiet. The muscles worked. The back was strong. The breathing calm. He felt how the months in the GYMcube, the squats, the pull-ups, the king sets, all that which is sold as “hygiene”, here below unfolded into another kind of freedom: He could walk without suffering. And yet, he thought, that is exactly it: That one only notices freedom when the body no longer calls in between.
He looked at the ring.
It showed: 5,432 steps.
It was morning.
“You see”, said Gustav von A. suddenly, without turning around.
He pointed at a wall.
On the wall hung, as everywhere in this city, a sign. It was small. It was inconspicuous. And yet it was, like so many signs, a form of order. On the sign it said – in Italian, in English, in German – something that Hans Castorp immediately knew, because he had read it a hundred times in the Sonnenalp, only in a different form:
It is recommended…
Hans Castorp stopped.
Gustav von A. did not stop.
“What is recommended?” asked Hans Castorp.
Gustav von A. turned around.
“That one does not drink the water,” he said.
Hans Castorp looked at the sign.
It was, strictly speaking, a small matter: avoid tap water, wash hands, check ice cubes, caution in the heat. It was, strictly speaking, only hygiene.
But recommendations, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, are never only hygiene. They are morality. They are fear. They are the form in which a society tells itself: We know that we are at risk, but we do not want to say it out loud.
Hans Castorp felt a thread of cold run down his back, although it was warm.
“Why do they recommend it?” he asked.
Gustav von A. looked at him.
In this look lay, very briefly, something like mockery.
“Because it is always recommended,” he said. “And because one always believes one can save oneself if one only acts correctly.”
Hans Castorp looked at the ring.
He thought: Dr. Porsche would have understood that.
He would have said: ritual.
He would have said: hygiene.
He would have said: bestforming.
And here, in this city, it suddenly seemed – like everything – like a mask.
They walked on.
They passed a square where people were sitting and eating.
Hans Castorp smelled coffee, fish, sweat, perfume.
He saw people taking photographs.
He saw people photographing themselves.
He saw people who, with a ring on their finger, counted their steps, as if they were on vacation and yet on duty.
He had to laugh.
Not loudly.
Only inwardly.
For how unedifying it is, he thought, that even in a city that has been proving for centuries that everything rots, everything sinks, everything dissolves, one still tries to calm oneself with numbers.
