At breakfast the salon was bright.
Not bright because the city would be bright; bright because the hotel wanted it that way. The curtains had been drawn back, the light had been arranged so that everything looked like a picture, and pictures, that is the old art of this city, are the most polite form of lying.
The tables stood, starched, in rows and ranks. White cloth. Silver. Glass. The sounds muffled: knives on porcelain, voices that behave because they know they could be heard. The chandelier hung over everything like a crystalline thought. It sparkled as if it had no function other than to show: Here one not only eats, here one lives.
Hans Castorp did not sit down right away.
First he stood at the edge, as he was used to: a man who stands at the center and yet remains at the edge because, inwardly, he does not quite consider himself entitled.
Then he saw Gustav von A.
Gustav was already sitting.
He had a newspaper in front of him, but he was not reading. He only held it, the way one holds something one needs as a bourgeois prop so that existence does not appear too naked. His face was calm, but Hans Castorp, who had by now learned to read the body the way Dr. Porsche reads a curve, saw the small signs: the line around the mouth that was too tight, the hand that went to the temple too often, the short, inaudible exhale that is not relief but effort.
Gustav looked up.
“You slept badly,” he said.
It was not a question.
It was not pity either.
It was a statement.
Hans Castorp smiled.
“One sleeps here… differently,” he said.
Gustav von A. nodded.
“One lives here differently,” he said.
And then, without wanting to – or perhaps precisely because he wanted to – his gaze slid to the door.
Hans Castorp did not follow the gaze immediately.
That is one of those small moral exercises one can get used to: not always obeying another’s gaze when it contains a command. But Hans Castorp was, despite System‑2 resolutions, a human being. And human beings, dear reader, dear readers, are not good at refusing gazes when beauty is involved.
He looked at the door.
The beautiful apparition entered.
Not hurried, not posing; rather as if stepping into a room that does not belong to her and yet knowing that she changes it as soon as she is there. The hair today was not simply light – in the morning light it was almost silver. The shirt was again plain. Nothing was emphasized. And precisely for that reason, thought Hans Castorp, everything was emphasized: the line of the neck, the way the shoulders are set, the calm of the movement.
The person took a tray.
She took coffee.
She took fruit.
She sat down at a table where people were already sitting, and the people pretended to go on talking, although in truth they were no longer talking, but looking.
Gustav von A. looked a moment too long.
He did not look like a stalker, not like a lecher; he looked like a person to whom something has been shown that he did not order and that therefore strikes him. And Hans Castorp saw it: it was not the beauty alone that struck Gustav; it was what beauty always does when it does not appear as décor but as an event: It reminds one of time.
For what is beauty other than a kind of present that refuses to be past?
Gustav von A. lowered his gaze.
He took the newspaper.
He pretended to read.
Hans Castorp knew that he was not reading.
He knew it because he himself had often enough pretended to read: in rest halls, in dining rooms, in waiting rooms, when the inner life was too loud.
Hans Castorp took a piece of bread.
He also, almost automatically, took the bottle of hibiscus white tea from his bag. The red tone shimmered in the glass like a small private secret.
Gustav von A. saw it.
“You really drink that,” he said.
“It is recommended,” said Hans Castorp.
Gustav smiled briefly.
“Recommended,” he repeated, and in the word lay everything that tired him about the world: the gentle force of prescription disguised as concern.
Hans Castorp unscrewed the bottle but held it in his hand for a moment.
“They recommend things down here too,” he said, and he thought of the sign on the wall, of the three languages, of the hygienic trifle that sounded like fate.
Gustav von A. put the newspaper down.
“I know,” he said.
He said it so quietly that it was almost not said.
Then he stood up.
He stood up as if he had something to take care of.
“I’m going,” he said.
“Where to?” asked Hans Castorp.
Gustav hesitated.
A hesitation, dear reader, dear readers, is sometimes the first visible sign of a lie.
“To the barber,” said Gustav.
Hans Castorp raised his eyebrows.
Gustav looked at him, and in this look there was something that Hans Castorp had not often seen in him: a kind of defiance.
“I look… unedifying,” said Gustav.
Hans Castorp had to smile, against his will.
“You look like yourself,” he said.
“That is precisely the problem,” said Gustav.
And with that everything was said.
