It began.
The scissors cut.
The sound was soft, like a quiet, dry chewing. Hair fell.
They fell like time.
Hans Castorp thought of Dr. Porsche.
He thought of vascular stiffness.
He thought of the diastolic number that is just over eighty and therefore becomes a moral question.
He thought: You can measure age, and you can cut it, and you can dye it – and it remains.
The barber bent forward, looked at Gustav’s face, not like a person, but like a picture. He held the head lightly, turned it, examined.
“Your hair is very…”, he said, and searched for a word that does not offend. “…full of character.”
Gustav did not smile.
“It is gray,” he said.
The barber raised his eyebrows.
“Gray hair is…”, he began, and that was that bourgeois politeness that wants to be comfort and in doing so prevents truth.
Gustav interrupted him.
“I know,” he said. “I know what it is. I would like it to… not be like that.”
Hans Castorp felt a small sting.
Not because he found it ridiculous.
Because he understood it.
For Hans Castorp, too, had in recent months not wanted things to be “like that”: blood pressure not like that. Stress not like that. Fat percentage not like that. Sleep not like that. This is called bestforming, and it sounds modern; but at its core it is the same old human business: You want life to obey you.
The barber nodded slowly.
“Colorazione,” he said, as if it were a magic word.
He went to a shelf.
He took a bowl.
He took a tube.
The color was dark.
It smelled.
Not strong, not vulgar; but it smelled of chemistry, of a small violence.
He mixed.
He stirred.
The sound of the stirring was dismally intimate, because it showed: Something is being produced here that will later be called “natural.”
Hans Castorp looked at Gustav.
Gustav looked in the mirror.
He did not look out.
He did not look at Hans.
He looked only at himself.
The barber began to apply the color.
He did it gently, carefully, as if he were stroking a picture.
The dark mass settled on the gray.
It settled like a lie.
It settled like a blanket.
It settled like a mask.
Hans Castorp had to think of the yellow and green powders that stood on his table. He had to think of the red of the hibiscus. Those are colors too, he thought. Those are mixtures too. Those are also small chemical lies that one calls “nature” because one prefers to believe in herbs rather than in fear.
The barber worked on.
He also stroked over the eyebrows.
A little.
Just a little.
Gustav flinched.
“That’s part of it,” said the barber, kindly.
Gustav said nothing.
He let it happen.
And Hans Castorp, who had learned in the Sonnenalp to let devices be attached to his body, to have blood taken, to let himself be measured, recognized this attitude: the consent of the person who believes he must suffer in order to be allowed to.
“You will see,” said the barber.
See.
Again and again: see.
The eye as the main organ of modernity.
The barber let the color take effect.
He set a timer.
Yes.
A timer.
Here too: numbers.
Here too: measurement.
“Ten minutes,” he said.
He said it as if it were a promise.
Hans Castorp now did sit down after all, because standing suddenly became ridiculous in this small, intimate workshop of self-deception. He sat down on a chair at the edge, and the chair was uncomfortable, as if it wanted to say: spectators should not become too comfortable.
He looked at Gustav.
Gustav looked in the mirror.
The color shone.
It was not yet “natural.” It was a wet, dark mass, like mud, like ink.
“How do you feel?” asked Hans Castorp.
It was a harmless question.
But in harmless questions the knife is often hidden.
Gustav did not answer immediately.
Then he said:
“Like someone who is doing something he does not want to do.”
Hans Castorp smiled.
“Then why are you doing it?”
Gustav looked at him in the mirror.
The gaze did not come directly, but via the reflection, and reflections, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, make every gaze more honest and more uncanny at the same time.
“Because I want to,” said Gustav.
