He turned on the tap.
The water came at first hesitantly, then with a small jolt – and it was, for a moment, not clear.
It was rosy.
Not red like blood, not brown like mud; but rosy, as if someone had mixed in something that is ashamed. It had that color one sees in very diluted hibiscus, when the tea has been left standing in the glass for too long and the remainder gathers in the curvature of the bottom.
Hans Castorp stared at the stream.
He thought, involuntarily, of Dr. Porsche, of the deep redness of the hibiscus white tea, of the sentence that had then shot into his head in the examination room like an omen: Venice perhaps – of water that can turn red if you look at it too long.
He held his hand under the stream.
The water was cool. It smelled of nothing – and precisely that smelled suspicious, for nothingness is often the form in which hygiene disguises itself. After a few seconds it became clear. It was as if the tap had had a brief cough.
“Rust,” thought Hans Castorp.
Rust is the bourgeois explanation for something uncanny. People say: old pipes. People say: nothing. People say: in a moment.
He rinsed his face, looked again in the mirror.
A man who washes himself. A man who believes that washing solves something.
He reached for his little tin, for his “health powder,” the dark yellow one; he weighed out – one could have watched him like an alchemist who, instead of gold, would like to produce calm – three grams, perhaps a little more, for the feeling that it must “work” is always a little greedy. He stirred it into water, gargled, swallowed. The taste was sharp, bitter, warm: turmeric, pepper, ginger, and beneath that that strange, serious note of black cumin that pretends to be truth.
Then bitter drops with lemon juice, then – and here he faltered – the hibiscus.
The previous evening he had prepared the tea in a thermos; not with tap water but, out of a caution that he himself felt to be ridiculous, with a still water from glass bottles that the hotel had provided. On the label, “Nature” was written in a script so elegant that it already smelled of marketing again.
He poured.
The color was deep red.
He looked at it, and something in him that was not rational – system one, if you will, that quick, bad statistics animal – made a connection: the rosy water from the tap, the deep red in the glass, the lagoon outside, greenish, shimmering. Red, green, water. It was as if the day had a palette.
He mixed in the grass-green longevity powder, which, in the red, looked like a scandal: green in the red water, as if someone had transformed Morgenstern’s “blue grass,” only the other way round, into liquid. It foamed slightly. It smelled of matcha, of paper, of a distant forest.
Hans Castorp took the tablets.
Vitamin D3/K2, which one actually does not need in the South and yet takes; acetylsalicylic acid, resveratrol, magnesium; Q10; and, last, the one that in the doctor’s mouth sounded like a motor: metformin.
He did not do it mechanically. He did it with a kind of devotion.
That is, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, the comedy of our time: we have left religions behind us, and now we worship tablets.
When he was finished, he stood still for a moment.
He listened to the water.
For a moment, he felt well.
And precisely that is dangerous.
