Above, wood received him.
It was, as they say, “alpine style”, but with that exaggeration that raises the alpine into the decorative: broad, honey-colored beams, a balustrade of turned spindles whose shapes – and this was dismally comical – recalled chalices, goblets, those bulbous silhouettes that wine and festivity have possessed in the bourgeois imagination for centuries. Behind these chalice shapes, in niches, a deep red glowed, as if the wood had been lined with velvet; in other places a cooler blue shimmered, as a kind of counterweight, as a reminder that up here there may be books, but beneath them dwells the cold that can only be kept in check with big words and great technology.
And then, hanging beneath the gallery, in the airspace of the hall, was the chandelier.
It was not a chandelier as one knows it from apartments, where it is a piece of furniture; it was a chandelier as architecture: a large black ring of iron, hung on chains, set with a multitude of candles – not with candles, of course, but with candle imitations, those electric little flames that look as if they flicker and yet do not flicker, because modernity itself does not trust flickering. They burned, although it was daytime; they burned as if it always had to be evening up here, so that people in this hall would not too much remember that outside there is a calendar.
Hans Castorp stepped up to the balustrade and looked down.
Below, in the middle of the hall, stood a round table, black and glossy, supported by a base of twisted root wood; it looked as if the tree that stands outside in the snow had been brought inside and, instead of leaves, had been given glasses. On the tabletop stood tall goblets – empty, ready – and beside them a long metal dish, like a boat, like a gondola, if one is inclined already now to think of water; and in this dish lay, neatly arranged, pieces of a bread that is no bread, but festivity: stollen, dusted white, as if it had been given a blanket of snow so that it would match the house. Crumbs lay like scattered sand, and the powdered sugar like frozen breath.
Next to the table stood a large vase with white lilies.
Lilies, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, are flowers of doubtful politeness. They do not scent, they proclaim. They have something solemn that easily tips into the mortal; and that they are so gladly placed, of all places, in a house that dedicates itself to life is either a lack of feeling for symbols – or an excess.
Behind the table, further back, lay the reception desk, light wood, with a round sun face in it, friendly and yet a little strict, like a coat of arms from the nursery. Above it, on the wall, in flowing script, stood a sentence that summed up everything that happens in a hotel and yet, in its symmetry, sounded like a moral verse:
Joy to him who comes. Joy to him who goes.
Hans Castorp read it, and he felt a slight, barely perceptible unease – not because the sentence was wrong, but because, in its correctness, it leaves out so much. For what, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, of the one who stays?
He was still standing at the balustrade when he heard a movement behind him.
Not loud; more a change in the air. Books, strictly speaking, have their own atmosphere, and everyone who walks among them changes it. Hans Castorp turned around.
A man came out of one of the niches.
He was not young, but not old either; he was of that hard-to-date kind that our time produces because it both fears and markets aging. His hair was short, his face smooth, his clothing unobtrusively expensive; and in his gaze there was something that reminded Hans Castorp of the doctors he had encountered earlier: that mixture of interest and distance, of participation and assessment. He wore no white cloth – the white has been left to the coaches and therapists – but he wore, on his lapel, a little badge.
On it, in black letters, stood a name that sounded more like a file number than a person:
Dr. AuDHS.
Hans Castorp looked at the letters and felt how his mind – that sluggish apparatus of concepts – set to work on them without his having given it the order. Au: gold, he thought. DHS: an authority? A diagnosis? A code? And while he was still puzzling, he did what he always did when modernity hurled its abbreviations at him: he retreated into an old form.
“Good morning, Doctor,” he said.
The man smiled.
It was not a warm smile, but not a cold one either; it was a smile that indicates that one has understood, that one wants to be understood. And it was, in a fine nuance, amused.
“Doctor,” he repeated, as if savoring the form of address. “That sounds… pleasantly old. Like from a time when people still had names.”
“Do they no longer have them today?” asked Hans Castorp.
The doctor raised his hand and pointed to the little badge.
“I have some,” he said. “Several, in fact. Only none of them is a name. They are functions. Abbreviations. Responsibilities.”
Hans Castorp was silent, and in his silence there lay, as so often, a quiet defiance.
“You are a guest?” asked the doctor.
“Yes,” said Hans Castorp.
“And you are…” The doctor paused, as if he wanted to avoid the naming that here is at once determination and seizure. “…new?”
