Hans Castorp felt a warmth rise in his neck that did not come from the fire of the candles. New, he thought. New is always suspicious. New is always recordable.
“One could call it that,” he said.
The doctor stepped closer to the railing, looked down at the table with the stollen, at the lilies, at the people moving there, and he said, almost casually:
“New Year’s Day is a strange day. Everyone is exhausted, but everyone acts as if they were renewed.”
“That is the program,” said Hans Castorp.
“Ah,” said the doctor. “You already speak like we do.”
He let his gaze return to Hans Castorp. This gaze remained, like an instrument, a tick too long on Hans’s face, on his hands, on the posture of his shoulders, as if he were reading, without reading, the aftereffects of the night.
“You were down there yesterday?” asked the doctor.
Hans Castorp thought of the ice bar, of the fireworks, of the twitching of his body, and he felt a reflex stab into his chest – not pain, more like memory in physiological form.
“I was… there,” he said.
“And?” asked the doctor.
Hans Castorp could have answered: It was beautiful. It was unsatisfying. It was war game. It was masquerade. It was home. He could have said many things; but he said, because he was Castorp and not Settembrini, not Naphta, not someone who likes to talk, only this:
“It was loud.”
The doctor nodded.
“Loud is always more for the body than for the mind,” he said. “The mind can pretend it is uninvolved. The body cannot. It is honest.”
Hans Castorp regarded him.
“Are you a physician?” he asked.
“I am a doctor,” said the doctor. “That is already a lot today.”
Hans Castorp smiled. It was a polite smile, and it was, as he knew it in himself, a little unsatisfying, because he knew while doing it that he was smiling.
The doctor continued, in that gentle, matter-of-fact manner that at the same time calms and delivers you up:
“You wear a collar like a shield. You have your hands in your pockets as if you were holding on to something. And your pupils are still…” He paused, as if weighing a word. “…restless.”
Hans Castorp felt his breath catch for a moment – not from fear, but from that small annoyance one feels when one is seen.
“You see a lot, Doctor,” he said.
“That’s what I’m here for,” replied the doctor. “Up here they call it: care. They used to call it: observation.”
He leaned against the railing. Below, someone picked up a glass, another laughed; the day continued its administration.
“You know,” said the doctor, “what people up here actually buy?”
Hans Castorp thought: Time. Warmth. Forgetting.
“Longevity,” he said.
The doctor shook his head.
“No,” he said. “They buy the feeling that their life is a project. That you can work on it the way you work on a façade. That is the new morality: optimization.”
He said the word without mockery, but you could hear that he did not quite like it – not because it would be wrong, but because it fits too well.
Hans Castorp looked at the books that stood on the shelves, neatly lined up, with spines that shone in different colors, as if they were goods.
“And the books?” he asked. “What do they buy with those?”
The doctor followed his gaze.
“The illusion of depth,” he said calmly. “A book today is a piece of furniture that claims one has time.”
Hans Castorp was silent. A sadness stirred in him – quiet, unsatisfying. Not because he was sentimental, but because he sensed that the doctor was right and that being right is something cold.
“And you?” asked the doctor suddenly. “What do you buy?”
Hans Castorp felt the word “name” rise to his tongue like a foreign body.
He thought of the man who wrote names in the night. He thought of the little wooden stick the woman had given him. It was still in his pocket; he felt it now, as if it had suddenly become heavy. A ridiculous thing – and yet it was there like a piece of evidence.
“I buy nothing,” he said.
The doctor smiled again, that calm smile.
“Of course,” he said. “That’s what all those who buy the most say.”
