The relaxation room was, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, a strange mixture of living room and infirmary. It was warm, wood‑paneled, with large windows, behind which the snow lay like a silent threat. In the room stood couches – not simple couches, but couches on wheels, as if one had not been able to decide whether to give the guest freedom or patienthood. Blankets lay over them, brown, heavy, soft. And in the middle stood a large, box‑shaped body of wood that looked like a stove, like a cozy machine in which warmth is stored as a substance.
Hans Castorp lay down on a couch.
He did it without shame. Shame, in a bathrobe, is in any case a weak authority.
Morgenstern lay down on a couch next to him. Between them was a distance that was bourgeois, but not cold.
For a while they just lay there. One heard the soft hum of the heating. One heard, somewhere, a rustling – perhaps someone pulling the blanket into place, perhaps a body defending itself in sleep.
Then Morgenstern said, very softly, as if he were afraid of disturbing the room:
“Yesterday I said to my wife that she was exaggerating. And she cried. And I said she was sensitive. And I laughed, as if it were a joke.”
He fell silent.
“And now I think,” he continued, “that the laughter… was the real problem. Not the sentence. But this…” He searched for the word. “…this standing‑above‑her.”
Hans Castorp thought of the narrator, of the authorial position; and he thought how unedifying it is that one can stand ‘above’ everywhere: above the scene, above the partner, above one’s own mistake. And that the ‘above’ is a form of violence if one does not notice it.
“The standing‑above‑her,” he said, “is a fine position. You see everything. Only not the other person.”
Morgenstern nodded, as if that was exactly what he had meant.
“Respect,” he said again, and now it sounded less like a headline, more like a prayer. “Compassion. Responsibility. Safety. Partnership.”
He said the five words like five steps that one has to climb, even though one knows that one can stumble.
Hans Castorp looked, through the window, at the snow.
The snow was white. It covered everything. It made the world clean, like a fresh cloth. And yet one knew that underneath everything still remains: paths, stones, grass. It was only hidden.
He thought: Perhaps what Morgenstern calls “blue grass” is nothing other than the attempt to color something under the snow so that one does not have to feel that it is still there.
He reached, without thinking about it, into the pocket of his bathrobe.
The little wooden stick was still there.
He pulled it out and looked at it. Then he took, very slowly, the tip and wrote with it, not on paper – there was no paper – but on the fogged glass of the window: one line, then another, then a letter that did not quite become a letter.
It blurred immediately.
The condensation took up the trace and drew it back into itself, as if it had no patience for identities.
Morgenstern saw it.
“You are writing,” he said.
Hans Castorp smiled.
“I am trying,” he said.
Morgenstern was silent for a moment. Then he said:
“One has to be prepared for it to blur.”
Hans Castorp looked at him.
“Yes,” he said. “That is the danger. And the freedom.”
Outside, somewhere, a little snow fell from a branch. Inside, the steam still lay in their hair. And Hans Castorp, who lived between names and aliases, between guilt and self‑protection, between mask and hunger, thought – not as a concept, but as a feeling – that perhaps there are two ways to no longer be a donkey:
One is to tell the truth.
The other is to stop insisting on the blue when you cannot bear the green.
He closed his eyes.
And for the first time in a long while – perhaps since the first Walpurgis Night – he slept a little, not deeply, not long, but honestly.
