It was an English word, and precisely for that reason it seemed like a promise. Health, thought Hans Castorp, is too heavy in German; in English it can be sold more easily.
A brochure was lying on a table.
He picked it up.
On the front was the same corridor depicted in which he was standing – a pretty trick of modernity: you show the guest his own existence as an image so that he recognizes himself in it and feels confirmed. At the bottom it said: Dr. med. Wendelin Porsche. Medical applications.
Hans Castorp turned the brochure over, and his gaze fell on a list.
It was a litany.
Cardiovascular performance tests, laboratory tests, ultrasound examinations, therapy. Lung function, resting ECG, stress ECG without lactate measurement, 24 h blood pressure measurement, arterial vessel check (ABI + PW), bioelectrical impedance measurement; selective lab tests, selective stool tests; a “13 C urea breath test”, and underneath it said – and Hans Castorp had to, despite everything, smile briefly – “Helicopter Pylori Test”.
Helicopter.
Today people even fly over the bacteria.
Under therapy there were, like a small archaic spook in the midst of all the technology: acupuncture, chiropractic therapy, infusion – and bloodletting.
Bloodletting.
Hans Castorp thought that a house that promises longevity in the end always ends up with blood again. Eros and Thanatos, he thought, always go through the veins.
At the very bottom there was a sentence which, in its sober cruelty, felt like a moral pinprick:
Medical consultations are billed according to the time required.
Time required.
The time-novel as an item on the bill.
Hans Castorp leafed further, read “annual check-up”, read “at least 3 overnight stays” and felt how the number three – this bourgeois number of order, of stays, of “just a short” visits – stirred something restless in him. He knew how that begins. You come for three weeks. And stay.
He sat down.
It is disheartening, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, how quickly one sits down when a chair is built in such a way that it elicits assent. Hans Castorp sat, held the brochure on his knees and looked at his hands. They were calm. And yet, beneath the calm, lay the old restlessness: the thought of entries, of lists, of names.
Next to him sat a woman, sporty, in a tracksuit, who looked as if she had her rest only as a stopover. On the other side sat a man whose face smelled of business, although he was freshly showered. They all sat here as if they were waiting for a sacrament.
And then, at the end of the row, sat a man who did not seem to belong here, because he did not look like someone who wants to be optimized, but like someone who has long since understood himself as a form.
He was slim, almost skinny, and his posture was so upright that one involuntarily thinks of discipline before one thinks of health. His hair was gray, careful, not slicked back, but orderly. He was not wearing a tracksuit, but a simple jacket that looked as if it had grown out of the habit of decency. On his knees lay not a brochure, but a small notebook.
And he was writing.
Not much. Not hastily. He wrote like someone writes who knows writing as duty and as salvation. A short stroke, a word, a pause – as if every sentence first had to be earned.
Hans Castorp looked at him for a while without realizing it, the way one looks at something that reminds one of something one has never lived: a life that is in order because it has work.
The man raised his gaze.
His eyes were light and at the same time tired, and in them lay a coolness that was not unfriendly but protective. He looked at Hans Castorp, and for a moment it was as if two different forms of bourgeois existence had recognized each other: the fleeing and the creating.
“You are reading,” said the man, and it did not sound like a question but like a statement.
Hans Castorp raised the brochure a little, as if he had to justify himself.
“It was recommended to me,” he said.
The man nodded as if he knew the word recommendation from his own experience.
“Recommendations,” he said softly, “are the gentlest form of command.”
Hans Castorp smiled. He liked the sentence because it was true.
“You are…?” he began.
The man made a small hand movement, as if he wanted to avoid naming. Then, as if he had nevertheless decided that in chapels one says names, he said:
“Gustav von A.”
Only an initial, like a curtain. Hans Castorp thought of Dr. AuDHS, of abbreviations, of responsibilities. Here too an abbreviation – but a different one: not modern, but aristocratic, as if the man wanted to withdraw into a family tree.
“Hans Castorp,” said Hans, and felt how easily this word came out of his mouth, as if it really were his.
Gustav von A. nodded.
“Castorp,” he repeated, and you could hear that he was testing the word like a material. “That sounds like the North.”
“I come from below,” said Hans Castorp.
Gustav von A. did not smile. He lowered his gaze back to his notebook.
“We all come from below,” he said. “But up here we like to act as if the valley were a legend.”
Hans Castorp was silent. The sentence was almost Settembrinian, but without eloquence; more like an Aschenbach sentence, if one is inclined to think in functions.
“You are here because of… health?” asked Hans Castorp.
Gustav von A. raised his shoulders minimally – a gesture that says: I do not take the word entirely seriously.
“I am here,” he said, “because I have to work.”
Hans Castorp looked at him.
“Work?” he repeated.
Gustav von A. raised his gaze again. And now there was, very briefly, something like a crack in his control: not pain, more a flare-up.
“The body,” he said calmly, “is a tool. If it does not function, you cannot create.”
Create.
The word fell into Hans Castorp’s inner self like a small coin into an empty bowl. Tonio, he thought, would suffer from this word: from the hardness that lies in it and from the longing that it simultaneously produces. For whoever creates is allowed to stay. Whoever does not create remains suspect.
“What do you create?” asked Hans Castorp, and it was disheartening how quickly one asks intimate questions in such rooms because the devices prepare them.
Gustav von A. looked at him for a moment as if considering whether he should answer. Then he said:
“Sentences.”
Hans Castorp felt a small, involuntary tug – envy or admiration, he did not know.
“Sentences are also… values,” said Hans Castorp slowly.
Gustav von A. twisted his mouth barely noticeably. It could have been a smile if he had allowed himself one.
“Values,” he said, and you could hear that he does not love the word, “are everything today. In the past one had them in one’s head. Today one has them on paper. Or on screens.”
Hans Castorp thought of photos, of the photo booth, of the donkey, of the blurring.
“And where do your sentences lead you?” asked Hans Castorp, more out of a feeling than out of interest.
Gustav von A. glanced briefly to the side, as if he saw something that was not there: water perhaps, a surface, a movement.
“To the South,” he said. “To a place that is beautiful and disheartening.”
Hans Castorp raised his eyebrows.
“Beautiful and disheartening,” he repeated.
“Yes,” said Gustav von A. “Like everything that seduces you.”
Then he looked back at his notebook and wrote a word, as if he had to remind himself of it.
Hans Castorp wanted to say something else – perhaps ask, perhaps joke – but at that moment a door opened, and a young woman in white clothing, not quite a lab coat, not quite a hotel uniform, called out a name.
“Mr. Castorp?”
Hans Castorp stood up.
Gustav von A. nodded to him, barely visible, and said softly, without looking up:
“Don’t let yourself be improved too much.”
Hans Castorp wanted to answer, but then he was already in the corridor, following the woman in white, and the chairs remained behind like a row of confessionals.
