The examinations did not begin like an examination, but like a choreography.
They led Hans Castorp from room to room, and each room had a different temperature, a different smell, a different light – as if they wanted to tell the body: You are not just a body, you are an inventory.
First lung function.
A device, a mouthpiece, a short command: breathe in deeply, breathe out, press, hold. Hans Castorp blew, and it was as if he were not blowing air, but history. He thought of Davos, of rest halls, of the highlands, of breath as a cure; and he felt how modernity no longer treats breath as fate, but as performance.
Then resting ECG.
They stuck small dots on his chest, as one sticks labels on a package. Cables ran away from him, as if they had attached invisible threads to him. He lay on a couch, and the sound of the paper – this fine, mechanical scratching when curves are printed – reminded him of something he could not immediately name.
Curves.
Curves are the poetry of control. One transforms the invisible into a line, and because it is a line, one believes one has understood it.
Hans Castorp thought of the little wooden stick. You can write with anything if you are prepared for it to smudge. Here it was not a stick that wrote, here the machine wrote. And it did not smudge.
Stress ECG.
They put him on a device that looked like a bicycle, only without freedom. He pedaled, and a screen showed numbers. The woman in white said kindly: “Very calm.” It is disheartening how often in such houses one says “calm,” as if calm were a button.
Hans Castorp pedaled. His heart beat. He saw the sweat on his forehead as proof that he was alive, and at the same time felt a quiet comedy: In the past one exerted oneself in order to get somewhere. Today one exerts oneself in order to reach a value.
In between they took blood from him.
Little tubes, colored caps, a small prick. Blood is the old truth that can never be modernized. It is always a bit improper, even in the health sector.
Then ultrasound.
They laid him on a couch. They pushed his shirt up. Gel, cold, slippery, on the skin – a small shock, as if one had to overcome the surface in order to reach the truth. A device glided over him, and on a screen his insides appeared as a gray landscape. The heart beat there, black and white, as if it were an animal one searches for in the snow.
Hans Castorp looked, and he thought: This is how one sees oneself today. Not in the mirror, but as a shadow image.
“Very nice,” said the woman in white.
It was a sentence that in this situation was dishearteningly comical. Nice. The heart is nice when it works.
They saw the thyroid, they saw the abdomen, they saw the large vessels that run through the body like roads. And then, particularly carefully, they looked at the brain-supplying arteries. They checked whether the head is still well supplied – as if in a time when the head has to invent so much, one must also make sure that it gets enough blood.
Arterial vessel check.
They put cuffs on, they measured, they heard the pumping, this regular inflating, as if the machine wanted to show the body what it feels like to be controlled. Hans Castorp involuntarily thought of the war nights, of commands, of footsteps, of the pressing and yielding. The body remembers principles.
Bioelectrical impedance measurement.
They had him step onto a scale that not only weighs, but judges. It divided him into water, fat, muscle, mass, as if he were a household being settled. Hans Castorp felt a slight shame, not because his values were bad, but because, as a human being, he suddenly felt very small: a bundle of shares.
Time passed in between all this.
