Hans Castorp showered in the small cubicle that was called the shower and also did not want to be anything else. The water was hot, and he thought of Morgenstern, of the sauna, of the truth of heat. He thought that water is always truth, because it does not let the body lie: it makes it soft, it makes it red, it makes it visible.
When he was dressed again and left the cube, he felt how strange it is that after exertion one walks more lightly. Not faster – more lightly. As if one had carried something out of oneself that was not weight but restlessness.
He walked through the hotel, and people did not look at him any differently than before. Nobody knew that he had just done twelve repetitions. Nobody knew that his back had burned. Nobody knew that he was carrying a logbook in which his sets stood like little pieces of evidence.
And Hans Castorp thought, with a quiet, Tonio-like bitterness: You can do a great deal, and it counts for nothing if no one reads it.
In the evening, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, the small, neatly dressed man came to the door again: the cuff.
Hans Castorp sat down on the bed, tied the band around his arm, pressed the button. The machine hummed, tightened, released, tightened – as if it were reminding him of something he must not forget.
He saw the value.
The diastole was, as expected, just over eighty.
“Normally high,” he thought, and he could have laughed if it had not been so unedifying that one lives in numbers.
He took the logbook. He wrote the value in it.
He also wrote underneath: PUSH – done.
Then he put the pen away, as if it were an instrument that one must not touch too often, because otherwise it produces too much truth.
And before he turned off the light, he thought:
The Berghof had curves. The Sonnenalp has sets. The curve was passive; the set is active. And yet both are the same: a way of taming time by turning it into repetition.
He closed his eyes.
The smile that came to him involuntarily as he did so was polite.
And a little unedifying.
