They did not go far, and yet Hans Castorp had the feeling as if they were changing houses. For the paths in such institutions are, dear female reader, dear male reader, always also paths of meaning: From the hall of identities into the room of work on the body it is a step that feels like a transition – from the bourgeois to the biological, from conversation to sweating.
They came into an area that did not smell of wood and perfume, but of that peculiar mixture of rubber, metal and clean air that forms where people consume their strength as a service. There they stood: the GYMcubes.
One must not imagine these cubes as cozy rooms. They were like cells, and they were so intentionally. Privacy in luxury, as Hans Castorp had long since learned, is not a freedom but a commodity. In the past, domes of plastic had been built to let the guests sit in the snow as if in exhibitions; here they built cubes of walls to leave them alone with iron as with a mirror.
Dr. AuDHS stopped in front of a cube.
“Here,” he said.
Hans Castorp saw the door. It looked like a hotel door. And yet it had something else: It did not promise sleep, but exertion.
Dr. AuDHS opened, and Hans Castorp stepped in.
It was as if he were entering a floor plan.
For the cube had inside that peculiar clarity that only rooms have that are marked by function. On the left, right after the entrance, there was a small airlock, an anteroom that seemed like a polite buffer: One came from the hotel, one was not yet in the gym. Then a corridor began, narrow, straight, without ornament. And on this corridor there were doors, small doors, behind which there were small rooms: Changing room 1, Changing room 2, trainer room – named so soberly that it almost became ironic again; then a shower, then a WC. It was as if the side rooms of the human being – changing, washing, emptying – had been lined up as one files documents.
The corridor led further, and at the end there was a door, larger, that opened into the white area.
Hans Castorp looked through the open door into this white area and felt, with a slight fright, how large it was. Not large in the architectural sense, but large in the moral one: Here there was no excuse. Here there was only the rack, the bench, the bar, the plates, a stick, a few collars, a few mats. Keep it simple – the simplicity was not cozy, it was strict.
“You see,” said Dr. AuDHS, “it is a cube. Five meters. Order. You cannot get lost.”
“One can,” said Hans Castorp, “also get lost in five meters.”
Dr. AuDHS nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “In oneself.”
He pointed to the doors.
“Get changed. Changing room one or two – depending on which is free.”
Hans Castorp saw that one of the doors had a small strip of light, as if it were occupied. He took room two. He stepped inside.
The room was small, just big enough to undress without pretending. A bench, a hook, a mirror. Hans Castorp looked at himself in the mirror, and he was not startled because he was vain; he was startled because he was older than he felt, and because age in the mirror always seems like an assertion: You see it and yet you do not believe it.
He took off his shirt, his trousers, and he put on things that did not smell of celebration and hotel, but of training: fabrics that cling to the body as if they wanted to force it to be honest. He tied his shoes, and this tying had something of a vow.
When he stepped back into the corridor, he heard voices. Dr. AuDHS was speaking with someone. The voice that answered was calm, deep, and it had a tone that does not ask but posits.
Then Prof. Frank Zieser appeared.
