That in such houses one “has doctors sent for” is a custom that is at once old and new: old, because it makes the doctor a servant; new, because it makes the guest into a case. Hans Castorp went, as he had already done once before, to the reception hall, where Mr. Kautsonik was standing, and asked, with that mixture of timidity and matter‑of‑factness that modern man has developed when he asks for care:
“Tell me… can one speak to the doctor?”
Kautsonik raised his eyebrows. In his pensioner existence, he was a man who no longer had to prove anything, and precisely for that reason he was the ideal mirror for all those who still want to prove something.
“The doctor?” he asked in that tone that is already half the answer.
“AuDHS,” said Hans Castorp.
Kautsonik nodded, as if he had expected exactly this abbreviation.
“The doctor,” he said, and he pronounced the form of address as though there were still certainties in the world, “is in the house. I will have him sent for.”
He reached for his device, spoke into it, and Hans Castorp once again saw that strange modern magic at work: you speak into a little thing, and a person appears.
Kautsonik put the device away, looked at Hans Castorp and said, with a dry politeness that is at the same time compassion:
“Sleep, isn’t it?”
Hans Castorp blinked.
“How…?”
Kautsonik made a small hand movement, as if to say: I have decades.
“You can tell by the way they walk,” he said. “And by the fact that people suddenly speak very quietly. As if they didn’t want to startle the sleep that doesn’t come anyway.”
Hans Castorp smiled, involuntarily.
“Yes,” he said. “Sleep.”
Kautsonik nodded.
“That is unedifying,” he said. “People used to come here to rest. Today they come here to learn how to rest.”
He did not say it mockingly. He said it as he would also have said: The counter used to be over there.
Then they waited, and one might have thought they were waiting for a doctor; in truth they were waiting for an interpretation.
Dr. AuDHS appeared, as always, not like someone who is sent for, but like someone who has only briefly made himself invisible. He stepped out of one of those zones into which the staff disappears, and his smile was at once friendly and knowing, as though he knew that Hans Castorp had reached a point at which the program unmasks itself.
“Mr. Castorp,” he said.
Hans Castorp again felt that little twitch at the name, which he now knew: the reminder that a name, in his case, is never just a name.
“Doctor,” he said, and held on to the form of address like a handrail.
AuDHS looked at him – and one noticed that he not only saw, but also saw the data, even if he did not have them before his eyes. The gaze of modernity is no longer only physiognomic, it is statistical.
“You have bad nights,” he said.
It was no reproach. It was a finding.
Hans Castorp nodded.
“I…” he began and faltered, because it is unedifying to confess to another that one has become uncertain in something as fundamental as sleep. “The ring…”
AuDHS smiled, and in this smile lay that irony that does not chill but understands.
“Ah,” he said. “The ring. Your new marriage.”
Hans Castorp looked at him.
“Marriage?”
“A ring is a promise,” said AuDHS. “In the past one promised fidelity with it. Today one promises transparency with it. And transparency, esteemed reader, dear reader – forgive me, Mr. Castorp – is the modern form of infidelity against oneself.”
Hans Castorp was silent. He did not understand everything, but he understood enough to feel caught out.
“It says,” said Hans Castorp, and in the “it” one already heard the personification of the machine, “I sleep badly.”
“You sleep badly,” confirmed AuDHS. “And now comes the most modern part of it: you sleep even worse because you know it.”
Hans Castorp exhaled. That was exactly the truth he did not want to hear, because it was so banal and therefore so right.
“I have tried…” he began.
AuDHS raised his hand.
“You have tried,” he said. “And that is exactly where the trap lies. Sleep is the only human activity that gets worse as soon as one undertakes it.”
He paused, glanced briefly to the side, as if he were adding a short footnote in his thoughts, then said:
“Dr. Porsche told you that you had to improve the REM share.”
Hans Castorp nodded.
“He… he said the word. And I nodded.”
“That is your talent,” said AuDHS mildly. “You nod your way through your life.”
Hans Castorp smiled, politely. And a little unedifyingly.
“REM,” AuDHS continued, “is – roughly speaking – that zone in which the body sleeps and the mind works. Or in other words: in which the mind is finally allowed to work without the body supervising it.”
Hans Castorp thought involuntarily of Tonio, of the creating that does not fit into the day; and he thought how strange it is that modernity even prescribes to dreams how productive they are supposed to be.
“And to improve REM,” said AuDHS, “you have to reduce stress.”
“Stress,” Hans Castorp repeated softly.
AuDHS nodded.
“Stress,” he said. “And now we come to something that Dr. Porsche probably did not put into your hand, because it is… too little representative: stress is not only in the head. Stress is in the body. And therefore, Mr. Castorp, you cannot calm the head with the head. You have to outsmart it.”
Hans Castorp looked at him.
“How?”
AuDHS raised his eyebrows.
“Psychosomatic,” he said.
Hans Castorp waited. He waited like a pupil who expects a solution that can be copied.
AuDHS smiled and said, almost conspiratorially:
“I do it myself.”
Hans Castorp blinked.
“You?”
“Yes,” said AuDHS. “I am a doctor, but I am also human. And I am – that is the embarrassing part – also a case.”
He said it without shame. That was the crack you wished for: this man who orders others is himself not ordered.
“When I,” he continued, “notice in the evening that my thoughts are driving down on the motorway, then I do something that is very unmodern: I give the body a problem that is smaller than the problems of the head.”
Hans Castorp did not quite understand.
AuDHS said:
“Acupressure. Fakir mat. Fakir neck roll.”
Hans Castorp stared at him as if he had just heard the word “scourge.”
AuDHS nodded.
“Yes,” he said, as if he had read the look. “It is a kind of domesticated pain. Not enough to be heroic. But enough to force the mind to briefly leave the motorway.”
Hans Castorp felt a strange mixture of resistance and curiosity. Resistance, because pain is unedifying. Curiosity, because he sensed that sometimes salvation lies precisely in the unpleasant.
“That is supposed to… help?” he asked.
“It is supposed,” said AuDHS, “to get the body to loosen a few of these stress loops. In your case: against the ‘normally high.’ Not because the mat lowers blood pressure like a medication – we are not in a brochure here – but because it changes the whole inner posture: from taut to earthy.”
Hans Castorp thought of the sentence: Order is perhaps only a fear that has dressed itself up. And he thought that his head is dressed up right into the night.
“And I get… such a mat?” he asked, and you could hear how absurd it is to ask for a fakir mat in a luxury hotel.
AuDHS smiled.
“You do not get it,” he said. “You get it as a gift. Later. To your room. So that you cannot claim you had no possibility.”
Hans Castorp looked at him.
“A gift,” he repeated.
“A gift,” said AuDHS. “Modernity even gives you the pain so that you do not have to look for it yourself.”
Hans Castorp smiled. It was a genuine smile. And, as so often, it was a little unedifying, because it showed him the absurdity in which he nonetheless takes part.
AuDHS continued, now once again quite matter‑of‑factly, with that pleasant calm that gives the other the feeling of being in competent hands:
“That is the one thing. The physical. Psychosomatic meditation.”
Hans Castorp nodded.
“And the other?” he asked.
AuDHS looked at him, and in his gaze there suddenly lay something that was less doctor and more storyteller.
“The other,” he said, “is a story.”
