From then on, esteemed reader, began the time to change.
Not in the grand, dramatic way it changes when you see war or death; but in that quiet, repetitive way it changes when you adopt a rhythm. The Magic Mountain had stretched time through rest cure and meals; the Sonnenalp stretched it through cycles: deload, deload, deload, refeed. Eight, ten, twelve. Five, four, three, two, one.
Hans Castorp got up in the morning, and he did what Dr. Porsche had given him as a longevity ceremony: weigh out the dark yellow powder, mix it with water, gargle, swallow; bitter drops with lemon; deep red hibiscus white tea; stir in grass green powder; tablets like wafers. He did it not because he liked the taste; he did it because it was an order he needed in the morning so as not to disappear onto the thought highway.
Then he went – on PUSH days, LEGS days, PULL days – into the GYMcube.
The cubes stood, like small, free‑standing cells, somewhere in the hotel area; they were the modern variant of the rest cell: privacy as product, work as ritual. Hans changed, in room one or two, depending on which was free; he entered the white training room, saw the rack, the barbell, the plates – and felt each time how his body swung between fear and obedience.
Zieser was not always there; sometimes he was there. Sometimes it was a human trainer, sometimes a camera, sometimes a voice from a screen that kindly said what the body had to do. And Hans Castorp, the deserter, sometimes thought that it is a special form of irony to withdraw from war only to then voluntarily let oneself be commanded by machines.
But he did it.
He pressed.
He squatted.
He pulled.
He wrote.
“A set only counts when noted,” Zieser had said. And so Hans Castorp noted, with a pen – finally a pen, not a wooden stick – numbers in a logbook. He wrote: eight. He wrote: ten. He wrote: twelve. And every time he wrote, it was as if he were writing himself into the order.
After training came the food. No buffet, no choice, no temptation – or rather: the temptation consisted in the fact that you had no choice. Plates arrived that looked Mediterranean without having been Crete: vegetables that were not overcooked; oil that shone; fish that did not smell of fish but of “quality”; yogurt; whole grains; sometimes a piece of dark chocolate as a pleasure anchor. Hans Castorp ate, and he noticed how food, when it is no longer pleasure, becomes part of the work.
On the deload days he was – how shall one put it – slightly hungry. Not so much that he suffered; but enough that he noticed how much hunger is a feeling that one likes to suppress in bourgeois life. Hunger is the reminder that you are a body.
On the refeed day, by contrast, everything was as if allowed, but controlled. He ate more, and he felt a childlike joy that the program granted him a feast. It was, as said, fasting and carnival in miniature.
And every day – that was the second, silent command – he walked his steps.
Ten thousand.
One can, esteemed reader, walk ten thousand steps in many ways. One can walk them by going outside across meadows. One can walk them by going through corridors. One can walk them by, when it snows, pacing up and down on the carpet in the room like a captive thought. Hans Castorp did what he could.
In winter he walked a lot indoors. He walked past the red columns, past reception, past Mr. Kautsonik, who sometimes stood there like a monument of service. Kautsonik then looked at him, nodded, said dryly:
“You are diligent, Mr. Castorp.”
Diligence: the bourgeois word that suddenly sounds like a virtue again in the wellness resort.
In spring Hans Castorp walked outside. The snow retreated, the park became more real, the trees became lighter, and the meadow – this meadow that Morgenstern had once mocked as blue – was green. He walked along the water, past pools and ponds that were not a lagoon and yet, in some evening hours, when the light became flat, acquired something lagoon‑like. And sometimes, as he walked, he thought of Gustav von A. and of the south word. Mediterranean. Venice. Water. Beauty.
In early summer he walked further. And now walking was no longer just a duty, but a habit. The body had learned that movement is not an exception but a background. Hans Castorp noticed that habit is a form of calm – and at the same time a form of captivity.
For the program was not only outside. It was in him.
He rejoiced over numbers. He rejoiced over a diastole that in the evening, at the check before going to bed, was no longer just over eighty but below. He rejoiced over a sleep evaluation that became friendlier. He rejoiced over a body shape that changed, over a belly that became flatter, over a look in the mirror that seemed less tired.
He reached his goals.
So they say.
And that is, esteemed reader, the point at which one should become suspicious. For goals in such systems are never ends. They are transitions. You reach them, and immediately the reaching itself becomes the new target.
Hans Castorp stood outside on an early June day, in the park that now really was a park; the air was soft, the sun no longer wintry but friendly; the grass was dense and green. He walked, not because he had to, but because he could. He paused briefly, looked at the grass, and within him there stirred – strange enough – a kind of gratitude. Not pathetic. Just: quiet.
Then he looked at the ring.
The progress circle was blue.
He smiled.
The smile was polite.
And a little unsatisfying.
For the grass was green.
On the display it was blue.
