There are rooms, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, that are ahead of their name and betray it at the same time: they are called “music rooms”, and one expects that tones live in them, that something vibrates, that air, wood, strings and people join into an order that is higher than mere practicality. And then it happens that in such a music room – whose stage carries a grand piano, as if it were carrying a promise, whose windows open the view onto a landscape that calms as if it had been designed by a hand especially for the nervous system – no music sounds, but speech.
It was an evening that was no longer winter and not yet summer – an evening on which the green outside, behind the heavy curtains, already had that cheerful impertinence that in the mountains always seems like a lie: as if the world were light, as if it were unspoiled. The lawn stood well-groomed; the trees held their branches as if they were aware of their appearance; and somewhere, far beyond the window, a person walked, small as a punctuation mark, on a path that was not entered in the calendar.
Inside, however, was the order of the house: wooden floor that presented itself as warm although it was not; red columns that, with their golden bases and capitals, looked like oversized candle stubs – as if the room had kept Walpurgis Night in mind as architecture; armchairs and chairs that did not form rows but islands, conversational landscapes, small bourgeois fortresses. In the middle stood a long table on which water bottles, glasses, a few candles and – the modern symbol of every “lecture” that no longer wants to be a sermon – two microphones had been placed, small, black, so discreet that they revealed their power precisely thereby.
Hans Castorp took a seat.
He did it with that half hesitant, half obedient movement that he had learned at the Berghof – and which, since he had been here, had returned into his body, as if it were a muscle memory. The body, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, is reliable in this: it unlearns many things, but it is reluctant to forget its old orders. Hans wore the ring on his finger that Dr. Porsche had given him – this smooth, metallic circle that pretended to be jewelry and in truth was nothing other than a spy, a small, faithful, merciless recorder. He did not feel it – and precisely for that reason it was there.
Next to Hans others were sitting.
A couple holding hands, as if in such rooms, which smelled so much of comfort, one had to prove to each other that one was “really together”. A woman whose face had something tense about it, as if she were listening not only for words but for possible judgments. A man who changed his sitting position even before the evening began, as if sitting were a kind of moral test. And another man – one had once seen him, on a night that smelled of confetti, with a wig and donkey mask, in a moment when the world was parodying itself; now he sat, well-groomed, without mask, without wig, and yet with a look that revealed that he had not gotten rid of the donkey, but carried it within him like a memory one no longer wishes to perform.
His name was Morgenstern.
At any rate, that was the name that was now spoken. And the name fit: it sounded of novelty, of beginning, of the attempt to rename oneself without thereby claiming that the past had never existed. Hans saw him from the side, only briefly, and thought, without quite wanting to, of that strange truth that people sometimes do not change their morals, but only their title.
