That’s how Sunday stood out. His afternoon was also marked by carriage rides undertaken by various groups of guests: after tea, several pairs of horses dragged themselves up the loop and stopped in front of the main portal to pick up their customers, mostly Russians, namely Russian ladies.

“Russians always go for a walk,” said Joachim to Hans Castorp – they stood together in front of the portal and watched the departures for their entertainment. “Now they drive to Clavadell or to the lake or to the Flüelatal or to Klosters, those are the destinations. We can also drive while you are there, if you feel like it. But I think for the time being you have enough to do to settle in and don’t need any activities.”

Hans Castorp agreed. He had a cigarette in his mouth and his hands in his trouser pockets. So he watched as the lively little old Russian lady took her seat in a carriage with her thin grandniece and two other ladies; they were Marusja and Madame Chauchat. She had put on a thin duster’s coat with a belt in the back, but was without a hat. She sat next to the old woman in the back of the car while the young girls took the back seats. All four were merry and kept moving their mouths in their soft, almost boneless language. They talked and laughed about the carriage blanket, which they had difficulty dividing into, about the Russian sweets that my great-aunt carried with her as a snack in a little wooden box lined with cotton wool and paper tips, and already nowpresented … Hans Castorp differed with share of Mrs. Chauchat’s veiled voice. As always, when the careless woman caught his eye, the resemblance that he had been looking for for a while and that had dawned on him in his dreams was reaffirmed… But Marusja’s laughter, the sight of her round, brown eyes, looking childishly over the handkerchief with which she covered her mouth, and her high breasts, which inwardly should not be a little ill, reminded him of something else, shocking, what he had seen the other day, and so he watched cautiously and without his head move aside on Joachim. No, thank God, Joachim’s face didn’t look as blotchy as it did then, and his lips weren’t so pitifully distorted now either. But he looked at Marusya in an attitude, with an expression who could not possibly be called military, but appeared so bleak and self-forgotten that one had to address them as quintessentially civilian. Then, by the way, he pulled himself together and looked quickly at Hans Castorp, so that he just had time to take his eyes off him and send them somewhere in the air. He felt his heart pounding – unmotivated and on his own, as it did here.

The rest of Sunday offered nothing extraordinary, apart perhaps from the meals, which, since they could not be made richer than usual, at least showed an increased delicacy of the dishes. (For lunch there was a chaud-froid of chicken garnished with crabs and halved cherries; for the frozen patisserie in little wicker baskets made of spun sugar, and then fresh pineapple too.) In the evening after his hisAfter drinking beer, Hans Castorp felt even more exhausted, chilly and heavier than the day before, said good night to his cousin around nine o’clock, hurriedly pulled the feather bed over his chin and fell asleep like a dead man.

The following day alone, that is, the first Monday that the trainee spent up here, brought another regularly recurring change in the course of the day: namely one of those lectures that Dr. Krokowski held fortnightly in the dining room in front of the entire adult audience of the “Berghof” who spoke German and was not moribund. As Hans Castorp heard from his cousin, it was a series of related lectures, a popular-scientific course under the general title “Love as a Disease-Creating Power”. The instructive conversation took place after the second breakfast, and, as Joachim said again, it was not permissible, or at least very reluctant, to exclude oneself from it – which is why it was also considered amazing cheek that Settembrini, although more proficient in German than anyone else, not only never attended the lectures, but also indulged in the most disparaging remarks about them. As far as Hans Castorp was concerned, he decided to come, primarily out of politeness, but also out of undisguised curiosity. Before that, however, he did something completely wrong and wrong: he decided to go for a long walk on his own, which made him feel bad beyond all expectations.

“Now watch out!” were his first words when Joachim entered his room in the morning. “I see that I can’t go on like this. I’m sick of the horizontal way of life now– the blood falls asleep. Of course it’s different with you, you’re a patient, I don’t want to seduce you at all. But I want to go for a proper walk right after breakfast, if you don’t mind me, a few hours at random into the world. I put a bite in my pocket for breakfast, then I’m independent. Let’s see if I’m a different guy when I get home.”

“Nice!” said Joachim, seeing that the other was serious about his desire and intention. “But don’t overdo it, I advise you. It’s different here than at home. And then be back on time for the lecture!”

In reality, there were reasons other than physical ones that prompted young Hans Castorp to pursue his plan. He felt as if the difficulties of acclimatization were much less to blame for his hot head, the bad taste he had most of the time in his mouth, and the random beating of his heart than such things as the doings of the Russian couple next door, the speeches the sick and stupid Frau Stöhr at the table, the Herrenreiter’s soft cough which he heard every day in the corridors, the remarks made by Herr Albin, the impressions he had received of the manners of the suffering youth, the facial expression of Joachim when he looked at Marusja, and similar perceptions more. He thought it must be good to escape the spell of the “Berghof” for once, take a deep breath outdoors and move around vigorously, so that when you’re tired in the evening you at least know why. And so he parted companyvon Joachim, when he started his officially measured stroll after breakfast to the bank by the gully, and marched down the road his own way, waving his stick.

It was a cool, overcast morning – about eight-thirty. As he intended, Hans Castorp took a deep breath of the pure morning air, that fresh and light atmosphere that faded effortlessly and was without the scent of damp, without content, without memories… He crossed the watercourse and the narrow-gauge railway, came to the irregularly built street , left it again immediately and took a meadow path that ran only a short distance on level ground and then diagonally and rather steeply the one on the rightup the slope. Hans Castorp was pleased at the climb, his chest expanded, he pushed his hat off his forehead with his crutch, and when, looking back from a certain height, he saw in the distance the mirror of the lake he had passed on the journey down, he began him to sing.

He sang the pieces he just had at his disposal, all sorts of sentimental folk songs like those found in commerical and gymnastics song books, including one that contained the lines:

“The bards shall love and wine,

But praise virtue more often” –

she sang at first softly and humming, then loudly and with all her might. His baritone was brittle, but today he thought it was beautiful and he became more and more enthusiastic about singing. If he used it too high, he resorted to fistulous head tones, and these, too, seemed beautiful to him. When his memory failed him, he helped himself by reading the melodysome meaningless syllables and words, which he sent into the air in the manner of the art singers with a shaping mouth and a magnificent palate-R, and finally went over to just fantasizing about both the text and the tones and its production even accompanied with operatic arm movements. Since it is very tiring to climb and sing at the same time, he soon became short of breath and was missing it more and more. But out of idealism, for the sake of the beauty of the song, he conquered the need and, with frequent sighs, gave his last until he finally let himself sink down under a thick jaw in extreme shortness of breath, blind, only a colorful flicker in his eyes and with flying pulses , – after such a great upheaval, suddenly the prey of a thorough depression, a hangover,

When, with his nerves fairly recovered, he set out to continue his walk, his neck was shaking so violently that, at such a young age, he shook his head in exactly the same way that old Hans Lorenz Castorp had once done. The apparition reminded him of his deceased grandfather, and without finding it disgusting, he took pleasure in imitating the venerable chin rest with which the old man tried to control the trembling of the head and which the boy had once so liked.

He climbed even higher, in switchbacks. Ringing of cowbells attracted him, and he also found the flock; she was grazing near a log cabin whose roof was weighed down with stones. Two bearded men came towards him, axes on their shoulders, and parted as they drew near.“Well, farewell, and thank you!” said one to the other in a deep, palatable voice, put his ax on the other shoulder and began to walk down the valley between the pines, without a path and with cracking steps. It had sounded so strange in the loneliness, this “Farewell and have thanks” and dreamily touched Hans Castorp’s mind, dazed from climbing and singing. He repeated it softly, trying to imitate the guttural and solemnly clumsy dialect of the mountain man, and climbed a little way over the alpine hut, because he was anxious to reach the tree line; but after a glance at the clock he gave up on this project.

He followed a path to the left, towards the place, which ran level and then led down. Tall coniferous forest took him up, and as he wandered through it he even began to sing a little again, albeit with caution, and although on the descent his knees trembled even more strangely than before. But emerging from the wood, he stood surprised before a magnificent scenery that opened up to him, an intimately closed landscape of peaceful and magnificent pictoriality.

A mountain stream came down the hill on the right in a flat, stony bed, poured foamingly over blocks laid out in terraces and then flowed more quietly towards the valley, picturesquely bridged by a footbridge with a plainly timbered railing. The ground was blue from the bell-shaped flowers of a perennial plant that grew everywhere. Serious spruces, huge and regular in stature, stood singly and in groups on the bottom of the ravine and on the heights, and one of them on the side of the torrentrooted diagonally in the hanger, protruded crookedly and bizarrely into the picture. Roaring seclusion reigned over the beautiful, lonely place. On the other side of the stream, Hans Castorp noticed a bench.

He crossed the footbridge and sat down to be entertained by the sight of the water fall, the foam drifting, to listen to the idyllically talkative, monotonous and yet inwardly varied noise; for Hans Castorp loved rushing water just as much as music, maybe even more. But no sooner had he settled down than a nosebleed came upon him so suddenly that he could not quite protect his suit from contamination. The bleeding was profuse, persistent, and bothered him for about half an hour, forcing him to keep pacing back and forth between the stream and the bench, rinsing his handkerchief, snorting water, and lying flat on the plank seat again, that damp cloth on the nose. So he lay there when the blood finally stopped – lay still, hands clasped behind head, knees drawn up, eyes closed, ears filled with noise, not unwell, rather mollified from copious blood-letting, and in a state of oddly diminished vitality; for when he had breathed out he felt no need for fresh air for a long time, but calmly let his heart beat a series of beats with his body still, until late and lazily he took a superficial breath again.

Suddenly he found himself placed in that early life situation which was the archetype of a dream modeled on the latest impressions that he had dreamed a few nights ago… But so strong, so complete, so to the point where space andtime he was transported into the there and then that one could have said that a lifeless body was lying up here by the Gießbache on the bench, while the real Hans Castorp was standing far away in earlier times and surroundings, and in a daring and, despite all simplicity, heartbreaking situation.

He was thirteen years old, lower grader, a boy in shorts, and he was standing in the schoolyard conversing with another boy of about the same age from a different class—a conversation that Hans Castorp had started quite haphazardly, and that he , although it could only be very short because of its factual and succinctly defined subject, it was highly enjoyable. It was the break between the last but one lesson, a history lesson and a drawing lesson for Hans Castorp’s class. In the courtyard, which was paved with red bricks and separated from the street by a clapboard wall with two entrance gates, the students walked up and down in rows, stood in groups, leaned half-seated against the glazed ledges of the building. There was a babble of voices. A teacher in a slouch hat oversaw the goings-on by biting into a ham sandwich.

The boy Hans Castorp was talking to was called Hippe, his first name was Pribislav. As a curiosity, the r of this first name had to be pronounced like sch: it was called “Pschibislav”; and that odd first name did not go badly with his appearance, which was not quite average, decidedly alien. Hippe, son of a historian and high school professor, notorious model studentConsequently, and already a class further than Hans Castorp, although hardly older than him, came from Mecklenburg and was obviously the product of an old race mixture, a transfer of Germanic blood with Wendish-Slavic – or vice versa. It is true that he was blond – his hair was cropped very short above his rounded skull. But his eyes, blue-grey or gray-blue in color – it was a somewhat vague and ambiguous color, the color perhaps of a distant mountain range – had a peculiar, narrow, and actually somewhat crooked cut, and just below were the cheekbones, prominent and strong pronounced, – a face formation, which in his case was not disfiguring at all, but even quite appealing, but which was sufficient, to give him the nickname “the Kyrgyz” among his comrades. Incidentally, Hippe was already wearing long trousers and a high-necked, blue jacket pulled at the back, on the collar of which there used to be a few scales from his scalp.

Now the thing was that Hans Castorp had had his eyes on this Pribislav for a long time – had picked him out of all the crowds in the schoolyard that he knew and didn’t know, took an interest in him, followed him with his eyes, one might say : admired him? in any case looked at him with exceptional sympathy and was already looking forward to observing him on the way to school as he interacted with his classmates, to seeing him speak and laugh and to distinguish his voice from a distance, which was pleasantly muffled, muffled and somewhat hoarse. Admittedly, there was not really sufficient reason for this participation, if one did not, for example, take the pagan first name,the model school (but which could not possibly carry weight) or finally wanted to take the Kyrgyz eyes for such – eyes that sometimes, with a certain sideways glance, which did not serve to see, could darken in a melting way into a hazy nightness – so Hans Castorp worried little about the spiritual justification of his feelings or even about how they might have to be named if necessary. Because there was no question of friendship, since he didn’t “know” Hippe at all. But in the first place there was not the slightest need for naming, as there was no thought of the subject ever being brought up – it was not suited to that, nor did it desire it. And secondly, a name means yes, if not criticism, then determination,

But well or badly justified, in any case these feelings, so far removed from name and communication, were of such vitality that Hans Castorp had been quietly dealing with what spoke, at least, of the fidelity and constancy of his character, considering what a vast amount of time a year signifies at this age. Unfortunately, there is always a moral judgment inherent in character trait designations, be it laudatory or reproachful, though they all have their two sides. Hans Castorp’s “Loyalty”, onwhich, by the way, he didn’t take any further credit for, consisted, without judgment, in a certain clumsiness, slowness and perseverance of his mind, a preserving basic mood, which made conditions and living conditions seem all the more worthy of attachment and continued existence, the longer they existed. He was also inclined to believe in the infinite duration of the condition he was in, valued it for that very reason and was not eager for change. In this way he had become accustomed in his heart to his quiet and distant relationship with Pribislav Hippe and basically considered it a permanent feature of his life. He loved the emotions that it entailed, the suspense as to whether they would meet him today, pass close by, perhaps look at him, the silent,

It lasted a year before it reached that adventurous climax, then it lasted another year, thanks to Hans Castorp’s continued loyalty, and then it stopped – and he did so without him noticing any more of the loosening and dissolving of the ties that bound him linked to Pribislav Hippe when he noticed that they were being created. Pribislav also left school and town as a result of his father’s transfer; but Hans Castorp hardly noticed that anymore; he had forgotten it before. It can be said that the figure of the “Kyrgyz” imperceptibly entered his life out of the mists, slowly becoming more and more clear and tangibleup to that moment of greatest closeness and physicality, on the farm, had stood in the foreground for a while and then gradually receded and disappeared into the mists without a pang of farewell.

But that moment, the daring and adventurous situation in which Hans Castorp found himself again, the conversation, a real conversation with Pribislav Hippe, came about as follows. It was drawing time and Hans Castorp noticed that he didn’t have his pencil with him. Each of his classmates needed his own; but among the members of other classes he had this and that acquaintance whom he could have approached for a pen. The best known, he thought, was Pribislav, the one he was closest to, with whom he had secretly had so much to do; and with a joyful upsurge in his nature he resolved to seize the opportunity—an opportunity he called it—and ask Pribislav for a pencil. That this will be a rather strange prank since he really didn’t know Hippe, he missed that, or else he didn’t bother, blinded by a strange lack of consideration. And so he really stood in front of Pribislav Hippe in the throng of the Klinkerhof and said to him:

“Excuse me, can you lend me a pencil?”

And Pribislav looked at him with his Kyrgyz eyes above the protruding cheekbones and spoke to him in his pleasantly hoarse voice, without showing surprise or at least without showing surprise.

“Sure,” he said. “But you must definitely give it back to me after the lesson.” And pulled his crayon out of theBag, a silver-plated crayon with a ring that had to be pushed up to let the red-colored pin grow out of the metal case. He explained the simple mechanism while their two heads bowed over it.

“But don’t tear him in two!” he said.

Where was he thinking? As if Hans Castorp had the intention of not returning the pen or even treating it negligently.

Then they looked at each other with a smile, and since there was nothing more to say, they turned their shoulders and then their backs to each other and left.

That’s all. But Hans Castorp had never been happier in his life than in this drawing lesson, when he drew with Pribislav Hippe’s pencil – with the prospect of handing it back to its owner afterwards, which as a mere bonus followed informally and naturally from the previous one. He took liberty to sharpen the pencil a little, and of the red-lacquered shavings that fell off he kept three or four in an inner drawer of his desk for nearly a year–no one who saw them would have guessed how important it was. Incidentally, the restitution took place in the simplest of forms, which, however, was entirely in line with Hans Castorp’s intentions, yes, to which he even did something special – dulled and spoiled as he was by his intimate dealings with Hippe.

“There,” he said. “Thank you very much.”

And Pribislav didn’t say anything, only hastily revised the mechanism and put the crayon in his pocket…

After that they never spoke to each other again, but for once, thanks to Hans Castorp’s enterprising spirit, it happened anyway…

His eyes widened, confused by the depth of his rapture. “I think I dreamed!” he thought. “Yes, that was Pribislav. I haven’t thought about him for a long time. Where did the schnitzel go? The desk is on the floor, at Uncle Tienappel’s house. They must still be in the inner small drawer at the back left. I never took them out. I didn’t even pay them enough attention to throw them away… It was all Pribislav as he lived. I didn’t think I would ever see him so clearly again. How strangely like her he looked – this one up here! So that’s why I’m so interested in her? Or maybe also: I made myself that way for himinterested? Nonsense! Nice nonsense. By the way, I have to go, and as soon as possible.” But he stayed lying there, thinking and remembering. Then he straightened up. “Well, goodbye and thanks!” he said, tears welling up in his eyes as he smiled. With that he wanted to leave; but he quickly sat down again, hat and cane in hand, for he had noticed that his knees were not quite supporting him. “Oops,” he thought, “I don’t think that’s going to work! And I’m supposed to be in the dining room for the lecture at eleven sharp. Walking here has its beauty but also its difficulties, it seems. Yes, yes, but I can’t stay here. It’s just that I’ve gotten a little lame from lying down; moving will make it better.” And he tried again to get to his feet,

After all, it was a miserable homecoming after such an arrogant departure. Repeatedly he had to stop along the way, as he felt his face suddenly turn white, cold sweat break out on his forehead, and the erratic behavior of his heart took his breath away. He fought his way down the switchbacks miserably; but when he reached the valley near the Kurhaus, he saw clearly that it would be impossible for him to cover the long stretch of road to the “Berghof” on his own, and since there was no tram and no rental vehicle showed up, he asked he asked a carter, who was driving a trolley with empty crates towards “Village”, to let him sit up. Back to back with the coachman, legs dangling from the carriage, watched by passers-by with wondering sympathy,

” Dépêchez-vous, monsieur! ‘ said the French doorkeeper. “ La conférence de M. Krokowski vient de commencer. And Hans Castorp threw his hat and cane into the cloakroom and, with his tongue between his teeth, hastily and carefully squeezed his way through the barely open glass door into the dining room, where the spa guests were sitting in rows on chairs, while on the narrow right side Dr. Krokowski in a frock coat behind a set table decorated with a water carafe and spoke…