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Of the Baptismal Basin and of the Grandfather in Twofold Form

Hans Castorp preserved only pale memories of his actual parental home; he had scarcely really known his father and mother. They died away within the short span between his fifth and seventh years, the mother first, quite unexpectedly and in expectation of her confinement, of a vascular obstruction resulting from neuritis, an embolism, as Dr. Heidekind called it, which caused instantaneous paralysis of the heart - she had just been laughing, sitting up in bed; it looked as if she had fallen over with laughter, and yet she had done so only because she was dead. That was not easy for Hans Hermann Castorp, the father, to understand, and since he had been very deeply attached to his wife and was not the strongest man himself, he did not know how to get over it. His mind was disordered and diminished from then on; in his dazed condition he made business mistakes, so that the firm of Castorp & Son suffered painful losses. The spring after next, during an inspection of warehouses at the windy harbor, he caught pneumonia, and since his shaken heart could not withstand the high fever, he died within five days despite all the care Dr. Heidekind devoted to him, and followed his wife, with considerable participation from the citizenry, into the Castorp family tomb, which lay very beautifully in St. Catherine's churchyard, with a view of the Botanical Garden.

His father, the senator, survived him, though only by a little, and the short span of time until he too died - likewise of pneumonia, incidentally, and amid great struggles and torments, for unlike his son Hans Lorenz Castorp was a nature difficult to fell, tenaciously rooted in life - this span of time, then, only a year and a half, the orphaned Hans Castorp spent in his grandfather's house, a house on the Esplanade built at the beginning of the past century on a narrow plot in the taste of northern classicism, painted in a gloomy weather color, with half-columns on either side of the entrance door in the middle of the ground floor, reached by five steps, and with two upper stories besides the bel etage, where the windows were drawn down to the floors and furnished with cast-iron grilles.

Here lay exclusively reception rooms, including the bright dining room decorated with stucco, whose three windows hung with wine-red curtains looked out on the little garden behind, and where, during those eighteen months, grandfather and grandson took their midday meal alone together every day at four o'clock, served by old Fiete with the earrings and the silver buttons on his tailcoat, who with this tailcoat wore just such a batiste neckcloth as the master of the house himself, and tucked his shaved chin into it in quite similar fashion. The grandfather used the familiar form with him and spoke Low German to him, not by way of joking - he had no humorous trait - but in all objectivity, and because that was simply how he dealt with people from the common folk, warehouse workers, postmen, coachmen, and servants. Hans Castorp liked to hear it, and very much liked to hear how Fiete answered, also in Low German, bending around behind his master from the left as he served in order to speak into his right ear, on which the senator heard considerably better than on the left. The old man understood and nodded and went on eating, very upright between the high mahogany back of the chair and the table, scarcely bent over his plate, while the grandson opposite him silently observed, with deep and unconscious attention, the spare, cultivated movements with which the grandfather's beautiful, white, lean old hands, with their arched, tapering nails and the green signet ring on the right forefinger, arranged a mouthful of meat, vegetable, and potato on the point of the fork and brought it to the mouth with a slight inclination of the head toward it. Hans Castorp looked at his own still awkward hands and felt in them the possibility, already prefigured, of one day holding and moving knife and fork just as his grandfather did.

Another question was whether he would ever arrive at tucking his chin into such a neckcloth as filled the spacious opening of the grandfather's oddly shaped collar, whose sharp points brushed his cheeks. For one had to be as old as he was for that, and already today, besides him and his old Fiete, no one far and wide wore such neckcloths and collars any longer. That was a pity, for little Hans Castorp particularly liked the way the grandfather leaned his chin into the high, snow-white cloth; even in memory, when he was grown, it pleased him exceedingly: there was something in it that he approved from the ground of his being.

When they had finished eating and had folded their napkins together, rolled them, and put them into the silver rings, a task with which Hans Castorp at that time did not easily come to terms, since the napkins were as large as small tablecloths, the senator rose before the chair, which Fiete drew away behind him, and went with shuffling steps into the "cabinet" to fetch his cigar; and at times the grandson followed him there.

This "cabinet" had come into being because the dining room had been made three-windowed and carried across the whole breadth of the house, so that, unlike the usual arrangement for this type of house, there had remained room not for three salons but only for two; one of them, however, lying perpendicular to the dining room and with only one window onto the street, would have turned out disproportionately deep. Therefore about a quarter of its length had been separated from it: precisely the "cabinet," a narrow room with a skylight, dusky and furnished with only a few objects: an etagere on which stood the senator's cigar cabinet, a card table whose drawer contained attractive things - whist cards, counters, little scoring boards with folding teeth, a slate with slate pencils, paper cigar tips, and more besides - and finally a rococo glass cabinet of rosewood in the corner, behind whose panes yellow silk curtains were stretched.

"Grandpapa," little Hans Castorp might well say in the cabinet, rising on tiptoe and striving upward toward the old man's ear, "please show me the baptismal basin!"

And the grandfather, who had already gathered back the skirts of his long, soft frock coat from his trousers and drawn his bunch of keys from his pocket, opened the glass cabinet with it, from whose interior there came toward the boy a peculiarly pleasant and curious scent. All sorts of objects no longer in use and for that very reason fascinating were kept there: a pair of curved silver candelabra, a broken barometer with figural wood carving, an album of daguerreotypes, a liqueur case of cedarwood, a little Turk, hard to the touch beneath his bright silk costume, with clockwork in his body that had once enabled him to walk across the table but had long since refused service, an old-fashioned ship model, and quite at the bottom even a rat trap. But the old man took from a middle shelf a heavily tarnished round silver bowl, which stood on a likewise silver plate, and showed both pieces to the boy, separating them and turning each one this way and that with explanations already given many times.

Basin and plate had not originally belonged together, as one could well see and as the little boy allowed himself to be instructed anew; yet, the grandfather said, they had been united in use for about a hundred years, namely since the basin had been acquired. The bowl was beautiful, of simple, noble form, shaped by the severe taste of the early years of the last century. Smooth and solid, it rested on a round foot and was gilded inside; yet time had already faded the gold to a yellowish shimmer. As its only ornament, a raised wreath of roses and jagged leaves ran around its upper rim. As for the plate, its far greater age could be read on the inner side. "Sixteen hundred and fifty" stood there in flourished numerals, and all sorts of curly engravings framed the number, executed in the "modern manner" of those days, florid and arbitrary, coats of arms and arabesques that were half star and half flower. On the reverse, however, in changing styles of script, were dotted in the names of the heads who over time had possessed the piece. There were already seven of them, furnished with the year of inheritance, and the old man in the neckcloth pointed each one out to his grandson with his ringed forefinger. The father's name was there, the grandfather's own and the great-grandfather's; and then the prefix "great" doubled, tripled, and quadrupled in the explainer's mouth, and the boy listened, his head inclined sideways, his eyes fixed thoughtfully or even thoughtlessly and dreamily, his mouth devout and sleepy, to the great-great-great-great - that dark sound of the tomb and of time's burial, which nevertheless at the same time expressed a piously preserved connection between the present, his own life, and the deeply sunken past, and worked on him in quite a peculiar way: namely in the way expressed on his face. He fancied he was breathing musty-cool air, the air of St. Catherine's church or of St. Michael's crypt, at this sound; fancied he felt the breath of places where, hat in hand, one falls into a certain reverently forward-swaying gait without using the heels of one's boots. He thought he heard, too, the secluded, pacified stillness of such echoing places; religious sensations mingled with those of death and history at the sound of that dull syllable, and all this affected the boy somehow beneficially; indeed it may well be that for the sake of the sound, in order to hear it and repeat it, he had asked to be allowed to look at the baptismal basin once again.

Then the grandfather set the vessel back on the plate and let the little boy look into the smooth, faintly golden hollow, which gleamed up from the falling skylight.

"Now it will soon be eight years," he said, "since we held you over it and the water with which you were baptized flowed into it… Lassen, the sexton of St. James's, poured it into the hollow of our good Pastor Bugenhagen's hand, and from there it ran over your little head here into the basin. But we had warmed it so that you should not be startled and should not cry, and you did not; on the contrary, you had been screaming beforehand, so that Bugenhagen had not had an easy time with his address, but when the water came you grew still, and that was respect for the holy sacrament, let us hope. And in the next few days it will be forty-four years since your blessed father was the child to be baptized, and the water flowed from his head into this. That was here in the house, his parental house, over there in the hall, before the middle window, and it was still old Pastor Hesekiel who baptized him, the same man the French nearly shot as a young man because he had preached against their robberies and extortions - he too has long, long been with God. But seventy-five years ago it was I myself whom they baptized, also there in the hall, and they held my head over the basin here as it stands on the plate, and the clergyman spoke the same words as over you and your father, and likewise the warm, clear water flowed from my hair - there was not much more of it then than I have on my head now - down into the golden basin."

The little boy looked up at his grandfather's narrow old head, which was again bent over the basin as at that long-vanished hour of which he told, and an already tested feeling came over him, the strange, half-dreaming, half-frightening sensation of something at once drawing on and standing still, of a changing permanence that was recurrence and dizzying sameness - a sensation known to him from earlier occasions, and by which he had expected and wished to be touched again. It was partly for its sake that the showing of the standing and wandering heirloom had mattered to him.

If the young man examined himself later, he found that the image of his forefather had impressed itself on him much more deeply, clearly, and significantly than that of his parents; this may possibly have rested on sympathy and a special physical kinship, for the grandson resembled the grandfather, so far as a rosy beardless youth can resemble a bleached and rigid man of seventy. Mainly, however, it was probably characteristic of the old man himself, who without question had been the true character figure, the picturesque personality in the family.

Publicly speaking, time had passed over Hans Lorenz Castorp's nature and opinions long before his departure. He had been a highly Christian gentleman of the Reformed congregation, strictly traditional in sentiment, so stubbornly intent on an aristocratic narrowing of the social circle in which one was fit to govern, as though he lived in the fourteenth century, when the artisan class had begun, against the tenacious resistance of the old free patriciate, to win seat and voice in the municipal council, and he was hard to win for anything new. His activity had fallen in decades of vehement upswing and manifold upheavals, decades of progress in forced marches, which constantly made such high demands on public courage for sacrifice and risk. But by old Castorp, God knew, it had not been brought about that the spirit of the new age had celebrated its widely known, brilliant victories. He had held far more to the customs of the fathers and old institutions than to daredevil harbor extensions and godless metropolitan tomfoolery; he had braked and played down wherever he could, and if matters had gone according to him, the administration would still today look as idyllically old-fashioned as it had once looked in his own countinghouse.

Thus the old man presented himself, during his lifetime and afterward, to the bourgeois eye; and even if little Hans Castorp understood nothing of affairs of state, his silently observing child's eye nevertheless made, in essence, quite the same observations - wordless and therefore uncritical, rather merely living observations, which, incidentally, later too, as a conscious memory-image, entirely preserved their word- and analysis-hostile, simply affirmative stamp. As we said, sympathy was at play, that closest connection and kinship of nature which skips a generation and is nothing rare. Children and grandchildren look on in order to admire, and they admire in order to learn and develop what lies prefigured in them by inheritance.

Senator Castorp was gaunt and tall. The years had bent his back and neck, but he sought to compensate for the bend by counterpressure, whereby his mouth, whose lips were no longer held by teeth but rested directly on the empty gums - for he put in his dentures only to eat - drew itself downward in a dignified and effortful way; and precisely through this, as also perhaps as a means against an incipient unsteadiness of the head, there came about the honorably severe, braced-up posture and chin support that so pleased little Hans Castorp.

He loved the snuffbox - it was an oblong tortoiseshell box inlaid with gold that he handled - and for this reason used red handkerchiefs, whose corner was accustomed to hang from the back pocket of his frock coat. If this was a cheerful weakness in his appearance, it nevertheless had altogether the effect of a license of age, a negligence such as great age either consciously and jovially permits itself or brings with it in venerable unconsciousness; and in any case it remained the only one that Hans Castorp's childish sharp eye ever perceived in his grandfather's exterior. But for the seven-year-old, as later in the memory of the grown youth, the old man's everyday appearance was not his actual and real one. In actual reality he looked different, far more beautiful and correct than usual - namely as he appeared in a painting, a life-size portrait that had earlier hung in the parental living room and then, together with little Hans Castorp, had moved to the Esplanade, where it had received its place above the large red-silk sofa in the reception room.

It showed Hans Lorenz Castorp in his official dress as councilman of the city - that serious, indeed pious civic costume of a vanished century, which a commonwealth at once grave and audacious had carried with it through the ages and preserved in pompous use, in order ceremonially to make the past present and the present past, and to attest the steady coherence of things, the venerable assurance of their signed deed. Senator Castorp stood there in full figure, on a reddish-tiled floor, in a perspective of pillars and pointed arches. He stood with chin lowered, mouth drawn downward, the blue, thoughtfully gazing eyes with the bags beneath them directed into the distance, in the black, more than knee-length, gown-like overcoat, which, open in front, showed a broad fur trimming at border and hem. From wide, highly puffed and bordered upper sleeves emerged narrower under-sleeves of plain cloth, and lace cuffs covered the hands down to the knuckles. The slender old man's legs were in black silk stockings, the feet in shoes with silver buckles. Around his neck, however, lay the broad, starched, many-folded ruff, pressed down in front and swept upward at the sides, from beneath which, to excess, a folded batiste jabot still hung over the waistcoat. Under his arm he carried the old-fashioned hat with broad brim, whose crown tapered upward.

It was an excellent picture, created by a notable artist's hand, kept with good taste in the old-masterly style suggested by the subject, and awakening in the beholder all sorts of Spanish-Netherlandish-late-medieval notions. Little Hans Castorp had often looked at it, not with an understanding of art, of course, but nevertheless with a certain more general and even penetrating understanding; and although he had seen the grandfather in person as the canvas represented him only once, at a ceremonial procession by the town hall, and even then only fleetingly, he could not help, as we said, feeling this pictorial appearance of his to be his actual and real one, and seeing in the everyday grandfather, so to speak, an interim grandfather, one provisionally and only imperfectly adapted. For the divergent and curious quality in this everyday appearance evidently rested on such imperfect, perhaps somewhat awkward adaptation; there were remnants and indications of his pure and true form not wholly to be effaced. Thus the old-fashioned high white collar could be called "father-killers"; but it was impossible to apply this designation to the admirable article of clothing of which those were only the interim indication, namely the Spanish ruff. And the same was true of the unusually curved top hat the grandfather wore in the street, to which in higher reality the broad-brimmed felt hat of the painting corresponded; and of the long and wrinkled frock coat, whose original image and true essence appeared to little Hans Castorp as the bordered, fur-trimmed gown.

Thus he was inwardly in agreement that the grandfather was resplendent in his correctness and perfection when one day it was time to take leave of him. This was in the hall, the same hall where they had so often sat opposite one another at the dining table; in its middle Hans Lorenz Castorp now lay on the bier, surrounded and heaped about with wreaths, in the silver-mounted coffin. He had fought through the pneumonia, had fought tenaciously and long, although it seemed that in the present life he had been at home only by way of adaptation, and now lay, one did not quite know whether victorious or overcome, in any case with a sternly pacified expression, much altered and sharp-nosed from the struggle, on his parade bed, the lower body covered by a blanket on which a palm branch lay, his head propped high on the silk pillow so that the chin rested most beautifully in the front hollow of the honorary ruff; and between the hands half covered by the lace cuffs, whose fingers in an artificially natural arrangement did not conceal coldness and lifelessness, an ivory cross had been placed, at which with lowered lids he seemed to gaze unwaveringly.

Hans Castorp had seen the grandfather several times at the beginning of his last illness, but toward the end no longer. He had been entirely spared the sight of the struggle, which for the most part had also taken place at night; only indirectly, through the anxious atmosphere of the house, old Fiete's red eyes, the coming and going of doctors, had he been touched by it. But the result before which he found himself placed in the hall could be summarized by saying that the grandfather had now been ceremonially released from interim adaptation and had definitively entered into his actual and appropriate form - an approvable result, even if old Fiete wept and shook his head without ceasing, and even if Hans Castorp himself wept, as he had wept at the sight of his suddenly dead mother and of his father soon afterward likewise lying still and strange.

For it was now already the third time within so short a span and at such young years that death had worked upon the mind and senses - especially also upon the senses - of little Hans Castorp; the sight and impression were no longer new to him, but already quite familiar, and as the first two times he had behaved toward them with perfect composure and reliability, by no means nervously, though with natural sorrow, so too now, and to an even higher degree. Ignorant of the practical significance of events for his life, or childishly indifferent to it, trusting that the world would somehow or other take care of him, he had displayed at the coffins a certain likewise childish coolness and objective attention, which on the third occasion received an additional, precocious shading through the feeling and expression of experienced connoisseurship - to say nothing further of frequent tears of emotion and of contagion by others as a self-evident reaction. In the three or four months since his father had died, he had forgotten death; now he remembered it, and all the impressions of that time restored themselves precisely, simultaneously, and interpenetratingly in their incomparable peculiarity.

Dissolved and put into words, they would have looked approximately as follows. Death had about it a pious, meaningful, and sadly beautiful, that is to say spiritual, aspect, and at the same time a wholly different, positively opposite, very physical, very material one, which could not really be called beautiful, or meaningful, or pious, or even sad. The solemn-spiritual aspect expressed itself in the pompous laying-out of the corpse, the splendor of flowers and palm fronds, which, as is known, signified heavenly peace; further and still more clearly in the cross between the dead fingers of the former grandfather, the blessing Christ by Thorwaldsen standing at the head of the coffin, and the candelabra rising on either side, which on this occasion had likewise assumed an ecclesiastical character. All these arrangements apparently had their more precise and good meaning in the thought that the grandfather had now entered forever into his actual and true form. Besides this, however, as little Hans Castorp well noticed, though without admitting it to himself in words, they all, and in particular the quantity of flowers, and among these again especially the numerous tuberoses, had another meaning and sober purpose as well: namely that of beautifying, making forgotten, or preventing from coming to consciousness the other, neither beautiful nor really sad but rather almost indecent, low bodily aspect that death had about it.

With this aspect it was connected that the dead grandfather appeared so strange, indeed not really as the grandfather, but as a life-size waxen doll which death had substituted for his person, and with which all this pious and honorable display was now being made. The one lying there, or more correctly: what was lying there, was therefore not the grandfather himself but a husk - which, as Hans Castorp knew, did not consist of wax but of its own substance; only of substance: that was precisely the indecent and scarcely even sad thing - sad as little as things are sad that have to do with the body and only with it. Little Hans Castorp looked at the wax-yellow, smooth, cheesy-firm substance of which the life-size death figure consisted, the face and hands of the former grandfather. Just then a fly settled on the motionless forehead and began to move its proboscis up and down. Old Fiete chased it away carefully, taking care not to touch the forehead as he did so, and with an honorable darkening of his expression, as though he neither might nor wished to know anything about what he was doing - an expression of modesty that evidently referred to the fact that the grandfather was only body now and nothing more. But after a circling flight the fly briefly settled again on the grandfather's fingers, near the ivory cross. While this was happening, however, Hans Castorp believed he perceived more distinctly than before that faint yet quite peculiarly tenacious exhalation familiar from earlier times, which shamefully reminded him of a schoolmate afflicted with an unpleasant ailment and therefore avoided by everyone, and which the scent of the tuberoses was secretly intended to drown, though for all its beautiful luxuriance and severity it was unable to do so.

He stood repeatedly by the corpse: once alone with old Fiete, the second time together with his great-uncle Tienappel, the wine merchant, and the two uncles James and Peter, and then a third time when a group of harbor workers in Sunday clothes stood for a few moments at the open coffin to take leave of the former head of the house of Castorp and Son. Then came the funeral, at which the hall was full of people and Pastor Bugenhagen of St. Michael's, the same man who had baptized Hans Castorp, wearing the Spanish ruff, delivered the memorial address and afterward, in the cab, the first directly behind the hearse, which was followed by a long, long row, conversed very kindly with little Hans Castorp - and then this period of life too was over, and Hans Castorp immediately afterward changed house and surroundings, for the second time already in his young life.