Thus ended the campaign of the flat-land to recover its lost Hans Castorp. Our young man did not conceal from himself that the total failure of this embassy marked a crisis in the relations between himself and the world below. It meant that he gave it up, finally and with a metaphorical shrug of the shoulders; it meant, for himself, the consummation of freedom—the thought of which had gradually ceased to make him shudder.
Operationes Spirituales
Leo Naphta came from a little place near the Galician-Volhynian border. His father, of whom he spoke with respect, obviously with the feeling that he was now remote enough from his native scene to view it with impartial benevolence, had been the village schochet, or slaughterer—a calling different indeed from that of the gentile butcher, who was labourer and tradesman, whereas Leo’s father was an official, and the holder of a spiritual office. Elie Naphta, after being tested by the rabbi in his pious proficiency, had been empowered by him to slaughter suitable animals after the Mosaic law and according to Talmudic prescription. The performance of his ritual task had imparted something priestly to his being; and his blue eyes, which the son described as sending out gleams like stars, had held in their depth a wealth of silent spiritual fervour. The solemnity of his bearing spoke of that early time when the killing of animals had been in actual fact a priestly office. Leo, or Leib, as he had been called in his childhood, had been allowed to watch in the courtyard while the father carried out his task, aided by his helper, a powerful youth of the athletic Jewish type, beside whom the slender Elie with his round blond beard seemed still more fragile and delicate. Standing near the victim, which was hobbled and bound indeed, but not stunned, he would lift the mighty slaughter-knife and bring it to rest in a deep gash close to the cervical vertebra; while the assistant held the quickly filling basins to receive the gushing, steaming blood, and the child looked on at the sight with that childish gaze which often pierces through the sense into the essential, and may have been in an unusual degree the gift of the starry-eyed Elie’s son. He knew that Christian butchers had to stun their cattle with a blow from a club before killing them, and that this regulation was made in order to avoid unnecessary cruelty. Yet his father, so fine and so intelligent by comparison with those louts, and starry-eyed as never one of them, did his task according to the Law, striking down the creature while its senses were undimmed, and letting its lifeblood well out until it sank. The boy Leib felt that the stupid goyim were actuated by an easy and irreverent good nature, which paid less honour to the deity than did his father’s solemn mercilessness; thus the conception of piety came to be bound up in his mind with that of cruelty, and the idea of the sacred and the spiritual with the sight and smell of spurting blood. For he probably saw that his father had not chosen his bloody trade out of the same brutal tastes that moved the lusty gentile butcher or his own Jewish assistant to find gratification in it, but rather on spiritual grounds, and in a sense bespoken by the starry eyes.
Yes, Elie Naphta had been a brooding and refining spirit; a student of the Torah, but a critic as well, discussing the Scriptures with his rabbi—with whom he not infrequently disagreed. In his village, and not only among those of his own creed, he had passed for something unusual, for a man of more than common knowledge—knowledge for the most part of holy things, but possibly also of matters that might not be quite canny, and anyhow were not in the ordinary run. There was something irregular, schismatic, about him, something of the familiar of God, a Baal-Shem or Zaddik, a miracle-man. Once he had actually cured a woman of a malignant sore, and another time a boy of spasms, simply by means of blood and invocations. But it was precisely this aura of an uncanny piety, in which the odour of his blood-boltered calling played a part, that proved his destruction. There had been the unexplained death of two gentile boys, a popular uprising, a panic of rage—and Elie had died horribly, nailed crucifix-wise on the door of his burning home. His tuberculous, bedridden wife, the boy Leo, and four brothers and sisters, all wailing and lamenting with upflung arms, had fled the country.
Not utterly and entirely penniless, thanks to the father’s foresight, the little troop came to rest in a small town of the Vorarlberg. Frau Naphta found work in a cotton-spinning factory, where she laboured as long as her strength held out, while the children attended the common school. The mental pabulum purveyed by this establishment probably answered to the needs of Leo’s brothers and sisters; but for him, the eldest, it was quite insufficient. From his mother he had the seeds of his lung disease; from his father, besides his slenderness of build, an extraordinary intelligence: mental gifts that were
