Prior to that event, however, was Christmas, two days of festivities—or three, if you counted Christmas Eve—that Hans Castorp had awaited with some anxiety, shaking his head now and then, wondering what they would be like here, only to discover that they came and went like normal days with a morning, afternoon, and evening, with the usual whims of the weather (a slight thaw set in), and were indistinguishable from others of their sort, apart from a little external decoration and the mood that held sway in people’s hearts and minds for the time allotted to them, until the days moved on, becoming a recent, then distant past silted with a few novel impressions. Director Behrens’s son, Knut by name, came for a holiday visit and lived with his father in the residential wing—a pretty young man, whose neck vertebrae already stuck out a bit too far as well. You could feel young Behrens’s presence in the air. Dressing with special care, the ladies were subject to little fits of laughter and temper, and their conversations were about encounters with Knut in the garden, in the woods, or down in the resort.
