A Gushing Fountain

by Martin Walser

  His mother asked, “Did you get a look when you passed Schnitzlers’ and the Linden Tree?”

  In the excitement of being photographed he’d forgotten to. Mother had especially reminded him to do it on his way home. He’d done it often enough already, pedaling slowly past and counting how many guests were in the Linden Tree’s garden. In view of the anticipated costs of being photographed, it would have been especially important today to see if there were more guests in the garden of the competition than on their own terrace. When Josef came home from school later, he would report how many people had been sitting in the Lakeshore Café and how many in the garden of the Crown. They couldn’t compete with the Lakeshore or the Crown, but they ought to be able to compete with the Linden Tree and Café Schnitzler. Johann carried the bicycle back downstairs and out the back door, pedaled down into the village, counted seven people in the Linden Tree garden and five at Schnitzlers’, returned, and reported the results. “Elsa,” Mother asked the waitress, “how many do we have?” Elsa added them up in her head and said, “Six on the terrace.” Mother nodded as if that confirmed her worst fears. “And inside?” Elsa screwed up her face again, pictured all the tables to herself, totaled them up sotto voce, said “Nine,” and added, “but it’s only twelve thirty.”

  Mother turned to Johann and told him his father had called from Oberstaufen to say he wouldn’t be coming home until seven thirty, on the workers’ train. But his trip to Oberstaufen had probably been a waste of time. “What has that Schulz got to his name?” she said to Mina. “A health food store nobody wants.”

  “Health food isn’t bad,” said Mina. And after Mother gave her a look, “. . . for people who can afford it.”

  “In Oberstaufen!” said his mother. “Health food in Oberstaufen, Mina! He guaranteed a loan of 7,500 marks when we’re in debt ourselves for . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence.

  “Two beef roulades with red cabbage and purée,” said Elsa and stuck the order on the nail behind the door.

  A man with a briefcase entered the kitchen right behind her and expressed his thanks for the excellent brisket. As long as the Station Restaurant in Wasserburg could serve a brisket like that, he wasn’t worried about its future. “Chin up, dear lady,” he said. He shook Mother’s hand and said, “And best regards to your husband. Just don’t lose your nerve! If you could see the sort of places I’ve been in these days and the furniture I had to repossess, dear lady—it’s the elite. The elite are having a tough time of it these days. But you’ll pull through, I can feel it. I’ve been a bailiff of the court since 1911. I learned the trade under the authority of his majesty the king, dear lady, and I can tell the wheat from the chaff. You don’t belong to the chaff, no ma’am! Just plug up the little holes for now and you can negotiate the big ones later. Who’s better at that than you!”

  The whole time he was speaking, the gentleman held Mother’s hand. He’d clamped his briefcase between his knees in order to take her hand in both of his. All at once he had to sneeze. He let go of her hand, turned away, and immediately produced a gigantic yellow handkerchief with white flowers and applied it to his equally gigantic and very misshapen nose. Mother and Mina sang out simultaneously, “Gesundheit, Herr Bailiff!” He thanked them, took the briefcase he’d still held clamped between his knees while he sneezed, and departed. It was as if there was nothing left to say after that explosive sneeze.

  When he was gone, Mother said, “The worst thing is the electricity. Everybody can see we have to put in a mark for every little bit of current.” Mina said she should feed the meter when no one was in the hallway. Hardly anyone noticed the meter because it was right next to the bell box. She was right. Before, when everything was still in good working order, the room number would fall into the corresponding slot when a guest pushed the bell in his room upstairs. His father told him that that’s how you knew it was time to bring the member of the Imperial Railway Board the warm water for his shave.

  Mina said she thought it would be much worse if they repossessed the gramophone. Mother shook her head as though she’d given up on Mina once and for all. If she’d had anything to say about it, she said, the gramophone would never have gotten into the house in the first place. “No gramophone, no restaurant,” said the Princess from her place at the sink, thereby proving once again that her hearing wasn’t so bad after all. Johann was glad that the Princess didn’t turn around every time she contributed to the conversation. He just couldn’t get used to her glass eye. It was never in the place you expected it to be. At least it wasn’t in the place you expected a left eye to be, symmetrical with the right one. It was noticeably lower, sitting at the lower edge of her eye socket, right on top of her cheek bone. When she had first introduced herself, she said she was thirty-one, a princess, and had two children, the second one by a seventeen-year-old, the first one by a swindler who turned over a borrowed car with her in it, which is how she came by her injuries.

  When Josef threw his school bag onto the bench in the kitchen and reported eleven guests in the Crown and four in the Lakeside Café, Mina said that meant they were keeping abreast of the places on the lake. Mother took a long look at Mina again and said, “What it means, Mina, is that it’s not just us who aren’t making any money, it’s the places on the lake, too.” His mother had directed the last part of her sentence toward Johann. Johann knew she meant to remind him who their competition was: the Crown and the Lakeshore Café were run by outsiders, Lutherans. And Herr Michaelsen, the owner of the Lakeshore Café, had not just been a major but was also married to an Englishwoman. Go see if you can compete with powerful people like that.

  “Oh, ma’am,” said Mina, “dr sell hot g’seit, wenn d’Henn guat huckt, scherrat se so lang, bis se schleaht huckt.”

  The Princess called out furiously, “Wenn die Henne gut hockt, scharrt sie so lange, bis sie schlecht hockt.”—When the hen’s nicely settled, she’ll scratch till she’s badly settled.

  Johann had sensed right away that he shouldn’t have allowed himself to be photographed. He began to wonder why he had no regrets at all about making this mistake that he could never make up for. He had been photographed. There would be no one to be seen in the picture but him. No one else. It was clear that no one but him knew what that meant. None of them would be in this picture. How would they know what it means to be in a picture all by yourself? Just him in front of the giant redwoods the professor had brought back from—yes, definitely—from Sumatra, as confirmed by Helmer’s Hermine’s index finger ticking back and forth. Johann could feel it: he wasn’t the same person anymore that he had been before the photographer took his picture. And it made almost no difference to him at all now that it was an itinerant photographer. That’s how shameless he’d become. Now he was the boy who had been photographed. And he would be that boy from now on.

  “What’s wrong with him?” said Josef. “Is he running a fever?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Suspended Payments

  WHEN JOHANN GOT HOME from playing dodge ball, he heard Josef practicing the piano. Josef was playing scales. Next year when Johann started school, he would begin piano lessons too, if only to please his father, who often said it would have been terrible to be born before there were pianos.

  As soon as dinnertime approached, Mother sent Johann into the extra room where his father was playing or Josef was practicing scales to tell them that patrons were already being seated. Only a flimsy folding partition separated the dining room from the extra room. Johann went to stand beside his father, whose hands immediately froze in mid-phrase. He nodded, let them drop, closed the piano, then patted his knee and said, “Sit up here.” Then Johann sat on his knee while Father finished what he had just been playing by singing it quietly into Johann’s ear. His father was a singer, too, second tenor in the choral society. Josef and Johann’s room was directly above the extra room, where the choral society rehearsed on Thursday evenings, and Johann always listened to see if he could pick out his father’s
voice from the others. There were two voices he could clearly make out: the limpid, silvery voice of Herr Grübel, rising effortlessly to any height, and Herr Späth’s voice, which made a strained impression while striving for the same notes. When Johann encountered Herr Grübel or Herr Späth in town, he greeted Herr Grübel with respect and Herr Späth with sympathy. Herr Späth was a mason who worked amid sand, cement, and dust. Herr Grübel lived in the center of town in a little old wooden house that huddled beneath its roof, and he was always occupied with his silken-backed cows, with round red and yellow apples, smooth cherries, freshly mown grass, and fragrant hay. Johann imagined that must be good for Herr Grübel’s voice. As often as he could, Herr Späth came to the restaurant straight from his dusty work, drank beer or lake wine at the regulars’ table, and always smoked a stogie. Herr Grübel almost never came to the regulars’ table. It was unimaginable that he had ever smoked. Herr Grübel walked beside his team of oxen as they pulled a cartful of grass or hay into town, moving so slowly it seemed they would never get there. The only sound was the clop of the oxen’s resilient hooves on the freshly tarred street. And whenever Johann greeted Herr Grübel, he would reply, “Good day to you, Johann!” It sounded like something from the Benedictus, in which he soared above the choir and made everything in the church seem to float, so that Johann no longer felt the uneven hardness of the kneeler.

  The moment Johann appeared at the kitchen door, he knew that his mother would say, “Go tell them there are already guests on the terrace and in the dining room.” Johann took off running, but not before he heard the Princess say, “That’s his favorite thing, chasing Josef from the piano.” It was true that Johann couldn’t understand how you could practice scales for hours on end. When he learned the piano, it would be by playing melodies.

  In the extra room he stood beside Josef and lowered the fallboard none too slowly. “Not yet!” cried Josef. “People are starting to complain,” said Johann. Josef stopped at once. And since he looked so alarmed, Johann conceded, “Not yet, but they will soon.” Josef jumped up and began a small wrestling match, which Johann—being two years younger, two years smaller, and two years weaker—lost. But he didn’t give up until he was lying on the oiled parquet with Josef kneeling on his biceps. That’s how all their fights ended. It didn’t hurt to lose to Josef. It was enough that Josef was sweating. As he lay on his back looking up into Josef’s face, he saw no intent to humiliate him. Adolf’s face beamed with joy when they played dodgeball and Johann was standing where he was guaranteed to be hit. Adolf cocked his arm, made as if to throw, Johann dodged to the right, but Adolf didn’t throw. He waited half a second until Johann straightened back up but wasn’t ready to dodge again (you weren’t allow to move from your spot), and then he threw much harder than necessary from so short a distance and hit Johann right on the neck. It hurt. It hurt Adolf too when he hit Johann so hard, but only after he’d hit him. You could tell. Johann knew for sure that Josef would always protect him. Against anybody. At home, of course, Johann had to do what Josef said. But in the world outside, Josef was his protector.

  Johann beat a retreat. He had heard the scratch of his grandfather’s rake outside on the gravel. Grandfather was raking up the first fallen chestnut leaves. Grandfather was forever straightening, sweeping, and raking. He moved slowly and breathed heavily. Whenever he passed the boxes of geraniums that crowned the waist-high terrace wall with flowers, he would discover a withered leaf, a faded blossom, or something else that absolutely had to be removed. Nor was he able to pass between the planters of ivy flanking the exit to the train station without plucking off something that had turned yellow in those walls of green. Although he couldn’t bend over very well anymore, he still stooped down for anything lying on the ground. He was incapable of passing the least scrap of paper or cigarette butt without bending down to pick it up. Johann always rushed over when Grandfather bent down because it always looked like he wouldn’t be able to straighten back up but would fall forward and never get up again. Grandfather sat in the restaurant every evening, but never at the regulars’ table. He sat next to the door at the table beneath the clock. He drank nothing, ate nothing, just read the paper. Since he practically never turned the page, you couldn’t be sure he was reading at all. In the morning and at night, Johann helped Grandfather put on and take off his shoes. Grandfather couldn’t reach the laces by himself anymore.

  When Johann emerged from the house, the graveled yard beneath the two chestnuts on the station side of the restaurant had already been raked clean of anything that didn’t belong there. His grandfather had even swept the worn wooden planks of the truck scale. It was important to Grandfather that the scale be kept ready for action at any moment. They had a truck scale at the Linden Tree, too, a roofed-over one, in fact. That’s why some farmers preferred to drive their wagons full of windfalls or straw onto the Linden Tree’s scale. At the Station Restaurant they tared the scale before every weighing so the customer could see that the pointer stopped next to the zero. But some people just didn’t get that and chose the covered scale at the Linden Tree instead, especially when it was raining or snowing. That amazing catch of bream last year in April, for instance, when three carts full of fish got weighed on the Linden’s scale and it was in the newspaper: The Miraculous Catch—the three carts and the Linden Tree scale. Johann wished he could do the weighing, but he couldn’t yet manage to turn the big crank that raised the scale bed. When the crank handle was at the top of its travel, it was out of reach over his head.

  Whenever he lost a fight with Josef, Johann sought out his grandfather. Grandfather put his rake and shovel into the wheelbarrow, and Johann wheeled it behind the house and down to the compost pile in the courtyard. Grandfather had followed and now stood under the apple trees, checking to see if the branches sagging under their heavy burden of fruit were properly supported. He called over Niklaus, who had positioned the props. When he wasn’t otherwise occupied, Niklaus filled hundredweight sacks with coal and lined them up under the overhanging roof of the carriage house so that if a customer wanted a hundredweight of hard coal or briquettes, it was all ready to go. Grandfather told Niklaus to bring him more props. The Welschisner tree had a particularly heavy harvest this year and needed more support all around so the branches wouldn’t break. Johann picked up a fallen Gravenstein from the ground and bit into it. Grandfather said Johann could get a basket and gather the drops for tomorrow’s applesauce. Johann fetched a basket from the second floor of the carriage house, where everything they didn’t need but might eventually need lay around, and he picked up the fallen fruit under all eight apple trees. There was no one’s bidding Johann did more readily than his grandfather’s. He especially didn’t like Josef giving him orders. They were mostly chores Josef should have done himself but passed on to Johann when he didn’t feel like doing them. And if Johann refused, a wrestling match would ensue that Johann lost and then he had to do what Josef told him. When Grandfather gave you a job, you had the feeling he would rather have done it himself but couldn’t anymore. Grandfather was a giant, but a stooped one.

  Johann had carried the basket up the back stairs and set it down by the door to the porch when Mina came running through the courtyard and up the stairs. She dashed past Johann into the house, loudly wailing and crying “Noooo!” and “It can’t be!” Johann ran after her. In the kitchen she collapsed on the bench next to the door, which was actually Johann’s place. But whereas he always slid down the long bench into the corner under the boiler, Mina stayed right at the end of the bench, set her elbows on the rutted tabletop, and wailed and yelled and wailed. Mother, Grandfather, and Elsa clustered around her at once, and the Princess didn’t just look over her shoulder from her place at the sink but turned her whole body. Mother and Elsa implored, “Come on, Mina, what’s the matter? Come on, tell us what happened!” Mina had planned to withdraw twenty marks from the branch of the Bank of Commerce and Agriculture in Glatthars’ house because the Lindau harvest fair was coming
up soon, but she’d come back empty-handed. The door had been closed. A posted notice announced that the bank was forced to suspend payments temporarily. A meeting of creditors was being convened. Judicial proceedings had been initiated to avoid bankruptcy. The directors of the bank asked their honored clientele for their continued trust. Only trust could now prevent the worst, namely, bankruptcy. Mina recited all these sentences through her tears in the best High German they had ever heard her speak. She’d deposited years of earnings in the bank—everything she’d earned in that very bank. She hadn’t kept a thing for herself, and Alfred had put his savings in the bank too, the same bank. They were going to get married next year or the year after that. And now it was all gone, gone, gone.

  Grandfather said it still wasn’t clear that everything was gone for good. Big, heavy Elsa was also gazing down at skinny little Mina crying her eyes out and obviously couldn’t stand it that Mina was getting all the attention. So she just started in about how when she was in Baienfurt, where she worked before coming here, she picked up the food from a counter window right between the kitchen and the dining room, but here she had to run to the kitchen, pick up the food, run back down the corridor fifteen or twenty feet at least, then turn left and push open the door with her elbow, and only then was she in the dining room. It was even farther to the guests on the terrace: a good twenty feet from the kitchen door to the swinging door, from there another seven feet to the front door, “down two steps and you’re on the terrace, but it’s still quite a ways to the tables. I’m tellin ya, my first week here, I thought I was gonna eat my own feet.” Big, heavy Elsa from Einöd near Homburg depicted her weary trips as though every step was torture. She must not have known that Grandfather had designed and built the building. She probably meant to say that she had it even harder than Mina. Elsa looked forever run ragged. Her considerable lower lip always hung down and showed a good amount of gum and in her glassy stare you could see what a torture it was to wait on tables. To wait on tables in this restaurant. From her place at the sink the Princess said, “If everybody’s going to say what they don’t like, I’ve got a few things to say myself.” Mina looked only at Mother, Mother only at Mina. Mina stood up. Compared to Elsa and Mother she was really tiny. She said, “Here,” and handed Johann her small, dark red passbook. When she came back from the bank, Mina had always handed Johann her passbook and said, “Put it away for me.” She knew how much Johann liked to open and close the heavy door of the safe in the front office.