A Gushing Fountain

by Martin Walser

  They had barely exited, walking backwards and bowing, when the music took an East Indian turn. Anita’s mother was bowing an instrument with many strings. Dumb August blew on a flute. The ringmaster cracked his whip and called, “Vishnu, Vishnu, Vishnu, Vishnu,” turning in a different direction each time. With the final “Vishnu,” he turned toward the blooming apple trees. And out from under them, the water buffalo emerged. “Vishnu,” called out the ringmaster, now in a different tone of voice. “Vishnu in person, from whose navel the lotus grows and blossoms, the blossom in which Devi sits enthroned, the goddess of all gods, who will now dance Baratanatyam and with all her many arms trick Shiva, the god of Death.” The music fluttered up like a flock of tropical birds. Anita, Indian from head to toe, dancing in the white blossom. The black buffalo carried the image in a circle. Anita had more than two arms, and all her arms were moving. But Johann could tell which were the real ones and saw that black hair grew in Anita’s armpits. The buffalo circled the ring twice. The music became more and more Indian. The buffalo stopped. Anita stood up, jumped off, and collapsed in the sawdust of the ring in a small heap of all those arms. Only when the buffalo came and stood in front of her did her head emerge. Anita rose and held out both her hands to it. It licked them in fervent devotion. The music swelled to a crescendo. People applauded. Johann had a feeling of bliss. Then the buffalo knelt down on its forelegs, inviting Anita Devi to take a seat between its broad, spreading horns. Which she did. Vishnu stood up and, to triumphal music, bore Anita Devi out into the darkness beyond the Gravenstein tree to which he had been tethered all day long. The audience clapped. Johann clapped as hard as he possibly could. He wanted to infect the others with his enthusiasm. Bharatanatyam! A word from his word-tree! He felt that he belonged to the circus now. Adolf clapped considerably less than Johann.

  On the other side of the ring sat Herr and Frau Brugger, also in the front row. Herr Brugger hardly clapped at all. With one of his hands he patted the back of the other hand. Oh, Herr Brugger, thought Johann and felt a sort of sympathy for Herr Brugger. He wanted at least to draw Adolf over to his side, away from his father. Over to Johann, to Johann’s father. As soon as the ringmaster said “India,” Johann thought of his father, especially at the word Bharatanatyam. When his father was no longer able to hold a book himself, Johann had read to him. Anselm, the three-year-old, would be put in bed next to his father. Johann always read until both of them—Anselm and Father—fell asleep. Rabindranath Tagore was the poet whose works Johann had to read. The chapters were called “The Counsel of the Heavenly Ones,” “The Two Animals,” “The Path of the Sun,” “The Flower Greeting,” “The Tale of a Child’s Soul,” “The Sacrifice of Song,” “The Reconciliation,” “The Shining Track.” He probably would have found it boring to read. But not to read aloud. Rabindra, however, sang movingly in an ancient, sacred language from the Upanishads. And what he sang brings a blessing—brings a blessing. When the buffalo licked Anita’s hands, how could he help but think of Rabindra’s great epiphany!

  One day the lad was sitting on the doorstep of his father’s house, looking out. And he saw a zebu and a donkey standing side by side. The zebu, however, was tenderly licking the donkey’s coat. Just as the two beasts—so foreign to each other and with completely different natures—sensed their common, eternal oneness beyond everything that divided them, so too the boy suddenly beheld the inner connection of the whole world and all its creatures. And permeated with universal feeling, he experienced the essence of love, of not being able to do anything but love, and he spoke: I must love, must love.

  Johann always went upstairs to his father after school, even before he had something to eat, and when he asked him how he was, his father said, “Come, read me the tenth song of the Bhagavad Gita.” And then whenever Johann read I am the active element in the realm of powers / The sunlight in the heavenly choir of suns . . . he had the feeling he was growing as he read. In December, his father’s favorite had been the “Night Song.” “Come, read me the ‘Night Song’ from Zarathustra again,” he would often say in December. In fact, the “Night Song” was Johann’s favorite to read aloud. When he read it, he had the feeling he was singing. When he read, It is night: now all the gushing fountains speak more loudly. And my soul, too, is a gushing fountain, he had the feeling his voice was singing all by itself. Every time he read his father the “Night Song,” his father said Johann’s favorite sentence: “You’re amazing, Johann.” Now, as Vishnu carried the many-armed Devi around the ring, Johann felt that through his father, he was closer to Anita Devi than anyone else in the audience. I must love, must love.

  When it was over, everyone who had performed paraded around the ring to a blaring march, led by the ringmaster. The ringmaster made a final appeal to the audience to recommend La Paloma Circus to their friends if they had enjoyed it. Then the spotlight over the ring went out and the house lights came up.

  Adolf whispered to Johann that they had to get rid of the others first, and he’d be right back. Then he said out loud, “So long, got to rush off,” and ran down the village street. The others ran after him. Johann walked the short distance to the terrace, climbed the steps that led up to it, walked across the terrace to the trellised pears, and bent the slender stems apart. The lights over the benches were now off as well, but lights were burning in all the trailers. He knew which trailer Anita was in. But what good did that do him? He might have stood there all night if Adolf hadn’t come back. Right away, he asked, “Which trailer does she live in?”

  Johann said, “In the one under the Prince Ludwig tree.” He had played and fought with Adolf under these same trees at every season of the year, so he knew which apples grew on which trees.

  “Then we have to approach from below,” said Adolf, and ran down the terrace steps to the street and down the street to the path below the orchard. Johann simply ran after Adolf. Adolf ran far enough along the path so the light from the street couldn’t reach them anymore, and then clambered over the high fence. Johann climbed after him, and Adolf and Johann both jumped down into the orchard, landing at almost the same time. Adolf apparently knew exactly where the compost pile was and bypassed it. Then he whispered to Johann, “The Welschisner tree.” That was the tree closest to the Prince Ludwig tree. When they reached the tree’s thick trunk, Adolf whispered, “Boost.”

  Johann put his back to the trunk, interlaced his fingers, leaned back against the trunk, and whispered, “Ready.” Adolf placed one foot in Johann’s hands, climbed onto his shoulders, and pulled himself up into the branches. Then he slid out along the biggest branch that extended toward the trailer. He took no further notice of Johann. Johann stared at the wide, low window of Anita’s trailer. It was bright, but a curtain was pulled across it from the inside. He looked up at Adolf, who had now stood up on the branch, steadying himself on thinner branches, and was poking his head up above the foliage. And then he whistled. Not the loud four-finger whistle, but the one with the index finger and thumb of one hand. It wasn’t such a sharp whistle. Instead, it slowly fell and got softer and then rose again and got louder. Johann thought it was shocking to draw attention to yourself like that. But Adolf didn’t stop making the tone that fell and got soft and rose and got loud. Johann hissed, “Stop that!” But Adolf didn’t hear or didn’t want to hear. Johann wondered if he should take a fallen branch and poke Adolf to make him stop whistling. Then the door of Anita’s trailer opened. Anita stood in the doorway, her bathrobe yellow, her turban red. Adolf stopped then. As soon as the door opened, Johann had jumped behind the thick trunk. Someone inside must have told Anita to close the door. She stepped back, the door closed, and Adolf clambered down and said, “That was her.” It sounded like he had accomplished everything he wanted.

  They climbed back over the fence onto the path, ran out into the street, called, “So long!” to each other, and took off in opposite directions, Adolf down the street and Johann up the street.

  A babble of voices from the inn told h
im that the regulars’ table was more than full. The chairs would be crowded around the table in a big circle. Johann went up to his room, stretched out on the bed, and let himself be licked by Tell, who’d been waiting for him. Why had Adolf run away so fast? So long! and he was gone. Johann just barely had enough time to say So long! himself. They could have talked everything over. That’s the way it had always been with them, hadn’t it? In the evening, even when it got quite late, they would never part ways so abruptly. Adolf would walk Johann home, but they weren’t ready to split up yet. They simply hadn’t finished discussing the most important thing, and so Johann would walk back down the village street with Adolf, turn right at the linden tree, and then, fifty yards farther on, left at the entrance to the Bruggers’ house, where they stood on the steps talking, and while still talking, they would just naturally set off again, back up the street to the terrace steps. And if at that point Johann’s mother or Adolf’s from the Bruggers’ house hadn’t turned up to put an end to the two of them walking back and forth, they would still be far from finished. Perhaps would never be finished. There was always so much that was important. And now nothing but, So long, So long, and gone.

  Johann was unable to read or fall asleep. He tiptoed into the lavatory and opened the window. Fortunately, it was large and he could lean out and gaze down on the three trailers where lights were still burning. Since at this time of year they weren’t renting out rooms yet and his mother was still busy in the restaurant and Josef was still at the ski hut and his father dead, no one needed to use the lavatory. Johann could lean out the window until the lights had gone out in all three trailers. Then he went back to Tell and finally went to bed himself.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The First Time

  JOHANN NEVER READ WHILE SPOONING up his breakfast of bread in warm milk. At all other meals, he read. It wasn’t like at the Bruggers’ or other families where everyone ate together. In Johann’s family, everyone ate when they had time. If Johann was alone in the kitchen with the Princess or Mina, he couldn’t read, either. Sometimes he did prop a book in front of his plate, but he was always much too distracted by the Princess or Mina to be able to read. Mina preoccupied him even more than the Princess. Every time he looks up, Mina looks at him. She has a small face framed by curly reddish hair, pulled back and tied at the nape of her neck. And her eyes are intensely blue. Mina is certainly the nicest person who ever lived. In the beginning, when he was little, it was she who had gotten Johann dressed and undressed. She even bathed him, in fact. He would stand in the sink while she rubbed the washcloth up and down his body. But before washing him, she always had to shoo away the Princess. “You have to watch out, or she’ll stare some part right off of you,” she always said. Five years ago at Christmas, she had repaired that awful burn hole in his Norwegian pullover. “That’s invisible mending as only Mina can do it,” said Mother when she saw it. Which meant that she herself could not have darned that hideous hole in a way that you wouldn’t even notice the catastrophe unless you knew it was there. And when Johann had outgrown the sweater, Mina had knitted extensions to the sleeves so it fit him again. Since Johann preferred not to wear a piece of clothing that was important to him in order to protect it, his pullover had stayed so beautiful that Johann still felt like the Silver Knight when he wore it. The only time the pullover didn’t pass muster was when he was with Anita.

  Sometimes Mina simply came around the big stove, bent down to him, and ran her hand two or three times over Johann’s hair, but without doing the slightest damage to his haircut. Quite the contrary: Johann had the feeling that his haircut had been blessed. Since Luise had begun working there, Johann had become aware of the possibility that there was another person with a claim to the title of nicest person that ever lived: Luise from the South Tyrol. Johann knew he would defend Luise against any approach that aimed at more than just ordering a beer. Mina would be leaving soon. There was no one he could tell that, if it wasn’t for Luise, Mina’s leaving would be unbearable. Mina had given notice for December 31st and had planned to get married in January. Alfred had already leased a farm in Höhenreute and was waiting for her, and Johann had already typed up her letter of reference on the Continental: She has always performed the tasks assigned to her to our complete satisfaction. Fräulein Mina is leaving us voluntarily. Johann had the feeling that this reference was a poor reflection of Mina’s importance. Mother had taken what she dictated to him from references that had been written for her, years ago.

  Then when Mina saw how poorly Father was doing, she decided to stay into the new year. And when Father died on January 3rd, she said, “I can’t leave now.” Her mother had come from Niedersonthofen to take over all the jobs Johann’s mother was, for now, incapable of doing. Mina held little Anselm on her arm as Father’s coffin was carried out of the office. She put off her departure until Easter. Yet now it was just before Low Sunday, and she was still standing at the stove. “I’ll leave at Pentecost,” she said, “or Alfred’s going to go to the dogs.” Mina spoke the way they do in the upper Allgäu: she said dong for getan and long for gelassen.

  Today when Johann looked up and saw Mina looking at him, she didn’t come around the stove. “Awful news, just awful, awful,” she said. In the middle of the night, they’d had to run for the doctor. August from the circus had been found lying in front of his trailer with his hands and feet tied, and beaten black and blue. Mina said they’d hung a sign around his neck that said “Compliments of the 99.7%.” It was uncertain whether August would be able to perform today. If Herr Seehahn and Semper’s Fritz hadn’t found him, and if Semper’s Fritz hadn’t rung the doctor out of bed right away, Dumb August would have choked on his own blood.

  Johann recalled Wolfgang Landsmann and his balloon-tire bicycle and how Edi Fürst had thrown it into the ditch. Then Wolfgang had raised his right arm and looked under it, back at his comrades. He thought about that muster again and again. Edi, at the time still a troop leader in the Jungvolk, pulls out his roster, moistens his pencil tip, and crosses out Wolfgang Landsmann. A song two, three, four, Steig ich den Berg hinan, das macht mir Freude. Josef had once told Johann that Edi was probably the only troop leader in the entire squadron who came to every muster in jackboots. Edi Fürst was a bit on the short side. Yet even though he really wasn’t tall, he beat them all at high jump, to say nothing of horizontal bar. The face he made when he landed on the mat after performing a giant flyaway and quickly snapped to attention was exactly the same face that he made when he stood before his troop in high boots. When he stood before the troop with that face, everyone could see there was nothing more important than the muster taking place at that moment. Nothing in the whole world. Nobody found anything to grin about then.

  Johann would have liked to skip Mass. In the street, he stopped and looked over toward the trailers, where nothing was stirring. The buffalo stood motionless beneath the Gravenstein tree. The ponies lay on the straw under the projecting roof of the carriage house. The trailer doors were shut. Johann walked into the village as slowly as humanly possible. But nothing happened that would have caused him to stop, much less turn around. Since today he’d forgone his hair grease—and that also meant forgoing any kind of coiffure, even one that looked like a crown—he could start running as soon as he passed the linden tree, where all the streets converged.

  As he knelt down in the pew next to Adolf, Adolf whispered to him, “They gave it to August last night.” Right after this piece of news came a gesture that meant that what he said was for Johann’s ears only. Nobody else must hear it. When Mina told him what happened last night, Johann had thought at once of Herr Brugger. When Herr Brugger entered the restaurant with the ivory toothpick in his mouth, Johann always felt like something was going to happen. Mind you, when Herr Brugger led cows and calves or pigs out of his trailer and into their stalls, he was a different person. He sang a quiet ho-ho-ho-hoh to the animals and guided them with caressing hands. And the animals followed him without resistance. B
ut when he emerged from his house in his hunting togs with a rifle over his shoulder and Treff at his side, then the sun flashed from his gun barrel even when it wasn’t sunny. Johann and Adolf would stop playing, greet the hunter, and watch while he got into his Mercedes and turned on the ignition. The truck that Father had acquired a year before his death had to be cranked, and if he didn’t do it right, the crank jumped back and smacked Father if he hadn’t pulled his hands away fast enough, hit him so hard that he cried out in pain and had to rub his hands together for a while before he could try cranking the truck again. But Herr Brugger just got into his car, pressed a button, and the motor started up with a harsh gurgle. On special days, Herr Brugger marched through the village at the head of his column of SA. Since an accident a few New Years back, when his car had gone into a skid on glare ice, slid into the Oeschbach, and turned over, he had a bad hip. To tell the truth, he limped. But when he marched along at the head of the SA, he compensated for his limp by a jerking and twitching you weren’t supposed to notice. Adolf said that if anybody told his father he should use a cane, his father got hopping mad. Johann avoided Herr Brugger whenever he could. But if Herr Brugger caught sight of him before Johann was able to disappear around the corner of the house, he went right straight to Johann’s mother and complained that Johann had made himself scarce so he wouldn’t have to greet him, Herr Brugger. Johann had never before heard the expression “made himself scarce,” but he understood right away what it meant. And then Mother gave Johann a dressing-down in front of Herr Brugger. She really read him the riot act. Wasn’t he ashamed to be sneaking around a corner just to avoid saying hello to Herr Brugger? She was at her wits’ end with him. Your own children let you down. Herr Brugger let Mother finish her whiny, despairing scolding, then he removed the toothpick from the corner of his mouth and said to Johann, “You listen up now, laddie boy.” Fortunately, Mother didn’t use the words of the person who had lodged a complaint when she scolded him. She never said Make yourself scarce, thank goodness. Johann could only feel comfortable at Adolf ’s house when he knew Herr Brugger was on the road selling livestock, hunting, or commanding the SA or the National Socialist Automotive Corps. Of all the mothers of his schoolmates, Frau Brugger was the friendliest. You couldn’t go to the Bruggers’ without her giving you something. Of course, Johann knew that it wasn’t Herr Brugger who had beaten up August from the circus. But he knew very well that Herr Brugger knew who had. Something made him whisper to Adolf, “Who did it?” Adolf rebuked him sharply with a condescending glance while repeatedly tapping his index finger against his temple. Which meant: Are you crazy? That’s top, top secret! Anyone who asks a question like that is already a little bit like the one they had to beat up at night. So stop asking such stupid questions!