A Gushing Fountain

by Martin Walser

  “Which joke was that?” Hanse Luis wanted to know.

  “Why did they start painting swastikas on the bottom of chamber pots, was the question,” said Fritz, “And the answer: So the assholes can see what they voted for.”

  “Oh, that one,” said Schulze Max. He’d often told that one and was surprised he hadn’t ended up in Dachau.

  “I’m amazed they’re forcing resistance fighters the likes of you two to paint fences,” said Hanse Luis.

  “Shut your trap,” said Fritz. “We gotta get Harpf out.” Dulle agreed. At the end of March, the county administrator was going to hang the Polish guy who had a thing with the Stuka, and Harpf—the Pole, an eighteen-year-old guy, was already up on a chair with the noose around his neck—Harpf goes and says to the county administrator: Is this really necessary, Herr Kreisleiter? And the Kreisleiter bellows at him: I’m ordering you to kick over the chair! But Harpf refused to kick over the chair. So Dr. Fröhlich zealously steps into the breach and does it for him. So in May, he and the Kreisleiter were the first ones the Poles went after. They caught them and beat them to death, both on the same day, the Kreisleiter in a ravine up in Heimersreutin and the ophthalmologist in the ladies’ room of the Lindau station.

  “At least he was wearing a skirt and blouse when he went into the ladies’ room,” said Schulze Max.

  “And silk stockings, too, I hear tell,” said Dulle.

  “It’s true,” said Hanse Luis. “At first they couldn’t figure out who was male and who was female in all the hubbub.”

  When Frau Fürst passed them with her bag of newspapers, they all said hello. She seemed not to hear them. Shortly before he got called up, Johann had had some business with Frau Fürst, because she had to make a list of all the hens in town so everybody who had more than two could turn over the extra eggs.

  Now she was back to walking the town with her mouth stitched shut.

  “Poor woman,” said Herr Minn.

  “Yeah, right,” said Hanse Luis. “You know what the conductor said about making music. Goes for war, too: there’s no trick to starting together, it’s ending together that’s hard. Always was a real bantam rooster in his uniform, that Edi Fürst, and then on top of it all he gets the Knight’s Cross in January, went straight to his prissy little head. He bought the farm on May 13th just because he refused to believe what the Russian loudspeakers were blaring at him: War over, Throw down weapons, No more shoot. Good ol’ Edi just laughs. Propaganda, nothing but a Russian trick, saw it all the time on the Eastern front, the Russkies want to round us up free of charge. But the fact that they hadn’t had any radio contact with the division command post for days—you know what that means, Private Fritz, you old front-line veteran. It bothers Edi, that’s for sure. Takes off with his tank in the direction of the command post. Four hours later, no Edi in sight, so the staff sergeant drives toward the woods where they had their last sight of Edi. Lead tank come in, where are you? And comes back with the news: lead tank drove over a mine, driver, chief, and gunner made it out of the tank alive but bled to death in the field. And now the radioman has contact with the division again. War’s over. Has been since May 8th. All fighting to cease immediately. So they raise a raggedy white flag, the Russkies come in from every direction. They shovel graves for the chief, the gunner, and the driver and put them in, heads pointing east. That night, before they get loaded onto trucks, the staff sergeant takes off, swims across the Danube, makes it through. But our city-scene embroiderer, squad leader, first lieutenant, and Knight’s Cross wearer bought the farm, that’s for sure.”

  And Helmer’s Franz called over, “Frommknecht Leo always says: The good guys buy the farm and the scum return.”

  “He just had to be such a big shot all the time,” said Semper’s Fritz. “Poached my chicks and left me the dregs. Now his chicks’ve come home to roost.”

  “What happened to his sister, Edeltraud, is much harder on poor Frau Fürst,” said Herr Minn. “She killed herself and her child because she and her Sturmführer from the SS Bodyguards had sworn a pact that in case of defeat, he would kill himself and she would kill herself so no one could humiliate them. Now she’s dead and her child, too, and there’s been word from the Sturmführer that he’s living in Spain under an alias and hopes to come back when the smoke clears a bit.”

  Dulle: “There ain’t no limits no more.” And since nobody said anything, he went on, “To what people’ll do.”

  Semper’s Fritz said nobody had died as nasty a death as the Princess, a.k.a. the Stuka. Schulze Max knew the most about it because he had it from Herr Deuerling, who saw the whole thing through the station window. She’d been standing on the terrace between the planters of ivy with Lucile and Luise, everybody glad the unpredictable SS had finally withdrawn to Bregenz because, hemmed in between Mount Pfänder and the lake, it would be easier to defend than the vulnerable Wasserburg. The French enter the town as if they were on maneuvers. And everyone’s waving a welcome. The tank crews all young fellows, most likely still in their teens. Good old Stuka can’t hold back, runs out, reaches for their outstretched hands and grabs one, but dangling in the air like that for a second, she should have stayed still and let them pull her up the rest of the way instead of kicking her legs. So one foot gets caught in the tank’s track. She screams and the boy lets go of her hand. She falls and the big iron track rolls over both legs, and those legs she was so justly proud of get crushed. By the time they can bring the tank to a stop, she’s dead.

  Dulle said, “What a woman. We ain’t gonna see her likes again.”

  Hanse Luis said that must have been what the little half-pint railroad man Deuerling meant when he said: Only one eye, but enough lip for two.

  “And the beautifulest High German you’re ever gonna hear,” added Dulle.

  “Paris is shit, London is bigger,” chimed in Schulze Max.

  “The expert is astonished, the layman rubs his eyes,” shouted Fritz.

  “O pain, be gone,” said Hanse Luis.

  As they were painting the fence in front of the Villa Gwinner—Dulle and Johann blue, Herr Minn and Schulze Max white, Semper’s Fritz red, and Helmer’s Franz in the lead, prepping the pickets with sandpaper—Hermine came out with a tray of glasses and a pitcher of cider, poured a glass for each of them, and said it was compliments of M. Lapointe. Hermine was more important than ever, having become the housekeeper for the commandant of the local occupation forces who was residing in the Villa Gwinner, where Hermine had always been in charge of cleanliness. She spent every night in a crash course in French from Herr Seehahn, because M. Lapointe was not permitted to speak German. He knew German, she said, but as commandant, he could only speak and hear French. And what a gentleman he was! And so bashful! Such a handsome fellow and yet so bashful—or rather, timide. And how well he went with that villa where the swans in the stained glass windows outnumbered the ones down on the lake. Our church windows looked like factory windows by comparison. “Johann,” she said, “I wish I could show you the hall. I let your father have a peek once, and he said it was a marriage of tropical wood and Jugendstil!”

  She thought the painters were doing a great—or rather, chouette—job. They all drank M. Lapointe’s health.

  On July 14th, General Lattre de Tassigny landed in Bad Schachen.

  Johann waited for the next chance to run into Lena. He was never entirely where she wasn’t. On a Sunday in June, he had finally gone to see Magda. She told him that Wolfgang and the torpedo boat in which he was serving had both been captured by the English, who were about the best captors you could ask for. Johann had steered Magda to the bench that surrounded the thick tree trunk. There they could gaze into the foliage together. He had not been able to look her in the eye. What he would have liked to say was: Let’s die right now. Only so he wouldn’t have to say anything else. He jumped up and looked her in the eye after all. Looked at the oval face framed by an oval of hair and was able to withstand the gaze that began at the bridge of her nose.
Beneath the infinitely delicate nose, a bit of mouth, a small, noble curve. She asked about Lena as if she already knew everything. But for him to own up to everything she’d already learned via village news broadcasts (which were nothing if not instantaneous)—that he could not do. Oh, it would have done him good if he could have depicted how he lay in wait day and night for Lena signals. He could only say that sometimes he ran into Lena when she came up the stairs.

  Magda: “Push her down.” And because he looked at her in surprise, she added, “The stairs.”

  “Oh,” he said, “you mean down the stairs.”

  He didn’t bring off the parting very well. When she was gone, he knew that Magda now thought he was going to break it off with Lena at once, break it off before it had even started. He had not been able to reveal the least bit of the mood he was in. And yet, he would have liked nothing better than to let Magda feel his elation, let her participate in his rapture, in his Lena addiction. Why wasn’t it possible? Why couldn’t Magda feel what he was feeling? Why couldn’t he draw her into his silent jubilation? Into this constant rising! rising! rising! He was flying, wasn’t he? Flying to any altitude.

  Johann wished for a world in which it would be possible to tell Magda about Lena’s summer dresses. Only when she wore one of them did you see what Lena was like. The sleeves so short that you could look inside the dress. She had much more hair in her armpits than Anita. She moved and stood still in her dresses, but inside her dresses she was naked. He saw that. The dresses left room for her nakedness. The dresses didn’t even touch Lena. They enclosed her nakedness without concealing her nakedness. Lena was naked inside her dresses. And why couldn’t Magda have the same experience? Why couldn’t Magda experience him? He felt himself to be a natural phenomenon. Like a sunrise, like a warm wind in winter, like hail in June. He scribbled more poems down but didn’t deliver them. Lena asked him if he wasn’t writing poems anymore. He wasn’t, he lied. But they didn’t contain him. He would rather write down what it had been like earlier, when he was feverish. In the summer. When he lay in his bed in Room 9 and outside, downstairs, there were footsteps on the gravel, in the house. It was as if the world were taking place in a huge hall that endlessly amplified all its sounds. Until they were painful. But when he thought back now, they were pleasant pains.

  In the highboy he had also found the purchase ledger in which he had written his first sentence (Oh, that early in the day / I should be so lonely). If I’ve saved this sentence for seven years, I can save it for a few more. But it was more important to save the things of Father’s that the highboy still contained. His most precious find: a booklet in landscape format, watery green, that promoted Wasserburg with pictures and texts from an age in which Glatthars still advertised “Delikatessen, linen and woolen goods, manufactures, fancy goods, and toys” but also “goose down, eiderdown, and crepe.” Johann thought about Frau Glatthar, about the foreclosure auction that had frightened him more than Knecht Ruprecht’s rattling chains and jangling bells. Each advertisement and picture in the booklet was framed by a garland of leaves he recognized from the lid of his father’s inkwell. Jugendstil, Father had called it. Wasserburg, the German Chillon was the booklet’s title. That was his father all over. He’d probably brought Chillon home from his commercial apprenticeship on Lake Geneva. And Lord Byron, whom Johann and Tell had translated together under the Gravenstein tree, had been in Chillon, too. What interconnections!

  But he also read with keen interest the clippings his father had saved, “Mobilization Orders,” for example:

  The German Volk today mobilizes in the battle for work.

  On the orders of the Führer, the spring offensive is to begin immediately.

  The attack on unemployment is to be carried out along the entire economic front.

  No employer may shirk his duty. All must storm forward together.

  Every business, large or small, must be a shock troop.

  Two million fellow members of the Volk must be called to the colors of employment this year.

  Give aid to the army of employment!

  Show camaraderie and give them work!

  Our goal: Germany Without Unemployment.

  Sieg Heil!

  Beneath it Father had written: 3/22/34. Beneath another clipping, 11/11/36. It was entitled “Seventy Years Old” and read: At midnight on November 9, 1936, the retired senior postal inspector Ludwig Zürn, the man who has done so much to advance the cause of local history, crossed the threshold of his seventieth year. Only a modest fraction of the material on local history and traditions that Herr Zürn has collected in the course of half a century has appeared in print. Zürn’s thorough and up-to-date methods were already evident many years ago, as shown by—among other things—his Home Book of History, setting an example which Munich, the Capital of the Movement, is now about to follow. Zürn’s activities were not restricted to Wasserburg, however. In Lindau, too, he is highly regarded as a refuge for anyone experiencing difficulties with their Aryan status or similar problems. May many more years therefore be granted to him to climb the rungs of life’s ladder.

  Reading such clippings, Johann felt as if he hadn’t even been alive back then. Was he alive now? Certainly not in a present he shared with others. He was alive only by virtue of the fact that Lena existed. He could only perceive things that had nothing to do with her if he tried extra hard. He had to give himself reasons, tell himself why he should notice this or that, even though it had nothing to do with Lena. He had to go to the town offices to pay twenty marks for all the books left behind by Viktor Baron von Lützow after the baron, upon hearing that the war had been lost, threw himself—so people said—in front of a train. So did shoemaker Gierer. But in his case, it might have been an accident at the grade crossing. Johann was for calling it an accident in shoemaker Gierer’s case. He had to accept that in the case of the baron, it hadn’t been. All the written material and books in the boxes he transported home in the handcart had to do with homosexuality. Magnus Hirschfeld, The Third Sex. He was interested in such things. He wanted to understand Cousin Anselm, his great uncle. Who was dead. Passed away right after the liberation, and so was spared the sight of his Alpine Bee as a burned-out shell. An SS Untersturmführer had ordered an anti-tank barrier thrown up in front of the cheese factory, and although the village had run up white flags of surrender, he had shot and killed a French officer who was riding unprotected on top of his tank. The Untersturmführer was immediately blown to bits by a tank shell and the factory caught fire and burned.

  The day before that, Otmar Räuchle, his great-uncle’s favorite cheese maker, had been shot and killed. He was already on his way home to Amtzell, where he still resided, when it occurred to him that he had forgotten to turn off the stirring machine. So he turns around, back to Geiselharz, turns off the machine so the electric motor won’t burn out, and sets off for Amtzell again. He’s almost home when he runs into some French soldiers. He takes off across a field, they shoot at him, and a bullet catches him in the back of the head and exits through his mouth. That same evening, Johann’s great-uncle reached home after walking six days from Rottenburg to Amtzell. In Amtzell he heard that they’d put up a tank barrier in front of his Alpine Bee, so he decided to sit on a bench in front of Otmar Räuchle’s cottage and wait for him to come home from work. So he has to witness them bringing in Otmar Räuchle’s body. The next morning, they find him dead in Otmar Räuchle’s living room, sitting in an armchair and slid sideways a little. They said he looked like he’d just nodded off. The Alpine Bee fire also consumed the queasy piano, consumed the red upholstered chairs whose legs were so delicately curved they seemed almost not to touch the floor, consumed the grandfather clock that seemed to strike in its sleep and the glass-fronted bookcase. Not consumed, however, were the twenty-four half-leather gilt-edged volumes of Meyers Konversationslexikon. Cousin Great-Uncle had transported them and the six-volume edition of Schiller from Geiselharz to Wasserburg before he was locked up; he had notic
ed Johann’s interest in these two works and said Johann should have them. And so they were his. Whether he took out a volume of Schiller or of Meyer, he always did so reverently. He felt rich. And within himself there was room, infinite room, but only for light, or really only for brilliance, the luster of gold and the highest notes. True, he was no tenor, but he could still rise and soar. Inside himself, every note was reachable. He only needed to leave it inside. As soon as he tried to sing or just to say it, it turned out that his brilliant note wasn’t that brilliant. But as long as all that was expected of it was to fill Johann up, it was the fullest, loveliest, highest note in the world. Attuned in this way, Johann was unable to take notice of anything terrible. Anything dreadful fell away as easily as it had arrived. He wouldn’t deny that around him there were dreadful things going on. But he couldn’t pretend. And he would have had to pretend that anything terrible could touch him. It didn’t touch him. He felt himself at flood tide, in an element of pure grace and glory. Every day he could recall was the most beautiful day of his life. Any other kind of day was simply not permitted. Confirmation day, in June, he and Josef in the crowd of confirmands. A most reverend bishop, also named Joseph (although with ph), successor to the sainted Ulrich, had come from Augsburg to examine the confirmands, asking them in front of the entire parish what was meant by the Trinity, the mysteries of the rosary, which saints had been commemorated in the previous week and which were to be celebrated this week and next week. The girls’ index fingers had competed with the boys’. After the service: gold wrist watches for Josef and Johann from their great-uncle; an excursion up the Gebhardsberg, the vista, the lake a noble blue beast with Konstanz cradled between its legs; bratwurst, lemonade, their great-uncle, a celestial concentration of inexhaustible good fellowship. The fact that the canon from Wasserburg had held the bishop’s staff and the canon from Nonnenhorn had held his miter exalted those two vicars forever in Johann’s eyes. Despite being clad in a festive cope, the priest, on the other hand, gained nothing of lasting value thereby. On the Gebhardsberg, his great-uncle had again taken out one of his fine white handkerchiefs and wiped—no, practically scrubbed—the tip of his tongue. He’d done the same thing when Josef and Johann had tried on worsted suits and gabardine coats at Bredl’s in Wangen. Johann never had the courage to ask him why he did that. Now the Anselm of all Anselms was dead. His fine white handkerchiefs were never used for anything except dabbing at the tip of his tongue. Perhaps it was simply that their great-uncle often wanted to—or had to—touch the tip of his tongue but didn’t want to do it with a bare hand occupied with everyday tasks, hence those marvelous white handkerchiefs. O Anselm, thought Johann, now you are wholly mine. His mother had told him that in the years it took his great-uncle, without a pfennig to his name, to build up his cheese-making business, he had eaten nothing but what she called sure Bodebira a.k.a saure Bodenbirnen a.k.a. sour potatoes. And in the same spirit of frugality, he always walked to Wangen to withdraw his milk money, at least seven and a half miles there and back. Once he’d made it, of course, he always drove. And hummed. Hummed at the wheel. Without that melancholy, ponderously humming man, Johann might never have discovered Schiller. And even though it had done him no good to study the half-leather gilt-edged vagina, it was one thing to know what you didn’t know and quite another not to know what you didn’t know. The supreme moment: all the church flags are lowered, Canon Krumbacher holds out the bowl with the chrism for the most reverend bishop, who reaches in and daubs what clings to his finger onto Johann’s forehead. It feels, and seen out of the corner of Johann’s eye, looks like the stuff that shoots out of his IAWIA when he crosses the finish line. And then Canon Hebel comes with two altar boys and wipes off the bright and holy smudge with a cotton ball, which he hands to Höscheler’s Heini, who puts it into the bowl being held by Frommknecht’s Hermann. And from every direction, a wave of song: Holy God we praise Thy name.