A Gushing Fountain

by Martin Walser

  Mother said, “Our profit’s down the drain.”

  Mina said, “We can still use them for sausage salad.”

  The Princess said, “Schiller dead, and this character still walks the earth.”

  Johann went to the office and sat down at his father’s desk. It was his favorite place. Since it was evening already, he took the rubber date stamp and turned it to the following day. That was his favorite occupation. Poor Mina, he thought, and Loser’s Gebhard, too, even worse! Since Loser’s Gebhard had to pedal his bike with one foot, Johann pitied him more than Mina. At least Mina was engaged to one of the strongest men in Wasserburg. Alfred ran the whole farming operation at the Linden Tree. He was bigger than all the rest, and the top of his head was a level field of the tiniest blond curls. The sides were shaved bare. Johann imagined that as soon as Mina told him what had happened to her savings, Alfred, who was as friendly as he was large, would pick her up, lift her above his head, and begin to turn in circles until Mina would cry, I’m getting dizzy! Just what I wanted, Alfred would reply, so you get dizzy and finally stop talking about money.

  But what about Johann? Could he think about anything else besides money? First he lets himself be photographed, then he lets a mark’s worth of cervelat get shredded in his spokes. He didn’t care. Defend yourself, man! He was hot. Through and through. Nothing but hot, down to the backs of his knees, down to his feet, heat trickled through him. He had never felt himself so clearly. Saliva pooled in his mouth so he could barely swallow fast enough to keep up with it. His saliva tasted sweet. He had to bend his right arm, make his biceps get big and hard. It couldn’t compare to Adolf’s muscle. Up to now, when they curled their arms side by side, Adolf always had the bigger, harder muscle. When he was alone in his room, Johann did pushups. Soon he would challenge Adolf to compare. He felt there was nothing he couldn’t ask of himself. He felt invulnerable. Money or no money! It seemed to him he could put up with anything. When Johann had run himself a glass of water from the tap at noon while the Princess was washing dishes, she’d called to him, “A drop in my bucket and I’ll be with child.”

  “Adelheid!” Mother had shouted from the stove. Mina laughed. Johann pretended he didn’t get it but felt like he was in a storm stirred up just for him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Loan Guarantee

  AT HALF-PAST NINE, Johann was waiting at the station. The wooden barrier was painted a light green, and he wanted to be standing there when the locomotive chugged in, released its steam, and came to a stop with a little squeal. The way the railroader’s uniform sat on the short but extremely straight-backed Herr Deuerling, it would never occur to a soul to think of him as a senior secretary of the Reichsbahn. Only a retired army captain could wear a railroader’s uniform as he did. And not just any captain, but a captain who needed to continually remind people, because they kept forgetting, that he was not from around here. It was true, he’d been born on the banks of the Lech River, but—and this was the crucial thing—on the Bavarian side. Whenever Herr Deuerling crossed the street to fetch his beer from the restaurant, he would suddenly materialize in the kitchen doorway and call out in a commanding voice, “Ten-shun! All present and accounted for?” And Mina’s little voice would pipe up, “One cook, one dishwasher on duty, one boy doing his spelling!” and snap the fingertips of her right hand to her temple. “As you were!” cried Herr Deuerling. “As you were!” cried Mina. And to Johann he said, “Head up, chest out, suck in your gut!” If Elsa came in, he would try to mix it up with her and crowd his pretend sparring partner up against the nearest wall or behind the stove and then onto the coal bin, which was always kept closed. Elsa was a good two heads taller. Nevertheless, she usually ended up sitting on the coal bin and once there, would pull Herr Deuerling onto her lap and start in with, A farmer went trotting upon his gray mare. Elsa emitted such shrill, penetrating shrieks during these pretend battles that the Princess was compelled to turn around and watch. When Elsa set Herr Deuerling back on his feet, the Princess said, “Schiller dead, and this character still walks the earth.” And Herr Deuerling would loudly reply, “Three hours’ detention for your fresh mouth. Dismissed!” He bellowed Dismissed! so sharply that the Princess instantly returned to her sinkful of dishes.

  Johann always pretended to be completely absorbed by the long words in his picture book, so everything took place as if he weren’t there, but he heard it all with his heart in his mouth. No doubt about it, this was life. He was experiencing what life was like. But he wasn’t allowed to look. He had to keep staring at the stiff cardboard pages of his picture book. Life was a forbidden thing. The sounds reaching his ears from the other side of the big stovetop intimated that later on, there would be nothing as beautiful as being tossed in the air by the thighs of a powerful woman while singing, A farmer went trotting upon his gray mare. Until not too long ago, Mina had played A farmer went trotting with him, until one day he had declared that it was a stupid game. A farmer went trotting upon his gray mare, bumpety, bumpety, bump! With his daughter behind him so rosy and fair, lumpety, lumpety, lump! A raven cried Croak! and they all tumbled down, bumpety, bumpety, bump! But when Elsa sang it and Herr Deuerling bounced up and down, it wasn’t stupid at all. When they did it, it didn’t sound cozy, either, as it did with him and Mina. It sounded shrill. Life was evidently a pain you couldn’t get enough of.

  After Herr Deuerling had raised his signal baton to let the engineer know he could resume his run, he opened the barrier and allowed the few people who had arrived by the late train to leave. Only after he had relieved them of their twice-punched tickets, of course. Johann would have liked to save his father’s ticket, a round-trip Wasserburg-Oberstaufen on September 29, 1932. Actually, Johann wanted to save everything. Having to throw anything away was painful. As soon as his father was through the barrier, Johann took his briefcase. Johann knew that they were not going to give each other the Eskimo kiss, tip of nose to tip of nose, out here in public. But Johann had the briefcase. Sometimes, when he knew he wouldn’t be observed, Johann took the briefcase out of one of the two giant, dark armoires in the upstairs hall and, holding it in his hand, walked back and forth in front of the big oval mirror in his parents’ bedroom. No one else in the whole village had a briefcase to match his father’s. The doctor’s bag, for instance, didn’t have a lock shiny as gold under its handles. It didn’t have a reddish sheen like his father’s either, but was dark and nondescript. His father’s briefcase bulged out more on both sides and had a silken lining and two compartments. Helmer’s Hermine might have a similar briefcase, but it was much smaller. Everyone knew that it came from Berlin and had been given to her by the second Frau Professor Bestenhofer, whose house Hermine cleaned. Father had had his briefcase since before the war. He’d brought it back from Lausanne, where he’d gone to learn French and business. Today it was stuffed full but not particularly heavy. It was the teas. Father bought all his teas at his friend Hartmut Schulz’s health food store in Oberstaufen. He was an army buddy of Father’s, actually, a fellow POW in a French retaliation camp near Chantilly: thirty or forty thousand prisoners out in the open from July to November 1918, all with diarrhea. The weaker ones toppled backwards off the plank over the latrine pit, sank in, and disappeared. Father called the plank that the weakest ones fell off of the latrine plank. Everyone else at the regulars’ table called it the thunder board when they talked about the detention camps. Then by train to Tours on the Loire, where they had actual tents and adequate food. But Johann’s father and his friend Schulz were already sick and had to be sent home on a medical train in the summer of 1919. They traveled together as far as Kempten. When they had recovered, they exchanged letters. Schulz, ten years younger than Johann’s father, planned to be a pastor, became a pastor, but didn’t stay a pastor. Instead he opened a health food store in Oberstaufen.

  Johann saw that his father was sweating. As soon as Father started perspiring, he got quite pale. They went straight to the office, and Father sat dow
n on one of the chairs. Johann ran to the kitchen, called to Mina—who was standing motionless in the straightened-up kitchen, staring at the stovetop—that his father needed hot water for his maté tea. When he returned to the office, Mother was already unpacking the graham-flour bread that Father had brought home, as well as a tube of vitamin cream. Johann handed her the knife; she spread the cream on the bread and gave it to Father. Grandfather came in, too, and sat down on a straight-backed chair. “Armchairs aren’t for me,” he would say if someone offered him a seat in one. Mother had closed the door to the office so no one who might come through the hallway could look in. After he had eaten a third piece of bread, Father took off his jacket and rolled up his right sleeve. Mother had already taken the hypodermic needle out of the cabinet. She filled it, soaked a cotton ball in disinfectant from a little bottle, wiped a spot where there weren’t any previous needle marks visible, squeezed the skin between her thumb and index finger, pushed the needle in, and pressed the piston until the hypodermic was empty. Wiped the spot again. They did that twice a day.

  Father showed them all the things he had brought home. A wreath of figs for Josef and Johann. For Mother there was a bottle of Indian perfume. “Musk,” he said, “take a sniff.” She turned away brusquely, wanted nothing to do with musk perfume. He looked at her as if asking for something. She looked away. He’d brought teas and a tincture for Grandfather, hawthorn and Korodin drops, and told him, “You’ll be surprised how much it clears up your chest, Father.”

  Mother said, “And what about the loan guarantee?”

  “He had to make use of it,” said Father. “The bill was due on Saturday.”

  “So it has to be repaid by Monday,” said Mother.

  “Yes,” said Father. “They say it’s been the worst season in Oberstaufen since 1919.”

  “Same here,” said Mother. Father said nothing more. “Seven thousand three hundred,” said Mother. Father nodded. “What am I going to do?” said Mother. “We have two outstanding loans of our own, one due October first and one on the fifteenth. The brewery and the savings and loan.”

  “Savings and loan, too?” said Father in surprise.

  “Three thousand four hundred,” said Mother, her voice rising, “endorsed by Strohmeyer and Co.”

  “I see,” said Father, “the coal. But we have receivables.”

  “Three thousand seven hundred ninety-five,” said Mother.

  “Exactly,” said Father.

  Mother: “But they won’t be paid off by Monday.”

  “In any case, the brewery can’t lodge a complaint about the bill,” said Father.

  “Oh, yes, they can,” said Mother. Father stood up, went over to Mother, and put his hands on her shoulders.

  Father was a bit shorter than Mother. Johann thought no one had jackets as beautiful as his father’s: green with white flecks, brown with white flecks, a gray one with black pinstripes. And all his jackets were quite long, with two rows of buttons to be fastened. And he never wore a shirt without a collar. Grandfather wore almost nothing but collarless shirts. Grandfather, however, had a grayish-white mustache. Under his nose it was wonderfully dense and full. It narrowed only a bit toward the corners of his mouth, and right at the corners it turned up in two flat curves. Grandfather had a field of stubble on his head, too, a thicket of stiff gray hairs. And so, Johann felt, Grandfather had no need of a collar.

  Father paced up and down the office and said he and his friend Hartmut Schulz were planning to take over a silver fox farm in the Allgäu. And here at home, down in the shed, he was going to set up some hutches next week and start raising angora rabbits. There was room in both the pigpen and the old horse stall, now empty and unused. It was ridiculous to keep pigs. But angoras! They didn’t smell and brought in ten times as much. There were purebred pairs for sale right now in Lindau-Reutin. In a year you’d have forty to sixty angora rabbits, pounds and pounds of angora fur every week—basically cash in your pocket. Angora fur was bidding fair to crowd cashmere out of the market. Didn’t it make sense to raise angoras? And no expenses. You could feed them on kitchen leavings and the grass under the trees. Josef and Johann could see to feeding them and mucking out the hutches; he’d comb the fur. It wouldn’t make them rich, but the income would be steady. Of course, the silver fox farm would earn them a lot more. If his friend Hartmut Schulz had to close his health food store in Oberstaufen, it would free him up to run the silver fox farm. Demand for silver fox fur was on the rise as well. A silver fox farm in Ellhofen was for sale. He and his friend Hartmut Schulz were going to Ellhofen in the next few days to have a look at it. Silver foxes! Ellhofen had the ideal climate for raising silver foxes. It was in the Allgäu sure enough, but not in Upper Allgäu. Ideal! And to guarantee success, they would clear out a room in the attic and raise silk worms. Silk was always in demand.

  Father stopped pacing. Everyone looked at him. Johann liked listening to his father talk. He had such a lilting voice. By the way, Father said, he was going to Mariabrunn and Neukirch next week, too. There was a farm for sale in Mariabrunn. Mostly orchard, twelve and a half acres, almost no animals—just what he had always been looking for. And in Neukirch there was an inn with a bakery. Right beside the church, that is, vis-à-vis, on the other side of the street. A prime location in Neukirch, an up-and-coming town. If they kept on asphalting the roads at this rate, there’d be an asphalt road from Tettnang to Wangen by the end of the decade, and halfway between: Neukirch. And in the middle of Neukirch: us.

  Father was excited by the prospects that were opening up for him and for the entire family. When he fell silent for a moment, all his animation seemed to be gathered in his mouth, his lips. They practically swelled, and his mouth and mustache almost stood out from his face. Johann was sure there was not a father in all the world to equal him. Whether his father spoke or played the piano, it always sounded beautiful. Not to mention his penmanship! The restaurant’s books were all written in his wonderful hand with generously large and beautiful loops. Not a letter went unadorned. The initial letters sometimes disappeared entirely in a thicket of spiraling tendrils that sprouted for their sake. Johann rescued all the paper from his father’s wastebasket and on the unwritten side practiced making letters like his father’s. When he started school next year, he would show off with Father’s handwriting. He wanted nothing to do with the clumsy descenders and rigid loops that Josef brought home from school. Josef said that it was German script, Sütterlin script. What Father wrote was italic. Johann would write in italic.

  From his bag Father extracted a little black case, fished a tiny key from his wallet, and unlocked the case, whose two equal halves hinged open. In both halves, all sorts of glass components shimmered and glinted from the green felt lining: tubes that ended like trumpets or blossoms or flutes, round parts, wavy parts, small and large spheres, triangles—all made of glass. It was a magnetizing apparatus, the wonderful invention of his friend Hartmut Schulz. Schulz had entrusted it to Father so he could look for someone willing to finance its production. With this apparatus, virtually any illness was curable, since all illnesses arose from a failure of excitation in the nerve fibers. To reawaken that excitation through magnetization was the great, universal cure. Of course, it wasn’t Hartmut Schulz’s discovery that the entire universe and all of life consisted of the subtlest of fluids, an emission much more delicate than light or sound, a fluid so fine that no one had yet succeeded in measuring it, although one could constantly sense it, experience it, and recognize it. Which was why wise men like the Englishmen Locke and Newton, as well as Kepler, Paracelsus, Franz Anton Mesmer, and Maxwell—each in his own way, but all talking about the same thing—had given us reports of this coelesti invisibili. And now, after ten years of labor, his friend Hartmut Schulz had taken what had previously depended on an extraordinary and rare talent, the talent that a hundred and fifty years ago had made Franz Anton Mesmer world-famous and the most sought-after physician of his time in Vienna and Paris—namely, the tal
ent to heal the sick without laying a hand on them, but merely through the emanation of his own power—his friend Hartmut Schulz had captured this talent in his apparatus.

  Then Father connected what looked like a glass comb to an electric cord, plugged the other end of the cord into the wall socket, ran over to the little case, and started twirling knobs and pushing down tiny levers until a buzzing noise became audible and a violet light began to flash from the comb’s glass handle all the way down to the very last of its teeth.

  “Augusta, wait,” cried Father, but his mother ran over to the door. “Please, don’t!” cried Father. Don’t open the door, he meant. “Augusta!” he said again. Luckily, he stressed the first syllable of Augusta. Johann couldn’t stand it when people called his mother Au-gusta or even worse, Au-guste. They were people who spoke High German. Father also spoke mostly High German, but he said Au-gusta. And that was her name: Augusta. Just like his own name was Jo-hann and not Jo-hann, for heaven’s sake.

  “You try it, Johann,” said Father. Johann went over, and his father ran the glass comb with its violet flashes over Johann’s head and down his neck and back up to his head. Then he turned the machine off. “How was it?” he asked.