A Gushing Fountain

by Martin Walser

  She said she needed to go back downstairs. But first, the boys had to go to bed.

  In bed Johann thought about the cemetery of moss in the church and the seventy-one little white crosses. One of which was for Traugott Strodel. He’d seen old Frau Strodel today, too, even before the blessing of the flag. She was standing by a grave the way you stand when you’re praying. Dear Sacred Heart of Jesus . . .

  Johann wasn’t afraid of war. He really wasn’t. He liked to shoot because he liked to hit the mark. When he shot Adolf’s air rifle, he didn’t pull the trigger until the notch and bead sights were completely lined up and steady. Then he ran over to the target and saw that the little pellet had torn a hole in the ten, or maybe the eleven, and sometimes even the twelve. Then he felt like he had it all under control. Everything. Prince Johann, the king’s son. Easy as pie. He looked at the picture of the guardian angel that hung from the wall at a slight angle with the light from the streetlamp reflecting off its glass again. As far as he was concerned, the picture didn’t need to be hanging there. My God, what a feeling when he stretched his arms and legs . . . he wished he could tell someone how it felt to stretch like that. But he didn’t know who to tell.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Mother Joins the Party

  MOTHER WAS STANDING BY THE STOVE when Herr Minn came into the kitchen to say he wanted to settle his bill before Christmas. She preceded him into the office. Johann followed. After all, hadn’t he helped pull the hand cart all the way from here to Reutenen to deliver Herr Minn’s eight hundredweights of briquettes? As they walked to the office, they could hear music coming from the spare room and Herr Minn told mother her husband could have been a concert pianist. “Nehmen Sie doch bitte Platz, Herr Minn,” said Mother. Since Herr Minn wasn’t originally from around here, nor even in the parish, Mother invited him to please sit down using the formal Sie. Everyone in the village did. And Mother spoke High German with him. For her, High German was dialect forced into a straightjacket of foreign sounds. “Eight hundredweights of briquettes, Johann?” she said. Johann, in the same tone of voice: “Nine fifty-two, plus eighty for the delivery.” “We’ll leave that off, since it’s Christmas,” said Mother. “Bless you,” said Herr Minn, who was more than a head shorter than Mother. Mother put a piece of carbon paper into the pad of blank bills and asked Johann, “How much was that?” “Nine fifty-two,” said Johann. Herr Minn was impressed because he didn’t know that, when Mother happened to encounter Johann, she would often show him a number of fingers with her left hand and Johann would have to multiply it by the number of fingers she held up with her right. “You’ve got to learn it sometime,” she told him, “and it might as well be now.”

  Johann took the twenty-mark bill from Herr Minn, opened the safe, and gave him his change. Mother said she’d heard about the Christmas festivities the new party had organized for children in the spare room of the Crown: a Christmas tree decorated with little swastika flags and a nice speech by Herr Minn that ended with a prayer that God would bless the work of the great Führer, Germany’s savior, Adolf Hitler. Herr Minn confirmed that those were his exact words. The crisis had become so severe: more and more people were being killed every day in street fighting in the big cities, the economy on the point of collapse, six million unemployed, the third chancellor this year and he was sure to resign within the month. “Dear lady, the choice is either chaos—meaning conditions like in Russia, i.e., murderous Bolshevism—or Hitler.”

  As a Lutheran, Herr Minn prayed to the same God as the Catholics, said Mother. She only said it because some people thought joining the new party meant following godless leaders. Just rumors, said Herr Minn. Rumors spread to make the Führer look bad to the faithful, both Lutherans and Catholics. “If I hadn’t seen so much evidence of true piety in him, I never would have joined the party, not in a million years.” So said Herr Minn. “As you know, I’m on the church council, and I’m actively involved on the building committee, so we don’t have to hold Lutheran services in the school anymore. You can’t call Mayor Hener a godless person, and he just resigned from the Bavarian People’s Party to join the National Socialists, although he’s not going around shouting it from the housetops. So did Hartstern the architect. And his wife.” People were flocking to the party, people from all walks of life. “And as for religion, take a look at this.”

  And he took a postcard out of his billfold and handed it to Mother. “A present from me,” he said. Mother showed Johann the card as if it was more important for him to see it: Christ on the Cross, and standing before him, a man in a brown shirt with the swastika flag. Next to him another Brownshirt, giving the salute. “Can you read what it says?” asked Mother. Johann spelled it out and then said the whole sentence, “Lord, bless our struggle. Adolf Hitler.”

  Again, Herr Minn was impressed. Mother put her hand on Johann’s head. “Not even in school yet,” said Herr Minn, “and he can already read one of the Führer’s sayings. Bravo!”

  “He gets it from my husband,” Mother said.

  “And diligent, too,” said Herr Minn.

  “Maybe he gets that from me,” said Mother and ruffled Johann’s hair. Johann was glad they thought of him the way he would have liked to be.

  His mother said she was interested in joining the party. Herr Minn was delighted. Mother said that then they could hold their meetings at the Station Restaurant. It was already the favorite meeting place for the cycling club, the gymnastics club, the music society, and the choral society. They kept their prizes and trophies on display and even stored some of their flags. “Your mother’s a smart woman,” said Herr Minn. “But you’re right. There’s a Brown House in Munich, and just recently in Lindau, too, in the Fischergasse. Here in the village we meet sometimes here, sometimes there.” Mother said the spare room could be quickly heated, and there was a telephone, too. “And the tallest flagpole in town,” laughed Herr Minn, “except till now you’ve always flown the wrong flag.” Mother made a face that was probably supposed to express the fact that she had nothing to do with what flag was flown.

  Herr Minn wished them a blessed Christmas. He’d drop off the application form tomorrow so that her membership could still date from the current year. Membership was still less than a million. Without Adolf Hitler, the country was sure to fall apart next year, so the Führer would definitely take over. It could be that a membership number among the first million would be considered a great honor to have.

  They walked Herr Minn to the front door. It had started snowing. In winter, the terrace was empty. Herr Minn retrieved his bicycle from where it was leaning against the wall, and Mother called to him, “Be careful not to fall!” He said something cheery in return and disappeared down the hill. Grandfather was sweeping off the snow that had blown in onto the terrace. “That’s enough sweeping now, Dad,” said Mother. Grandfather agreed there was no more point to it.

  Johann went and stood next to his grandfather. “It’s snowing like the devil now,” said Grandfather. He laid his hand on Johann’s head. His hand was heavier than Mother’s.

  Since they couldn’t do without the piano, they opened their presents in the spare room. That meant that Josef and Johann weren’t allowed to go in until Father played “Silent Night” on the piano. The entrance into the spare room took place through two different doors: wine glasses in hand, the four remaining patrons followed Elsa in from the restaurant side: Hanse Luis, Schulze Max, Dulle, and Herr Seehahn. Josef, Johann, Niklaus, and Grandfather entered through the door from the central hallway. Finally Mina, the Princess, and Mother came in from the kitchen.

  On Christmas Herr Seehahn always wore on the green lapel of his yellowish Tyrolean jacket the medal he had been awarded by the Holy See. As a sailor during the revolution in Munich, he was supposed to arrest the Papal Nuncio. He’d told him, If you come with me, your Eminence, I’m placing you under arrest. If you take the back door, you’ve given me the slip.

  Dulle was farther from his birthplace than any of the others.
Dulle came from a town whose name always sounded to Johann as if someone was making fun of Dulle. Johann would never have dared to utter that name in Dulle’s presence: Buxtehude. Dulle talked differently than everyone else in the village. He lived in a shed attached to Frau Siegel’s house, north of town in Hochsträss, right next to the freshly tarred road. Dulle was always on the go, day and night, both as a fisherman’s helper and a man with a thirst, unless he was chasing Fräulein Agnes’s cats. Adolf claimed that the walls and ceiling of Dulle’s shed were papered with bills from the inflation. Hundred-thousand-mark bills, bills for millions, billions, trillions. Adolf said that in 1923, a newspaper cost sixteen billion marks. Whenever Johann heard about the inflation, he thought the country must have been running a fever back then—106 or 107 degrees.

  Having been in a circus, Schulze Max came from nowhere and everywhere. He slept on a pile of old nets in the attic of the community hall where fishermen’s families who had moved to the village from Bavaria were housed.

  Compared to where Dulle and Schulze Max spent the night, Niklaus had splendid digs in their attic. Niklaus had a real bed, and he’d arranged old chests around it to make it into a kind of room. Niklaus had attracted Johann’s interest when Johann once watched him wrap his feet round and round with rags and then put on his lace-up boots. Last year, Mina had knit Niklaus a pair of socks and put them under the Christmas tree, and he’d just left them there. When Mina tried to hand them to him, he shook his head. Niklaus seldom spoke. He could say what he had to say by nodding, shaking his head, and gesturing with his hands. You could tell he didn’t have any kind of speech defect when he reported that Baroness Ereolina von Molkenbuer had ordered three hundredweights of bituminous lignite coal and Fräulein Hoppe-Seyler two hundredweights of anthracite. He just didn’t like to talk. Talking was not his thing.

  For Josef and Johann there were light gray Norwegian sweaters under the Christmas tree, almost but not quite white—more like silvery gray—with gray-blue, slightly raised stripes. Two different patterns across the chest so that, thank goodness, they wouldn’t get them mixed up. Josef put his on right away. Johann would have preferred to put his sweater back under the tree, but everybody said he should try it on too, so he did. When he felt how the sweater hugged his body, he pretended he needed to go to the bathroom, ran out quick, and stood in front of the mirror of the wardrobe in the passageway. He had to have a look at himself. And what he saw were silvery gray, almost bluish, raised stripes and a coat-of-arms in a circle on his chest. The king’s son, he thought. As he went back in, he couldn’t quite conceal his feelings. Mina could tell. “Looks real good on you,” she said.

  The sweaters were from the Allgäu, from Anselm, the great-uncle they called Cousin.

  Every present was accompanied by a soup plate piled with cookies: S-shaped butter cookies, gingerbread rounds, Springerle, cinnamon stars, Spitzbuben with marmalade centers, macaroons.

  “I could never do that,” said Mother to Mina, meaning the cookies. Johann nodded vigorously until Mina noticed him nodding vigorously. Last year, he’d had a chance to sample the cookies Adolf got. The Bruggers’ cookies all tasted the same. With Mina’s cookies, each kind had its own particular flavor, but all of them tasted like only Mina’s cookies could. This year there was something wrapped in silver paper next to Johann’s and Josef’s plate of cookies, something longish with a little flag stuck into the silver package that said: “With all my” followed by a red heart. And above that it said: “Merry Christmas from the Princess.” Josef was already having a bite by the time Johann got his unwrapped. “Nougat,” he said. “Right,” said the Princess. “Yummy,” said Josef. Johann rewrapped his nougat bar, untouched.

  There were silk stockings for Mina and Elsa. Both said Mother and Father shouldn’t have. For Mina, there was also a passbook. “And a little seed money,” said Mother, “in the District Savings Bank. They’re not going to fold.” Mina shook her head and said, “God bless you, ma’am!” For the Princess there were several skeins of blue wool under the tree. She picked them up, touched an index finger to her temple in a soldier’s casual salute, and said, “Right.” Then she turned to Johann and said, “You know what you’re in for now.” Johann also said, “Right!” and returned her salute. In the evening he always had to stick his hands through the skeins of wool so the Princess could roll them up into a ball from which she could knit. She spent every free minute knitting for her Moritz. She was allowed to visit the one-year-old in Ravensburg once a month but wasn’t permitted to be alone with him. The mother of Moritz’s seventeen-year-old father sat in the room the whole time the Princess was there. After every visit, the Princess would tell how the mother of the child’s father, not even forty years old herself, wouldn’t let the Princess out of her sight for a second while she hugged little Moritz. The Princess was said to be thirty-one. Beside everyone’s plate she had left her own present, and they all had little heart-flags stuck into them: for Elsa a white linen napkin on which the Princess had embroidered a rearing horse in red yarn; for Mina two potholders, on one a large red A, on the other an M of the same size; for Niklaus she had crocheted a pretty border onto two foot cloths; for Herr Seehahn there was a tiny bottle of egg liqueur; for Mother a tortoise-shell comb; for Father a little sack of lavender blossoms; for Grandfather an ivory snuff box. “Come here, Johann,” she said. “Take this to your grandfather and tell him that Ludwig the Second gave it to my great-grandfather because when the king sprained his ankle during a hunt in the Kerschenbaum Forest, he carried him home to the castle on his back.” Everybody applauded and the Princess, who had overdone her lipstick for the occasion, bowed in all directions. Johann could have looked at the Princess all night long. That big red mouth went so well with her asymmetrical glass eye. For Niklaus there was again a pair of socks and a pack of stogies under the tree. The socks (it was the pair from last year) were again ignored. He took the stogies, the plate of cookies, and the crocheted foot cloths and put them down by his chair. As he passed the Princess, he said, “You’re quite a girl.” She saluted and said, “Right!” Then he went back to Father and Mother and thanked them with a handshake. But while shaking hands, he looked neither Father nor Mother in the eye. Even as he stretched out his right hand, which was missing the thumb, he was averting his gaze. It looked almost like he was already turning away, reaching his hand out to the side or even back behind him. You could see he didn’t do it out of inattention. He just didn’t want to have to look people in the eye who had given him a present. Niklaus sat back down and picked up his glass of beer. He only drank beer from a glass on Christmas, Easter, and St. Nicholas Day, otherwise from the bottle. Johann liked to watch and listen when Niklaus placed a bottle on his lower lip, tipped it up, and emptied it with a sighing sound. How uninteresting drinking from a glass was by comparison. Niklaus also took every bottle that returned from the restaurant, officially empty, to be placed on a rack behind the building and await the truck from the brewery. He put each one to his mouth and drained it dry. He didn’t want any to go to waste.

  Hanse Luis took out his pocket knife, opened it, and handed it to Niklaus. Niklaus took a stogie from the pack and cut it in half with the blade, which was half-moon-shaped from frequent honing. Like Hanse Luis himself, Niklaus only smoked half stogies. But Niklaus smoked so seldom that the twenty half stogies he got by cutting them in two lasted from one Christmas to the next. Since Hanse Luis constantly had to have a stogie in his mouth, he lit each fresh half stogie from the butt of the preceding one. As Hanse Luis folded up his pocket knife, he said that Hagen’s Fritz, who bragged in every tavern that he was only learning tinsmithing so he could make himself a tin wreath to hear the rain falling when he was dead and in the grave—this same tin snipper and Hagen nipper from the Semper house in Wasserburg (who was turning out to have the biggest mouth in the parish) felt it necessary to speak to him, Hanse Luis (in actuality, the dirt farmer Alois Hotz who, because there were already too many Hotzes in the region, had b
een redubbed with the name of his house: Hans . . . not exactly a name to write home about, and besides, he only came from Hege)—this Semper Hagen’s Fritz kid, blond as a sow down to his eyelashes, came up and asked him a stupid question, namely: Why bother slicin’ your seegars in two if you’re just gonna light the second half with the first one anyways? Don’t make no sense. Hanse Luis said he’d coughed out a few ha-has while he was trying to think why he always did stick sliced-off half stogies into his mouth. How should he know? So, saying a quick prayer to Hugo, who as the April Fools’ Day saint was in charge of coming up with an answer when you haven’t got one—Ha ha ha . . . yes . . . well, it’s like this, my little tow-headed tinsmith. See how my nose hangs way out over my kisser and my chin sticks out too, and even turns up a bit? And but my kisser’s nothin’ but a line way far in the back and more or less tooth-free thanks to Itler the dentist? And this great stuck-out schnoz of mine has never been seen without its glob o’ snot. So here’s what I’m getting at, you little sow-blond tinsmith: even my world-famous Hanse-Luis-nose don’t stick out as far as an uncut stogie, so a drop o’ snot would damage my seegar, whereas with a half-stogie there’s no cause for concern at all, cause when the glob o’ snot has hung there long enough, it finally drops—as is right and proper—down into the abyss, an abyss that yawns before every man and not just Hanse Luis from Hege, parish of Wasserburg. Got it? Hanse could see right away that the sow-blond apprentice tinsmith wasn’t used to being called to account for his big mouth . . . Did he say mouth? It was more like a beak the sow-blond tinsmith (and there wasn’t a blonder sow lying around in the pigsty) had on his face. The upper lip went one way, the lower lip another—but blond as a sow he was, including his eyelashes. Hanse Luis usually used dialect for everything he said, but when he switched to High German, as he just had, every word sounded like he was standing on a pedestal to say it. And sure enough, just as Hanse Luis finished speaking, another glassy drop separated from the string that hung from his nose and fell to the floor past the glowing end of his stogie.