A Gushing Fountain

by Martin Walser

  When Johann is again alone with his mother, she says not to tell anyone what he heard Battist say or they’d all lose their lives: the guest, Mother, and Johann. Mother always says, “lost their life,” no matter how someone dies. Johann nods; he probably should have told her that he wasn’t even listening and doesn’t know what it is he mustn’t tell. The whole time he was wondering if he could put on another record before more guests arrived. The record player is right next to the table where Battist was sitting. Father’s favorite record, with Johann’s favorite song, “Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen ass,” sung by Karl Erb, who started life as a meterman in Ravensburg and was a relative of Grübel’s Ludwig. Father is hardly in his grave when Johann is sorry he never got around to singing “Jägerlied,” the song Father liked most to hear Johann sing while he accompanied him on piano. “Only four years old, Hartmut, and Schubert’s “Jägerlied” down pat!” his father had said the last time his friend Hartmut visited them from Oberstaufen, and he’d sat down at the piano and Johann had to sing the “Jägerlied.” At the end, the only thing Johann wanted to sing was “Von Apfelblüten einen Kranz,” which his father wasn’t that fond of accompanying. In the meantime, Johann is able to accompany himself, since Lehár writes easier notes than Schubert.

  Johann is marching beside Wolfgang, the second Wolfgang in his life, out to the flak battery in Schnetzenhausen. They pass a troop of men, also marching in formation, but instead of uniforms they’re wearing dark and light stripes and round caps without bills and Wolfgang says softly, so no one but Johann can hear, “From Dachau.” And it occurs to Johann that he has forgotten that man named Battist and also forgotten that he had forgotten him. The only thing Johann heard while not listening on that Sunday morning was “Dachau.” When Johann returns home after flak training and comes into the kitchen where his mother is sitting with the great-uncle they call Cousin, his great-uncle is just saying, “Whatever happens, we’ll be the ones to pay the price.” Mother says, “Shhh.” Her face is feigning something. Johann recalls her face after she talked to Battist. He’s forgotten that face and forgotten that he’d forgotten it.

  So they won’t be sent back to the front by one side or taken prisoner by the other, Johann and his buddies Richard and Herbert have kept to the ridgeline for days, walking first north from the Inn Valley, then west. And then once, between Mittenwald and Garmisch, they couldn’t avoid crossing a valley and got stopped by two men, wearing that same striped outfit, who threatened them with pistols and forced them to hand over all the weapons they still had on them. Which they do. When they’re back in the cover of the forest and starting to climb again, Herbert says, “They were from Dachau.” Again Johann recalls what he’d forgotten and that he’d forgotten it.

  Father took his drops on little pieces of zwieback. Father hit him only once in his life. Johann had tied a solid rubber ring on the end of a string and was whirling it around. The ring came loose and flew into hundreds of glasses from the previous day’s holiday festivities waiting to be washed. It sounded like every single one of them was breaking. Followed immediately by a not-very-painful box on the ear from his father, who was standing next to him. Since the box on the ear came before he had time to fear it, it didn’t hurt. When Mother is at her wits’ end with Josef and Johann, she has to herd them into the darkest corner of the cellar, paddle them with a cooking spoon, and say something she probably picked up in Kümmertsweiler: that she should use one of them to beat the other to death. When they emerge from the cellar, all three of them are crying. Every time it happens, Mina right away gives Josef and Johann a piece of candy she calls a zickerle. She always places the candy on her palm, holds her hand up to Josef or Johann’s mouth, and they take the candy from her palm the way a horse would.

  How was one supposed to know how valuable whatever was happening would be for one’s memory? It’s impossible to simultaneously live and know anything about that. Which wart was more prominent, more grand, the one on the left side of Helmer’s Hermine’s nose or the one on the upper lip of Customs Official Heym’s wife, the deputy leader of the League of National Socialist Women? The Frau Heym wart, of course, was the later of the two to shed its glow on the village. And before that could happen, two houses holding three customs officials’ families had to be built on the southeastern edge of the village. From deepest Bavaria and even Franconia, dialects were imported that one could then encounter every day in town. Frau Hopper flung open the door to the mail room and said, “Schnöi a Bockl aafgemm”—Schnell ein Päckchen aufgeben. Gotta package to mail in a hurry. The postmistress knew that to achieve immortality, this sentence had to be passed on to Helmer’s Hermine. Helmer’s Hermine passes everyone’s house on her way home from the lower to the upper village, where she lives behind a wall of arbor vitae. Frau Heym, who was responsible for bringing the competing wart into the village, also uttered a sentence that had come to Helmer’s Hermine’s attention and had thus gained permanent currency: “Heaven is in Erlangen.” That’s what the pale-cheeked, six-foot Franconian native and deputy leader of the League of National Socialist Women said, so people in the village would know that Frau Heym feels in exile here. Frau Heym’s wart is darker and flatter than the one that beams like a purple lighthouse from the left side of Helmer’s Hermine’s face. Purple is the most distinguished color in the Church year. Helmer Gierer’s Hermine is related neither to the bank Gierers nor the butcher Gierers, nor the saddler Gierers, nor the baker Gierers, nor to any of the many other Gierers in the villages of the parish, but she is distantly related to all the Gierers in Nonnenhorn, Hege, Hattnau, Bodolz, and Enzisweiler, but obviously, visibly related only to her brother, Helmer’s Franz, who was able to play dead in that sappers’ post near Soissons, thereby avoiding the POW camps. In the darkness, he removed his boots and foot rags and then, because it seemed like the safest thing to do, he walked barefoot and with a pitchfork on his shoulder that he had taken from a bombed-out farmstead—always looking like he was just coming from or going to his fields—all the way from Soissons to Wasserburg. Father always said that Helmer’s Hermine cleaned houses without demeaning herself in the least. Apparently, she ennobled the villas of the summer people by cleaning them. She is a queen. Who wasn’t a queen? Was Frau Fürst perhaps not a queen? All of a sudden, she’d become the leader of the League of National Socialist Women and was hanging the Maternity Medal in gold, silver, or bronze around the necks of mothers and working for the Winter Relief Committee. All of a sudden, she was giving speeches that were then reported in the newspapers she delivered. And who wasn’t a king? No question but that in this village there were only kings and queens. And that led to conflicts. It always does when kingdoms are squeezed too close together. On her way home from cleaning, Helmer’s Hermine reports to Frau Gierer from the bank what there is to report about those conflicts and struggles. Frau Gierer from the bank walks back and forth between the two chestnut trees and listens to what Helmer’s Hermine has to report. Anyone who sees these two women walking back and forth on the gravel between the two chestnut trees must realize the importance of what Helmer’s Hermine has to report. Johann keeps the gravel as spotless as he inherited it after Grandfather was discovered one morning dead in his bed next to the sleeping Niklaus, who was supposed to be keeping watch over him. Helmer’s Hermine walks like no other person in the whole village has ever walked or ever will. Summers and winters those lace-up boots of soft black leather covering her ankles were always carefully tied. Nothing careless could ever be associated with Helmer’s Hermine. At every step, the pointy-toed boots fly energetically outward before the brakes are applied. Dancers walk like that. An energy peculiar to Helmer’s Hermine is visible in her step; with each step she actually kicks an invisible ball and then puts down her heel with such force it looks like she’s trying to hack a hole in the gravel or the pavement. Of course, she has left the village in no doubt about where these black, pointy-toed boots of fine leather came from. Helmer’s Hermine’s feet fit perfectly into th
e shoes of Frau Professor Bestenhofer, over whose floors Hermine bends and stoops in her proud way, which all by itself is enough to keep them shiny. During her reports to Frau Gierer from the bank, Hermine never looks at the woman walking right next to her. But Frau Gierer from the bank gazes uninterruptedly at Hermine, whose speech seems directed upward rather than straight ahead. And Helmer’s Hermine speaks only High German. Yes, she does say hofele-hofele instead of sachte-sachte, but that and a few sayings that would lose all their juice in High German are the only dialect words anyone’s heard her utter. Her brother speaks only dialect. Since no one has ever witnessed a conversation between Helmer’s Franz and Helmer’s Hermine, it’s hard to imagine what language they could have spoken with each other. It’s easier to imagine that they’ve never spoken to each other. Or that they had a language not dependent on words. They certainly didn’t see each other every day, since Helmer’s Hermine was out of the house during the day and Franz was out of the house at night, mostly sleeping in his shepherd’s trailer at the edge of the parish woods. He poached in every district. Adolf, echoing his father: “Franz lends a hand when a man is needed.”

  Thanks to their high walls, even higher gates, and the bushes and trees that hid them even more, the world of the lakeside villas would have been unimaginable without Helmer’s Hermine’s bulletins. As it was, one learned that Herr Streber had been able to build the extensive house that rose directly from the lakefront wall on the western shore of the peninsula’s neck with the profits the First World War had yielded to a manufacturer of gun stocks and rifle barrels, while Herr Geisler owed his lakeside villa to the peaceful and even pious production of silver lace and gold braid and perhaps even ecclesiastical vestments. And if certain people were curious which villa owner was their actual father, they were able to learn that fact from Helmer’s Hermine as well. Hermine says that Eschig, the tobacco merchant from Bremen, visits his wife and son so infrequently that he still brings his son Edgar, known as Knupp, teddy bears, even though the boy is already a troop leader in the Jungvolk. And from whom if not from Helmer’s Hermine were we able to find out that there was nothing going on between Frau Eschig and Herr Halke, even though the latter—an art photographer from Berlin who had started working as an aerial photographer for Dornier in Friedrichshafen and always wore a leather coat—had found accommodations in her villa. We know from Helmer’s Hermine that the wife of the eminent physician Professor Bestenhofer, also from Berlin, is already his second wife and used to be his head nurse. Even without Helmer’s Hermine we know that she’s always taking off on her much older husband, trotting into the village, and shoplifting whatever will fit into her purse in all the stores, since the Herr Professor is always going around town paying for what his wife has stolen. From Helmer’s Hermine one learns that in high society, such shoplifting is defined as an illness, and your better class of people even has a special name for it: kleptomania. And the fact that the village’s name has been in the twenty-four-volume Meyers Konversationslexikon since as long ago as the turn of the century, because Professor Hoppe-Seyler died here, would have gone forever unnoticed if not for Helmer’s Hermine. On account of his protoplasm research, she tells us, the professor was so famous that they had to put his place and date of death into the encyclopedia. Protoplasm. No sooner did Johann hear this word for the first time than it soared up into his word tree and now sits shining along with pleurisy, Popocatépetl, Bhagavadgita, Rabindranath Tagore, atmosphere, theosophy, Jugendstil, Swedenborg, Balaam, and Bharatanatyam.

  From one of his bedroom windows, Johann would be able to watch the two women off-loading their freight of information between the two chestnut trees. But he doesn’t. Whenever he’s passed the two gravel-walkers coming from the train station, he’s always given them a proper greeting. He would say hello, even though they’re women and Johann has learned that in contrast to men, women you neglect to say hello to as good as never complain to Mother. He says hello, but doesn’t realize what a chance he’s missed to observe the keen, majestic, upright posture one assumes during the lucid narration of nothing but things of the utmost importance.

  The fact that even Hermine herself, adept at and even addicted to High German, insists on stressing her own Hermine-name exclusively on the first syllable, is at least as much a part of her essence as the miniature purple lighthouse, known as a wart, to the left of her nose. Now that it’s past, one understands why Frau Gierer from the bank can only receive Hermine’s reports between the chestnut trees. Herr Schlegel built his building, in which the bank Gierers live and have their business, next to the Station Restaurant after Johann’s grandfather himself had designed and built the Station Restaurant to harmonize with the train station in stone, style, and color. Herr Schlegel’s building stands on the other side of the restaurant, not in competition, but rather like a sister with long hair, overgrown by wild grapevines and with flowers and a lawn in front. And that’s exactly what would not have gone with receiving a report from Hermine. What does go with it is the crunch of gravel at every sentence and every step.

  The object of such visitations can begin to suspect that the past only obtrudes to make one suffer at its irretrievability. As long as it was happening before our eyes, we didn’t look at it, because from one second to the next we were engrossed in expectations that we now know nothing about. We probably never live, but just wait to begin living soon; afterward, when all is past, we wish we could find out who we were while we were waiting.

  Along with falling water, big fish slither down a steep, rounded hillside. Johann must catch at least one of them. As fast as he can, he snatches one and holds on tight. The giant lake trout tries to escape his grasp, wants to be stronger than he is. He can’t allow that. He’s got to bring one home. He has to kill it. He hits it on the head with a slippery stone. Its face contracts like a small child’s about to cry. It’s Adolf, isn’t it? Soon it won’t be. He strikes again and again. It gives a last shudder. Gives up the ghost. Dreamwork complete. He’ll bring the trout home.

  In the last autumn before Father died, Mother said, “A crow’s never flown that close to our window before. Almost hit the pane, but veered off at the last second.” When people ask if they can get a hundredweight of coal on credit, it becomes her habit to let them know with a wave of her hand that that hundredweight isn’t worth mentioning again.

  CHAPTER TWO

  La Paloma

  WHEN JOHANN GOT HOME from confirmation class, he saw that La Paloma Circus had arrived in town. As Johann started to dash across the terrace into the house, Tell should have been pushing open the swinging door with his nose even before Johann reached the two steps from the terrace up to the front door, which was standing open, and should have been jumping up on Johann until he let him put his front paws on his shoulders and lick his neck. Then the two of them would have continued at a run down the long, wide hallway into the kitchen. Johann would have sat down on the long bench to the right of the door, slid into the corner, and waited for Mina or Mother to bring a crepe and put it down in front of him, straight from the pan. But there was no Tell to be seen, just circus wagons shimmering blue and white and red through the trellised pears that closed off the south end of the terrace.

  Johann hadn’t come home up the Dorfstrasse, otherwise he would have seen the circus wagons in the courtyard from a long way off. He’d come via the Moosweg, through the meadows outside the village. Adolf had made fun of Johann’s haircut. Johann knew—or thought he knew—that Adolf would have liked to have hair as long as Johann’s. On his father’s orders, Adolf always had to get his cut like Johann’s used to be before he started school: most of his head shaved, with only a little tuft left in front. Now Johann was allowed to grow his hair so long it almost covered the back of his neck. Plus a part, like Josef’s. Josef rode the train to school in Lindau every day. Josef said anybody with a half-shaved head would be laughed at in Lindau. And since this week Josef was at ski camp and hadn’t taken the bottle of hair oil with him to the m
ilitary preparedness ski course, Johann had been able to avail himself of this bottle for the first time. With the aid of the hair oil, he had styled a jaunty wave sweeping up to a frozen peak. He had paraded this coiffure like a crown through the upper village and the lower village, from the station to the lake. At every step he could feel his hair shudder, and so he walked carefully in order to convey his tonsorial crown to the church unharmed. After confirmation class, Johann had to visit his father’s fresh grave, sprinkle it with holy water, and say three times: Lord, give him eternal peace, may eternal light shine upon him, Lord, let him rest in peace, Amen. The others were already standing outside between the castle and the Crown Hotel. Johann had hurried to catch up. Adolf had shouted, “Careful, don’t let your tango-mane slip!” And Guido had added, “Nothin’s gonna slip, his hair grease’ll keep it in place.” Everybody laughed. Hair grease was the term Luise used when she bought hair oil for Josef from Häferle the barber, whose wife washed and set Luise’s hair. The phrase immediately spread through the entire village. When the regulars ordered their glass of beer from Luise, they added, “But without hair grease, please.” And Luise would blush fire-engine red. She came from a mountain farm near Kaltern and had been brought to Wasserburg by Herr Caprano the wine merchant, who traveled to that region to purchase his Kalterer See and St. Magdalener for the village. There was no one Johann liked listening to better than Luise. Hers was the language of the South Tyrol, and he’d just heard Luis Trenker speaking it in the movie The Call of the Mountain. From deep in Luise’s throat, those same angular sounds emerged more gently. Talking was by no means a matter of course for Luise. Actually, she was silent. Or mute. When she opened her mouth, Johann could tell she was taking a chance. As if she was walking a tightrope in front of an audience. Luise said woll instead of ja.