A Gushing Fountain

by Martin Walser

  She came down the three steps and over to him. “Let’s go,” she said. And because he obviously was unable to move a muscle, she said, “Before we put down roots,” and laughed and said, “That’s what Papa always says.” Johann thought: The last time I heard that was when Schulze Max said it one Christmas Eve.

  Now, was he going to take the main street to the church with Anita, more than half a mile with her between all those houses on both sides till they were finally all the way down the hill and in the church out on the peninsula? Not on your life! Just think of all the people they might run into! No, no, no. He would take her by the Moosweg.

  If Anita had remained silent, he certainly would not have uttered a word either. But she talked almost nonstop. She wanted them to quiz each other on the questions that would be asked in class and say the Manual of Confession. “You start,” he said. And she did. But before she did, she said she wasn’t confessing, just reciting the manual. And then she recited it, unbelievably fast and not leaving out a single point, not even the one that talks about unchastity, alone or with other people. Alone or with other people, Johann thought. Then she recited all the conditions that had to be fulfilled before contrition is true contrition. Then she recited all the things that mustn’t happen between confession and communion if you want to be allowed to take communion. “OK, now it’s your turn,” she said. Johann shook his head but didn’t look over at her. Instead, he started to walk faster. She said she had to be back by six thirty. The performance began at eight o’clock. So then why did she have to be back by six thirty? To change, put on her makeup, and warm up. She was part of the main act of the evening: the Viennese trapeze artists. It was her family’s act. Her father did most of the work, of course, but he needed her and her brother, too. Had Johann seen the pole in the middle of the ring? They performed on that pole, from the bottom all the way up to the top, fifty feet above the ground. He’d be able to see them. Luckily, they could set up the ring here so that people in nearby houses couldn’t see their tricks at the top of the pole without paying admission. That was always the biggest problem with their performance. Here, the top was only visible maybe from the street or from the restaurant terrace. “But we’ll be sure to pass the hat there,” said Anita and laughed.

  As they entered the churchyard, Johann said he had to pay a quick visit to his father’s grave and she would have to enter on the women’s side, anyway. He pointed in that direction, turned right toward the grave, sprinkled it with holy water, and said three times to himself: Lord, give him eternal peace, may eternal light shine upon him, Lord, let him rest in peace, Amen. Then he went in on the men’s side. Inside, he saw Anita sitting way up in front. On his side, he walked just as far forward, nodded to her, and she nodded back.

  He had left the house so early because he wanted to get to the church with Anita before anyone else was there. It had worked. Johann pictured himself standing at the pulpit the way Father Chrisostomus had stood there during Missionary Week and called out with outstretched arms: Why do the heathen rage? And below him, in the first row, Anita would be sitting. And he would preach just for her.

  The other girls and boys gradually trickled in. The priest emerged from the sacristy, and before beginning the class, he went over to Anita and spoke to her, his stiff goatee going up and down without Johann being able to catch a word. Adolf had sat down next to Johann and glanced over at the girls. Then he whispered to Johann, “The girl from the circus.” He gestured with his head when he said “the girl.” Johann gave a vague nod, as if he weren’t as sure about that as Adolf obviously was. How come Adolf knew it already? In a village, you can never tell how it comes that everyone knows everything immediately. The only thing you can be sure of is that everyone does know everything immediately. Adolf’s shirt had a much finer check than Johann’s. And instead of a sweater, he was wearing quite a long jacket that was held together by a belt of the same fabric.

  The priest said that now they were not six but seven girls and eleven lads. In the priest’s language, boys were always lads. He said he was pleased to announce that Anita Wiener was well prepared to take her First Holy Communion along with the children from Wasserburg. Johann felt a shiver run down his back. He had to take a hurried, deep breath. His ears were ringing. Was he flying or falling? Quickly, with the nail of his right thumb, he dug a letter into the soft wood of the pew. He cut an A into the wood, then a W. But he screened what he was doing to keep Adolf from seeing it. Suddenly, he heard Adolf whispering that Johann didn’t have to hide it with his hand because he, Adolf, had already seen it. And he pulled Johann’s hand away from the pew. Evidently, Adolf was going to urge the other boys to look over here and see what Johann had just done. Johann stared fixedly at the priest, as if he couldn’t be distracted right now. And in fact, the priest was just enlarging upon how bad it would be if the communicants, after making their first confession tomorrow afternoon and departing the church in a blessed state of grace, were then to put that state at risk by some sinful negligence or even destroy it entirely by committing a mortal sin, and then take their First Communion on Sunday morning in an unworthy state. That was the most severe, the blackest, most terrible sin there was—to receive the Body of the Lord in a defiled condition. It sounded like anyone who did such a thing could expect to be struck by lightning or have the earth open up and swallow them.

  When the priest had ended the class, it occurred to Johann that he still had to say an Our Father and a Hail Mary for Josef’s guardian angel, who had let him survive with just a torn ligament. Actually, the worst is ready to happen at any second, and as much as possible you have to prevent it by faith and prayer, supplication and entreaty, so that only the second or even third or fourth worst thing happens.

  By the time Johann finished his two heartfelt but hurried prayers, the others had already left the church. He ran.

  In two separate groups, the girls and the boys were walking up the Dorfstrasse, the boys some distance behind the girls. The girls had Anita in their midst as if to make sure nothing happened to her. You could see and hear that Anita was the center of attention. Did Anita notice that she was the only one with bobbed hair? All the others had braids. He was the only boy whose hair was not simply pushed back toward the middle of his head. If she hadn’t noticed, he couldn’t tell her.

  Of course, they didn’t return by the Moosweg, but up the main street. Johann would have rather shown Anita the third possibility to return to the village from the church: the path along the lake, a walled walkway in front of the villas, protected from the waves by huge stones that had simply been piled there as a breakwater. Anita had already said she thought the pastures in the broad hollow through which the Moosweg ran were beautiful, because from one side to the other cuckoo flowers and buttercups were in bloom. Johann didn’t notice all the flowers until Anita said she wanted to pick a bouquet for her mother on the way home. And now she was being led up the main street like a captive queen. He and Anita on the path along the lake, Johann thought. The waves ceaselessly trying to get at them yet always failing—Anita would surely have liked that. Anita could have walked on the wall side and he on the water side. In that case, however, she would be walking on his left and could see his darned sleeve. So he would have had to let her walk on the lake side after all, impossible at this time of year: April, snow melt, all the water from the mountains, the lake overfull and right now, stormy.

  After they had passed beneath the big walnut tree that stood right at the edge of the street, they saw their teacher coming down the steps from the barber shop. He had his hair cut even shorter than Adolf’s, every hair on his entire round head cropped down to a third of an inch, maybe on account of the silver plate still in his head from the war. The girls greeted him with, “Heil Hitler, Herr Teacher.” The boys, too. Adolf was the only one who shot out his arm when he said it. He even put his left hand down to his fabric belt and stuck his thumb under the belt as if it were the buckle of a leather uniform belt. The teacher said, “
Heil Hitler, dear children” twice, and unhurriedly stuck out his right arm. “Well, now,” he said, “everybody listen to this. Come on, come on, no shilly-shallying,” he said when the girls and boys failed to cluster around him at once. “It’s enough to make a person sick the way you greet your teacher. How do you expect to teach your parents to do it? What was that I gave you to write into your National Rebirth notebooks about how to greet each other? Firstly . . . Adolf?”

  And Adolf piped up, loud and over-enunciated, as if speaking to the hard of hearing, “Firstly, we on Germany’s southern border must insist on the German Greeting in place of all older customs and despite any stubborn resistance.”

  The teacher: “Secondly . . . Anneliese?”

  And Anneliese, just as loudly and excessively enunciated: “Secondly, it is a sign of weakness to let one’s style of greeting be influenced by the person one is addressing.”

  “Good, Anneliese!” cried the teacher. And they all knew he was thinking of the last day of school before Easter when he had to give Anneliese a box on the ear because she was erasing an incorrect answer to a math problem in her notebook but denied it when confronted by the teacher. “The worst thing is not that the answer was wrong,” the teacher had scolded, “but that you lied about it. A German girl doesn’t lie,” he’d said and given Anneliese a slap that sent her sprawling so hard against the harmonium that its key got broken. The teacher then gave the girl a kick while she was still on the ground. Then he turned to the blackboard, hammered with both fists against it, and screamed, “She’s a liar. She lied, and then she tries to deny that she lied.”

  When there was a change in the weather, it often happened that the teacher hammered against the board like that. When he thrashed Franz Döbel because he’d taken fifty pfennigs from the Winter Aid collection box to buy glue for his model airplane, the teacher hadn’t hammered the board just with his fists, but with his head, too, which made his dentures fall out of his mouth. Franz Döbel, still lying on the floor, picked them up and gave them to the teacher, who put them back in his mouth. Everyone knew: from the war, the silver plate in his head. That’s why he was always so quick to fly off the handle.

  “Thirdly . . . Johann!” the teacher cried.

  And Johann piped up, “Thirdly, whoever insists on answering the German Greeting by doffing his hat or cap or with some mishmash such as ‘Good day, Heil Hitler,’ whoever keeps answering evasively when we greet him with a raised arm and Heil Hitler—such a person will be stricken from the list of those we greet.”

  “Any exceptions?” asked the teacher. “Irmgard?”

  “An exception,” Irmgard spoke up, “is during Carnival. When tomfoolery reigns in outward appearances, the German Greeting is to be avoided.”

  As he recited his answer, Johann knew that he would not be able to greet the regular customers, whom he was obliged to greet whether he encountered them in the restaurant or on the street, with Heil Hitler. On Memorial Day at the war memorial, the priest had raised his hand in the German Greeting. Even so, Johann would always greet the priest with Grüss Gott. There were people such as the teacher or Frau Fürst who you said Heil Hitler to automatically. In every house where she delivered the paper, Frau Fürst called out as she came through the door, “Heil Hitler, everybody.” Every time she said that, Johann remembered what the teacher had said: that the German Greeting was “Heil Hitler” and any addition was forbidden. Someone ought to let Frau Fürst know that sometime. After all, in the meantime, she’d become a leader in the League of National Socialist Women. She’d had her daughter Eva’s name changed at the municipal registry; she was Edeltraud now. Frau Fürst explained in every house she entered that Eva wouldn’t do anymore because Eva was Kyra von Strophandt’s deputy. When Kyra von Strophandt, the leader of the League of German Girls, married an SS Obersturmführer from Halle and was inducted into the Community of SS Families, a picture of Edeltraud had appeared in the newspaper that her mother delivered to every house—Edeltraud standing right next to the bride. And ever since Edi Fürst became a troop leader, you really couldn’t call him anything but Edmund. As troop leader, track star, and gymnast, he was in the paper even more often than his sister Edeltraud. You could tell immediately by the way Frau Fürst tossed the paper onto your table that her children were in the news again. Sometimes when Johann was sitting at the table, she even opened the paper to the Bulletin Board column and among the eleven or twelve announcements pointed right to where it said, “Troop 36/320,” and especially to the last line: “No excuses accepted.” Although Johann nodded, she pointed to another line in the announcement: “Don’t forget to bring overdue payments for Sports Day badges.” Johann stood up and said “Jawohl!” with just a bit of exaggeration. And Frau Fürst: “If only they were all like you, Johann! But there are shirkers, pansies, and saboteurs, Johann, who make life damn difficult for Edmund.” And with, “Heil Hitler, everybody,” she was gone.

  After the teacher had strolled off in the direction of the peninsula, Adolf said they had greeted him like a bunch of magpies and he predicted there’d be hell to pay. Hell to pay. Johann could hear from the sound that it was one of Adolf’s father’s expressions. Today, Adolf looked like he could be the teacher’s son. Because the teacher was wearing the same kind of jacket, with buttons all the way up to the collar and a belt of the same material. It made an especially elegant impression that the buttons were concealed from view. Probably Adolf’s mother had seen the teacher wearing that kind of jacket and had ordered one made as much like it as possible by Zwerger’s Anna or the wife of Gierer the shoemaker or Fräulein Höhn or even Frau Schmitt, the tinsmith’s wife.

  Johann had given a start the minute he saw the teacher emerging from the barbershop. Of course, the teacher knew where the children were coming from, two days before Low Sunday. The teacher had stopped playing the organ in church three years ago, no longer entered the church at all, and signed all his notices and placards with “Heller, Head teacher, NSDAP Member and Propaganda Warden.” On election day two weeks ago, all the schoolchildren had to run up and down the village reminding everyone they found without a voter’s badge to be sure to do their duty and vote. When you voted, you got a badge. In the days before the election, they had to memorize the sentence on the ballot and chant it in chorus along the Dorfstrasse: Are you in favor of the reunification of Austria with the German Reich, carried out on March 13, 1938, and will you vote for the candidate list of our Führer, Adolf Hitler? And then they all yelled, “Yes!” twice as loudly. The week after the election, the teacher brought the newspaper to class. They had been practicing percentages. In the Lindau district, 99.2 percent had voted Yes. How many people was that out of a total of 20,422 eligible voters? And in Wasserburg, 659 Yes votes. What percentage of 665 eligible voters was that? Then the teacher said, “Six No votes, we’ll bring them around, too.” Johann thought, Thank goodness his father wasn’t one of the six No votes. Not anymore. Hitler means war. Johann had never repeated this sentence of his father’s out loud. He had never told Adolf or Ludwig or Paul or anyone else how Strodel’s Traugott had died in the August sun with his guts spilling out and his father and Helmer’s Franz unable to stuff them back in. “Where’s our host?” Adolf’s father, who’d been too young for the war, had demanded whenever he came into the restaurant. “Is our host bedridden again? Or is he just reading?” Adolf’s father liked to criticize Johann’s father. Adolf’s father was in the SA, the Reich Hunter’s Association, the National Socialist Automotive Corps, and the Party. Johann’s father was a member of the choral society, the veterans association, the alpine club, and the volunteer firemen. Luckily, Mother was in the Party, with a membership number in the first million. As Mother had foreseen, party meetings were held in the Station Restaurant. And the teacher had even given a lecture there one winter, “Our Armaments and Those of Other Countries Compared.” The teacher had been a captain in the war. So many people came to hear the teacher they had to open the folding partition. Father wa
s not one of the audience for that lecture. That didn’t attract attention, since Father was seldom seen in the restaurant anyway. Only Herr Brugger had noticed. As long as Father was still alive, it had given Herr Brugger no rest to know that only Mother had joined the Party. Mother had to repeatedly explain her husband’s absence. Mainly, she had to repeatedly fend off bankruptcy. Otherwise, what happened first to the Brems, then to the Hartmanns, then to the Capranos, and finally to the Glatthars would have happened to them, too. When all of the Glatthars’ belongings were auctioned off after Frau Glatthar died, Johann could see that nothing worse could ever happen to a family than a foreclosure auction. The whole village comes, everyone strolls through your rooms and notes down what they want to bid on: 1 sauerkraut crock, 2 nightstands with white marble tops, 1 grandfather clock, 3 washtubs with accessories, 1 laundry mangle. Johann had never seen anything as terrible as the auction of all the Glatthars’ possessions. He didn’t have to be asked twice to do anything to help stave off foreclosure. The whole time Frau Glatthar was bedridden, he and his father had gone to visit her. Father always brought her some of his teas. Frau Glatthar had some kidney disease that no one else far and wide had ever had. She said so herself. Johann had never heard anyone speak so softly. It was amazing you could hear her at all. It was the gas pump that had bankrupted them, she said. Anyone could pump gas up into the five-quart glass and then let it flow into his tank without having to come into the store and pay for it.

  After his auction, Brem the carpenter, who even with his pistol hadn’t been able to keep people from inspecting all the things to be auctioned off, was usually to be found sitting behind the house that no longer belonged to him. He sat at a table with his air rifle and would shoot the wings off the flies that landed on the table. He did it with the air pressure alone. The rifle lay on the table, which was strewn with crumbs of food. Herr Brem waited with his finger on the trigger until one of the flies wandered in front of the muzzle, then he pulled the trigger. Adolf had watched him and said that he wasn’t trying to kill the flies, just shoot their wings off.