A Gushing Fountain

by Martin Walser

  When Mass was over, the first thing Johann had to do was go to the grave again, sprinkle it with holy water, and murmur: Lord, give him eternal peace, may eternal light shine upon him, Lord, let him rest in peace, Amen. Out by the cemetery gates stood his teacher, surrounded by all the others. The teacher led the way to school. Apparently he had already told the others why they had to hurry off to school, despite its being Easter vacation. They sat down at their desks just like on a regular school day. The teacher said it was his duty to warn the boys and young ladies (the teacher never called them lads, but always boys, and the girls young ladies) of the dangers that threatened the German people from all sides and would continue to threaten them as long as there were complacent elements who gave aid and comfort to the enemies of the German people. He talked about Dumb August, first without naming him and then, without actually saying the words, about their First Communion. Johann had to admit to himself that he had underestimated Dumb August. He hadn’t realized how dangerous he was. But still, he was sorry they’d beaten up the Little Giant with his head of curls. All they would’ve had to do was tell that curly-head he mustn’t make jokes that could be used by the enemies of the German people. The teacher called First Communion an old custom that would sooner or later be replaced by even older customs. Before we were Christian, we had a different religion. Now, he just wanted to remind them that a German boy and a German young lady had no need of confession to be pure. School would begin again on Monday, and then he would tell the children more about how they could stay clean by doing their duty. Then they could dispense with rattling off their prayers on bended knee. In the meantime, when they got home, the first communicants should read what it said in the parish magazine about Widukind. Then they would know how little the truth was worth to the church. The heathen Duke Widukind makes a pact with the devil because he intends to murder Karl, the Christian kaiser. Sneaks into the kaiser’s camp—on Christmas Day, of course. Kaiser Karl is kneeling unarmed at the altar, devoutly praying to the Christian God. According to the parish magazine, the wild Saxon duke suddenly goes strangely soft. Walks up to the kaiser, confesses his evil plan, and at once the baby Jesus rises from the white Host in the priest’s hand like a miraculous rose on a cold winter night. Widukind gets himself baptized, and the devil forsakes Germany for good. The first communicants should please enlighten their parents and tell them what he, their teacher, had told them about Widukind and Karl, so that their parents would know what to think of the parish magazine.

  As they went home, not a single boy or girl said anything about what the teacher had told them, though they usually made fun of everything he said. For a while they walked up the street as if the teacher was still there among them. Adolf wore a face that made him look like he was the teacher. Or the teacher’s son. He was wearing that jacket again, the one with buttons up to the collar and a belt of the same material. It was impossible to simply talk to Adolf. Not until they encountered Crooked Hat did they start running and hooting as usual. Whenever this man had been shopping in the village, he walked his bicycle back home. He always wore a stiff hat on his head, and it was always askew. A tiny brim ran around the hat like a gutter. No one knew where he lived. When they called after him, “Crooked Hat!” he turned and lifted his hand to ward them off. He had little gold-rimmed glasses and an old-fashioned face. When Johann was by himself and encountered Crooked Hat, of course he didn’t call him names. Johann would look him in the eye and say Grüss Gott. Crooked Hat always looked like he had to be careful not to fall with each step he took. And then, what a funny-looking rucksack he had. You couldn’t buy a rucksack like that anywhere, so baggy and light-colored—almost white. Crooked Hat must have made it himself. That rucksack was never full, not even when Crooked Hat was on his way home. The whitish thing always just hung there limply against his back. His purchases were in the basket clipped to his bike rack. As soon as the girls sang out, “Heads up, here comes Crooked Hat!” the boys took each other by the hand and formed a chain across the road. Crooked Hat pushed his bike through the girls, came toward the chain of boys, and stopped right in front of Adolf and Johann, who were in the middle of the chain. No one said a word. His front wheel was almost under Adolf’s and Johann’s hands. Johann could feel the pressure of Adolf’s hand. He returned it, which meant: You can count on me. I’m not giving in. He won’t get past me. Crooked Hat kept looking straight ahead, even after he’d come to a stop. Johann thought that Crooked Hat stood there like an animal. Like an animal that doesn’t know what to do next. Then he raised his face, and you could see his eyes, enormously magnified behind his thick lenses. Then he opened his mouth, and they heard him say, not loudly, but quietly, “Thank you very much.” And he took his bicycle, carried it into the field, and, once in the field, around the end of the chain of boys. He set it down carefully on the road and set off again, still walking it. Adolf said, “We should’ve reset the chain along the edge of the road so Crooked Hat couldn’t get back up onto it.” Everyone agreed. Nobody wanted to take responsibility for the mistake they had all made.

  Johann recalled a black cat with yellow eyes that had once strayed into the lower carriage house. Johann had closed the door. He wanted to pet the cat, but she got away from him. So he had to chase her. He caught her and suddenly threw her into the air, so high into the air that she hit one of the wooden ceiling beams. And he chased her again, caught her again, threw her against the ceiling again. Each time he threw the cat against one of the beams, she yowled. And each time, it was more difficult to get his hands on her again. She scratched and bit. Johann’s hands were bleeding, and yellow mucus was dripping from the cat’s eyes. When the cat fled onto a beam where Johann couldn’t reach her anymore, he gave it up, opened the door, waited outside for a while, and then lost interest in the cat and went to join the other boys in the village. But he had no desire to tell Adolf or Ludwig or Paul or Guido or Berni or Helmut One or Helmut Two what had just happened. He hadn’t seen the cat give its dying shudder. That was an Adolf-word for the last twitch, and not just of cats. Adolf claimed that women did it, too, when a man was lying on top of them. Johann didn’t forget that the day he had chased the cat had been a Friday.

  Adolf announced that the Bruggers were going to drive Anita to church tomorrow. Adolf was saying something that his father had told him. You could tell from the way it sounded. Johann thought about how Herr Brugger was often the first guest at the regulars’ table on Sunday morning and—until Schlegel the builder, Schmitt the tinsmith, and his apprentice Semper’s Fritz arrived—the only one. Herr Brugger would then tell Johann’s mother and Johann, who had been to early Mass, that he didn’t need the Church. The forest was his church, where he was closest to his Lord. He always said: my Lord. Mother always said: our Lord.

  Adolf said that Anita’s parents could walk with Johann if they wanted to go to church, since Johann’s mother would have to be at the stove all day. His father had already reserved a table for the celebration. A table for eight: Adolf’s father, his mother, his godparents, Anita and her parents, and Adolf.

  Johann had planned to take Adolf along. Maybe they could help the circus people haul hay, or curry and water the ponies. But when he heard that Anita was to ride in the Bruggers’ car on Sunday, which was tomorrow, he had to come up with a white lie. His brother was coming home with a torn ligament, he said, and he had to pick him up from the train and carry his skis and rucksack. And then he ran home, fetched Tell, and took him to the carriage house. There stood the green Ford truck in which Father, toward the end, had gone on his salesman’s rounds because he didn’t want to be a restaurateur. Fruit, shortenings, wood, and coal. But neither Niklaus nor Johann’s father could manage to lift a hundredweight sack from the scale onto the bed of the truck. Father was too sick, Niklaus too old. Josef could manage it in the meantime. Johann could almost do it. Johann, in the meantime, was able to carry the hundredweight sacks from the handcart—which they were again using to transport coal to customers since
Father’s death—into people’s basements or to the basement window and empty them just as well as Josef. On level ground or downhill, no problem. Only when the way was up several or many steps was he not quite able to do it yet. Niklaus could fill the sacks by himself, since they had acquired a tipping scale and stiff coco fiber sacks. When Josef and Johann got home from school and had eaten something, they loaded the sacks onto the handcart, which could hold a good ten hundredweights of briquettes or twelve hundredweights of hard coal. Since they had just purchased twenty-five new coco fiber sacks, Niklaus could always fill twenty-five hundredweights in the morning while Josef and Johann were at school. Then, while they made the deliveries, he could fill another ten or twelve hundredweights. And so between noon and evening they could deliver between eighty and a hundred hundredweights to their customers. Since Father had died and his truck stood idle among the piles of coal in the carriage house, they used Herr Waibel’s horses and wagon to supply their larger customers directly from the coal cars, as they had in the past.

  Johann got into the Ford with Tell. The car was going to be picked up soon. Xaver Noll from Hengnau had already paid for it and was going to modify it for his own purposes. Xaver Noll was a farmer who they said could run circles around any engineer.

  Johann had already gotten hit by the crank when it jumped back; since then, he hadn’t dared to try cranking it again.

  Actually, Johann was sitting in the Ford, waiting for Anita to come and sit beside him. But since he had shut the carriage house door from inside, how could she know he was sitting there? And even if she had known, it would hardly occur to her to sit in a coal truck. Nevertheless, Johann sat and waited for the door to open and Anita to come and squeeze between the pile of coal and the truck and get in beside him. The carriage house door did open, but it was Niklaus. He started to fill sacks with coal. How was Johann going to get out of here without Niklaus seeing him? Although Niklaus didn’t hear so well anymore, you could never tell with someone who was hard of hearing what they heard and what they didn’t. The coal that Niklaus shoveled onto the tipping scale, weighed, and slid into the sack below made a pretty loud noise. He could take advantage of that to slip out behind Niklaus. If Niklaus discovered Johann there, he would have to tell him what he was doing sitting in the truck on a Saturday morning. Johann couldn’t think of a white lie. Just sitting behind the wheel? Practicing switching gears! That was it. Johann started to practice coordinating the clutch with the gearshift. It felt good the way the gears got along with each other up there in the transmission, far away from Johann, just because with a foot and a hand he was operating a clutch and a gearshift lever. And when he did it right, he could feel how smoothly the gears meshed in the transmission.

  Suddenly, Tell jumped up and started barking. Johann got out of the truck at once and squeezed out between the coal and the side of the vehicle, shooing Tell ahead of him. Niklaus was not surprised at all to see Johann emerging from the depths of the carriage house. Niklaus recited the list of people they needed to make deliveries to that afternoon: Frau Haensel, Fräulein Hoppe-Seyler, Herr von Lützow, and Frau von Molkenbuer. All summer people, small accounts, people you could only deliver three or four hundredweights to at a time because they had no space for more. True, Fräulein Hoppe-Seyler got seven hundredweights. That wasn’t so bad. But Frau Haensel only got three. You had to carry them up to the second floor and through the whole apartment onto a covered balcony and empty them into a bin. She always laid a path of newspapers through her apartment so not a speck of dust could fall on her carpet. Herr von Lützow had a little bin next to his stove that held only a single hundredweight. Also on the second floor. At least Frau von Molkenbuer had room for eight hundredweights in her attic. Plus you didn’t have to carry the sacks all the way up there. Her apartment was in a renovated barn, and under the gable there was still a winch for raising bales of hay. With it, you could pull up one sack after another. On the other hand, her house was way out in Nonnenhorn. But today was Saturday, Johann’s Nonnenhorn day. Every Saturday at the canon’s house, he could exchange the Karl May novel he had just finished for a new one. The canon in Wasserburg had only boring books with titles like When I Was Still a Backwoods Farmer Boy, all bound in the same boring paper bindings. The books in school had titles like Barrage against Germany, The Command of Conscience, and Army behind Barbed Wire. For Johann, the war books were even more boring than the stories of backwoods farmers.

  So now he knew he would have to change his clothes. They would put three hundredweights for Frau Haensel into five sacks and the hundredweight for Herr von Lützow into two sacks. There were too many stairs. If Josef found out, he would make fun of them. But Johann didn’t want to be forced to turn back when he was halfway up the stairs. He knew it wouldn’t be long before he would be able to carry any hundredweight sack into any attic. Josef couldn’t do it till he was thirteen, either. And when Johann was thirteen, he’d be able to do it, too. At Fräulein Hoppe-Seyler’s house, you could push the handcart between the huge trees right up to the cellar window and dump the sacks in. But only if you did it hofele-hofele.

  So, the first load to Frau Haensel and Fräulein Hoppe-Seyler, and the second to Herr von Lützow and Frau von Molkenbuer, whose first name was Ereolina. Johann knew that from typing up the bills. Josef refused to do bookkeeping. And so all the paperwork, from discharging the waybills after the coal cars had been shoveled empty to billing the customers, fell to Johann. He always admired the way Josef would declare that bookkeeping was out of the question for him! Josef was an artist. And bookkeeping was out of the question for an artist. Until last winter, Father had taken care of all of the paperwork. His handwriting was admired even by people like Herr Brugger. But then, as Father became more and more worn out and you couldn’t expect Josef to do the bookkeeping, it was natural that Johann had taken over the purchase ledger, the billing, and the correspondence with the tax office and with the banks. Of course, Mother took care of placing the orders and paying the bills. That had always been her job. But it was Johann who wrote everything down. It had always been fun to sit at Father’s desk, try out the rubber stamp, pound away on the Continental, or even dip one of Father’s expensive fountain pens into the inkwell and then imitate Father’s extravagant handwriting on the back of some envelope. He had always been attracted even by the inkwell, which was inserted into a little glass cube and closed with a domed lid of silver leaves. To say nothing of the fact that the telephone stood on the desk. Their number was 663. Which meant, Johann thought, that they had the six hundred and sixty-third telephone in the Lindau exchange. Only Johann was allowed to turn the wheels on the rubber stamp that changed the day and the month. The weaker his father became, the more exclusive was the control Johann gained over the highboy. Mother and Joseph were not interested in this unfathomable piece of furniture with more secret compartments than it had drawers. Since Father’s death, Johann had been discovering more and more of them. Inside were father’s report cards from the Royal Bavarian Middle School in Lindau and little notebooks filled with his beautiful penmanship. But what they said was not so interesting to Johann. It reminded him of the things his father had been talking about in the spare room that night when the folding partition from the main room was shoved aside so that everyone could hear what was happening in Berlin. Johann and his mother shared responsibility for the safe. How he loved it when the heavy steel door sank closed with that sighing sound. The safe looked like it belonged in a knight’s castle. The two critical keyholes were concealed behind armorial shields that you slid aside.

  Johann returned, dressed in his work clothes, and he and Niklaus heaved the ten sacks onto the bed of the handcart. Then they placed a wooden frame with exactly the same dimensions as the bed of the cart around the sacks to keep them from sliding off when they went downhill or around a curve. Since the level path across the courtyard and onto the street was blocked by the circus ring, they had to push the cart around behind the house and up the steep untarre
d entrance ramp that was full of ruts from the recent rain. The two of them couldn’t manage it alone. Johann fetched his mother, Mina, the Princess, and Luise. All together, they were able to do it. And then: around the side of the house and hell-for-leather down the Dorfstrasse, so that Niklaus struggled to keep up. Johann didn’t brake or wait for Niklaus until he knew that Anita would no longer be able to see him if she came out of her trailer. Already, while loading, he kept glancing over to the trailers. He just didn’t want Anita to see him this way, in his old coalman’s jacket with pants and boots to match. With the customers or anywhere in the village, he wasn’t the least bit embarrassed to be seen in his coalman’s clothes. Quite the contrary: the more coal dust on him, the more fun the work was. It was a pleasure to look in the mirror and see that everything in his face was black except his eyes and his teeth. But he didn’t want Anita to see him that way. At five o’clock, they were supposed to be in church for their first confession. At four thirty, he would be standing at her trailer, freshly washed and waiting for her to come down the three wooden steps. If she came out at all. Perhaps the beating of Dumb August had changed everything in some utterly unimaginable way. Perhaps there would be no more circus. Perhaps when he came back from the first delivery, or from the second, they would have vanished completely.