A Gushing Fountain

by Martin Walser

  Johann could tell that Adolf had staged this whole toll business just for Anita’s sake. “You and me are staying together,” he said quietly to Anita. Except for Anita and Johann, everyone had now gotten past Adolf. Already they were running, waiting between waves, and running again. The boys began each run by yelling to give themselves courage. The girls uttered high shrieks.

  Johann walked toward Adolf, lowering his candle so that it was also like a sword. As they began to duel, Anita took advantage of their candle fight to slip past Adolf. She ran after the others, but before reaching them she stopped and looked back. Johann was aware that she had stopped, although he needed to concentrate on Adolf. They would each try to knock the candle out of the other’s hand. The closer he got to Adolf, the more Johann lowered his candle. That way, Adolf couldn’t just strike at Johann’s candle. They got so close that the candles they were both holding quite low touched and rubbed against each other. Who would be first to cock back his arm and strike? Johann had advanced so steadily toward Adolf that Adolf had taken a step back. Should he crowd him to the edge of the promenade so he would fall in the water? A wave they couldn’t pay attention to washed over their shoes. Johann sensed that he would not be able to withstand Adolf’s stare much longer. He wanted to say: Come on, let’s make peace. But he couldn’t. He sensed that he couldn’t glare at Adolf the way Adolf was glaring at him. And then Adolf was already doing what Johann had only thought of. Cocking his arm and instantly striking with his candle. Johann’s candle broke, and he was so startled that he dropped his Schott. A wave washed the beautiful book against the wall. Johann grabbed it before it could be pulled back into the lake.

  Adolf snickered, said, “One to nothing,” and ran to join the others. He soon caught up with Anita, walked beside her on her right, on the lake side, and yelled, Stop! when a wave came and, Go! when the wave receded and left the path free. Then he ran forward to the next starting line, holding Anita by the hand. Johann followed slowly with his broken candle and sodden Schott. Up ahead, where the path left the lake and continued past Hoppe-Seylers’ park to the Dorfstrasse, they all gathered. Main topic of conversation: Adolf’s victory. Everyone felt sorry that Johann’s candle was broken and his Schott soaked. Ludwig put his arm around Johann’s shoulder.

  Adolf said, “He started it.”

  Johann thought: Started what?

  Ludwig told him to cut the wick of the candle at the spot where it was broken. Then Johann would already have a candle that had burned down to where the others would be after the last May devotions. Johann said he would. He wouldn’t relight his candle until the others’ candles had burned down to the same length. But what about his Schott? It was ruined. Johann knew he would never get another leather-bound Schott with gilt edges. Now he would just have one in boards with red edging, like Franz Döbel’s. And it didn’t seem to bother Franz in the least. Franz was three years older and had missed his First Communion when it was his class’s turn because of his flying. He lived out on Bichel Pond and built gliders that really flew. He wanted to be a pilot when he grew up. Flying was the only thing that interested him. He knew every type of plane in the world and had even been inside a Zeppelin. He had a Schott in boards with red edges and that didn’t seem to matter to him at all.

  From the linden tree on, Johann was alone with Anita. She was silent. He was silent. She might have said that it wasn’t so bad to have a broken candle and a sodden hymnal. But his Schott was supposed to last him a lifetime. You were supposed to be able to pray the stations of the church year that are assigned to each Sunday for fifty or sixty years with that book. But his father hadn’t had a Schott either, just a small prayer book that was printed in shorthand. He surely must have been the only person who had a Gabelsberg prayer book that was so tiny and still had everything in it. Should he tell Anita: As soon as I’ve learned shorthand in Lindau, I can use my father’s shorthand prayer book anyway? He couldn’t say that.

  As the restaurant came into view, they could see that the circus people were taking things down and packing up.

  “Yes,” said Anita, “we’re leaving today. In weather like this, it’s better to be in the trailer and on the road.”

  And in fact, it was just starting to rain.

  Johann said, “Yes, of course.”

  He had to get used to it, arm himself. Arm himself against the moment the orchard would be without Vishnu and the circus ring and the circus wagons. The circus was leaving because it was raining, because Dumb August had been beaten black and blue, because it could have been the police. Arm himself.

  “Johann,” Anita called him back when he had already turned to go. He stopped, and she came and held her candle out to him. “Let’s trade,” she said. Wherever they were going, she wouldn’t be attending May devotionals, since they usually started so late it would make her miss her performance. So she didn’t need the candle. And as a memento, Johann’s broken candle would serve just as well. And then he’d have one that wasn’t broken. “Come on,” she said. He gave her his candle and took hers.

  As he lay on the bed in his room with Tell (when Tell lay next to Johann, he stretched himself out as long as a person), he asked himself if it was good for Anita to have a broken candle as a memento of him.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Follow Her

  AS JOHANN CARRIED HIS brother’s bicycle down the back stairs shortly before six o’clock on Monday morning, he had no pangs of conscience. Josef wouldn’t be able to use his bicycle for the next two days anyway.

  The yard looked desolate: the grass under the trees trampled flat, remnants of straw and sawdust everywhere, puddles from the rain that had also brought down more apple blossoms during the night. And no more La Paloma Circus. Late yesterday afternoon, Xaver Noll had come on his homemade miracle tractor and pulled all the circus wagons out of the courtyard. Typical that he did it, even though it was Sunday. He called himself godless. He marched in the parades in his black SS uniform. At the regulars’ table, they said he was the world’s smartest farmer. Besides being able to build for himself all the machines he needed, he heated his house with the gas from the liquid manure in his barn. Where else in the world would you find such a thing?

  Johann had watched the departing wagons from the lavatory window. Of course, the circus people had come to the door before they left to pay the rent for the space. But Mother had waved them off: No, no, she wouldn’t take any money from them after what had happened. Frau Wiener tried to hug Mother, but Mother was able to fend her off because she was almost two heads taller than Frau Wiener. Anita shook everyone’s hand, Johann’s last.

  “Well,” she said, “until next time.” She was wearing her wild sweater again with the red, white, and blue nap. Anita, Anita, he thought to himself. She even turned back and said, “Don’t forget all about me.” Johann nodded. “You either,” she added to little Anselm, who was watching it all from his mother’s hip as usual. Johann thought Anita should have said her sentence about not forgetting only to him, and not to little Anselm, too.

  Later, the ringmaster and director of the circus came up to the restaurant, too, and thanked them even more profusely than Frau Wiener had that there was no rent to pay. “Dear lady,” he said, “I can only tell you that your generosity will never be forgotten! You will be in our prayers. Au revoir, dear lady.” Johann saw that his mother had the same expression on her face she wore when she had pains near her gallbladder.

  Luckily, his mother had not called out as he crept along the upstairs hall whose every floorboard creaked. When he reached the stairs, he slid down the banister to avoid any further noise. If you snuck past Mother’s door at an unusual time of day, you could expect her to call out: Johann, is that you? She could tell Josef from Johann by the way each snuck past. And even when she slept, she was apparently able to hear everything going on in the hall.

  Before he went to bed he’d unbolted the back door, and now he didn’t latch the door behind him but left it slightly ajar. He wasn’t g
oing to run any risks. He felt like what Franz Döbel had told him pilots feel when the plane leaves the ground. He had hidden a chocolate bar under a loose roofing tile on Peter Schmied’s bakehouse last night. It was from his godmother’s bakery, and she had given it to him as a First Communion present. As he unwrapped this fabulous bar of Waldbaur chocolate, his first thought was to share it with Anita. Where and when he would do so was unclear. He could have kept the chocolate out of Josef’s clutches by hiding it in his secret compartment in the highboy, but that would have meant opening the office door this morning and Mother might have heard the latch click. So last night he had quickly slipped the chocolate under this loose tile. The bakehouse was a tiny building on the edge of the orchard in front of Peter Schmied’s house and barnyard, a little house just for baking bread, and so low to the ground that it was easy for Johann to reach the roof tiles. He often hid things he didn’t want Josef to find under those loose tiles. Because Josef immediately gobbled up whatever treat they were given and would eat Johann’s portion, too, if Johann didn’t hide it. For Johann, sharing it was as much of a pleasure as eating it.

  He wrapped the chocolate bar in a blue scarf he had brought along, clipped the little package to his luggage rack, and set off. Set off, as if he had somewhere to be by eight o’clock. He rode down the Moosweg to the bay, then turned onto the poplar avenue that led to Nonnenhorn. The poplars and the reeds were not moving at all today, not a cloud in the sky. It couldn’t be better weather for what he had planned. As he rode along between the reeds and the fishermen’s huts, it occurred to him that in or near Langenargen, there must also be a net-drying rack and huts where the fisherman repaired and stored their nets. Although he had some money with him, since he had access to the safe, he didn’t want to spend the night at an inn.

  He was still riding as if he had to be somewhere by eight, and he began to perspire. He pretended he was Old Shatterhand’s strawberry roan, sweating big flakes of foam.

  He had never ridden his bicycle beyond Nonnenhorn before. But didn’t Jutz the organist ride his bike from Kressbronn every Monday to give Josef and Johann piano lessons? And so slowly, both coming and going, you would think he was trying to demonstrate how slow he could ride without falling over. Kressbronn couldn’t be all that far away, if such a slow rider came from there every Monday to give piano lessons. Johann’s lesson was this afternoon. He began pedaling even harder. Let’s get out of here. Don’t think about that. Five marks per hour. If you didn’t cancel your lesson ahead of time, you had to pay for it, even though you missed it. He could picture Mother’s face contracting, and her mouth getting tight as she handed Jutz the organist his ten marks even though he’d only given one hour of instruction. But perhaps she would be so worried that Johann was missing that the money wouldn’t matter. And a boxcar of straw was supposed to arrive today, too. Starting at noon, the farmers would be driving their empty wagons onto the truck scale. The scale had to be cranked up, the empty wagon weighed, and its tare printed out on the scale receipt. Then each farmer would drive out to the tracks, get his load of straw, and return to be weighed again. The gross weight was also printed out, but the weighing fee was charged only on the net weight. When his mother had no time and Josef could not tear himself away from the piano, Johann would stand at the weighing booth under the chestnut tree all afternoon, raising the heavy scale bed with the big crank. The scale bed would swing free of the ground, Johann would slide the small weight along the beam until it stopped swinging, too, then he would print out the receipt, crank the bed back down, and call out: Next, please! They didn’t earn much weighing wagonloads of straw, beets, and windfalls, but Mother was loath to give up the weighing business. The Linden Tree had a truck scale, too, one that was roofed over. If you didn’t think too clearly—and who did think clearly, anyway?—you would probably think you’d have to pay Johann and his mother extra for the weight of the snow and rain. Which was ridiculous. Whatever precipitation there was, was included in both the gross weight and the tare. So the net weight was the same in either case. But some farmers made comments while being weighed in snowy or rainy weather, comments Johann found humiliating. Why didn’t they go ask Herr Witzigmann about it? He organized all the loading and unloading for the savings and loan and totaled up all the carbon copies of the scale receipts every evening. What came out as the total net weight was more or less exactly what the boxcar had contained.

  Pedal harder. Go, go, go. Langenargen, Langenargen. He didn’t want to think about anything else now. On his left, between the path and the lake, came the villas where the summer people lived. The newest ones belonged to Ribbentrop and Streicher, big houses with tall hedges and fences. They bought their coal somewhere else. Helmer’s Hermine had declined to work in either Ribbentrop’s or Streicher’s villa. She had been asked to, of course. But both lay within the Nonnenhorn town limits. And Helmer’s Hermine said she never cleaned in Nonnenhorn. Semper’s Fritz had laid all the pipes in Streicher’s villa, and he told the regulars that the house had an underground escape tunnel. And when everyone asked where to, Fritz had pulled down one eyelid with his index finger and said, “To the boathouse. He’s got 140 horsepower in there. If things get too hot, it’s off to Switzerland.” The smallest house Johann rode past belonged to Martha and Elisa Sauter. Did the Fräuleins Sauter know Father had died?

  If they read the newspaper, they did. Johann had read the newspaper article about his father’s funeral, which took place at two o’clock on Epiphany. Frau Fürst had not tossed the newspaper onto the table in her usual energetic manner, but laid it down carefully, sat down on the bench under the boiler next to Johann, opened the paper, and pointed to the headline: A Sad Day. And she sat next to Johann until he had finished the whole article. The newspaper said it had snowed day and night for three days and hadn’t stopped until the middle of the day, shortly before the funeral. The newspaper said that the village was buried in more than twenty inches of snow. It said they had to plow the streets free. Then people had waded through the snow behind the hearse driven by Herr Waibel and pulled by his two horses. Johann had never seen so many people on the Dorfstrasse. In front of every house, people dressed in black were waiting to join the procession. Maybe one could see the people clad in black so clearly because everything was covered with white. The newspaper reported who had spoken at the funeral on behalf of Father’s schoolmates, his fellow POWs, the Kyffhäuser Bund, the volunteer firemen, the choral society, his comrades from the Prince Karl of Bavaria Infantry Regiment, his comrades from the former Royal Bavarian 20th Infantry Regiment, the restaurateurs’ association, and the Benevolent Association for the Survivors of the Fallen. Later, in the overcrowded church, it was the priest who spoke the longest. Johann didn’t register a word of what he said but only how his goatee had bobbed up and down. Except once, when the priest spoke directly to him, Josef, and Anselm. He told the three forsaken lads of the dear departed—departed before his time—that they should always revere the memory of their brave father. Of course, the newspaper didn’t mention the bit about the forsaken lads. Nor that the church was overcrowded. But it did say who the speakers were. The newspaper said that Father was forty-seven when he died and listed all the places he had fought. There was nothing about the fairly large bird that wouldn’t be shooed away. Nor did it say that Senior Postal Inspector Zürn, speaking on behalf of the Kyffhäuser Bund, was the only person wearing two armbands: the armband of the Kyffhäuser Bund and the armband with the swastika. Hurrah-Zürn, his father had called him. He, too, addressed the three lads who would have the privilege of growing up in happier times than their father, summoned all too soon to the great muster in the sky.

  In Nonnenhorn, Johann was just passing the farm where Frau Molkenbuer lived: Ereolina. That had been one of Father’s words too. Popocatépetl . . . or was it Potocapétepl? He repeated both words to himself until he couldn’t tell them apart anymore. And felt ashamed. To revere the memory of his father and then so soon forget his words! He could
see the word tree. Popocatépetl or Pototapécetl—the word swung in its lower branches, he just had to concentrate on it—Popocatépetl, of course it was Popocatépetl, what else? Pleurisy, Rabindranath Tagore, theosophy, Balaam, Jugendstil, Bhagavadgita, Swedenborg, atmosphere, protoplasm. And then the upper branches came back to him, Father’s favorite words: trepidation, bijoux, curiosity, exuberance, whitecaps, freckles, weeping willow, reincarnation, kingdom of heaven, chattels, memorial.

  Before he was even as far as the center of Nonnenhorn, he heard a sound he knew and feared, the thin whistling that means your tire has picked up a nail. He stopped immediately and saw he had a flat. Because he’d gotten distracted! That damn word tree! He howled, but quietly, just to himself. He’d learned how to howl quietly from Tell, into whose ear he’d whispered phony words of consolation this morning. Josef was always a sound sleeper, but if Tell had insisted on his morning routine, it would have woken Josef up. And that had to be avoided at all costs, because Johann could not have explained anything to him.

  Johann laid his bike down on the grass. Good thing he had a repair kit with him. It must be there, if Josef had put in everything that ought to be in a saddlebag. But Johann had never repaired a flat before. Whenever he got one on Josef’s bicycle, he just walked the bike over to Franz Hotz’s in Hege. Franz worked for the railroad, but in the evenings he repaired anything that could go wrong on a bicycle. And as long as Hotze Franz did the repairing, Johann preferred scratching the ears of Franz’s nanny goats to watching him work, so he hadn’t learned how to do it himself. Should he walk the bike back to Hege? Impossible. So he had to repair the flat himself. If the nail wasn’t still sticking in the tire, he would need a pan of water to find the tiny hole. You had to pump the tube back up again and then run it through the water and watch for rising bubbles to reveal the hole. Should he go to a house and ask for a pan of water? Again, this feeling of needing to arm himself. He had to arm himself.