A Gushing Fountain

by Martin Walser

  “Well?” said Adolf.

  Johann said, “Well, see you tomorrow, Adolf.” And turned and walked toward the linden tree so slowly that Adolf could easily have called him back.

  “Oh, Johann,” he heard Adolf say. But it sounded as if Adolf was saying it more to himself then calling to Johann.

  Johann felt miserable as he walked toward the linden tree. He could not turn around to look. If Adolf called to him again he would turn around. And stay. With Adolf. Forever.

  In order to make the turn at the linden that would hide him from Adolf’s view, he said all the words to himself that Adolf got from his father: manhood, footwear, consequences, role model, bad example, bootlicker, fop, womenfolk, litmus test. Johann had always admired the way Adolf lifted his chin when he used these words in a sentence. The words that moved Johann’s tree, he sensed, could not be said aloud: trepidation, bijoux, curiosity, exuberance, whitecaps, freckles, weeping willow, reincarnation, kingdom of heaven, chattels, memorial, Beatrijs, correspondence.

  Johann had just turned into his street at the linden, where all streets converged, when he saw two men coming toward him whom he had never seen together before: Herr Schlegel and Hanse Luis. Herr Schlegel was more dragging his walking stick than wielding it. One could not imagine him ever again drawing out the sword by its elegant handle and declaring: A personal gift from Frederick the Great after the Battle of Leuthen! The large, ponderous man now walked as if he had become too heavy for himself. Perhaps he would not have been walking at all if Hanse Luis had not taken him by the hand and pulled him along. Herr Schlegel let himself be pulled.

  Johann said his Grüss Gott and Hanse Luis asked in a loud voice, “Where is Manila?”

  “In the Philippines,” Johann replied.

  “Pernambuco?” asked Hanse Luis.

  “Seventy-seven and one half hours,” said Johann.

  “Lakehurst to Friedrichshafen?” cried Hanse Luis.

  “Fifty-five hours,” cried Johann.

  “And twenty-three minutes,” added Herr Schlegel weakly.

  “My respects,” said Hanse Luis, and without letting Herr Schlegel’s right hand go, he made a graceful bow to the huge old man.

  Herr Schlegel mumbled, “Up against the red wall and shoot him!” Hanse Luis let go of Herr Schlegel’s hand, placed his left forearm between his chest and his stomach, rested his right elbow in his left hand, quickly covered his mouth with his right hand, and then turned his hand and froze it in the German Greeting. Johann laughed to show Hanse Luis he understood that his mother was being imitated.

  Hanse Luis could imitate anyone. No one need be offended when Hanse Luis did his impression of them. Hanse Luis always imitated what was most characteristic of you. You could see how much enjoyment he got from doing impressions so well that everyone could tell immediately whom he meant. At the regulars’ table a few weeks ago, he had imitated Herr Harpf. Herr Harpf was the new local group leader. Herr Minn didn’t want to be local group leader anymore. He had resigned of his own accord. His son had been insulted, and in the Station Restaurant, too. Head Teacher Heller was giving a talk entitled “Yuletide, a German Holiday” and had made fun of the Virgin Birth. When Mother told Josef and Johann what had happened, she said she thought the Lord God could not allow a thing like that to be said. Somehow she feared for the safety of the house in which such a thing had been uttered. She thought that because she had listened without protest and without defending our dear Lord God from such disgraceful slander, the restaurant would collapse immediately and bury them all. She was hardly able to breathe, much less say anything. But no one else, not a single man or woman, had said anything, either. A few even smiled—she left it to Josef and Johann to imagine who they had been. Those were the lost souls, beyond help. And then young Minn raised his hand. He stands up, dressed in the uniform of the Navy SA, to which he belongs, and protests against the way the head teacher was talking here about a Christian article of faith. He, Max Minn, was a Lutheran. It wasn’t his article of faith. But he felt himself insulted by the words of his fellow party member, Head Teacher Heller. Now, young Minn has the habit of covering everything over with sh-sh, and even more so when he’s upset. Mother said it was almost all hissing sounds, but you could understand it anyway. The people who had been smiling before jumped up. Either Max Minn apologized to the head teacher, or they would throw him out on the spot. He did not apologize. And so, even though he would surely have left on his own, they threw him out. Five or six or seven of them grabbed for him. There wasn’t enough of him for all the hands that were grabbing. His glasses got knocked off and trampled. The next day, Herr Minn Senior resigned and turned in his membership book. One other person turned in his membership book, too: little Herr Häckelsmiller. Since little Herr Häckelsmiller never went to church, but his wife went more than once a day, people assumed his resignation from the party—and after all, he had been a member since 1924—to be the work of his wife. The assumption was that her prayers had finally been answered, and she had prayed her husband right out of the Godless Party.

  Fräulein Agnes, the Lutheran sacristan (the Lutherans had been able to build their own church in the meantime, because everyone was making money again)—Fräulein Agnes, whose membership number was not a year younger than that of little Herr Häckelsmiller, was supposed to have refused to fetch her neighbor Häckelsmiller his milk every evening because he had left the party.

  Since then, the customs official Herr Harpf had become the local group leader. He spoke Franconian-Bavarian dialect in a bright, tinny voice, and in his capacity as local group leader moved like a figure from a mechanical clock. Hanse Luis couldn’t resist imitating him. In the Station Restaurant recently, he was doing his impression of the local group leader and everyone was laughing. They didn’t notice that Herr Harpf himself had entered the room and had seen and heard everything. Fortunately, he had to laugh himself. If he was ever sick, he said, Hanse Luis could stand in for him.

  Johann watched Herr Schlegel and Hanse Luis until they disappeared from view between the nursery and the butcher shop. They were probably going to have a drink with Boger’s Paul the cooper, since the restaurants weren’t allowed to serve Herr Schlegel alcohol anymore.

  Public Notice: Prohibition from Consumption of Alcoholic Beverages for Herr Schlegel. Frau Fürst had not simply laid their newspaper on the table. She’d opened it herself and asked that Luise be brought in to hear what she would read from the page she had opened. Taverns and restaurants were officially prohibited from waiting on the builder David Schlegel because of alcoholism. Whoever served him alcohol would lose their concession. Frau Fürst looked from one to the other to assure herself that they had all taken in the announcement. Then she said in a more friendly, conciliatory tone, “Heil Hitler, everybody!” and left. That means no more David parties, thought Johann. On his name day, Herr Schlegel always invited all the Davids in the parish to drink lake wine with him. Last year there were eleven Davids. Over and done with.

  Tell jumped up when he saw Johann coming. Johann ordered him to stay by his doghouse beneath the carriage house overhang until Johann came to him. Carriage house—he would probably always think of Adolf when that word came up, because Adolf had tried to prove to Johann that the thing Johann called a carriage house was a barn. Adolf had said that a larger lean-to was a shed. An even larger one was a barn. The upper, smaller carriage house was a shed. The bigger one, a barn. Nobody in the whole village said carriage house when they meant shed or barn.

  Johann had accepted the fact that what they had was not a highboy even though he still called their secretary a highboy. But in the case of their two carriage houses, he wouldn’t give in. He did, however, avoid using the word carriage house in Adolf’s presence. Adolf clearly could not accept Johann’s calling both a shed and a barn a carriage house.

  Johann and Tell passed Niklaus, who was busy filling sacks, and went up to the house. From the spare room, Josef with his never-ending Bach pieces. “They keep go
ing in circles,” the Princess once said, “but they’re good to wash dishes to.” Upstairs, he lay down on his bed with Tell. Outside, a train was signaling its departure. Footsteps crunched in the gravel and then rang hollowly on the planks of the scale, but then Josef began a crescendo that drowned out everything else. The sun slanted in through the window, sharply dividing the room into planes of light and shadow. The leisurely ticking of the warning bell as the crossing barriers were lowered penetrated through Josef’s piano playing after all. Johann whispered his two lines into Tell’s ear:

  Oh, that early in the day

  I should be so lonely.

  Tell shook himself. Of course, Johann had to turn to him, take him by the neck in both hands, and give him a good shake. Because that was what Tell considered bliss: to be shaken by Johann.

  PART THREE

  Harvest

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Past as Present

  MAGDA IS GOING TO CUT a piece from Johann’s lower lip with a pair of scissors. He wasn’t able to stop her from getting hold of the scissors. He can already see that he won’t be able to keep Magda from cutting into his lower lip. They’re in a train. It’s fairly dark. The train stops. Johann manages to get his luggage thrown out, two suitcases. Johann is outside, he’s escaped. It’s the Wasserburg station. One of the suitcases doesn’t even belong to him. That’s an embarrassment. On account of Magda. He has used some sort of trick to escape her. He shouldn’t have done that, he thinks.

  The past is contained in the present and cannot be separated out the way you can extract one substance contained in another substance by means of some clever process, and then you would have it as such. The past doesn’t exist as such. It exists only as something contained within the present, a decisive or suppressed factor—and in the latter case, decisive, although suppressed. The idea that the past is slumbering and you can awaken it, for example, with the help of a lucky turn of phrase or the relevant smell or some other long-forgotten signal—by means of intellectual or sensual data—is a delusion you can surrender yourself to as long as you don’t notice that what you thought was the recovered past is really a present mood or whim for which the past has merely provided the material, but not the spirit. Those who most long to recapture the past are in the most danger of thinking that what they have produced is what they were seeking. We are unable to admit that there is nothing but the present. After all, it too is as good as nonexistent. And the future is a grammatical fiction.

  Instead of the past, should we call it the character of having been? Would that make it more present? The past does not like me trying to capture it. The more directly I approach it, the more clearly I encounter, instead of the past, the motive that at the present moment enjoins me to seek out the past. More often than not, it is a lack of justification that directs us into what is past. We are looking for reasons that could justify the way we are. Some people have learned to repudiate their past. They generate a past they deem more favorable. They do it for the sake of the present. One learns all too precisely what sort of past one ought to have had if one wants to come off well in the currently prevailing present. More than once, I have watched people positively slipping out of their past so they can present a more favorable past to the present. The past as a role. There are not many things in our conscious and behavioral economy that have such a pronounced role-playing character as the past. Is it wishful thinking that people with unstandardized pasts should be able to live together as the different individuals they are by virtue of—among other things—their pasts? In reality, our dealings with the past become more stringently standardized with each passing decade. The more standardized these dealings, the more what is displayed as the past is really a product of the present. It is conceivable that the past will be made to disappear entirely and will serve only to express how we feel now—or rather, how we’re supposed to feel: the past as a wardrobe department from which one can choose a costume as needed. A past completely available, approved, well-lit and laundered, and totally suitable for the present. Ethically and politically revised. Modeled for us by our most immaculate, our best and brightest. Whatever our past may have been, we have freed ourselves from anything in it that was not the way we would like it to be now. Perhaps one could say we have emancipated ourselves. Then the past exists within us as something we have overcome. Something we have mastered. We must come off looking good. But not so mendacious that we would notice it ourselves.

  To wish for the past, a presence over which we are not the master, with no conquests to be made after the fact. The goal of our wishful thinking: a disinterested interest in the past, and that it would meet us halfway of its own accord.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Harvest

  THIS FALL, HE WASN’T BAREFOOT on the ladder. He had a sack hung over his shoulder that held many more apples than the little bag he used to use. As Johann let apple after apple slide into the sack, it got so heavy he wouldn’t have been able to stand barefoot on the rungs. He had never been so seldom barefoot as this year, and his feet weren’t toughened. In the spring, the laced boots of his home guard flak battery; in the summer, the jackboots of the Reich Labor Service. And soon—hopefully soon—would follow the hiking boots of the mountain troopers. If you volunteered, you got to choose. Johann had chosen the tank corps like Josef, had been rejected because he wore glasses, and had then chosen the mountain troops.

  The gentle snap of the breaking stem as he picked each apple from its branch. Still in his ears: the percussive chopping of the twin-cannon flak. He preferred the hard hack-hack of the two-centimeter canons, however, to the booming of the eighty-eights. In Chieming, where he finished his sharpshooter training, he had filched one of the long, slim, two-centimeter projectiles. They lay in your hand, so cool and smooth and lovely. For two weeks, a plane pulled a tattered square of target across the sky, and they had shot at it from morning to night without ever scoring a hit. In April, Friedrichshafen gets bombed to ruins in a single night, and that same night they practice shooting tracers into the black skies above the Chiemsee. Johann wanted to hit something. When he aimed, he was an aimer and nothing but an aimer. The target positively sucked him in. It was unthinkable that he would not hit it dead-on. His Jungvolk target practice log was sacred. He kept it in his secret compartment. He had long since inherited Josef’s air rifle. Even before Josef joined up, he had lost interest in shooting at the targets thumbtacked to the door of the carriage house. In the meantime, the door was riddled with holes from which the small lead pellets, deformed on impact, peeked out. In Fürstenfeldbruck, Johann the Reich Labor Service man had shot thirty-three of a possible thirty-six points, prone and without support. Thirty-four would have earned him a Sunday leave. Mother waited day and night for at least one of them—Josef or him—to come home. In July, right after the awards ceremony in Stralsund, Johann had caught a train to Berlin and stayed only long enough to transfer to the first train heading south. The others from his team were going to continue on later. They wanted to get out and gape at the smoking ruins of Berlin.

  When Johann stepped down onto the platform in Wasserburg after a twenty-six-hour journey, Herr Deuerling said, “Get goin’, get along with ya! What took you so long?” Josef had just left on the noon train.

  Johann hadn’t known that Josef would also have leave and come home. He had only hoped he would. Josef was done with training and already a non-com, but not yet tested under fire. Before that: home leave.

  Johann had hoped Josef would arrive before August, when Johann had to enter the Reich Labor Service in Fürstenfeldbruck.

  Coming directly from Stralsund, it would have been great to meet up with Josef and tell him how they had fared in Stralsund—in Dänholm, actually, but Josef knew that already, since he had himself competed in the Marine Hitlerjugend national championships two years ago. This year, they were only fourth in the crew race, by half a boat’s length. But first in technical rowing and in semaphoring, too: Reich champions, thanks to Johann. The ne
xt best, a Berliner, had read his ten words in 1'40" with twelve errors, Johann in 1'30" with no errors. He could have done it in 1'20" or 1'10", except that the signalmen provided by the navy took much too long to start the next word after Johann had shouted out the word they were signaling before they had even finished it. Johann could guess any ten-letter word in the German language after only the first three letters—or four at the most. If they signaled H I N . . . Johann shouted HINDENBURG. If they signaled S T E U . . . and STEUERMANN had already been sent, Johann shouted STEUERBORD. If they signaled R E G E . . . Johann shouted REGENBOGEN. If they signaled T A N . . . Johann shouted TANNENBAUM. If they signaled F L A G . . . Johann shouted FLAGGLEINE. If they signaled S I G N . . . Johann shouted SIGNALGAST. If they signaled A N K . . . Johann shouted ANKERKETTE. If they signaled K O E N . . . Johann shouted KÖNIGSBERG. If they signaled L E U . . . Johann shouted LEUCHTTURM. But by the time the signalman received the next word from the timer standing beside him and started signaling it, another second had been lost. At least. But he was Reich champion in semaphoring nevertheless. Wolfgang—the second Wolfgang in the village—was the best runner with 12’0”. In total points, they were eighth out of thirty-nine teams. And if Josef had still been on the team, they would have been second like two years ago. Everybody said so, and he would have delivered it to Josef hot off the presses if Josef had been home. With Josef as starboard stroke, they would have been the first cutter across the finish line this time. They would have beaten the pants off the Berliners and Hamburgers and Heidenheimers good and proper. They couldn’t win a race without Josef to set the stroke and accelerate to the limit. All ten of them in Stralsund said so, and so did the cox.