A Gushing Fountain

by Martin Walser

  It’s stupid when things go wrong like this. He breaks his neck to get home, and Josef has left already. It hadn’t been a pleasant journey. July heat. Crowded compartments and corridors. Nothing but soldiers. Disgruntled soldiers: bawling, bellowing, bitter, silent. Wearing dirty, disheveled uniforms. Johann the only civilian. He had taken off his Marine Hitlerjugend uniform in the men’s room of the Stralsund station and stuffed it into his rucksack. He thought the Marine Hitlerjugend uniform was overdone, almost dandyish. It was only wearable near or actually on the water. The round cap was especially hideous: a circular lid with no visor and a bit of material stretched above a wide, stiff rim. Join the navy? Never! He was never going to wear a cap without a visor. It was incomprehensible to him how anyone could volunteer for the navy, despite the uniform. He was embarrassed every time he had to walk to muster through the village in such a getup, and he never put the cap on until he was down by the lake.

  Between Stralsund and Berlin the train had suddenly begun to sway. Johann knew at once what was happening. He was surprised no one sprang to their feet except him. He couldn’t stay put on his jump seat in the corridor. If the train was going to tip over, he didn’t want to get caught in the corridor again. If the train fell onto the corridor side, the car wall would be torn open and crushed against the compartments. He couldn’t say anything to these drunken, smoking, bawling, or dozing soldiers. He had to find a conductor or an emergency brake. When the train began to accelerate into the next straightaway, the last car, which was swaying the most, would jump the rails and tip over, pulling down the next-to-last car, which would pull down the next car, until the train that was already dragging the last car through the ballast with its side ripped open could be brought to a stop. That’s exactly what had happened last March 4th between Dornbirn and Bregenz, a Sunday evening when Johann and Gerhard were on their way home from skiing. When Johann saw out the window that they were leaning toward the ballast and heard the terrifying grinding and shattering, he had just enough time to take off his glasses but not to stick them in his pocket. There was a last shudder and bang, and then silence, except for something still trickling down. Gerhard and Johann had been standing in the corridor, and the wall of a compartment had slammed down between them. Johann struggled up through the compartment door, clambered out the window, and then back down through the next window and into the ripped-open corridor and found Gerhard, head-first up, to his belt in gravel and filth. Johann recognized him only by his ski pants. He started digging and clawed away the gravel until he came to the ravaged face and smashed head. Despite the four-year difference in their ages, Gerhard was the best friend Johann had ever had. Not a whiff of competition. Each wanted only to please the other. In the woods, they whistled in harmony. And they made fun of each other at every opportunity but never took anything seriously. Except perhaps what could be expressed by their eyes. Johann had ridden home on an emergency replacement train. Gerhard’s parents had already been notified by Herr Deuerling. Johann’s mother couldn’t utter a sound but only moved her lips. Seven dead, all in the last car. Everyone else injured, except for Johann. The first thing Mother was able to get out: Your guardian angel. And now he was in a train that was about to tip over, just like in Haselstauden in the Vorarlberg! Johann looked for a conductor he could tell to warn the engineer: Slow down, or you’ll throw us off the track. But he couldn’t find a conductor, only soldiers he couldn’t talk to. They were talking about the front, about their wounds, about nurses they had banged first this way, then that way. And how they’d blasted away with the new MG 42 until the Russians had taken to their heels with their socks smoking. Johann thought of the smoking Berlin. When they emptied a bottle, they threw it out the window, far out—not carelessly, but intentionally, as if it was a hand grenade. They did what was forbidden on purpose. After every bottle they threw out, they shouted the slogan that was meant to get people to be frugal and economize with everything: “Fight waste!”

  “Leuna,” said the soldiers, as the train rolled for half an hour past a wilderness of pipes and rods. It was where they made gasoline from coal. Once they achieved autarky, the war was as good as won! One of the soldiers bellowed, “Tonight or never.” Another joined in, “Autarky, autarky.” Since the first four-year plan, everybody knew what autarky meant and that it was the most crucial thing for Germany. Johann thought of Herr Breuninger, the art teacher in Lindau. In sixth grade, he had them illustrate the word autarky as a struggle for raw materials, and for each new sixth-grade class, he would recite the couplet he had penned himself but pretended he was making up on the spot: Don’t throw potato peels away, They may prove useful one fine day. Johann would have liked to tell that to the soldiers who were singing the praises of autarky. But maybe they hadn’t even noticed him. Which was all right with him, since his short-pant civvies must look ridiculous among these uniforms. And yet these dark green corduroy shorts were his favorites. They made him feel historical. The soldiers were telling one dirty joke after another, and then one of them finally did point to Johann and say, “You’re settin’ a bad example for this little guy.” His tone of voice reminded Johann of Elsa with her sagging lower lip, spooning with Herr Deuerling, and the expression she used to report some outrage: I thought I was gonna eat my own feet. Elsa from Ainaid by Homborsh, capsized in the moonlight, the non-swimmer, with the non-swimmer Valentin from Mindelheim. Amazing that even at that news, the Princess’s response was: Shake a leg, romance calls, the Führer needs more soldiers.

  Johann slid each apple carefully into the mouth of the sack and didn’t let go until it touched the apples already collected in the bottom. Far overhead in the unending blue of the October sky, the little glinting sliver needles of the bombers flying in from Italy nosed forward almost soundlessly. In the evening, they would learn from the radio whether it had been the turn of Stuttgart or Ulm, Augsburg or Munich. The only bombs that got dropped around here were on the return flight, the few they hadn’t released over the cities—seven between Lochau and Bregenz not long ago.

  When the sack got full and heavy, and the cord started cutting into his shoulder, Johann backed down the ladder rung by rung. He lifted the cord over his head and passed the sack to the waiting Niklaus, who insisted that only he, holding his arm out as a brake, was able to let the apples roll slowly and gently enough from the sack into the crate that they didn’t get bruised. Before Johann hung the empty sack across his shoulder again, he gazed at the place beside the trunk of the Gravenstein tree where last year Tell had sat and watched Johann deliver the sacks to Niklaus. Tell’s favorite spot. The letter from nine-year-old Anselm had arrived in Fürstenfeldbruck the first week in September: “Johann, we had to have Tell shot. Herr Brugger had to do it.”

  From the very first day in Fürstenfeldbruck, Johann had always waited until he was lying in bed to read his mail. When they were shown their quarters, he had insisted on taking the top bunk. He said he got nightmares if anyone slept above him. When he read Anselm’s letter, he turned to the wall and howled. Anselm wrote that after Johann had been drafted into the labor service, Tell had refused to take food from anyone else. He had run away twice, had to be caught, and had snapped at anyone who approached him. Finally Herr Brugger, the hunter and livestock dealer, got a muzzle on him. Then Herr Brugger led him into the courtyard and Anselm had to show Herr Brugger Tell’s favorite spot. They tied Tell to the Gravenstein trunk and Anselm had to maneuver the handcart into position in the grass two yards from Tell, stand in the cart bed, and call: Tell, look up here! Tell looked up and in that second, Herr Brugger pulled the trigger. Tell hadn’t suffered at all.

  Johann couldn’t eat anything for two days in Fürstenfeldbruck. He had to report in sick. You can’t line up for mess hall and then not eat anything. And besides, it had become his duty to recite a saying for the day. When everyone had gotten their chow and they were all standing at their places in the mess hall, someone had to recite a saying for the day. Sometimes it was one person, sometimes an
other. One day, no one volunteered. “Outside!” bellowed the sergeant. “Around the hall at a run until someone has a saying!” After the third time around—and it was a rainy day—Johann had had enough and volunteered. Everyone went back inside and stood before their cold suppers while Johann intoned in his clear voice the rhyme he had just concocted:

  The sun is bright, the world is wide,

  We’re comrades marching side by side.

  Within our hearts, the sun it shines

  Despite the darkness of the times.

  Fortunately, no one had laughed when Johann had the sun shining on this rainy day. From that day on, they all relied on Johann. Every evening before going to sleep he rhymed a saying for the next day:

  Our foes have weapons that can kill,

  But none to match our steely will.

  After reading Little Anselm’s letter, he knew he couldn’t eat a thing, not ever again. So he would give one of his buddies the saying for tomorrow and sayings for all the days to come. He couldn’t just holler out and then not eat anything. That wouldn’t do. Not only would he never eat again, he would never see or hear anything, either. Never feel anything. In every letter he wrote home, he’d reminded Anselm to please, please read his letter to Tell, too, send Tell his greetings and let Tell sniff the letter. He would spit on the upper left corner of every letter, draw a circle around the spot, and write next to it, “Let Tell sniff here!”

  With joy we wield the pick and spade,

  Proud to be Germany’s youngest brigade.

  After Tell had refused food from anyone else during Johann’s visit to Langenargen, Johann should have known that he could never leave Tell alone. But then he had to go and volunteer so he could get away before anyone else and be drafted into the labor service before anyone else. It couldn’t be too soon for him! He had killed Tell, not Herr Brugger! Two weeks later, Mother wrote that Herr Brugger had been picked up, arrested, called a parasite on the Volk for doing something against the wartime economic rules—trafficking in livestock for a lot of money. Poor Adolf, thought Johann, and wrote asking Mother to send him Adolf’s address.

  Every time Johann came down the ladder and gave Niklaus the sack, he saw Tell’s spot next to the Gravenstein trunk. He had sat in the grass against that trunk with Tell, had read and translated Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and read it aloud in English and German to Tell. And he had read him odes by Klopstock. It would never have occurred to Johann to read prose to Tell. Poems, yes: they flowed, swung, danced, and sung, and Tell had a feel for that. You could see it when you read to him. Of course, you also had to let him feel the rhythm through your hand on his neck. Little Anselm was going to bury Tell under the Gravenstein tree, but Herr Brugger said he wasn’t allowed to. Dogs suspected of having rabies had to go to the rendering plant. And he tossed Tell into a tin tub and took him away with the help of Dusan, who lived with ten other Serbs and Poles in Galle Schmied’s barn.

  Johann spent two more days without eating and then got a letter from Josef, written in Ostrowiece, a town he said was south of Warsaw. He wrote that Little Anselm had sent him a sweet letter. Main contents: They had to have Tell shot. In the evening of the day he got the letter, Josef and a Polish musician he was quartered with—an excellent jazz trumpeter who played regularly on Radio Warsaw—had played the funeral march from Chopin’s Sonata in B flat minor, Josef on accordion. After hearing Anita’s mother play the accordion in the circus, Josef had knocked on the door of the Wieners’ trailer the following morning and asked if he could try playing it. Right off, he played “La Paloma.” Then he pestered Mother until he got an accordion of his own, and after a few months, he could play practically anything on it.

  When Johann arrived too late from Stralsund, even though he basically ran directly from the awards ceremony to the train station and rode straight through without stopping anywhere, Mother said that during his home leave, Josef had done almost nothing but play piano.

  “Scales,” said Johann.

  Mother nodded. Already during Holy Week, when Josef had come home on four days’ leave, they had the impression he had come only to practice scales, especially the ones in contrary motion with four or five flats that were beyond Johann’s skills. Josef just rippled them off like nothing, even though the tendon of the little finger on his right hand was injured. When they practiced giving the salute in the barracks yard, the little finger always caused some trouble at first. Every slave driver of a drill sergeant had to see for himself if he couldn’t force Josef’s finger into the prescribed position, and then had to admit that as soon as he let it go, it jumped right back off-sides. One of them had said that with a finger like that, Josef would never have gotten into the reserve officer training course in peacetime.

  From Palm Sunday to Good Friday, Josef suddenly wasn’t the nineteen-year-old brother of a seventeen-year-old anymore. Not the brother you had to argue with about every little thing, the brother who was always snatching something from you or forcing a job on you he didn’t want to do himself. Suddenly, Josef was confiding in him. Wanted to know everything from and about Johann right away. Except for Magda, for whom and to whom Johann wrote poems, he hadn’t admitted to a soul that writing poetry was his favorite thing to do. Now he could tell Josef. And Josef hadn’t laughed but had said seriously—not too seriously, but without the least hint of mockery— “Will you let me have a look at one some time?” Johann had been unable to answer. He probably turned red as a fire engine.

  Johann had walked Josef to the train to return to Böblingen. Johann didn’t like the cap that went with Josef’s black uniform. A gleaming, totally rigid visor—and black, to boot—beneath a top that was too stiff, too round, and too formal, despite being greenish. The cap of a mountain trooper that he would be wearing was more dashing, and above all, softer and more comfortable. But since Josef had a narrower head, his stiff, puffed-up cap was easier to accept. But a stiff, rounded cap like that on Johann’s round skull? Impossible! Sometimes when Johann looked in the mirror, he thought people might take him and his round head for hydrocephalic. Although for years he had been shoveling coal out of boxcars, shouldering sacks, and carrying them into cellars and attics, nothing strong-looking had developed on him except his arms and shoulders. When he and Dusan shoveled three hundred and twenty hundredweights of briquettes from a boxcar into Waibel’s wagon between seven in the morning and three thirty in the afternoon, and then the four o’clock freight dropped off a boxcar with three hundred and seventy hundredweights of hard coal and they had emptied that, too, by eleven thirty at night, and during that whole long day they’d only had two or three hours of help from Magda’s brother, Wolfgang, Johann totted up what they’d accomplished in his letter to Josef the following day, because he knew Josef would be impressed. Before: Johann the weakling. After: Johann who empties two boxcars between seven in the morning and eleven thirty at night. Johann had the feeling there was nothing he couldn’t do. And much faster than anyone would expect. He wanted to surprise them all, and Mother the most. Actually, only her. He wanted everyone to shout Bravo! But not for his own sake. For his sake, only for her sake.

  Sometimes there was so much going on inside him, Johann just couldn’t hold out on the ladder. He rushed down, tossed the half-full sack to Niklaus, and wanted to run off to his notebooks, his poems. But then he climbed back up the ladder after all. He had to finish. For her sake.

  His favorite apples to pick were the shiny, red, plumply oval Prince Ludwigs, each one more beautiful than the last. You could tell by looking how delicious this variety was. He didn’t need someone to set the ladder for him anymore. When he came home from the labor service and encountered the Princess for the first time in the passageway—she now washed dishes for the man who was leasing the restaurant—she’d looked him over, up and down, with her one good eye, and he looked her over with both of his. She had a magnificent new coiffure, dense and curly like Dumb August’s used to be.

  Then she said, “O pain, be gone.”


  And Johann said, “How goes it for Princess Adelheid?”

  Still taking stock of him, instead of answering, she said, “The expert is astonished, the layman rubs his eyes.” And then: If she didn’t act soon Johann would be too old for her. And she laughed. She never laughed in a genuine way, but always went Ha-ha-ha-ha. Never more than four has. Then: “Well, you great big man, shake a leg, romance calls, the Führer needs more soldiers.”

  Johann had replied in her tone of voice, “O pain, be gone.”

  As he set his foot on the stairs, she had said, “In your dreams, my friend.” The only thing still missing was: Schiller dead, and this character still walks the earth. Then she would have run through all her sayings. But he felt he would rather have stayed with her than gone upstairs. Maybe there were sayings he had forgotten. What did it matter what someone said, anyway? The way the Princess fired off her sayings! The way she stood there! On tiptoe at the end and waving her arms as if treading water. Her uneven eyes no longer bothered him. The mass of curls compensated for everything, they and her over-large mouth. Had he forgotten that the Princess had such a huge mouth? And since the beginning of the war, they had taken to calling her The Stuka. Everybody except Mother called her by the name of the dive bomber. O pain, be gone. But really, there were women everywhere you looked. The town was crawling with women, women dressed the way women here had never dressed before. All big city women, bombed-out refugees. Maybe they had sewn these clothes themselves, trying to look like Hilde Krahl, Hansi Knoteck, Ilse Werner, Brigitte Horney, or Marika Rökk. Fantastic collars and bodices, hemlines and cuffs. And every one with two to four children in tow.