A Gushing Fountain

by Martin Walser

  Beneath the trees that Johann had to have picked by All Saints’ Day, because otherwise Mother would be embarrassed to face her fellow churchgoers, Frau Woschischek’s children waited for drops. Bombed out in the Ruhr region, living in the annex that used to be a stall—the horse stall that Mother had rented to Herr Mehltreter for the production of floor wax. Now bombed-out people had priority over floor wax. Frau Woschischek and her three children were housed in the right half of the ground-floor annex. The left half was still a pigpen where a mother sow was nursing nineteen piglets at the moment. There had been twenty-four to begin with, but she had already smothered five of them. Johann and Niklaus took turns standing watch all night and moving the piglets, but if you nodded off, another would get caught under its enormous mother. They hoped to get twelve or fifteen of the strongest through the ordeal. Once her children were asleep, Frau Woschischek received visitors next door and accepted money for it. Master craftsmen, journeymen, apprentices, vacationers, farmers, hired hands, and even schoolboys sneaked to her door after dark. The barred windows, wider than they were tall, were hung with red curtains. But the wall between stall and stall was thin, and when Johann stood watch by the mother sow at night, despite the radio that was constantly on, he could still overhear sounds and scraps of conversation that kept him awake. He felt like an explorer on an unknown continent. When Herr Woschischek came home from the Russian front on two weeks’ leave, Frau Woschischek, by her own account, was the happiest woman in the world. Herr Woschischek was no taller than the really short Frau Woschischek, and his glasses were so thick you couldn’t imagine him being able to see through them at all. And in Russia, no less. Lucile knew only a few words of German, but with gestures she could characterize or imitate everyone who came into the kitchen. Whenever Frau Woschischek passed through, Lucile would make the fingers of her small, white left hand into a tube and bore into it with her right index finger. Lucile’s hair was even redder than Mina’s—Mina who had long since become Alfred’s wife. Alfred had enlisted early on, and Mina ran their farm in Höhenreute. Lucile’s skin was also much paler than Mina’s. It was essentially white, Lucile’s skin, Snow White white. And from Paris. Twenty-three and divorced. Everyone who mentioned Lucile said the same things: Paris, twenty-three, divorced. Ever since Lucile had been running the kitchen, the Princess had a new saying: Paris is shit, London is bigger. She now used this sentence to express her disapproval of anything: Paris is shit, London is bigger. Lucile was probably the only person who never understood the saying, although it was aimed at her. Lucile now cooked for the man to whom Mother had leased the restaurant for as long as Johann was in Fürstenfeldbruck as a labor service man and composer of daily sayings. The lessee had had two hotels in Friedrichshafen destroyed by bombs in a single night in April. Now that he was back from the labor service, Johann occupied Rooms 8 and 9 along with his mother. Room 8 had been made into two rooms by the addition of a wooden partition. Lucile slept in the smaller of the two. In the other there was now a small stove, a sofa, and a table, and the delicately carved cherry chest of drawers from Grandfather. Johann slept on the sofa. Mother and Anselm slept in Room 9. Now Johann was no longer able to go to the kitchen and pretend to be reading on his bench in order to listen to how the men pestered Lucile. But at night, when it wasn’t his turn in the pig pen, he lay next to the partition and listened to all of Lucile’s noises. He heard her turning over in bed. And he heard her when she hummed or sang “Komm zurück” to herself. He liked to imagine that she knew he was listening, that she only hummed and sang because he was listening. He hummed “O sole mio.” He’d already been a hit with his tenor solo of “O sole mio.” But Lucile didn’t react, not even to an “O sole mio” that literally melted from its own passion. So close to Lucile and yet separated by the partition, he couldn’t fall asleep. He had to fiddle with his still nameless—and thus still known as—IAWIA until he found relief. When he did, he imagined he was crossing a finish line like the sprinters in the newsreels, hurling their entire being into the last tenth of a second as if trying to beat even themselves. Across the line, across the line, across the line.

  On the other hand, he was already going with Magda, the sister of Wolfgang number two. Also from the Ruhr, but from a completely different family. Being from the Ruhr district obviously had no special significance. Frau Woschischek and all her children looked as if they didn’t even know enough to wash themselves every day, so when they did get washed for a change, one was astonished. My respects, Herr Schlegel the builder would have exclaimed had he still been alive.

  But Magda and Wolfgang were the most beautiful apparitions imaginable. When they came to the train together each morning, Johann couldn’t decide which one he liked looking at more. He wrote poems, however, only for Magda. Not a day went by that he didn’t write her a poem, but he gave her only every tenth poem at most. He had a clear sense that it would be to his disadvantage to hand over everything he had written every day. Sometimes, sitting on the edge of his bed and thinking of Magda, he simply could not stop before he’d written five or even six poems into the oilcloth-bound notebook spread on his knees. He felt many things when he was with Magda, things he had to respond to, things he needed to celebrate in order to feel them entirely. His tone was always dictated by whichever poet he happened to be reading at the moment. He read nothing but poetry now. The stuff in the newspaper: unreadable. Novels: unreadable. Only poems. Now he selected only the poetry books from the books Father had left. During home guard flak training, during labor service training, he read nothing but poetry and wrote more poems than he read. For each poem he read, there were two if not three he wrote. Even as he broke the stems of Prince Ludwig apples beneath the thin, ethereal hum of silver bombers in the sky, there was no stopping the poem in him. Faster than was good for that special, delicate, red-bellied variety, he would sometimes clamber down the ladder, swing the sack off his shoulder to Niklaus so that the old man complained that he wasn’t taking proper care of the apples. Then he raced up the back stairs into the house and up to the second floor, grabbed the latest notebook and his fountain pen out of the drawer of Grandfather’s chest (which was so beautiful it made everything else in the partitioned room look ugly), and wrote down his newest poem so not a word was lost and every word was in its proper place. But he wrote more slowly than he had run, his hand moving in exalted solemnity. Poems were solemn affairs, one’s own included. Then there it stood, in black and white, in letters not quite so rounded and arched as his father’s, but more like Father’s looping curves than like Mother’s splintery and rather crushed individual letters. Mother’s handwriting had become nothing but individual letters; each one looked crumbled, like a Gothic ruin. Mother could not have forged a signature now as she once had. When he finished writing down a poem (they all ended with a solemn flourish), Johann always returned to the orchard much slower than he had left it and climbed back up the ladder. As he started to bag the red, oval apples again, the poem he had just written formed on his lips. Very quietly, of course, but repeated several times, like a litany.

  These are no earthly pains

  Burning through my veins.

  Your body pressing into mine,

  We leave the spirit far behind.

  Destroying, blessing flows the fire,

  An ultimatum to desire,

  Cauterizing every sadness

  And freeing us to boundless madness.

  Schiller and Magda felt equally close to him as he wrote, Schiller maybe even closer than Magda.

  Unless the world bears your sign,

  ennobled by your worthiness,

  And beauty apes your every line,

  Then life itself is meaningless

  And I will live no longer.

  Of course he had written poetry before, but one fine morning there was Magda, coming along the line of fir trees from the direction of the Schäggs’ house. As soon as he saw her, he knew she was the one he would write for. When all the others were crowding onto
the train they took to school, she still stood there as if she didn’t even want to go. She was solemn, serious. Had he ever been able to call someone fine before? Or even noble? Her hair seemed to shape itself on its own into an oval that framed her face, but softly, not severely. And at the back of her neck the oval came together in a pigtail that was no ordinary pigtail but a Mozart pigtail. And from her dark brown velvet dress gleamed gold embroidery. She emanated a gravity that required one to convey one’s thoughts to her only in poems. That’s how Johann felt. At last! At last he had an addressee. The hope of being understood was exciting. He had not had a girlfriend since he started going to school in Lindau. He couldn’t imagine getting to know any girls in Lindau. Besides, he wasn’t a leader in the Jungvolk or the Hitlerjugend. They had it easier. Last summer he had just dropped his hook into the water off the steamship landing when the daughter of the family who owned the Crown and the daughter of the doctor came down to the dock. They both went to school in Lindau, too. When he saw them approaching, Johann pulled his line back out of the water and quickly tore the worm off the hook. At that moment, the two girls passed close behind him without stopping. They didn’t say, “Hello, Johann,” to him, either, as would have been natural since they went back and forth to school in the same train every day. They were completely fixated on the steamer that had just arrived and was tying up at the dock. Now Johann could see that the girls were meeting two Jungvolk leaders from Lindau. They were standing on deck, wearing earthen-colored capes over their dark uniforms, and each raised an arm in greeting. It looked good, the way the two boys in uniform raised their hands above their caps. The hands paused in the air. The two girls waved excitedly. Then the uniformed boys were on the dock, hands were shaken, and they headed toward shore. Johann had tossed his line back in the water without a worm just in time and pretended to be concentrating on his cork, which was bobbing wildly as if God only knows how big a fish was nibbling at his bait. Johann knew, of course, that it was only the waves and eddies from the boat that had landed and was now pushing off again that made the cork dance around, but he needed a distraction. He didn’t look at them until they had gone past, but he heard them pass behind him. The boys from Lindau were wearing the flared pants they called breeches and the jackboots that went with them, and they thundered across the planks of the dock with the two girls hovering beside them. Johann became aware of the fact that he was barefoot. But it was the middle of summer, wasn’t it? A beautiful day, and no muster in the village that he knew of. The two Jungvolk leaders from Lindau—he recognized them; they were two classes ahead of him in school, Uhlmann and Dummler were their names—had come over by boat in their uniforms and boots and capes just to visit these two girls. As they were passing behind Johann, one of the girls said, “A boy with glasses gets no lasses.” He hadn’t just imagined it, he’d heard her. And he knew which of the two had said the sentence that could only have been meant for him, the boy with glasses. He pulled out his line for good and walked home on the Moosweg, hanging his head as though looking for something he had lost, because here he had the least chance of running into anyone. When he got home, he wrote on a new page of his oilcloth notebook the necessary poem.

  You groan for light in crabbed times,

  And empty dreams in blaring colors,

  Unforgiven victims, o my rhymes,

  Of dark designs by hateful others.

  But when Frau Woschischek appeared at the stall door to call her children, or when Frau Helling wobbled by in her high heels, there was a pause in his poetizing. Frau Helling lived in the basement of the house next door, where Frau Fürst and her children used to live. Frau Helling was from Berlin. Her husband was a war photographer, but only of the war in the air. He often landed in Friedrichshafen and was able to visit his wife. A bald-headed man with a permanent smirk, Herr Helling smoked as much as he drank, and even so, smoked and drank much less than his wife, the most made-up woman Wasserburg had ever seen. Either he was in the restaurant, or she was. If he was there, it meant she had a visitor, just like Frau Woschischek. But Frau Helling had been a dancer. She wasn’t short and big-hipped like Frau Woschischek. She had no truck with children. On the other hand, the most made-up woman in the world also walked on the highest high heels in the world. Everyone thought it was a daily miracle she could walk at all in shoes like that.

  Although Herr and Frau Helling never came into the restaurant together, both of them, independent of each other, stood at the exact same spot at front of the bar. Neither one ever sat down. They stood, and for as long as they stood, they drank—beer and schnapps. And in neither case could one have told by the clothes they wore whether it was a Sunday or a weekday. In general, it was a distinguishing characteristic of the evacuees and out-of-towners that the better-situated among them wore their Sunday best even on weekdays, while the poorer wore their work clothes even on Sundays. Of course, the regulars talked about what it was like with Frau Helling, but never when Herr Helling was present. While Herr Helling drank his beer and schnapps, all he talked about was his wife. He expressed his admiration, sang her praises, and described what a wonderful artiste she had been in Berlin before falling victim—on account of the war—to alcohol. Despite all he had heard, Johann could not have said for certain if Frau Helling had more contempt for the men who came to visit her, or vice versa. The men at the regulars’ table praised Frau Helling just as much as they despised her. Without praising her, they couldn’t have despised her, and without despising her, they couldn’t have praised her. Frau Helling was able to despise her clientele without feeling any need to praise them. She named no names, but from her over-painted lips there issued nothing but scorn. And the regulars’ table laughed about it. Semper’s Fritz shouted, “She sure gives it to us.” For some reason unknown to Johann, Frau Helling and her clientele had the need to outdo each other in contempt, which made for the accumulation of an extraordinary contempt-potential. But that accumulation was nothing compared to the contempt that filled Herr Helling when he spoke about his wife’s clients—without naming names, of course—and his wife. He took no offense. He expressed next to nothing. But he despised. You could see it. His mouth was one straight, lipless line that twitched a little when Herr Helling was despising. That sufficed.

  Johann heard everything, registered everything, but didn’t know why or what for. He sensed, however, that it had something to do with research. It had nothing to do with poetry. Only Magda had to do with poetry, just as poetry had only to do with Magda.

  Every Sunday after church, he ran home as soon as he thought he had stood at the grave long enough to be noticed by the people at the neighboring graves. He ran into the partitioned Room 8 to fetch from the drawer the poems he had composed during the preceding week and had made fair copies of on Saturday night, in order to take them to Magda.

  If a boy went with a girl, people in the village said he was flirting her. When the Princess, who apparently only washed dishes but actually kept track of everything, asked Johann once in the passageway if he was still flirting that girl out there— “You know the one I mean, over toward Nonnenhorn”—he had twirled his finger at his temple in a gesture cruder than he was and made the most horrid face he could. The Princess called after him, “I’m just saying, every broom finds its handle. Ha-ha-ha-ha.” When the topic was girls and women, there were some words Johann simply could not stand. If somebody said he was going with Magda, he made no comment. He would not put it that way. But he wouldn’t allow it to be called flirting. He didn’t know what to call it himself. That’s why he wrote poems. And delivered them. Magda gave no indication of whether she read his poems or not, whether she liked them or not. Johann was rather happy about her reticence. In moments when he was not writing poems, he could imagine that for someone who didn’t think poetry was the most important thing in the world, it could be embarrassing to be addressed like this:

  Whip up action in the tangled

  bodies of your transient team.

  Drive the
m on with urgent cry

  Toward your peaks ablaze with evening.

  It was just conceivable to him that there was nothing Magda could say about his poems. What he could not conceive of was not to bring his poems to her, to say nothing of not writing any more.

  By the time Johann had fetched his poems from home, Magda—who of course had also been in church and had been observed by Johann—was always sitting at the piano. Under the pretext of saying hello to her mother, he first assured himself that she was busy in the kitchen. Then he entered the living room as silently as possible and laid the week’s poems on the pile of music on the piano, stood behind Magda, and touched her hair, first with his hands and then with his mouth. He moved on to her neck. With his hands. And only once: under her collar with one of his hands, which slid forward and down her neck in the direction of her breast. Magda stopped playing at once. That startled Johann, he snatched back his hand, and Magda resumed her playing. Her mother called from the kitchen asking if Johann wanted to stay for dinner. No, thank you. On the stairs, he met Wolfgang Two coming up. Wolfgang had started going with the daughter from the Crown. She wasn’t from here, either, and was even a Lutheran.

  “Hey, brother-in-law,” said Wolfgang, and went back downstairs with Johann, sat down on the bench that encircled a thick tree trunk, and patted the bench beside him. Johann sat down, too. Then they talked. Wolfgang set the tone. He was going to study medicine, and he already liked to express himself diagnostically. What Johann was feeling and why he felt what he felt—Wolfgang could explain it all exactly, preferably using Latin expressions. For a while they would sit on the bench, then they would head into the village until they reached Johann’s house, then turn around and walk back out to Wolfgang’s house and then back in again, just like he used to do with Adolf. Since Wolfgang was going to school in Lindau, too, he had replaced Adolf. They were about to turn around for the third or fourth time when Wolfgang’s mother called down from the balcony that his dinner was getting completely cold. If she hadn’t, they would have walked back and forth forever