A Gushing Fountain

by Martin Walser

  When Wolfgang found out that Johann had to unload and deliver coal at the end of every school day, he started to help out, and with an enthusiasm that made working with coal into a sport. Since boxcars were in short supply now, they had to unload them in half a day. It used to be that you had to pay demurrage only on time over twenty-four hours. Now it was after eight hours, and the penalty was three times as much. So he had to skip school. What they were doing was called important for the war effort. Since Josef had enlisted and Johann had turned fifteen, he had a driver’s license and was allowed to drive the new Tempo three-wheeler. With Wolfgang standing behind him on the cargo bed and maintaining their balance by leaning left or right, they could take the curves fast, despite the Tempo’s instability—even if only to scare people, or at least amaze them. Wolfgang was a born athlete with black hair like the first Wolfgang, but curly, not straight. After unloading coal, they hosed each other off in the laundry room. Johann avoided looking at what Adolf would call Wolfgang’s manhood. Johann forced himself not to look. He would never have been able drop little innocent, unobtrusive hints to wangle it so that he and Wolfgang both ended up in the train station privy, a little annex whose doorless entrance was screened from the eyes of passersby by a huge wall of arbor vitae. He had been able to maneuver Adolf in there without him realizing right away what Johann was up to. Then, as they stood facing the glistening black, tarred wall of the urinal that smelled more of tar than of urine, Johann had tried to seduce Adolf into something more than urinating—peeing—together. And sometimes he succeeded. But Johann had the feeling that Adolf despised him when he wanted to fiddle with Adolf’s manhood. But whenever Johann managed to steer Adolf behind the arbor vitae hedge and in front of the tarred wall, he never did as much as he’d planned on doing. Johann was drawn to the gigantic bulge of the arbor vitae in front of the doorless entrance. Alone or with others, he called it the confessional. The arbor vitae foliage was so dense that neither the trunks nor the branches were visible. When you reached your arm into the hedge, you felt fragrant, soft greenness. Wasn’t that its hair? But it was neither possible nor desirable to get Wolfgang behind the hedge. Wolfgang was a year older. He shaved. He was Magda’s brother. And just in general. Girls were preferable now. Johann got that without really understanding it. Of all the boys and girls, only the girls were left, even though up to now, he had gotten less from them than from the boys. Once he had written four lines that he would never show to Magda:

  I wonder what you’re thinking of,

  what gives your soul its shape.

  What image, when you think of love,

  are you—the vine, or grape?

  What Berni said about Frau Woschischek didn’t turn him on, or what he had seen of Frau Helling, either. All he felt was an investigative interest. But the Princess—yes, the Princess was another matter. The Princess was a storm, a force of nature. The Stuka was a good name for her. And yet, a poem for the Princess? He couldn’t picture it. What about Lucile? She had never given a second thought to who was on the other side, rustling the bedclothes, noisily turning over, soulfully humming, singing, whistling. There was no audible response from her side to which one could respond in turn. Even her look could not be translated into the German of a seventeen-year-old. Really green eyes beneath really red hair and a skin that was nothing but white. Whatever happened, Lucile puckered her lips and raised her eyebrows. Even when the soldiers billeted in the gymnasium drank too much on New Year’s Eve and stormed the kitchen wanting to meet the French cook who made the best antipasto and the best deviled eggs, Lucile scrambled onto the stovetop (gone cold by that time), puckered her lips, and fended off the soldiers with a wooden spoon until she had them kneeling on the kitchen floor and singing “Komm zurück” while she used the spoon as a baton. Perhaps women were simply unattainable. It was not at all certain that women were in the least interested in what most interested Johann. Sure, if you paid for it, see Frau Woschischek, Frau Helling, or the bordello women the soldiers home on leave talked about at the regulars’ table. Those women could pick up a five-mark coin from the table with their lower set of lips. Or in Paris they could, anyway.

  He couldn’t talk to Magda about anything like that. Magda sat at the piano or knelt in the church pew or walked beside Johann up the Moosweg, and nothing was as certain as that she was not thinking about what—if he didn’t watch out—he was thinking about all the time. Unchastity, it was called in the confessional, and it always spoiled his complete contrition and thus absolution and thus communion. He had gotten used to opening his mouth to receive the Host without being in a blessed state of grace. For which he would have to pay the bill later in the eternity toward which one actually lived one’s life. Mother had made it crystal clear how stupid it was to let deadly sins in this short life here on earth spoil your chance for eternal life. Above all, they wouldn’t see each other on the other side. He wouldn’t be there. His mother would be waiting in vain for him in heaven. And then she would know the truth about him. Of all the people in the world, she was the last one he could have told what he was thinking about all the time. For a while, he had hoped to draw Adolf into the mood of unchastity that preoccupied him day and night. Last year in November, he had made one last attempt to share the most important thing with Adolf, and it had ended in farce. The army physical had brought all his schoolmates together again. For Johann, the day of the physical was a day of unprecedented anxiety. Getting undressed and being naked with Adolf, Ludwig, Helmut One and Helmut Two, with Berni, Guido, and Paul! Johann knew his IAWIA would not stay still when he caught sight of the others’ significant appendages. He couldn’t even think about their members without his starting to swell, rise, and stick out idiotically. And the more forbidden it was, the faster his member rose. And then, to walk into the next room and up to the different tables—medical commission, army doctor, medic, clerk, and so on. Johann had got across the finish line twice that morning to make himself more relaxed. And once there, he had looked at the ceiling more than at the others and forced himself to conjure up scenes that would distract him, like he and Lichtensteiger’s Helmut getting caught on an ice floe late last January and drifting off into the fog; they lost track of where the shore was, and if the breeze hadn’t picked up and blown away the fog, they probably would have frozen to death on the floe, which was maybe four yards square. With such scenes and a kind of intense internal detachment, he managed to keep his member from rising. But then they went out drinking. Once examined and declared fit for active duty, you were allowed to drink as much as you wanted. Fit for active duty—that was cause for celebration. He had managed to take a giggling Adolf, so drunk he was almost incapable of walking or talking, home with him. Since Josef had been conscripted, Johann slept alone in Room 9. But Adolf had been so smashed he couldn’t even get himself undressed. He had collapsed onto Josef’s bed and immediately started snoring. Then he threw up and Johann had to clean up him and the bed. It wasn’t a great night, his last night with Adolf. Fit for active duty, he thought, as he mopped up Adolf’s puke with a wet towel and crept along the dark hall to the bathroom carrying the puke he had gathered, fearing every moment that the creaking floorboard no creeping could avoid would wake up his mother and she would call out: Johann, what are you doing? Nothing, he would answer. She would find out soon enough that Adolf had puked all over the bed. Adolf had volunteered for flak duty. Johann hadn’t dared to ask him why. Only cowards and shirkers volunteered as anti-aircraft gunners. If you volunteered for the flak, it was like admitting you didn’t want to be sent to the front, that others could go to the front instead. If Johann hadn’t wanted to be sent to the front, the last thing he would do would be to admit it by volunteering for flak duty. The others get sent out to the front, and you sit on your behind in some fortification and fire into the air! How could Adolf do such a thing? And not say a word about it. He obviously didn’t care what Johann thought.

  The following morning, a telephone call from Geiselharz crowde
d out every other thought. The great-uncle they called Cousin had been arrested. From that point on, Mother could only refer to him as poor, poor Anselm. The nine-year-old who still was most often to be found holding her hand knew that it wasn’t him she meant when she said poor Anselm. The cousin they all owed so much to—arrested, in jail in Rottenburg. The last thing Johann had gotten from the great-uncle they called Cousin was a shiny, light-colored, close-fitting double-breasted suit, so bright and well-fitting that—besides Johann—only Johannes Heesters could wear such a suit when he sang to a woman in one of his films. On Johann’s sixteenth birthday—Josef was already in the tank corps—Johann was allowed to choose a suit at Bredl’s in Wangen. He modeled every suit he tried on for Cousin Anselm, who sat and watched with his knees wide apart. Although no one said why the Geiselharz Anselm had been arrested, it gradually was revealed to Johann that the cousin was supposed to have touched or pressured or abused the workers in his Alpine Bee cheese factory. When people mentioned the cousin now, they called him by a section of a statute. They said he was a hundred-seventy-fiver. When men said it, they did so contemptuously. Women seemed to pity him. “What a disaster,” said Mother. “Poor, poor Anselm.” If Mother had married Otmar Räuchle, the worker her uncle had picked out for her, he would have left her the Alpine Bee together with the shiny black piano; red upholstered chairs; a glass-fronted bookcase that contained a multivolume history of Switzerland, Meyers Konversationslexikon in twenty-four half-leather gilt-edged volumes, and several shelves of novels; and a grandfather clock, which against all expectation would again and again rouse itself from what seemed like slumber and manage to strike the hour. Mother had kept house for her uncle for a few years. Otmar Räuchle, Cousin Anselm’s youngest worker, would smuggle flowers into her room as soon as they started blooming. He picked them at 5:30 a.m. on his way from Amtzell, where he lived, to Geiselharz. Every time he had to make a detour on account of those flowers, since he couldn’t approach the cheese factory from the road in front with a bouquet in his hand. The other workers and the farmers, already busy delivering their milk by cart, would have laughed at him. So every day, he made a big circle around the town and arrived at Cousin Anselm’s house from the meadow behind it, and then somehow got into the house and up to Augusta’s room unseen. Every time, the vase Mother always moved from the night stand to the table was back on her night stand and bursting with freshly picked flowers. Otmar never said anything, but he always stuck one flower in his button hole. If a cuckoo flower smiled from the button hole of his cheese maker’s smock, it meant that Augusta would find a bright bouquet of cuckoo flowers on her night stand.

  She had nothing against Otmar, but she was receiving letters from Wasserburg and answering every one. She always gave herself time, however. Nothing would have pleased her more than to answer each letter at once, but she demanded of herself that at least a week should go by between the day a letter arrived and the day it was answered. That was more proper, she thought. At least once a day, she would look at the latest letter. Before re-reading it, she looked at it, like a picture. The violet ink. The fancy letters, written with a nib that was very fine but could also become quite heavy and broad. Dear Augusta! He was the only person who didn’t shorten her name—the first person since the priest, who also called her Augusta. The first time the Wasserburg letter-writer had come to Kümmertsweiler to buy apples, Augusta’s mother had invited him to stay for tea. Typical Mother’s mother. Mother’s father would never have simply invited someone to stay for tea. But Mother’s mother was born a Messmer, and they had been livestock dealers as long as anyone could remember; compared to Unsicherer’s farm, the Messmer property in Hemigkofen was an estate. Anna Messmer was the first woman to bring a horse with her when she married an Unsicherer. Her predecessor, Augusta’s grandmother, came from Bruggach but didn’t seem to have a very permanent address. Her trousseau must have consisted mainly of her raven-black hair, eyes shaped like plum pits, and skin that was not that white. Her name, Emritz, suggested she wasn’t from around there. It was astonishing that, despite this grandmother, as a child Augusta was said to have had an uncontrollable fear of Gypsies. If Johann bent down every night before going to sleep and looked to see if a Gypsy or some other sinister being was under his bed, he had learned it from his mother, adopted and retained it even though Josef always laughed at him as long as they shared a room. Who did he think was going to come up to the second floor and get under his bed? Here in Wasserburg! Josef was obviously less fearful than Johann and Mother. Mother probably had not inherited her fear that terrible things could happen any moment from her mother, that coddled and well-provided Messmer daughter from Hemigkofen, but from her father, who may have gotten it from his mother, the black-haired Theres Emritz with the unusually shaped eyes. That meant that all through her childhood and youth, Augusta would have bent down to look under the bed—perhaps, in the end, to discover some dangerous relative of hers. They say the well-endowed livestock dealer’s daughter who came up to Kümmertsweiler from Hemigkofen with that magnificent chestnut had to battle it out with her black-haired mother-in-law, whose oldest son, Thaddäus, the Messmer girl had stolen from her by marrying him. Fritz, the horse she brought with her, at first couldn’t stand it in Unsicherer’s stall and misbehaved so much that the cows next to his stall basically stopped giving milk. In the morning his mane and tail were always half tangled. The veterinarian and the priest did what they could, and his nocturnal fits became less frequent, but he still got one now and then. It was a battle. They said that only once the black-haired, plum-pit-eyed mother-in-law was dead—which she was, after only three years—did his restless fits stop entirely. And his mane and tail stayed untangled from then on. But from then on, too, Fritz the chestnut could not step over water, not even a puddle. Either he couldn’t stand seeing his reflection, or water in general terrified him. In the rain, you could hardly get him to walk calmly. In a thunderstorm, he sought refuge among the cattle in the pasture. Thaddäus decided to sell him. A dealer from Rorschach seized the opportunity and took Fritz with him, intending to get him up the gangway and on board the train ferry in Lindau, which transported freight to Switzerland. But the chestnut noticed that the gangway ran over water, got excited, reared up and jumped the railing, plunged into the water, and drowned. He’d been paid for. People said he’d always shied from water because he had a premonition of how he would end. Messmer’s daughter ran into her bedroom when she heard the news. The following day she gave the priest in Gattnau money to read three Masses for her mother-in-law. Then gradually, the born Messmer became the mistress of her own house, and her Thaddäus, who was shorter than she was, let her have her way. With what he made from selling Fritz, he was able to buy a very well-behaved brown that could find its own way home to Kümmertsweiler whenever Thaddäus delivered wine or hops in Tettnang, drank one glass too many, and nodded off on the box. The oak winepress was already housed at the Unsicherer farm, and now the village snow plow was also entrusted to them. And then, Thaddäus became a member of the borough council and served for thirty-five years. He washed himself every morning outside at the pump, putting the back of his neck under the stream of cold water first, which kept him from getting a toothache all his life. His wife, the Messmer daughter, liked to tell that story. She didn’t talk much, but more than her husband, Thaddäus. He worked like it was what he was put on the earth to do and went into the Eckes forest every morning, with or without a gun. The fruit dealer’s son from Wasserburg had gotten himself invited to tea and then for a while, he pedaled over three ridges and across two streams every Saturday, always leaned his bicycle against the garden fence on the side where the hollyhocks were blooming, took the clips off his pant legs, and asked for Augusta. He never shortened her name, and that fact alone must have pleased her mother, the born Messmer, who put some stock in appearances. But then suddenly, he stopped coming. When Augusta came home on Saturday afternoons, the first thing she did was go down to Gattnau and tell the priest—w
ho said her full name, just like the fruit dealer’s son from Wasserburg—what she considered to have been her sins. Then she walked, or rather ran, back up to Kümmertsweiler, always hoping the bicycle would be leaning against the fence on the side with the hollyhocks, the only bicycle under whose saddle there was a yellow tin tag attached to the frame that said EFFENDI in red letters. From pure joy that the owner of the bicycle was there, she always forgot to ask what that meant. But when the hollyhock side of the garden fence remained without the bicycle of the fruit dealer and restaurateur on seven Saturdays within the space of three months, she had said through the dark grille of the confessional that she had decided to enter a convent. As she left the confessional, she will have had the feeling that the priest was watching her through the gap in the curtains. She must have felt more important than ever before. I want to enter a convent, she had said. As she knelt down to confess, she had certainly not intended to say that. But suddenly, in the midst of detailing her meager sins, it occurred to her: If I go home and the bicycle is not leaning against the fence by the hollyhocks, I’m going to enter a convent. She didn’t want to enter a convent. But she also didn’t want to keep running around in the world senselessly if that bicycle was not going to be leaning against the fence when she got home. She was twenty-two. Had been keeping house for seven years. Had learned to cook in Liebenau and in The Bear in Tettnang. And her father’s brother, Uncle Anselm, wanted to marry her to Otmar Räuchle, his favorite cheese maker from Amtzell. In the pubs where her uncle always stood a round for everyone, if someone asked him why he had never gotten married himself, he would scratch the back of his right hand with his left, give a generous smile—his broad face really seemed to cradle the smile—and then say, “I’m much too impatient for that.”