In the evenings, they wrote to him. Either Mother wrote, or Little Anselm wrote, or Johann. Little Anselm wrote that Josef should bring him home a piece of shrapnel. Mother wrote: If only the war was over. Johann wrote: I hope I get called up soon.
“Whadda’ya say, young man?” called Frau Woschischek to Johann. When she called up into the tree like that, Johann knew even before looking down that she would be standing there with her legs apart, fists on her hips, and lower lip sticking out. And the most suggestive expression Johann had ever encountered. Frau Helling always looked down her nose at you, as if you were offending her even before you opened your mouth. Johann had to come down anyway to empty the sack and reposition the ladder. He had picked the Prince Ludwig tree clean. Now came—always the last—the Welschisner tree. This variety ripened the slowest. Johann made it abundantly clear by the way he climbed down that he was doing so because his sack was over-full and not because Frau Woschischek had called to him. He handed the sack over so Niklaus could empty them into the crates unbruised.
Frau Woschischek said, “May I?”
“Be my guest,” Johann replied obligingly.
“Turn about’s fair play,” she said, picked out a perfect Prince Ludwig, and took an enormous bite. While she chewed, she explained what she meant: this time Eva was eating the apple and not Adam.
Johann said, “Come on,” to Niklaus. Niklaus only had to help him reposition the ladder when he needed someone to brace against the ends of the stringers. It felt good to have Frau Woschischek watching as he laid down the big ladder and then set it up again. But he was also glad to be standing on the ladder again, breaking off one green Welschisner after another and sliding them into the capacious sack.
In addition to what Johann had already observed himself, Berni had told him things about Frau Woschischek that fired his imagination. Berni said Frau Woschischek walked back and forth in front of you in nothing but underwear and high heels, staring at you the whole time. With burning eyes, was how Berni put it. She pressed her index finger to her lips to indicate that everything had to be done quietly on account of the children sleeping behind the curtain. Her underwear was black. Whether Johann believed it or not, Frau Woschischek’s underwear was black. And how fast were you back outside again? In the blink of an eye, that’s how fast. In the blink of an eye she saw to it that you squirted, and that was that. That’s how it was everywhere. Cost you five marks, damned expensive. But pretty cheap, on the other hand.
If Frau Woschischek and all her brats had been lodged in Berni’s house, Johann would have paid her a visit, too. Maybe. But maybe not. But maybe so. But maybe not after all. It must mean something that when he thought about Frau Woschischek—and he thought about her more than he liked—not a single line of poetry occurred to him. He couldn’t think of Magda at all without words starting to stir inside him, form lines, and gather into the strophes of a poem. That time in Holy Week when Josef had said he would like to have a look at one sometime had become for Johann the best moment of all between him and Josef. It was a Monday, early afternoon; it had snowed again. He’d had to weigh two wagonloads of straw. He swept and tared the scale, and the farmers drove on and off; Johann, the seasoned scale operator, expertly cranking the scale bed up and then letting it ratchet back down. The farmers hardly glanced at their scale receipts anyway, since Josef, home on leave, was standing there beside him. And since Josef had said he would like to have a look at one sometime, Johann wrote to his brother, who was meanwhile back in barracks in Böblingen, that he, Johann, was going to enter the regional literary competition in the drama category. He didn’t dare enter anything in the poetry category. Except for Magda, not a soul had seen his poems. He couldn’t imagine showing those poems to anyone they weren’t addressed to. And they were addressed to Magda. To her, or to all mankind. He would have shown them to all mankind, but not to just any human being. But he would to Josef. Probably he would. The fact that Josef would have liked to read one—no, not read, would like to see one—made him feel closer to Josef. He could have caressed him. Some day he would let Josef see a poem. But not yet. Except for Magda, there was no one he could permit to see his poems. For now: the drama category. A five-act play in a single week. A week in May, however. In Fürstenfeldbruck with the labor service, the notice arrived: first prize for The City in Distress. Over to Augsburg on a Sunday morning, to the biggest hall he had ever seen in his life. A certificate in Gothic script and a book on General Dietl’s conquest of Narvik. A war book, not his kind of reading material. He didn’t tell Mother about it. Not yet, he thought. His play was set in the fifteenth century. In his next letter, he had to describe for Josef the ceremony in the big hall in Augsburg. He wanted Josef to hear how much he envied the winner in the poetry category. He had to stare and stare and stare at him. The poetry winner put in an appearance, stood on the stage, and accepted his certificate and his book as if he weren’t really present. A prominent, rounded forehead, enviably long hair, and in civvies—just imagine, the poetry category, the only civilian in the entire hall, and Johann of course wearing his dreadful labor service getup, jackboots from the Thirty Years War, but him, the poetry winner, in a flecked gray knickerbocker suit as aristocratic as Baron von Lützow’s and a dark green bow tie, probably silk, dark green, sensational, but his expression was the most outrageous thing: pure detachment. Dreamer, Johann had thought, and wrote that to his brother. Actually, it was the way he himself would like to be. Afterwards, no one could claim to have been noticed by the winner in the poetry category. He probably lived among his words. Where Johann would have liked to live, too. Just the fact alone of Frau Woschischek’s eternal chatter from the ground below was enough to rule that out. She talked like an open spigot. Maybe she didn’t even care if anyone listened to her. But Johann felt constrained to look down every once in a while. Niklaus wasn’t listening to her, that was for sure. He looked straight ahead. Frau Woschischek was complaining about an army jackass who was permanently two sheets to the wind, a noncom billeted with the soldiers in the gymnasium. This midget pestered her day and night. She said it in a way that sounded like Johann should help her. Johann called down to her that he would come tonight and throw him out. That’s what he planned to do. He was familiar with the stocky midget with the crooked nose. Two nights ago he had been down in the restaurant raising a ruckus. Johann had gone downstairs, and, for the second time since they had leased the business, sat down like a customer at the regulars’ table. He ordered a glass of apple juice from Luise and asked her to ignore Semper’s Fritz, who was sitting at the table in his private’s uniform and shouted to Luise, “A half-liter for Johann on Semper’s Fritz!” Semper’s Fritz spent the better part of his leave at the regulars’ table. The little noncom with the crooked nose was parading back and forth, stopping at every table where someone was sitting and shouting that since he was in for it in the next big push, off to Russia, that is—because of that, he could have any woman, no use playing hard to get, he’d lay ’em before they could let out a peep. His orders were already on the way, he’d be in the next dust-up, off to Russia, that is, and not coming back, so now, before he got whacked for good out there, he was allowed to have any woman, otherwise to hell with a hero’s death. . . . The only person who reacted to this noisy disturbance with more than an amused or anxious glance was Herr Seehahn. He stood up from the table against the wall where he always sat by himself, raised his right hand in the German Greeting, and sat down again. But Johann could read from the lips of the word-spewing Seehahn mouth that the Seehahn text had continued uninterrupted: False serpent, stupid sonofabitch, miserable prick . . . Suddenly the Princess appeared, addressed the noncom as “little man,” and said if he didn’t start behaving himself that instant, she would personally toss him out on his ear, even though he wasn’t really worth soiling her hands over, and if he tried to get fresh with her she wanted him to know, since he was over thirty, that anyone over twenty was out of the running for her, was that clear?—if not, he
wouldn’t be the first one she’d thrashed good and proper. And the shouter just put his head on her shoulder and started crying like a baby. In a peremptory voice, the Princess told two soldiers also billeted in the gymnasium to take care of their superior officer, please. They led the drunk out while the Princess accepted the applause of the patrons: Bravo, Stuka, bravo! And with Bravo Stuka resounding on all sides, she took her bows like an actress and disappeared back into the kitchen.
As Johann handed Niklaus the next sack, he said, more in the direction of Frau Woschischek than really to her, that he would stand guard that night. Frau Woschischek gave a little cheer—it sounded like Hip, hip, hooray—and took off. Johann wasn’t quite comfortable watching her receding backside tossing left and right. Maybe there would be another full air raid alarm tonight. They had an alarm almost every evening now. Then all bets would be off. They would all sit next to and across from one another in the cellar and listen to the mechanical drone of the bomber squadrons until the all-clear was sounded. By then, hopefully, it would be too late. Too bad. And thank God. But too bad, too. Really too bad. Perhaps the bomber squadrons would take another route tonight. In the blink of an eye, Berni had said and laughed. Guffawed is what he’d done, a throaty sound. What a deep, rough voice he had all of a sudden. And then he’d added that as soon as Frau Woschischek took hold of your dick, you came—mail delivered, meeting adjourned, next please, who hasn’t had a turn, who wants another go?
Berni had told him about it the night they walked home together from the movies in Lindau. Johann felt that it was the darkness and the walking side-by-side that enabled Berni to be so crudely blunt. Sitting across from each other in the train, in daylight, not even Berni, who was certainly more of a daredevil than Johann, would have been capable of saying that. He had said dick more than once. As they were passing the Schwandholz woods, Johann had an urge to tell Berni what had happened to him on the edge of those woods the night before Pentecost Sunday. He would have liked to tell Berni about the results of that night. He had lain there with Luise’s sister all night long, on a raincoat he inherited from Josef, on the moss at the edge of Schwandholz woods. Next to Rosi, against her, on top of her, behind her and in front of her. But nothing came of it, despite all his pressing and pushing. Rosi had been in town for only a few days to visit her sister. On Whit-Monday she was returning to the South Tyrol. It had turned into an inscrutable and completely silent struggle. Rosi had resisted but not in a way that made Johann feel he had to stop. He had gotten farther with her than he ever had with Irmgard or Gretel. And he was also not sure if it was his fault that he couldn’t get into Rosi anywhere. They rolled around on the ground, kept at it without speaking, groped each other, searching, panting. In his mind’s eye Johann had pictured the illustration he’d looked up and studied in his great uncle’s gilt-edged encyclopedia: the female genitalia, reproduced and labeled in a vivid steel engraving. Vagina. He still preferred the word plummy. He failed to translate the engraving into reality. Finally, he broke the silence after all, hoping to create a mood that would soften Rosi’s mute resistance a little. But of course, he was unable to say what he was thinking. Beating around the bush was no help. When it was finally light, he had covered Rosi’s mouth once more with his and pressed against it so hard it seemed he would never stop. Perhaps only to escape suffocation, she had worked her way out from under him. OK, OK, OK, forget it then, and he jumped up, slowly folded up the raincoat, and they walked side-by-side back to the village, slowly and in complete silence again. Johann had thought: I hope we don’t run into shoemaker Gierer’s Hedwig or Frau Schorer or anyone else on their way to early Mass. Again the birds sang louder than ever before, sang down at Rosi and Johann from all the trees. Not singing, shouting. At the corner of the courtyard, he touched her neck one last time, then went in the back door and up the stairs. He couldn’t worry, too, about how Rosi was going to sneak back into bed with her sister. Luise lived in the house of shoemaker Gierer, where three beds had become available beneath the sloping roof: Julius, Ludwig, and Adolf were in all in Russia, and Ludwig already killed in action.
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