A Gushing Fountain

by Martin Walser

  Of course, he failed to reach his room before Mother called out, “Johann, what is it?” Her tone made it abundantly clear that she had lain awake all night waiting for Johann.

  He called back, “Nothing,” and made that Nothing as hard and mean as he possibly could. He had pains in the area for which he had no name. Sharp pains. He knelt on his bed, bent over, lay down, curled up. Nothing helped. This was what came of his all-night mishandling in the Schwandholz woods. This was his Pentecost. As the pain gradually subsided, he caressed himself. Oh you, he thought. And he almost heard, literally felt, the answer: IAWIA. And thought: He is who he is. And since his Pentecost had now arrived, he understood it as a first name: He is who he is, HIWHI.

  Johann couldn’t immediately grin with the others when the flak instructor in Chieming illustrated the ballistics lesson with the pinklepipe; to hit a certain point on the urinal wall, you couldn’t aim your pinklepipe right at it. You had to hold it higher.

  Tonight, Frau Woschischek. Tonight he would offer Frau Woschischek IAWIA. And what if she laughed at him? He could say it was the Arabic word for dick. Or the Lithuanian word. The Lithuanian word was better.

  When he was back on the ladder and reaching for the green Welschisner apples, he saw through the branches a yellowish-brown—almost more yellow than brown—at any rate, very light brown uniform coming up the Dorfstrasse. Only the local group leader wore a shiny, light brown uniform like that. And that was no longer Herr Minn, the boat builder with the white goatee—hadn’t been for quite a while. It was Herr Harpf, the customs official whose tinny voice and marionette-like movements Hanse Luis could imitate so well.

  When he heard the speeches Herr Harpf had to give in the course of the year, Johann would recall that at the conclusion of Herr Minn’s speeches, he had always said: May God protect our people’s chancellor. Herr Harpf always closed with the exhortation to give three Sieg heils for the Führer and Reich chancellor Adolf Hitler.

  Since the war had begun, whenever Herr Harpf walked through the village on a weekday in that radiant uniform you could spot a mile away, everyone knew that in the family whose house he was heading for, someone had been killed in action. It was his duty to visit the houses and say that a husband or a son or a brother had fallen. When he saw that uniform, Johann froze. The local group leader could still turn off toward Peter Schmied’s and shoemaker Schorer’s, or farther on, where the Rehms, Heitingers, and Schäggs lived. Or he could turn off on the other side to the Hagens', or up the hill farther to shoemaker Gierer’s. Or just pass by, keep going toward the train station. But Johann saw that the local group leader was turning onto the terrace. Johann slid down the stringers without bothering with the rungs, threw off the apple sack, ran out into the street after the local group leader, trying to get into the house ahead of him. Herr Harpf would have to go through the passageway, then up the stairs to the second floor and knock on the door. Johann caught up with the local group leader as he was setting his foot onto the top step. Mother was just then in the hallway, under the open door to Room 14, also partitioned—a family of five had been quartered there. The wife was standing beside her eight-year-old, Mother next to Anselm. They all heard the local group leader’s boots on the creaking stairs and turned toward him. Mother sees him and screams. Anselm screams, too. Mother runs along the hallway into the partitioned Room 8. Johann stays behind the local group leader. The scream, a single tone, doesn’t stop. Nothing more from Anselm. Johann has no feeling of his own. He feels only what Mother is feeling. The local group leader goes into the half of the room that is a makeshift kitchen. Mother has left the door open. Mother stands looking at the approaching local group leader and no sound comes from her mouth. Johann has the feeling that her eyes see nothing. Usually, her eyes are like plum pits. Now her whole face is nothing but staring eyes and a mouth neither closed nor open. She knows nothing anymore. Johann squeezes past the local group leader and stands beside his mother, but not on the side where Little Anselm is standing. He needs to let Mother know he is there. Mother, his little brother, and he must constitute a single being. Against this raging storm. The local group leader looks as if he’s going to come to attention and raise his hand in the German Greeting. Instead, he removes his stiff cap, transfers it to his left hand, straightens up, and says something about field of honor, soldier’s duty, oath of allegiance, something about greater Germany, and then he suddenly puts out his hand to Mother and says, more quietly, “My condolences.” Since Mother doesn’t take his hand, he withdraws it, says suddenly and even more quietly, “My deepest condolences.” Clicks his heels together, puts on his cap, then executes a rather gentle about-face, turns back once more at the door, bows stiffly, and leaves.

  Then the three of them are alone. Johann closes the curtain and turns on the light. Mother says, “No.” So he turns it off again. Mother starts to scream again, but not so piercingly anymore. Still loud, but not piercing. No longer a scream, but drawn-out wailing tones that rise higher and higher in pitch. And end in a whimper. Johann holds her right hand, Anselm her left. They sit there into the night. They hear or do not hear the air-raid sirens. They continue to sit there after the all-clear. Until Mother says that Anselm and Johann should go to bed now, and Anselm and Johann are finally able to move again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Excursion

  THE ENVELOPE. THE CALL-UP NOTICE. Herr Taubenberger needed Johann’s signature as proof that he had delivered the letter to him in person. Enlisted. At last. To report to the mountain troop barracks in Garmisch on December 5th. But how was he going to show Mother the call-up? Skiing, mountain marches, mule trains on snow-covered trails, long evenings in huts above the tree line, lots of singing, the most beautiful of all uniforms . . . Mother started right in about the Schnells. Two weeks ago, the news that Schnelle Johann had been killed in action. The funeral is arranged and on the day before, his fiancée gets word from his comrades that Schnelle Johann is wounded and in sick bay in Silesia. So the wreaths are returned to the cellar. Two days later: the younger brother, Josef, killed in action. The wreaths are brought back out. The day after that: word that Johann is dead, too. Yesterday: Paul, their youngest, missing in action. Mother keeps repeating, over and over, what happened to the Schnells. Paul, missing in action. And where is Ludwig? Where are Guido, Berni, Helmut One, and Helmut Two? The only thing they know for sure is that Brugger’s Adolf is safe. Not with the flak, but—even safer—in a Luftwaffe radio training brigade in France, with the brigade staff for administration of communications equipment, an interesting assignment, but Adolf was not permitted to say anything more about it, as Frau Brugger told Mother when they chatted in the cemetery. Frau Brugger was glad that since her husband got locked up, he’d permitted her to start going to church again.

  Mother’s suffering turned Johann into a spectator. He was unable to imagine Josef being dead. He had no sense of it. He saw Josef in his mind’s eye, in a hundred different situations, alive. He lacked the ability to conceive of death.

  Time to be enlisted, what else! But how to escape from his mother? By the time he’s done with training, the war will be over. The miracle weapons are about to be deployed. In Fürstenfeldbruck, they’ve dug trenches for the electric cables along the runway for turbine fighters, rocket fighters, supersonic fighters, Messerschmitt 115s, which have already performed take-offs and landings. A thunder so loud you can’t say or hear anything for a while afterward. The first time, Josef thought: Judgment Day. They said these planes were invulnerable. And he’d be in Garmisch: mountain marches with a rucksack only half as heavy as a sack of coal, and no front and no war in sight. He reasoned with Mother.

  In the barracks, he followed the signs, ended up in an attic filled with bunk beds, and again took possession of an upper bunk as he had in Fürstenfeldbruck, one against the wall; beneath him, a Jochen from Hannover who cranked up a gramophone on the very first night and put on one of the two records he had brought along from his unimaginable big city, which he
then continued to play every evening—one night the first record, and the next night the second one—and every time the foxtrot started up, he was mobbed by listeners:

  Every single man

  any time he can

  plays his little gramophone

  and never needs to be alone.

  Or:

  Friend Sigismund can’t help it

  that he’s handsome.

  Friend Sigismund can’t help that

  he gets kissed.

  You think someone who’s handsome

  should pay ransom?

  Just be happy our friend Sigismund exists.

  Everybody showed with their hands and feet how the foxtrot carried them away. Johann, lying directly above the machine, didn’t jiggle along, but he sang along. From one evening to the next, more and more of them joined in until you couldn’t hear the record anymore.

  Johann turned his face to the wall and with his flashlight read the poems he had brought along, poems by Stefan George. Since Wolfgang—Wolfgang Two, that is—had been going out with the daughter from the Crown, he often passed the chaise longue on which SS squad leader Gottfried Hübschle was recuperating from a bullet through his arm and another lodged in his thigh. Wolfgang, who didn’t miss much, noticed that the squad leader was reading poems and told him right off that his friend Johann didn’t just read poems, but wrote them as well. Johann had to come and meet Gottfried and ended up sitting entire afternoons in a chair beside the chaise. He got up to leave when the squad leader’s parents came down on a visit from Hergensweiler, but the squad leader wouldn’t let him go, didn’t want to hear as much from his father and mother as they did from him—cared nothing about their little farm in Hergensweiler but said he was going to get an estate in the Ukraine when the war was over, unless he decided to remain an officer. Perhaps, in fact, he might return to the Ordensburg in Sonthofen, where he’d spent the happiest, brightest days of his life—bright, fiery days that shone all the brighter the further they receded.

  Gottfried Hübschle spoke High German even with his parents. Johann found that astonishing, since neither parent ever uttered a word of High German. They didn’t even try. The father didn’t say much in any case, but nodded eagerly whenever his son spoke. The squad leader’s mother, who clutched her handbag the entire time she was there, exactly like Johann’s mother clutched her little white purse in her wedding picture, namely, as if fearing someone would snatch it from her—the squad leader’s mother was unfazed by her son’s High German. It was almost painful to think of this small, thin, sharp-nosed, worn-out woman trying to speak High German. She looked much older than her husband; you might have thought that he was his son’s brother rather than his father and that she was the mother of both of them. Gottfried’s parents were glad their son was wounded and thus out of the worst of it. After the parents had left, the son felt called upon to explain his parents to Johann. He talked about them as if they were a species of animal. Lovingly, and full of pity as well. They were beyond help. Bent and broken for good, creatures of hardship and fear. Fear of God above, fear of the powers below. Two thousand years in thrall to religion, feudalism, taxes—thralldom in general. But that was all over and done with now. Man had picked himself up, German Man first of all, but others were already starting to follow his example and now the New Man would be created. Man without fear. Only he was beautiful. And only the beautiful man was worthy of love, worthy of life.

  Gottfried Hübschle did not look at Johann as he said these things. They had no need for special emphasis, because they were obviously, unquestionably right, just, and true. He was repeating them only for Johann’s benefit. For his part, it wouldn’t have been necessary to say them a second time. But for Johann’s sake. Since he cared about Johann. They had more in common than could be expressed right now. “We’ll talk again after the war,” he said, “if we’re still around.”

  There were sometimes words in what the squad leader recited so monotonously that sounded like they came from Zarathustra sentences, but Johann sensed that they were anything but Zarathustra sentences. They were more like sentences from church. Johann was glad when the squad leader opened his book of poems again and read from it. He read the poems in a voice that almost seemed not to belong to him. It was as if he costumed his voice to make it worthy of reciting these expansive and radiant poems. One afternoon he said he would like to leave the book with Johann, now that he had to return to the East. The bullet wounds in his arm and thigh had healed. And every Russian tank he cracked open out there would be one less tank rolling across the border of the Reich. His comrades needed him. Nowhere was he more needed than there. He just had to decide if he should get the number on the underside of his left forearm, which had been tattered by the bullet, re-tattooed or not. Should he take it as a warning from his so-called destiny not to cultivate his SS identity so much anymore? What did Johann think? Gottfried Hübschle was holding Johann’s right hand in both his hands as he said that. And the way he gazed into Johann’s eyes told Johann that with his question, the squad leader wanted to express how important it was to him to discuss life questions with him. Johann said, “Don’t re-tattoo it.” Every time there was talk about this SS tattoo on the underside of Gottfried’s left forearm, Johann felt a kind of pity for someone who had been branded like that. It was already bad enough to be in the SS, a troop of godless men who were said to do anything they were ordered to do. Obedient submission to the point of self-effacement—that was the SS for Johann. He was sure Gottfried Hübschle was not that kind of uniformed machine. But there were rumors that in the East, the SS took no prisoners. Johann thought it was propaganda, because it couldn’t possibly be true, could it, that they would shoot someone who had surrendered. He wanted to ask Gottfried Hübschle about that. But he was too embarrassed to ask such a thing. It was base even to think it might be possible. But then why did he feel sorry for anyone from the village who let himself be recruited by the SS? Just because people said they did everything they were ordered to do. Although the new constable regularly came into the restaurant, he never even hinted that Josef or Johann should volunteer for the SS. It wasn’t feasible, given Mother’s opinion of their godlessness.

  Gottfried Hübschle, who wore the Iron Cross first class and a silver wound badge, suddenly stood up, pulled Johann to him, and said, “Good boy.” Then he gave Johann the book and said Hergensweiler was not on the other side of the moon, so he’d see him after the war. He straightened up—he was six three, at least—saluted smartly, and left. For the first time, Johann had poems written in his century. The Year of the Soul. A midnight blue book stamped with golden letters. And what letters they were. Inside, too, the pages sang with these letters of primeval elegance. Johann could gaze at the poems on those venerable pages, pages that seemed almost Egyptian, without needing to read them right away. And Gottfried had told him that the poet had died only a few years ago. What astonishing news. He would not have dared think that such poems could be made in his own century. Poetry—that was Klopstock, Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin—and that was all. Maybe a few from the Göttingen Grove League, still eighteenth century in any case. But now, poems like these, so recent. Poems that had no less an effect on Johann than those by Klopstock or Hölderlin. And the squad leader had said that shortly before his death, this poet—the very thought was utterly overwhelming—had been in Wasserburg. Johann was already alive when Stefan George was supposedly in the village—no, probably not in the village. He would have been down by the lake, in the Crown. But if by any chance he took a train, he would have passed their restaurant. Johann received this information as a special favor bestowed on him. He loved to imagine himself as a three- or four-year-old sitting on the terrace steps, and this poet walking past in the company of a friend. The squad leader had shown Johann a picture of the poet, who looked just like his poems: primeval, elegant. Since then, Johann had to respond to everything in this poet’s tone. Even if he didn’t have enough for a whole poem, he wrote down indi
vidual couplets that could later be worked up into poems:

  My heart—was it not as full as yours?

  And was not God as great in all my nights?

  I hate the coward’s railing on the bridge,

  and seek in much the more I cannot have.

  As Johann came down the stairs with his rucksack and bag to catch the train to Garmisch, the girl was just coming out of the kitchen. He’d already passed her a few times in the house or outside on the terrace and nodded to her. And she had nodded back! She played the piano with as much perseverance and expression as Josef. She obviously had the same inner confidence that ensured that the tones always established order, no matter how quickly or slowly they were played. You could recognize the rhythm at once. Like when you glanced into a church and immediately absorbed its spatial principle. When Johann returned from the labor service, he’d been told to go downstairs and introduce himself to the family who were leasing the restaurant. He didn’t like having to do things like that. But he went through the motions and saw and heard next to nothing. Afterwards, he ran upstairs as if he were being pursued. Whenever the sound of the piano drifted up from the first floor, Mother would sit down and start crying. When she calmed down a little, she would say: Lena. That was the daughter’s name. Every time Mother heard the piano she would say: Lena. She had to say it out loud so she didn’t surrender herself to the idea that it was Josef playing. In the meantime, they had received a report from the company commander confirming his death. Even if the circumstances were not clearly described, they were clearer than what the local group leader had been able to tell them; but although the letter informed them that it happened in Nyiregyhaza and that Josef had died with his crew and was buried in the Miskolc military cemetery, row 1, grave no. 7, Mother would not or could not believe it. The company commander had gotten a letter wrong in Josef’s name. Obviously he had never seen the name in writing. Mother clung to that wrong letter. She demanded that Johann write again to the Unit APO No. 40-345-E and ask for more details. Johann wrote, and they were still waiting for an answer. God only knew where that unit had gotten to in the meantime. At least Josef’s service record book had been mailed to them by the army records section in Lindau before Johann’s departure. And fifty-one marks had been mailed from the unit with the handwritten note on the check stub “FLB, 9/1–10/21.” Johann checked the math: 51 days = 51 marks front-line bonus. But Mother wanted more facts. Until she got them, she still had to say “Lena” out loud every time the lessee’s daughter played the piano. Obviously it was the same with Mother as with Johann: she couldn’t imagine Josef dead. Nevertheless, she suffered as if Josef were dead. Johann did not suffer. He wanted to get to the front.