A Gushing Fountain

by Martin Walser

  She had come out of the kitchen, probably on her way to the piano in the spare room, since it was still early in the day and no patrons were there yet. But as she saw Johann coming down the stairs and his rucksack and bag revealed that he was leaving—and where one left for at that time was well known—this Lena had taken a step back, so that as Johann passed her she was again standing in the wooden frame of the kitchen door, and this time she didn’t just give him a friendly nod but also said, “Good luck.”

  So he, too, didn’t just nod, but said, “Thanks.” And then he just wanted to get out of there. As if the train was already signaling its departure.

  Upstairs he had shaken Mother’s hand. Arriving or departing, they never did more than shake hands. They didn’t need more than putting their hands together to express how they felt. Mother knew as well as Johann that, for example, a farewell at the crossing gate would be completely out of the question. Maybe Little Anselm could have gone to the station with him and waved good-bye, but he was in school.

  Whenever Johann lay on his upper bunk making poems, he had the feeling that this Lena was watching him. Partly because of the frame of the kitchen door, this Lena had become an image. Bangs like Anita’s. Adolf had called them pangs. Adolf was in France now, an administrator of communications equipment, an interesting assignment. This Lena didn’t have a bob to go with her bangs. Instead, she had a volcano of hair. Right behind the bangs, a volcanic wave of black hair erupted, hesitated over the middle of her bangs-draped forehead, and then flowed right and left down to her shoulders, flowed not straight, but in waves that hardly touched the shoulders before turning back, turning inward and then upward again; which led to the flood of hair being widest at the bottom. It splashed onto her shoulders and splattered sideways and inward and finally upward again. Plus two completely round and utterly dark eyes with two black but not very prominent eyebrows above them. When this Lena arose in his imagination, framed by the kitchen door, Johann couldn’t stop thinking about her. He had preserved that instant. When he wrote, he lived on the idea that someone was watching him. Not from close up, and certainly not over his shoulder. But at a distance from which his feelings as he wrote could be shared by the observer. Johann wanted to be observed. Wanted attention. Since his night on the nets in Langenargen, he was addicted to attention. He had never been as alone as in that night on the nets. Anita had not paid attention to him. She had seen in him only a messenger who would convey her greetings to Adolf. He was haunted by the fact that he had not conveyed the greetings to Adolf; it also made him feel good, annoyed him, and humiliated him. He still approved of his deception. He’d deceived them both, Anita and Adolf. It still did him good. Then the daughter of the family leasing the Crown and the doctor’s daughter had paid no attention to him when they met their Jungvolk leaders from Lindau at the dock. Magda had paid attention. No enough, but some. When he said good-bye to her, she said that if he was going to get letters from that Lena who lived at his house, then he would never get another letter from her. Where’d she get that idea? How was he going to get a letter from the girl with eyes that looked like they were there not to see but to be seen, a girl with hair you could bury yourself in! Magda said she should be ashamed to call herself Lena. Lena was part of her own name. From then on, she was going to call herself Magdalena. That was what they called her before she came to Wasserburg. This Lena needed to be shown that the name was already taken.

  Johann was amazed at the vehemence with which Magda talked about this Lena whom he hardly knew, whom he didn’t know at all. Most of the time she was away at boarding school on the Untersee. And at home she was mostly at the piano. Sure, at the last moment she had been there, had said Good luck; he’d answered Thanks. And they’d looked at each other only for the time it took to say Thanks.

  Now he was scribbling in his notebook as if singing the lines:

  Still blooming against gray-green rock,

  the miracle of red roses.

  He sang no further. Or not the way he wanted. He twisted and turned, wanted to feel, to sense himself. He was both arrow and bow. He would shoot himself high into the air. That was all that interested him, only that. He recited verses to himself that he had read. And when they ran out, he recited his own. If there was one he wanted to remember, he wrote it down:

  At twilight hour when shadows blue

  like sheep were herded down the lane

  I rose up weary from my rest

  and asked if life had been in vain.

  They were fitted for uniforms, sworn in, and trained. They were drilled by a drill sergeant, and at night they whispered from bed to bed that when they got into the field, he would be the first they would bump off. He called it a test of courage: from the top of the steep wall of earth that separated the individual shooting ranges, they had to let themselves fall backward, which was unpleasant even though the steep walls were covered with snow. If one of them just wasn’t able to let himself fall backward, it seemed to gladden the heart of this sergeant. He would pull that person out of the line and make him do push-ups, sprints, knee bends, and crawl on his belly carrying his rifle until he couldn’t go on. And the whole time he kept telling them that once they were out there, they would thank him for this training.

  Johann had expected the swearing in to be more difficult than it was. The prescribed oath tripped off his tongue like the words of contrition at the beginning of confession, just another formula. Repeat and recite and promise what had nothing to do with you. He had nothing against these texts, but they had nothing to do with him. Just as the songs they sang when they marched had nothing to do with him. They were only there to be sung, and besides, the ones he liked best were the ones that had yodeling parts. He competed in yodeling with a fellow from Lenggries. His name was Sepp, and he reminded him of Josef. This Sepp yodeled better, Johann realized during their very first march. His voice slid much more easily, more smoothly and brightly into falsetto than Johann’s did. Johann wanted to ask him how he did it, but he was too shy. But in shooting, Johann had no competition. You lined up the notch and bead sights with the target, rested your finger on the trigger, breathed out, and squeezed off a round. Johann didn’t see how anyone could miss.

  In January, high altitude training in the Kreuzeck range, the night before spent in a hotel a mile above sea level. Johann brought only one book with him: Thus Spake Zarathustra. As they slogged through the snow for six or seven or eight hours straight beneath a bright moon or a blazing sun, Zarathustra’s lofty sentences began to sound in Johann’s head. In Father’s last winter, Johann had read to him from this book when he could no longer hold it himself, and reading Zarathustra sentences aloud had been like singing. He grew, he sang, he grew.

  Johann led a mule. And each man carried his own fifty-five pound pack. The mules carried the machine guns and the ammunition. Occasionally someone toppled over and had to be treated by a medic. Johann had the feeling that nothing in the world could tire him—Zarathustra energy.

  Rock ledges, snow cornices, blue shadows, sparkling mounds of snow—Zarathustra milieu.

  He seemed haughty to himself and enjoyed feeling haughty. He was aglow with loneliness. When they had maneuvers on skis, he loved it, loved it most when the exercises were pointless, but on skis. Fresh snow, mountains, and forests. The peace that lay on the sunny rock walls and the peace on the walls in shadow. Sun peace and shade peace. Loneliness. All the shooting on maneuvers could not disturb the quiet of the wintry world. The shots only increased the quiet. When they practiced advancing downhill on skis, and during the pauses Johann lay in the snow among scattered fir trees, he almost forgot what he was doing here because he wanted to listen to the firs, how silent they were with their covering of snow. The firs lifted their snow out of the shadows and into the sun. Between the widely spaced firs, the light lay on the snow, sunning itself. The snow reveled in its color. The firs, in groups. They could not be arranged more perfectly. Positively ceremonious. In the evenings, a low-hanging sk
y. The clouds tore open their bellies on a thousand fir trees and expired in silver. Johann could feel lonely in the midst of a maneuver. Beside him in the snow, above him in the light stood Zarathustra. Johann felt himself taken up. He was convinced of his discipleship. As a lover. When Zarathustra said brother, Johann felt he was talking to him. Instead of the ordinary language of the service, he would have preferred to speak a completely different language all day long. And then he said to his master, who stood before him, above him, in the blinding light of heavenly clarity: I was born for this day and want to end with it. And didn’t know why he said it. To make his impressions palpable, he needed to respond to them. What he saw, heard, and sensed he answered, and only then did what he saw, heard, and sensed exist. When he had sentry duty and took up his post outside, he took in the wintry mountain scene and felt called upon to respond. The snow builds pretty walls of silence all around, he would say. The flakes called flakes are falling. What are the flakes but the syllables of a poem. Then he said: I watch the snow falling like an action. And only then does it snow.

  This falling and floating and swirling and driving of the flakes was replete with a tendency he could only match with long sentences that continually drew back from completion, circling more than progressing, but then, finally unable to deny their direction, they at last settled down in invisibility. Snowfall, a history. Not a poem anymore. Zarathustra’s seemingly inexhaustible store of gestures and sounds: a kind of substrate of encouragement. Encouragement to survive the fall from the language of prescription into the language of freedom.

  Two hours standing watch, four hours of rest, thus a night of sentry duty trickled away. In the morning, when it was past, he had the feeling of having been in a theater, but as an actor.

  When they trained during a snowfall and he was skiing into insubstantiality with nothing visible but his skis, with his elbow resting on the knee over his uphill ski, gliding along into boundlessness, aware only of what the ground beneath the skis was telling his knees, then he would think: no one should be here. But that he was there was all right. The worst case, for which what they were practicing here was supposed to be useful, was unimaginable. Nothing that happened between the Alpspitze and the Zugspitze could ever serve a useful purpose. As it was, he felt that where he was, was not really where he was.

  But he had to keep Mother alive, too. Give her some signs of life. And remind her that the dues for the coal dealers’ association must be paid soon. Then, on a Monday morning toward the end of February, the company commander, a school teacher in civilian life, read the names of the applicants who had been selected to receive reserve officer training in Mittenwald-Luttensee. Johann’s name was not among them. He went straight to that mild-mannered man who commanded the company. Yes, he said, he was very sorry. He wished he could have started Johann on the road to becoming an officer, but the corporal Josef had been assigned to for training in the Kreuzeck mountains had given Johann such a bad report that he couldn’t justify recommending him. He was really sorry, said the Swabian teacher-officer, because his written essays—the one about Bismarck and the other about leading columns of mules through the high mountains—had turned out to be far above average. Johann clicked his heels together, did an about-face, and left. He ran to the dormitory, lay down in his bed, gasped, and struggled not to cry. The company commander had said that if one wants to command, one must learn to obey. Said it in a way that suggested that since Johann had not fulfilled this basic precept of military life, he would understand that crushing his ambition to be an officer had been only fair. Johann had never failed at anything . . . yes, he had, in Langenargen. Now he lay in his bunk as he had on the nets in Langenargen. Rejected. A failure. All over. He was not able to regret the incident that had been the cause of it all. He would have done the same thing again. His group, ten recruits, clustered around an MG 42. One after another, they lay down in the snow beside the machine gun and recited how it worked. A warm, windy day at the end of January. With miraculously expansive visibility. Suddenly, the corporal asked Johann if he was cold.

  “No, sir, Corporal.”

  Then why was he jiggling his foot?

  Johann had no explanation.

  The corporal asked if he perhaps found training with the MG 42 boring and was that what he was trying to express by jiggling his foot?

  Not that Johann was aware of.

  The corporal: Because Johann had also been staring off into space. The only thing missing was that he would start whistling. But he, the corporal, would do his best to make things not so boring for the group’s number one smart aleck. And he made Johann sprint, lie down on his belly, crawl on the ground, do push-ups, etc. Ordered him back. Then out of the blue: “Snow’s really black today, isn’t it?”

  Johann said he thought it was white.

  The corporal was already worked up, and he got even more infuriated. Johann could see his silver wound badge, but there was no backing down now. The more insistently the corporal ordered Johann to admit the snow was black, the less Johann was capable of saying it was black. Now, on his bunk, his hopes crushed, he found that the snow on that warm, windy day in January had been just as black as it was white. But he had not been able to admit it. How would he explain that in the village? No one would ask him. The news that Johann hadn’t made officer was enough for them.

  Transferred to an infantry company in Oberammergau, a troop with a lot of wounded men, mostly privates first class and lance corporals. As for him, although he got no private first class stripe on his sleeve, he did get the small rifleman’s star, the smallest promotion of all. He lay on the upper bunk of a double-decker and thought about Gottfried Hübschle. And felt ashamed. He’d stumbled on the very first step, stumbled and fallen.

  Up to now, Johann had always managed to claim an upper bunk in every barracks, and one on the outside wall as well. He would not have liked to sleep in the middle of the bunkroom. Not in Oberammergau, either, where they had commandeered the hall of the Passion Play theater and filled it with beds. The outer wall reminded him of Gottfried Hübschle. On the hospital ship from Libau to Stettin, he and the man beneath him in the bunk bed had been pushed against the steel wall of the hull, at least two meters below water level. There’d been three submarine alarms. Gottfried Hübschle had told the medic that he and the other bed-ridden casualties who had been shoved against the wall would not be able to get up and out on deck if they were torpedoed. The medic agreed and said it was more important that the ones who were still mobile had their beds further forward, since they’d be able to help themselves if they took a hit. So Gottfried Hübschle just lay there and listened to the water gurgling quietly along the hull. In Oberammergau, the spring winds whistled around the Passion Play theater. Johann had flunked and ever since, found himself unable to read Zarathustra. The lance corporal on the bunk below his was eager to show Johann his tattoos: a large eagle across his hairless chest, holding a naked woman in its talons; on one arm a snake woman, on the other the head of a young girl. His last posting had been with the army in Courland, in eastern Latvia. The only way to get a leave was to denounce a buddy who had expressed doubts about Germany’s ultimate victory. “What all a body won’t do,” said the lance corporal, “when the noose is around your neck.” That was apparently how he got out of East Prussia just before the Germans were cut off. He said it while he and Johann were filling two hundred sandbags for air raid shelters, said it more to himself than to Johann. In civilian life he’d been a mailman. In Güstrow, in Mecklenburg. His special talent was dog imitations. Johann was supposed to guess which breed. Johann asked him please not to do a German shepherd. In the evenings after lights out, the lance corporal would lie on the lower bunk and quietly run through his repertoire of barks. It didn’t bother Johann as much as the stink of the feet he never washed, rising up ineluctably from below.

  One time, the lance corporal got up again and said, “Can you hear me, Johann?”

  “Yes,” said Johann.

 
; Then the lance corporal said very quietly that he couldn’t stop imitating dogs because as an SA man he had taken part in the persecution of the Jews, and now he couldn’t stop wondering if he would have to atone for it. If he could sing, he would sing to distract himself, but he had no ear for music.

  What had he done? asked Johann.

  “Set fire to their houses,” he said, “and beat ’em.”

  “Beat them,” said Johann. He wanted to ask: Why did you beat them? But he couldn’t.

  “Yeah, beat ’em,” he said, and whimpered.

  Johann turned to the wall. The lance corporal lay down again but continued to whimper. Beat them, thought Johann, why did he beat them? And then his stinky feet. Of all the stinks Johann had so far been exposed to in his various barracks, the stink of sweaty feet was the most repulsive.