A Gushing Fountain

by Martin Walser

  Perhaps Mother felt she could no longer countenance the fact that only a thin wooden partition separated Johann’s sofa from Lucile’s bed. They were basically lying right next to each other. He could hear her whistling, breathing, and she must have heard him, too. Johann had to move back into Room 9 and the double bed. Anselm now slept where Josef had slept. Luckily, Johann would sleep on the side next to the window. As he lay under his blanket, engaged with himself, he thought his way out the window and over to the first window of Room 10. On All Saints’ Day, after a mouth-on-mouth and mouth-in-mouth session against the wall of the corridor, he said, “I’ll come tonight.” He said it with as little seriousness as possible. He said it as if he was saying: No need to fear that I’ll come, Lena, I just like saying it so much, would love to repeat it over and over a thousand times, I’ll come tonight, tonight, tonight. . . . After two hours repeating it, he would say with as much quiet fervor as possible: No need to fear, I’m not going to come, I just say I am because I have to say it. And then he would start in again: I’ll come tonight. . . . Against the corridor wall, of course, he only said it a single time, and as unseriously as he could. Hopefully, it didn’t need saying that if he came, he would not come across the creaking floorboards of the corridor, because Mother would respond to that with an immediate What-is-it-Johann? It would have been embarrassing to even mention his mother at all in conjunction with his nocturnal plan.

  Silently, he rose from his bed, slipped out the window, and pulled it closed behind him. A dark night, the streetlight still out of service. But the red-gold chestnut leaves almost gave off a glow. You could only guess at the outlines of the truck scale and train station. The light yellow exterior house wall also had a sort of glow. Grandfather had provided the windows of his light yellow building with sills and trim of reddish sandstone, and every window also boasted a red sandstone lintel. The sill of one window reached almost to the sill of the next. It was possible to step from one to the other. And he could steady himself by holding on to the sandstone lintels, which projected far enough so that it must be possible to get a good grip on them.

  Johann, barefoot and in his gym shirt and shorts, felt fairly safe as he stood up outside his window and began to inch along the wall. The sandstone sills provided good footing. The sandstone lintel stuck out a good inch, rising to a low peak above each window, and his fingers found enough purchase on its sloping sides that he could feel his way from sill to sill with his feet. It didn’t get dicey until he reached the first window of Room 10. Had Lena correctly interpreted his throwaway remark? Would her window be left ajar and unlocked? Either she had felt and thought the same thing he did—then the window would be open—or she had not felt and thought the same—then he would grope his way back to his own window. He couldn’t very well knock on hers. She had understood him. The window opened at his push. She was even standing next to it. Gave him a hand down, although he didn’t need it. He climbed into her room without a sound. Lena led him to the double bed. The night between All Saints and All Souls, the only night when Josefine would not be sleeping in the same bed, an arm’s length away from Lena, because Josefine, who had worked for Lena’s family for years and was as good as a member of the family, had to be in the Allgäu over All Saints and All Souls to pray at her parents’ grave. But under the east-facing window stood a bed for Lena’s youngest brother. Hopefully he was as tight a sleeper as Anselm. Johann had to pretend from the beginning that he had forgotten there was a six-year-old in the room. On the other hand, he mustn’t forget it. Later, when he was back under the blanket in his own room, he realized that his irresponsibility on this night had been different than it was with Luise’s sister on the raincoat in the Schwandholz woods.

  Lena put up no resistance, not even a show of it. Of course, she didn’t help him. That he would have taken amiss. He pretended to know what he was doing. At first he did. Then Lena must have realized that he wasn’t as experienced as he pretended. Lena let him sense that she sympathized with his clumsiness, that she was happy to share in it, so to speak. She gave him to understand how unimportant it was if nothing at all happened. That was the highest, sweetest, most beautiful thing.

  It was the most complete coming together he had ever known. And at the most crucial, fated moment of all. An unheard-of harmony. Whatever happened, wherever they ended up on this unpredictable night, they would survive it together, they would be one. This mood whose inventor was Lena carried him across the finish line. Made him more responsible than he was. And as he was hurtling across the finish line, he should also have remembered that nothing from him should make it all the way into her. One more thing to keep track of! It seemed to him that Lena would surely think he was a complete scoundrel if he was capable of cold-bloodedly pulling out of her with total control and icy calculation. Afterwards, he hoped he had succeeded. He wasn’t sure. Back in his room, under the blanket, he kept replaying over and over what had played out in Lena’s bed. He felt he was lying not in bed but in bliss. He was weightless, buoyed up by something he had never felt before. He didn’t call it happiness. In fact, he rejected that word. Once again, no word for what was most important. For years he’d been running uphill, running, crawling, wriggling, clambering, taking on every hardship to gain another little bit and another little bit of ground, not to be deterred from his goal by any defeat, but with next to no idea what his goal was. Perhaps it would turn out that what was most important didn’t even exist. Everything—war, poetry, the mountains, physical strength, clothing, sound, talking and silence—everything interested him only to the extent that it brought him closer to his goal. And what could not bring him closer had no existence. No independent existence. He had to force himself to pay attention to it, pretend it interested him. Nothing had ever interested him that didn’t lead him up and in, across the finish line of his yearning, so to speak. And now it had happened, thanks to nothing and no one except Lena. Perhaps he could call it by the name deliverance. Actually, he needed no more words. He was delivered now. The stretch of trouble where everything was uncertain was now behind him. There you have it. That’s that. And the gratitude, so sharp and clear and urgent it almost hurt. To be delivered this way from a doubtful existence into the most pure and beautiful certainty! I really feel like I’m not swimming against the current anymore, Lena. Suddenly, it’s sweeping me off and away, and I’m the lightest, happiest cork afloat.

  He’d brought a little blood back with him from Room 10, a dark stain swallowed by his black gym shorts.

  The next day, when Lena’s high-heeled solo snatched him from his chair and he rushed into the corridor, she wouldn’t let him catch her, but as she slipped from his grasp she called back, “I’ll come tonight.” Then she was downstairs at the piano again. Since the French were no longer living in the house, she played Mozart. When she ran away from him to play, he could hear that her playing was aimed at him.

  He did feel a bit humbled when she showed up at his window, slipped inside, and acted as if it was nothing special to grope her way from sill to sill along the outside wall, holding on to the sandstone lintel with her fingers. Was Lena even tall enough to reach the lintel while standing on the sill? After all, they were tall, old-fashioned windows for high-ceilinged, old-fashioned rooms. But here she was. In a silk wrap. He played his flashlight over it: fiery red inside, outside a riot of flowers. She saw Johann’s astonishment and whispered, “My mother’s.” Johann had bolted both doors, taking care to do it without a sound. No one could get in. If Anselm woke up, Johann would have to try an Old Shatterhand gesture. He had taken an embroidered pillowcase out of the chest and laid it on top of the sheet. It didn’t even fit the pillows they used now, and must have been part of his grandmother’s trousseau. The saying embroidered in Gothic script was: Sweet Dreams till the Dawn, & Troubles Begone! Afterward, when Lena returned the way she had come, she took the pillowcase with her. She said she would wash it. Johann realized that the second night had been much bloodier than the first. It was
clear that he would have to wipe the blood off his member, too. He remembered that in the bottom of the night stand there was a white cover that got pulled over the blue Marine Hitlerjugend cap on special occasions. He used it to wipe himself clean. He hid the now blood-stained cover in his school bag. Tomorrow he was planning to ride his bike to school anyway. Of the four or five more or less parallel routes from Wasserburg to Lindau, he chose one that first followed a little-used field road and then ran through the Birkenried along a line of fir trees. He threw the blood-stained cap cover into the Oeschbach and hoped that it would see to carrying the bloody thing out to the lake, and it would sink out of sight forever.

  On the second night, Lena had again shared everything with him. On that second, more eventful night as well, their feeling of togetherness was more important than what had produced it. More happened on the second night than on the first. Before she clambered back out the window, Lena expressed it like this: “I won’t have to confess that one.”

  After school he returned along the same route, past Bichel Pond and through the Birkenried. He’d never run into anyone on this route. This time, he saw from a long way off that, just before the train lineman’s cottage, where his field road connected to a tarred road, someone had stood a bicycle on its head and was turning the rear wheel. Even before Johann came up to him, he saw that it was Wolfgang Landsmann.

  “Got a flat?” asked Johann.

  “What I haven’t got is a repair kit,” said Wolfgang.

  Johann leaned his bike against one of the little fir trees that lined the road.

  “Grüss dich,” said Wolfgang.

  “Servus, Wolfgang,” said Johann. What he really wanted to ask was if this was the balloon-tire bike Edi Fürst had thrown down the bank at the gymnasium back then. But he could see it was a balloon-tire bike, so it was the one that had been thrown down. So what he should have said was: Oh yeah, that’s the bike that Edi threw down back then. But he couldn’t say that. But he couldn’t pretend that he’d never seen the bike before, either. Since Wolfgang had a briefcase clamped to the luggage rack, Johann could have asked if Wolfgang was on his way home from school. But if Wolfgang had been attending secondary school in Lindau, he would have been in Johann’s class, so he couldn’t be coming from school.

  Johann fetched the repair kit from his saddlebag with over-eager solicitude, took a look at the tire, and couldn’t find a nail. So he said the only thing to do was to take off the wheel, remove the tube, pump it up, and dash the few yards to the Oeschbach. They’d hold it in the water and find the hole immediately. And he thought: I hope that bloody cap cover didn’t get hung up somewhere nearby.

  If the rise they called a hill hadn’t blocked the view, they could have seen the gymnasium from where they were standing. Luckily though, they couldn’t. Johann sensed that it would have really rubbed him the wrong way if Wolfgang had started talking about Edi Fürst and about that muster back then. He would simply not know what to say. What it was possible to say. And it was inconceivable for Johann to start talking about it himself. If Wolfgang were to start, Johann would have to react. How, he didn’t know. So, in any event, he should devote all his attention to repairing the flat.

  When Johann saw how little experience Wolfgang had with flats, he was able to pose as an expert, and Wolfgang admired his expertise. That did Johann good. He still took all his own flats to Hotze Franz in Hege and scratched the goats’ ears instead of watching Franz fix them. But he had paid attention when Crooked Hat fixed his tire in Nonnenhorn. And now he was simply the expert. His repair kit contained all the necessary items. And the way Wolfgang watched respectfully as he played bicycle mechanic, he had no choice but to succeed. And he did. At least, the tire stayed inflated until they reached the Station Restaurant. They walked their bikes, since they had a lot to talk about. That is, Wolfgang wasn’t finished with what he obviously wanted to tell Johann. Every day the weather allowed, he rode his bicycle to Lindau and from there took the train to Bregenz. He’d been going to school in Bregenz since late 1943.

  How little Johann knows. That’s what Wolfgang is most surprised at. Wolfgang’s Jewish mother and his father, Dr. Landsmann, had a privileged mixed marriage. Despite his name, Wolfgang’s father was not Jewish. From Stuttgart, originally from Weingarten, in fact. If the wife was Aryan, then the union was called simply a mixed marriage. Wolfgang was baptized by Father Dillmann in 1927. Me, too, Johann wanted to say, but couldn’t. So his father was what they called jüdisch versippt—allied to a Jew by marriage—loses his post as medical examiner and health service doctor in Stuttgart, and is lucky to be put in charge of the air raid shelter in the Schwabtunnel. They get bombed out in ’43 and move back here, to their house next to the Eschigs and the Halkes. The mother and Wolfgang move to Bregenz where he’s admitted to a school. The principal knew he was breaking the law: pupils with a Jewish mother were only permitted to attend school through grade nine. In ’44 Wolfgang volunteers for reserve officer training in Innsbruck without telling his parents. All that’s left is the Home Guard, under Commander Halke. At night they take down the tank barriers they had built during the day. Wolfgang’s mother lived in constant fear of getting arrested. Head Teacher Heller had intended to see that she did. That’s why she asked that the teacher be forced to sit in that window eight Sundays in a row with the sign around his neck: ICH WAR EIN NAZI. Wolfgang’s father had laughed and said it was misleading. It should have said: ICH BIN EIN NAZI.

  Wolfgang could see he was telling Johann things he’d never heard. “So you don’t know that Rudolf Hess paid a visit to Frau Haensel in 1934 either?” No, Johann doesn’t know that. He doesn’t know that Frau Haensel is Jewish. Wolfgang is amazed. She was being protected by someone in Munich, said Wolfgang. Johann wanted to interject that Frau Haensel had always been a good coal customer of theirs. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t say anything. At the moment, the anti-fascist working group that had always existed in the town was putting together a documentation of the Nazi persecution of anti-fascists in Wasserburg from 1933 to 1945. Springe the lawyer, who’d already left town for Berlin in 1937, was chairing the group. Johann knew him only by sight, since he bought his coal from the competition. Frau Prestele, Dr. Rütten, Professor Bestenhofer, Hajek-Halke all belonged to the circle, all people who lived in the villas. Except for Frau Prestele and Herr Hajek-Halke, they weren’t Johann’s customers.