A Gushing Fountain

by Martin Walser

  When they reached the chestnut trees, they could hear someone playing piano in the spare room. “Lena,” said Wolfgang. Johann was nonplussed. But acted as if he was only vaguely familiar with the name. Wolfgang said, “A student of Frau Prestele’s.” Of course, Johann knew that. But since he was already the one who knew next to nothing, he nodded at this piece of information as if it were also news to him. “Prestele says she’s very talented,” said Wolfgang. And that was something Johann really hadn’t heard before. “You know who she is,” said Wolfgang. “She’s the daughter of the family leasing your restaurant.” Johann nodded but also shrugged his shoulders as if it were a matter of indifference whether he knew the lessee’s daughter or not. But there was still more that Wolfgang knew. Her father Georg had always been an anti-fascist, and even in the darkest times, he and Wolfgang’s father had discussed everything together. Lena and her whole family had lived through the terrible bombing raid in April of last year. At which point Johann could have said that Lena had told him the worst thing about that night was that when she scrambled out of the bomb shelter, there was no place to go to the bathroom in the smoldering ruins of Ludwigshafen. But he didn’t say it. Wolfgang mastered the details of Lena and her family so thoroughly that Johann felt left out. Wolfgang had called Lena’s father Georg. He was obviously on familiar terms with the whole family.

  Then Wolfgang went up to one of the spare room’s windows and rapped on the pane, but Lena was playing so loudly she didn’t her him knocking. “She doesn’t hear me,” said Wolfgang. “When you see her, give her my best,” he said. He hoped they would see each other more often now. Johann nodded. Wolfgang got on his bike, waved, and rode off toward the western grade crossing. Johann knew the way to the villas of the Eschigs and the Hajek-Halkes and to the Landsmanns’ house.

  He entered his house by the back door. He didn’t want to see Lena yet. Mother had waited with his food. Anselm had already taken off again.

  Afterward Johann sat and resisted the urge to write a poem. His inside was bubbling with the words Lena had whispered in his ear the last two nights. They had to whisper everything they wanted to say into each other’s ear. That alone created a warmth that penetrated him through and through. And the words themselves were penetrating. Lena was a fanatic of diminutives. Instead of making what they diminished smaller, her diminutives duplicated and triplicated it, made it infinite, world-filling. Words and phrases didn’t stream out of Lena’s mouth, they were summoned. That was perhaps what made them so penetrating, that she summoned them so softly. Next to no consonants. Lena was a language macerator. The words that pressed in upon him could not have been softer or more vehement.

  Till now he had had to be constantly on guard when he had anything to do with other people, careful that there were no mistakes he would have to make up for. And all the people he had to do with had also been on their guard not to make any mistakes. Mother had never been able to do anything about the fact that he was alone. She didn’t even know he was alone. She was just as alone as he was. When Lena spoke into his ear, he had to think of his father, of the Eskimo language, of rubbing noses in greeting, and of the word tree. All at once, his whole word tree was a-rustle with Lena words. They didn’t belong in his mouth. He would have to find his own words. Including for what Wolfgang had told him about himself and his mother and father. The fear in which Wolfgang’s mother had lived because the teacher was going to have her arrested. Johann had to fend off the fear in which Frau Landsmann had lived. He had felt sorry for Wolfgang when Edi Fürst threw his bicycle down the bank. Then he had forgotten Wolfgang and forgot that he had forgotten him. Why didn’t he say that he recognized his bicycle? He could have shown that he recognized it. Then Wolfgang would have known what Johann meant by it! Why didn’t he say that? He is constrained by the fear Frau Landsmann had lived in. He wants nothing to do with it. Once or twice he had seen Frau Landsmann when he delivered Herr Hajek-Halke’s coke to his ground floor storage shed, a kind of lean-to built onto his greenhouse. Frau Landsmann had stood at the fence, chatting with the permanently tanned Herr Hajek-Halke. Landsmanns were not their clients. Johann hardly glanced at the two of them while carrying the full coal hod into the greenhouse addition and the empty hod back to the cart where Niklaus or Dusan had the next full hod ready. Every year he had carried a hundred and twenty hundredweights of coke into Hajek-Halke’s storage shed. Frau Landsmann’s face: eyes that wanted to escape their sockets but were held back by her lower lids. Her eyes lay heavily on her lower lids. And her lips were also heavy. Wide and heavy. Her chin kept them from slipping off her face. Johann sensed that Wolfgang had told him what he told him because Johann needed to know it. Maybe Wolfgang thought Johann was at fault because he hadn’t known all those things, hadn’t noticed them. Johann resisted the assumed reproach. How was he supposed to know that Frau Haensel was Jewish? He didn’t want to be told that something was expected of him. He wanted to decide what his own feelings should be. No one should require him to have a feeling he didn’t have on his own. He wanted to live and not be afraid. Frau Landsmann would pass on her fear to him, he could sense it. He had to turn his thoughts away from her and her fear. One fear gives birth to another. Nothing was as certain as that. He was afraid of encountering Frau Landsmann. Since he knew about the fear she had lived in, he didn’t know what he would do if he met her. How would he greet her, look at her, look away from her? Express more than he felt at that moment? He did not want to be forced. By anybody to do anything. The dead awaited him. He could not imagine Josef dead. In his mind’s eye, he always saw him alive. Perhaps in the winter he would imagine the dead as dead. Not now. Not in the glow of this summer. He had volunteered in order to choose his branch of the service. And he had not volunteered for the flak because he didn’t want to be branded a coward. He wanted to boast like ten naked niggers. The language he had learned after 1933 was his second foreign language after the language of the church. He had not embraced it any more than he embraced the language of the church. He had grappled with both languages. He needed to find his own language. For that, he had to be free.

  Once, in the schoolyard in Lindau, on the last day of school, the flag was to be lowered and the principal had assigned Johann to uncleat the rope and slowly bring down the flag. The principal himself stood with outstretched arm right next to the flagpole. Because this principal had once sent Johann home with an insulting message for his mother—to the effect that, as he said to Johann, she would have to decide whether she wanted Johann to be a secondary school student or a coal shoveler—Johann first pretended that the line was tangled in the upper pulley, thereby forcing the principal to hold his arm out even longer. Then he pretended the line had unexpectedly let go and the flag came swooshing down and half buried the principal, who struggled free and said, “The head idiot, who else.” Johann would never forget his look of contempt and fury. The only other person who’d looked at him like that was the corporal with the MG 42 on the Kreuzeck when Johann said he thought the snow was white.

  Johann never wanted to be subjected again, neither to power nor to fear. No one should have any claim on him. He wanted to be freer than anyone had ever been before.

  Then he heard Lena’s steps coming up the stairs and along the hall. He had to jump up and get out there in a flash, blocking her way and asking the question, “Was there anything between you and Wolfgang Landsmann? Is there still something?” He grabbed a fistful of her hair as if to indicate how well Wolfgang’s fabulous, beautiful black hair, reaching smooth and shiny down to his collar in back—how well it went with her unruly and equally black, upsurging waves.

  “Oh you,” she said, “come here.” And pulled his head to her in order to whisper more words full of weighty diminution and macerating power into his ear. Obviously she was not about to run out of words.

  “And she’s only sixteen,” said the eighteen-year-old and furiously covered her mouth with his. That is, he was not furious at all; he just wanted to rage. Rage fu
riously on and in her mouth.

  The next day it rained heavily. Johann took the train to school. On the way home, he recalled what he had dreamed the previous night. He worked himself into a kind of state free of volition. The dream should not have to obey him. He and Lena in a double bed. They are alone in the room. Lena is Josef’s wife. Josef joins them. Johann and Lena ought to have known that they couldn’t do such a thing here in Josef’s realm, and Johann had asked Lena ahead of time if it wasn’t too much—his brother’s wife. Josef stood in the door and said only two words: scruffy clothes. Johann had stood in front of the mirror in Josef’s jacket. But he had also lain in bed next to Lena with no clothes on.

  When Johann woke from this dream, he felt ashamed.

  Never again would he wear one of the lovely jackets that had been Josef’s. He couldn’t get rid of that dream. He could avoid the details, but the mood remained and colored everything. He tried to read. The dream intruded.

  Luckily, he heard Lena’s steps approaching and was in the hallway to intercept her, but she did not cuddle into his arm as usual. “Herr Krohn from Friedrichshafen is sitting at the regulars’ table,” she said. “He’s weeping and telling how in April he was supposed to blow up the bridge across the Argen near Giessen. But he went out of his way to wait until five young French soldiers were crossing the bridge and then he pushed the plunger.”

  “What’s he doing now?” asked Johann.

  “Selling pants again,” said Lena, “from a shack, since his shop is kaput.”

  “Lights out, knives out, three men to stir the blood,” said Johann.

  “Yes, Herr Seehahn,” said Lena.

  When Johann was alone in his room again, listening to the sounds the wind and rain made against the shutters on the four windows, he had to admit that he could not bring himself to tell Lena the dream in which she was Josef’s wife. He should have told her the dream. She told him everything about herself. He could not tell her everything. Every day there was something he couldn’t tell her. Write what he couldn’t say to her? Write down the dream, then let Lena read the written words? A kind of hope that he could appease the dream by writing it down. Or that its power to shame him would lessen. He had to write down the dream. He had to defend himself.

  Writing down the dream felt like something he shouldn’t do. But he did it. He had to. Simply entrust yourself to language. Perhaps it can do something you can’t.

  When he had written down the dream, he saw that he had not written down the dream but what he thought the dream meant. There was nothing left of the dream’s overflow. As long as he dreamt it, he had understood everything. Now, awake, he understands only its meaning. He had destroyed the dream by writing it down. He had not trusted language but had written what he wanted to write. He had wanted to deprive the dream of its power to shame by writing it down. He had aimed at something rather than entrusting himself. He would have to lose the habit of calculation, entrust himself to the sentences, to language. He imagined crossing the sea on a raft of sentences, even if the raft dissolved in the very act of being built and needed to be constantly rebuilt out of new sentences if he was not to drown.

  When he begins to write, what he would like to write should already be there on the page. What reached the page through language, and thus on its own, would need only to be read by him. Language, thought Johann, is a gushing fountain.

  Foreword as Afterword

  “IHR WERDET EUCH WUNDERN, Vater, wie es Euch da ring wird um die Brust.”—“You’ll be surprised how much it clears up your chest, Father,” says Johann’s father to his father. A more literal translation would be “. . . how light (or: easy) it becomes around your chest.” Contemporary German would use leicht (light, easy) instead of the dialect word ring. But ring is more than “light”; it also encompasses “open,” “comfortable,” “at ease.” First, one’s chest is constricted; then it is ring. Which has nothing to do with Ring (ring) or gering (small, scant, limited). As a positive adjective, ring has died out in standard written German. Grimms Deutsches Wörterbuch, begun in the nineteenth century by the great philologists and folklorists Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, is the German counterpart to the Oxford English Dictionary. It needs four closely-printed columns for its definitions and citations of ring in its various senses of “light,” “easy,” “small,” “little,” “meager,” “cheap.” Although according to Grimm, the use of the word begins to decline in the seventeenth century, “it continues a robust existence as an adjective and adverb in many dialects.” If only that were still true. It is hard to understand why High German allowed this word to die out without having one of equal value to replace it. The High German word gering accounts for only a fraction of what ring was once able to express: only “small,” “little,” but not “light,” and “easy.” A sixteenth-century verse by Hans Sachs cited in Grimm demonstrates that leicht is not a synonym for ring:

  nun diese pflicht

  daucht sie gar leicht und ring.

  Now this duty

  seems to her quite light and easy.

  If leicht was the equivalent of ring, a poet as concrete and precise as Hans Sachs would never have written leicht und ring. In short, we’ve lost ring. “Light” plus “open” plus “comfortable” equals ring. And the fact that Johann’s father, who insisted on speaking his Royal Bavarian Middle School German in the village’s thicket of dialects, couldn’t get by without the word ring shows me that there is no substitute for it. So I must run the risk that most readers will either take no cognizance of the word or will regard it as a meaningless syllable and hold it against the book or its author.

  Another example: on Christmas Eve in the restaurant, Hanse Luis says, “da fällt der Rotzglonker, wie sich’s gehört, wenn er wieder eine Zeit lang gelampt hat, regelmäßig in den Abgrund.”—“When the glob o’ snot has hung there long enough, it finally drops—as is right and proper—down into the abyss.” At issue is the word gelampt. Because several people not native to the village are present, Hanse Luis is speaking High German here, every word of which “sounded like he was standing on a pedestal to say it.” And yet he must say about the thing described as temporarily suspended from his nose that it has gelampt. High German gehangen (past participle of hängen, to hang) simply won’t do; hängen doesn’t convey the swaying, the imminence of a fall already inherent in the hanging, the way lampen does. It comes from the noun Lampe (lamp), derived from Greek and Latin via French. I think German is the only language that developed a verb from the noun, but it was a verb not destined to enjoy the imprimatur of High German. So it just hangs around in dialect and will eventually fall into oblivion.

  Another example: losen. This is how Semper’s Fritz has to talk: “Also, Kameraden aller Jahrgänge, loset, was einem eingerückten, das Ehrenkleid der Nation tragenden ehemaligen Spenglergesellen hat zugefügt werden dürfen.”—“OK, OK, comrades of all ages, listen up to what an enlisted former apprentice tinsmith wearing the honorable uniform of his nation had to swallow.” Since out-of-towners are among his auditors at the regulars’ table, he, too, speaks High German. But when he requests their attention, he can’t say Hört mir zu! (Listen to me) or Horcht her! (Hearken here), and certainly not Spitzt eure Ohren! (Perk up your ears). He has to say loset.

  Grimm’s dictionary notes that in all its uses, the verb losen expresses an appeal for attention and calls it “a word completely unknown to the modern written language.” There’s nothing to be done about that. Johann Peter Hebel (1760–1826), who wrote in both standard German and Alemannic dialect, makes it into Grimm as a source for losen:

  loset, was i euch will sage!

  d’glocke het zehni gschlage.

  Listen to what I have to tell you!

  The clock has struck ten.

  Why does High German forget a word for which it has no replacement, or merely a replacement instead of an equivalent?

  One more example, the noun Masen: “Einen rotglänzenden Prinz-Ludwig-Apfel nach dem anderen brach er und ließ ih
n vorsichtig, daß der Apfel keine Masen bekomme, in den umgehängten Rupfensack gleiten.”—“He picked the shiny red Prince Ludwig apples one after another and slid them carefully, so they wouldn’t get bruised, into the picking bag slung over his shoulder.” Masen does not appear in Duden, the standard dictionary of contemporary German from the publisher of the same name. But Kaltschmitt’s Gesammt-Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache of 1850 still includes Mase with the meaning “bruise,” “blemish.” In Grimm, it is linked to the verb masen, to taint, stain, blemish. Kaltschmitt also revealingly includes the alternative spelling Mose. In fact, in dialect, the a in Mase is pronounced like the a in English “wall” or “fall” or “tall.” Neither a standard German a nor an o but an open vowel somewhere between the two. High German has forgotten the word since 1850, and offers in its place: Fleck (spot, stain), Mal (mark, stigma), and Makel (flaw, taint, blemish, macula), but none of these represent what a Mase is. A Fleck contrasts too much with its immediate environment. The precise and therefore beautiful thing about a Mase is that it concentrates and only slightly darkens all the color values around it. Mal is too abstract, too stilted and filled with pathos. Makel is too moralistic. But Mase gets forgotten and there is nothing to replace it.

  A word about names: like many regional German dialects, the one spoken in Wasserburg and its surroundings puts the family name first and then the given name. But when a family name crops up in too many houses, the names of the houses themselves (names they have inherited from their original inhabitants) become important. Gierer’s Hermine and Hagen’s Fritz are not enough; one needs Helmer Gierer’s Hermine and Semper Hagen’s Fritz, who then come to rely entirely on the house names: Helmer’s Hermine and Semper’s Fritz. It’s the same with Hanse Luis, whose real name is Alois Hotz. Because of a plethora of Hotzes, the house name Hans comes to his aid. He’s the Luis from Hans’s. If a name has only one syllable and ends in a consonant, however, then an extra e gets attached to it. This final e is just barely voiced, as in French trente or pente or quarante in the south of France, or in the first person singular inflection in German: ich gehe, halte, hauche (I go, stop, whisper), which is also barely voiced. This is how the names Schnelle Paul and Hanse Luis come to be. If there hadn’t been so many Hotzes, Hanse Luis would have been Hotze Luis. A Georg Schmitt, however, wasn’t called Schmitte Georg but rather Schmitt’s Georg. The hardness of the double t permitted the –s inflection. Polysyllabic family names, on the other hand, always get a genitive –s no matter how they end, cf. Helmer’s Hermine, etc.