A Gushing Fountain Read online

  Copyright © 1998 by Suhrkamp Verlag

  English-language translation copyright © 2015 by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First English-language Edition

  Originally published in German under the title Ein springender Brunnen by Suhrkamp Verlag

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Walser, Martin, 1927–

  [Springender Brunnen. English]

  A gushing fountain : a novel / Martin Walser ; translated by David Dollenmayer.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-62872-424-0 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-62872-544-5 (ebook)

  1. Schoolboys—Fiction. 2. Villages—Fiction. 3. National socialism—Fiction. 4. Germany—History—1933–1945—Fiction. 5. Coming of age—Fiction. I. Dollenmayer, David B. II. Title.

  PT2685.A48S6513 2015

  833’.914—dc23 2014045336

  Cover design by Brian Peterson

  Cover photo of Martin Walser as a boy, courtesy of the author

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  Part One

  Mother Joins the Party

  Chapter One The Past as Present

  Chapter Two Johann Makes a Mistake He Doesn’t Regret

  Chapter Three Suspended Payments

  Chapter Four Loan Guarantee

  Chapter Five Blessing the Flag

  Chapter Six Mother Joins the Party

  Chapter Seven Meetings

  Part Two

  The Miracle of Wasserburg

  Chapter One The Past as Present

  Chapter Two La Paloma

  Chapter Three Anita, Anita

  Chapter Four The First Time

  Chapter Five Low Sunday

  Chapter Six Follow Her

  Chapter Seven The Miracle of Wasserburg

  Chapter Eight Taking Leave

  Part Three

  Harvest

  Chapter One The Past as Present

  Chapter Two Harvest

  Chapter Three Excursion

  Chapter Four Prose

  Foreword as Afterword

  Glossary

  PART ONE

  Mother Joins the Party

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Past as Present

  AS LONG AS SOMETHING IS, it isn’t what it will have been. When something is past, you are no longer the person it happened to, but you’re closer to him than to others. Although the past did not exist when it was present, it now obtrudes as if it had been as it now presents itself. But as long as something is, it isn’t what it will have been. When something is past, you are no longer the person it happened to. When things were that we now say used to be, we didn’t know they were. Now we say it used to be thus and so, although back when it was, we knew nothing about what we say now.

  We can stroll around in the past we all have in common, as in a museum. One’s own past is not walkable. All we have of it is what it surrenders of its own accord, even if that be no clearer than a dream. The more we could leave the past alone, the more it would become present in its own way. We destroy dreams, too, by asking them what they mean. A dream dragged into the light of another language reveals only what we ask of it. Like the victim of torture, it says anything we want to hear, but nothing of itself. As does the past.

  The moment the last train of the day stops in W., you start grabbing for your bags. You have more than you can pick up all at once. All right then—concentrate—one after another. But hurry, because the train doesn’t stop in Wasserburg forever. Each time you get your fingers on one bag, another you thought you had a good hold on slips from your grasp. Should you leave two or three or even four bags in the train? Impossible. So one more time, with both hands, grab as many bags as you can. But then the train starts rolling again. It’s too late.

  Where do dreams come from? Telling what things were like means building a house of dreams. You’ve dreamed long enough, now build. When you build a house of dreams, it’s not an act of will that leads to something wished for. You accept. Be prepared.

  The two men who carried Father out the front door on a stretcher wore uniforms and Red Cross armbands. Big Elsa the waitress and little Mina the cook held open the swinging doors, whose upper half was of rippled glass. The front door was already open. Johann was watching it all from the kitchen door. Since the front door opened east, he was staring into a fiery streak as the men carried Father across the terrace and turned toward the ambulance. The sun was about to rise above Mount Pfänder. Ice-cold air streamed in through the open door. Early March. Father must have survived that time. The word that Johann, who hadn’t started school yet, then had to spell for him was pleurisy. One of Father’s favorite pastimes was having Johann sound out long words that at first glance seemed illegible, even though at three, four, and five years he had already learned all the letters from his older brother: Popocatépetl, Bhagavad Gita, Rabindranath Tagore, Swedenborg, Bharatanatyam. Words you couldn’t automatically complete after hearing just the first three or four letters, like Hindenburg, flagpole, or marriage. When Johann asked what one of the hard words meant, Father would say: Let’s put it in our word tree and take a look.

  When a guest on the second floor pressed a button, his room number fell into the corresponding glass-fronted square in the bell box that hung in the central hallway, next to the kitchen door. Warm water then had to be taken up to that room at once so the guest could shave. Next to the bell box and also behind glass: tennis players on the deck of the SS Bremen from North German Lloyd. Mixed doubles, the men in long white pants, the women in pleated skirts with caps on their heads so that all you could see of their bobbed hair were the bangs. Bruggers’ Adolf always called them pangs. Adolf was his best friend, and Johann was too embarrassed to tell him that the word was bangs.

  As soon as Herr Schlegel spied Helmer Gierer’s Hermine approaching, he would call out: My respects, dear Lady! then step aside and nod his huge head. It wasn’t just anybody he favored with My respects. He could bear right down on you in all his height and bulk, take hold of you by the shoulders—although his right hand still held a cane (which, however, compared to Herr Schlegel’s body mass, was a mere swagger stick)—and demand: Where is Manila? If you didn’t answer: In the Philippines! at once, Herr Schlegel would either scold or laugh at you, whichever he felt like at the moment. When he was in a good mood, he would grasp the elegantly curved handle of his cane and draw out a sword, slash it this way and that, and cry: A personal gift from Frederick the Great after the Battle of Leuthen. Then he sheathed it back in the cane. Sometimes, however, Herr Schlegel could hardly lift that ponderous head, heavy as a Chinese lion’s. If his reddened gaze happened to fall on you then, he would grate out harshly: Up against the red wall and shoot him! Since Herr Schlegel sat at the
regulars’ table every day drinking his lake wine, Johann had blundered into that sentence more than once: Up against the red wall and . . . (a slight pause, and then in the same growl) . . . shoot him. Johann liked it better when Herr Schlegel, upon catching sight of him, cried: Pernambuco! If you answered: Seventy-seven hours and thirty minutes! he’d let you pass. If Herr Schlegel demanded: Lakehurst to Friedrichshafen? and you answered: Fifty-five hours, he’d take you by the shoulders and shake you until . . . and twenty-three minutes! popped out. Why did the gigantic builder never let Gierer’s Hermine go by without a My respects, dear Lady? Perhaps because Helmer, Hermine’s aged father, who had passed away long ago, had bequeathed him a sentence for lack of which not a week would have gone by without his being unable to say—at least once—what needed saying. And that sentence was: Die Bescht ischt nuaz. He could not utter that sentence in the kitchen of the Station Restaurant without being furiously corrected by the Princess who stood at the sink washing dishes and detested dialect of any kind: Die Beste ist nichts—Even the best woman is nothing. It annoyed the hulking builder to be corrected like that. Faster than you’d think possible, he would whirl around to face the Princess at her sink and ask in a High German every bit as good as hers: Where is Manila? and the Princess would sing out: In the Philippines!! My respects, dear Lady, said Herr Schlegel, drew his sword, declined it toward the Princess, and like a ship leaving port, departed the kitchen for the men’s room, which is where he was headed in the first place when he rose from the regulars’ table. On the other hand, the builder was also capable of giving in. When he encountered Helmer Gierer’s Hermine in the street and asked her the Pernambuco question, she answered in her most haughty High German: Beneath my notice! and he, quite impressed, said: My respects, dear Lady. And once, just to be mischievous, she gave him the brush-off in dialect: Wenn i it ma, isch as grad as wenn i it ka. And he, more or less adopting her idiom in return, remarked: Aha, wenn du nicht magst, ist es gerade, wie wenn du nicht kannst. If you don’t want to, it’s the same as if you can’t.

  The two of them never passed each other without at least a bit of banter.

  “Helmer Gierer’s Hermine cleans the villas of the summer people,” said Father, “without demeaning herself in the least.” Without Helmer Gierer’s Hermine, one never would have known what went on in those villas dozing by the lakeshore. From Easter to All Saints the motorboat of a manufacturer from Reutlingen lay at anchor between the path along the lake and the steamship landing. The name SUROTMA was on its lofty prow for all to read, but no one knew what it meant. When Johann first saw the word, he was immediately compelled to sound it out. But Adolf, whom he intended to impress with this skill, already knew from his father, who’d heard it from Helmer Gierer’s Hermine, that SUROTMA was derived from the first syllables of the names of the Reutlingen manufacturer’s children: Susanne, Ursula, Otto, and Martin. Now he knew that and repeated it to himself down by the lake, watching the SUROTMA with its thundering motor almost lift itself out of the water and leave in its wake two foaming white walls worthy of the thunder. Helmer Gierer’s Hermine: a source of news. Frau Fürst: her diametrical opposite. Herr Schlegel also stepped aside for Frau Fürst. That heaviest of all bodies in the village—and thus in the world—bowed before her and uttered his My respects, dear Lady. And Frau Fürst said nothing. And Herr Schlegel knew she wouldn’t. He would never have thought of asking her the Manila question, the Pernambuco question, or the Lakehurst question. From Frau Fürst you learned nothing, or as Helmer’s Hermine put it, everything was beneath her notice. Her lips looked like they were stitched shut. And yet, since she delivered the paper, she entered more houses than Helmer Gierer’s Hermine. No one expected even a hello from her. No one—not even the priest (but she was probably a Lutheran anyway), nor the mayor—could claim that she had ever taken any notice of them at all, much less said hello. She always carried her head as if to let the sun shine in under her chin. Frau Häckelsmiller, on the other hand, went around as if to let the sun shine on the back of her neck. How could the village have been a world if it didn’t contain not just everything, but everything and its opposite! The only path Frau Häckelsmiller trod, bent over as she was, was from her little cottage to the church and from the church back to her cottage, but she was perpetually on that path through the meadows known as the Moos. When the grass was tall, all you saw of her was the little hump of her back. Not even Helmer Gierer’s Hermine could have told you anything about Frau Häckelsmiller’s—presumably tiny—face. On the other hand, Hermine would tell anyone who was new to the village and wondering about the expression on Frau Fürst’s face, that it had been like that ever since they had brought the news to Frau Fürst that in Memmingen, just as he was about to climb into Herr Mehltreter’s automobile, which was being driven by Hans Schmied, her husband had collapsed and died, at the age of thirty-four, on his way to sell the floor wax Herr Mehltreter manufactured according to his own top-secret recipe in the former stable of the restaurant. But before that, Herr Fürst had vulcanized tires in the basement of Herr Schlegel’s house. But before that, he had tried his hand at selling radios in a gloomy town called Dortmund. Hermine had it from him, and the village heard it from her, that whenever it hadn’t rained for a spell in Dortmund, you couldn’t open your mouth without its filling up with the taste of soot that crunched between your teeth. But before that, he’d been in the war—an officer, in fact, and an excellent one, too. Helmer Gierer’s Hermine always wound up her story of the Fürsts by remarking that Frau Fürst and her two children now lived in the same subterranean rooms where tires used to be vulcanized and had never once failed to pay Herr Schlegel the rent on time. Then Helmer Gierer’s Hermine would say: My respects, while her right index finger—which always ticked back and forth to accompany what she was saying—suddenly stood bolt upright and still. Subterranean was one of many words Helmer Gierer’s Hermine imported into the village from the villas she cleaned without demeaning herself in the least: subterranean, kleptomania, migraine, tabula rasa, psychology, gentleman, etc.

  The village blossoms beneath the ground. Or should one say that autumn lays its many-colored hand on our borrowed green? Then the snow assumes the role of conservator. An edging of snow on all the branches. The snow provides silence, isolates certain sounds, and so passes them on. The lake glitters like armor on the body of winter.

  We live on, not as those we once were, but as those we have become after we were. After it is past. It still exists, although it is past. Is there more past or more present, now, in being past?

  CHAPTER TWO

  Johann Makes a Mistake He Doesn’t Regret

  WHEN THE BARBER WAS FINISHED, he squeezed the red rubber bulb while waving the nozzle around, spraying a generous dose of perfume onto the head he had just been applying himself to, and announced that now Johann was at least presentable again. Then he whisked away the blue sheet like a magician, but of course it was only Johann who emerged and had to try standing on his own two feet again and nod his head vigorously enough that the barber and everyone waiting on the bench could measure the extent of Johann’s gratitude and how mindful he was that it was only thanks to the tonsorial skills of Herr Häfele that he was presentable at all. Johann’s gratitude had to be so vigorously demonstrated mainly because he had to conceal what a bad feeling this haircut was giving him. Basically, his whole head shaved bald, only a few hairs from the middle of his head to the front permitted to be left standing. Too short to part. “My best to your family,” Herr Häfele called after him, “and tell your grandfather I’ll be there on Saturday as usual.” Johann was always on hand in the office—where his grandfather almost never appeared during the week—when the old man sat on Johann’s father’s desk chair and had Herr Häfele tie on the blue sheet, lather him up, and give him a shave. Then he permitted Herr Häfele to trim his thick mustache and apply his shears to the dense growth on his head. At such times his grandfather always seemed to him like a king. Grandfather liked it when Johann sat
and watched. Johann could sense it.

  Every time Johann walked out of the barbershop and into the corridor, he felt miserable. Right across the hall from the barber was Göser Marie’s shop, where he was headed next. Without even thinking about it he pushed down the door handle. The bell made a hellish racket—although you hadn’t intended to steal anything, you jumped at the noise like a thief caught in the act—and Göser Marie was out of her parlor and behind the counter before he even got that far. He bought ten pfennigs’ worth of raspberry drops. He’d spent fifty pfennigs of the mark he had with him on the haircut. By the time he got home, his mother would probably forget to ask where the other fifty pfennigs were. And even if she didn’t, she would OK ten pfennigs for raspberry drops. He hoped she would. He wasn’t sure. Sometimes his mother groaned while sitting at his father’s desk in the office, adding and subtracting something in her head. When she finished, she wrote down the result. Her lips moved a little whenever she added and subtracted like that. Anyone who didn’t know what she was doing might have thought she was praying. But then, the soft but still audible groaning wouldn’t have fit with praying. What it meant was, Oh dear, oh dear. Which in Mother’s dialect was Aahne, aahne.

  “Now you look like something again, Johann,” said Göser Marie. Johann nodded vigorously so that here too, it wouldn’t come out how dissatisfied he was with his haircut. If Göser Marie had guessed that Johann didn’t like the haircut, after he was gone she would have scurried across the hall to the barber and announced that Herr Häfele’s haircut was obviously not good enough for Johann from the Station Restaurant. And the next time Herr Häfele came to the restaurant and took his place at the regulars’ table, he would have called over to Johann’s mother behind the bar: Augusta, I don’t seem to be able to cut your son’s hair to his liking anymore. And there was nothing worse than customers, especially regular customers, complaining to their mother about Josef or Johann. That was the cardinal rule of deportment: always behave so as not to give anyone in the village cause to complain to Mother, who would immediately fetch the one against whom a complaint had been lodged and give him a proper dressing-down right there in front of the injured party. The express purpose of every reprimand was to show that you were incorrigible. That’s what the injured party expected. But if his mother scolded, she was also desperate. She worked, struggled day and night, to keep the family from ruin, despite the fact that his father—half from illness, half from other incapacities—kept repeatedly steering both family and business toward a predictable calamity with his catastrophically bad ideas. Every time so far, she’d preserved the family and the business from disaster through sheer hard work and determination, but then her own children go and insult the very people on whose good will they all depended. These outbursts always ended with a sigh from deep down inside her: Aahne, aahne, where will it all end. In her dialect, it was a sequence of sounds that expressed—even intoned—the inmost depths of her utter tribulation, a sequence in which individual words were no longer distinguishable. His mother never uttered a word of High German. His father, although he’d been born in Hengnau not even two miles as the crow flies from Mother’s birthplace in Kümmertsweiler, used dialect words only as a joke. He had learned a different way of speaking at the Royal Bavarian Middle School in Lindau, and yet another during his commercial apprenticeship in Lausanne. And another still, quite different, during the war.