The Lamp, Part 2 (7/5/2009)

My host parents had converted the basement from a private apartment to extra bedrooms six years prior to accommodate their fourth child. Even in heavily Catholic Bavaria, four kids is substantial: That they took on me, a fifth, effectively, was surprising but admirable. But then, you would have too.

You see, the previous year, family friends had hosted Bill, the California wunderkind. Bill was the consummate American exchange student; a chatterbox who loved small talk about your day. He frequented the Kamera diskothek (which for Passau, might well have been Studio 54.) He smiled a lot, and his flowing curly hair slinkied out from the everpresent fedora.

I’m not exaggerating: Bill was a Passau legend. Passau is a small city with few celebrities, and Bill was the local youth’s rock star. Everyone in Dublin has a Bono story; everyone in Passau had a Bill story. I arrived two weeks after his departure – one celebrated with a gathering at the train station and, if pictures were any testament, a sendoff remnant of the end of Revelation.

They wanted the outgoing Californian. They got the shy New Englander. Guess who came to dinner.

And, with all these expectations, my year actually began well. My language skills were rudimentary but solid, and I was away most of the day at a monthlong orientation anyway, learning that (among others) it wouldn’t all be roses, so wait for the other shoe to drop. Ha ha, I’m different, suckers, I thought. These initial nerves subsided; we’d joke, best we could at least, about the days ongoings, and I’d ask them about various Passau landmarks… what do you think of this architecture? What do you like better, the Dom or St. Paul Church? That hockey team in Deggendorf… how easy is it to get tickets?

Germany fascinated me, and I wanted to decipher the dialects, see the landscapes, taste the beer. As I poured over maps and travel magazines in their living room, they’d occasionally jump in. You have to make it to Munich. Linz. Nurnberg. Vienna. Landshut…

By early October, my weeks and weekends were full, and I hardly noticed my family’s passive aggression escalating. My host sister Dorothea, 17, stopped inviting me out with her friends. Well, whatever, I thought: she’d just had a falling out with the guy I’d talked to most when we hung out together. My host brother Flo, 19, was short with me once or twice. My host mother took to communicating through signs she posted for “general use” in the bathroom.

Still, I’m not a natural confronter, and maybe I was imagining all this. After all, the euphoria and newness had worn off and we were still cordial. Best, I thought, to keep a low profile and stay out of their hair.

One Saturday morning, though, I learned how long that hair stretched. My host father and sisters were finishing a late breakfast. There were a few extra rolls on the table; better eat them before they go stale.

“Who wants them?” my host father asked.
“Ach, I can’t” said Dorothea.
“Me neither, I’m too stuffed,” said Anna.
He looked at me, and said in the only English I'd ever heard from him: “Matt, kill ‘em all.”
“Kill ‘em all?” Dorothea asked. “Where’s that from?”
“You know,” he responded. “Kill ‘em all. Like in Vietnam.”