It Took a Village

It was a feast for the senses. It was a season of newness, of being green, grappling with my greenness, and getting to know my red-room-self. I was fourteen when my parents moved me from rural Alabama to a German village miles away from any other American. I had lived in Germany before, ages 3-6, but I didn't remember enough for it to make a difference to me. I knew how to count to ten in German, which I had learned in kindergarten, but that was the extent of my comfort zone.

It was still summer, weeks before school would start on the Army base, and I had no one. It was a hilly, farm village, smelling overwhelmingly of manure that coated the fields. My dad had found an attic apartment above the village deli (Metzgerei), and the pigs that they slaughtered twice a week grunted under my window at night while I was trying to sleep. Every Monday and Thursday, the sound, not unlike a woman screaming, came from the courtyard behind our apartment. I knew fresh meat would be available later that afternoon. The bakery was across the street. Everyday, the wives would arrive with their wicker baskets and get their daily bread, along with cold cuts and cheese from the Metzgerei.

The church, sitting on the steepest hill in the village, chimed the hour, every hour. The first few days, it really annoyed me. It was like an hourly reminder that I was out of my element--that I had gotten thrown into a world I didn't belong. I still wasn't accustomed to the six hour time difference, so I laid awake at night, reading Reader's Digest condensed books and listening to the chimes.

I didn't want to walk around during the day because the Germans would naturally try to talk to me, and I was panicky when all I knew how to say was, "I don't know how to speak German." I found ways to avoid them, walking off into the fields, wearing my walkman. There was the farmer driving his tractor with his Dachshund, Waldi, riding on the back, but he never bothered me.

One night, after about a week of being there, I suppose the word had made it around the village that there was a "new American girl" in the village, exciting on all three counts to the German boys. The doorbell rang around 11 pm. I answered the intercom, and from the street, I heard a German accent speaking English: "We have hear there is a new American girl here. We like to look at her." So here it was. My first German invitation, no matter how crass. But I had abandoned my Reader's Digest Condensed Book and slipped out the front door while my parents were still yelling from their bedroom, "Who's ringing the doorbell this late?"

I propelled myself downstairs, slowing down only on the last couple of steps. Regaining composure, I opened the frosted glass door to behold the crowd surrounding me. I did a demure turn. "Now you've looked at me," I said.

Of course, they were precisely the boys that my new landlady, the butcher's wife, had given me explicit instructions to stay away from. She didn't speak English, but she brought in her daughter, a college student, expressly for the occasion. They were the "bad seeds" of the village. But what is a list of names to a girl with no friends?