I took a train one June with Renee from Erlangen up to Bayreuth to spend the day with Christine who, too, was on two-month exchange between highschool students of Fairfax County, Virginia, and the German state of Bavaria. There wasn't a plan. The train overspeeded north durch der Fränkische-Schweiz and within the hour Christine was at the bahnhof with a car.
Christine had been given open use of a car. At the home she got to stay in her quarters were above the garage. Kitchenette. Full bath. The host family was all at work, or school, save the much older brother of her gästschwester—a serious man with wet, heavy eyes and a high brow to whom she spoke, exclusively, English. "Since we're speaking so much German at school I get to speak English at home," Christine explained.
To stay solo prolonged weeks in a foreign country is to find one's home language gradually lost. Whole words slip from mastery to mystery. What lights another's cigarette becomes a fire thing. Words toss themselves across new orderings. It takes what's often an intolerable loss for this all to happen.
Naturally, new terms for old things find room in your brain somewhere. Ein Stadtbummel: a stroll, errant, through a city's civic landscape. Bayreuth had what had come to be expected from these cities older than even the idea of the United States of America. Mountainous cathedrals, echt Gothic. A grand stone Rathaus. Parks and Plätze. All of it Black-Death old. Dip in and take a snapshot. The girls posed everywhere. Christine's face masked something Asiatic in her family's past. Renee's long and heavy lashes got her face all bashful at certain angles. They wore blousey white T-shirts, sized for Titans, tucked into high shorts. Christine and Renee shoulder-to-shoulder on a streetcorner by the Jean Paul Museum. Christine and Renee on a park see-saw, giggling, the Rathaus-Apotheke open for business across the street. The German curbside parking meter is identical to the American curbside parking meter. The curbside parking meter was an American invention, sent propitiously abroad. The German curbside parking meter Christine in her car, like so much else in this country, worked to ignore.
No one was friends so much as American together. At a cafe somewhere the orders were Radler, Radler, and Sprite. Auf Deutsch, say /ein spritt/. "A Sprite," Christine said, accentless.
Bayreuth's lionized citizen, Richard Wagner, built in 1872 a villa there in yellow stone. On a row of plaques above the front door's and windows' porticoes got inscribed these words: Hier wo mein Wähnen Frieden fand–Wahnfried–sei dieses Haus von mir benannt. A translation: Here where my madness peace found—Madnesspeace—should this house from me be so named. In Wahnfried's cellar vault lie, publicly unviewable, Wagner's handwritten scores. A darkened room which holds, in cabinets, illuminated dioramas depicting stage sets from the operas' original Bayreuth productions—around the center display of which Christine popped to scare Renee into high giggles—is now closed to the public. Who knows whose loss this is. Who knows what led upstairs to the library, where more than 2,500 books line the high walls in costly wooden shelves.
If the past is a foreign country it is the tourist's duty to impose herself thereon. "Take my picture," Christine said, and sat herself down on the bench at Wagner's grand piano. A Steinway, one hundred and two years her elder. Nothing, no ropes, no bitte nicht setzen, stopped her from taking this perch. She raised her wrists, poised, and laughed as the flashbulb filled this old hall with light.
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