In the Electric Eden by Nick Arvin

Author:Nick Arvin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bower House

Two Thousand Germans

in Frankenmuth

The television is on. Katherine’s mother sits in her easy chair, absorbed in the sorcery of shining images, while on the sofa Katherine slouches over a basket of laundry. She is matching socks. The room is growing dark, lit only by the TV and an end-of-day sky in the window. The shelves behind Katherine’s mother are crowded with knickknacks—smiling porcelain figures, artificial flowers in chipped vases, framed needlework platitudes. The green carpeting shows the wear of repeated passage along routes determined by a furniture arrangement which has not altered in many years. To Katherine, even with a pile of fresh laundry before her, the air smells shabby and stale. As is usual, the only sound in the room is the noise of the TV. In the years since Dad died, Katherine has seen her mother remove herself from the world and decline into a spiritless television habit of such fixation that Katherine now sometimes feels as if she were tending to a kind of vegetable that required TV-light to survive—the last time she dusted the room and moved the TV to wipe beneath it, her mother’s face followed the screen like a sunflower tracing the sun’s arc.

When she glances up from the laundry, the sky in the window is wildly aflame.

“We should go to this,” Katherine’s mother says.

Startled, Katherine turns. “What?”

“We should go.” Her mother gestures toward the television. “We might get on TV.”

The local news is on. A reporter is saying, “—next month Hans Kraus will come here, to Frankenmuth.” He stands on the main street in town, and behind him is a building with whitewashed walls accented by dark wooden beams and bright window box flowers. “Which just goes to show,” he says, “Frankenmuth, Michigan’s little Bavaria, truly is ‘world famous.’”

“What?” Katherine blurts again. “Who is Hans Kraus?”

Her mother smiles and says, “We could be on TV.”

The reporter explains that Hans Kraus is the star of the most popular talk show on German television. In a brief clip, a tall, balding man waves his arms and shouts something in German while the crowd at his feet laughs and applauds. “Here,” the reporter says and gestures toward the park: an image of the park’s amphitheater is shown. “Indeed—” the reporter lowers his voice dramatically “—Hans Kraus will bring not only his show here to Frankenmuth to tape a program, but he will also be accompanied by an entire audience of some two thousand Germans.” The reporter nods soberly, as if anticipating the viewer’s incredulity. “Two thousand,” he says, “real Germans, from Germany.”

“Mom, you want to go to this?” Katherine exclaims. “Everyone on the show will be speaking German. You don’t speak German, do you?”

“So? It’s television.”

“It’s television but we’ll never see it in this country. It’s German television.”

“Television is television. Millions of people will see it.” Her mother turns again toward the TV. She adds, her voice fading as her attention drifts, “Hans Kraus’s is the most popular show in Germany.”

The reporter has signed off; the news shifts to sports.

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