“The Thermostat-Nazi” by Morgan Kier

It had been my sister's suggestion to rent out the kids rooms to foreign exchange students. I’d been doing it for two years now. It was a nice little house near Alewife, well within walking distance to the red line. Every three months they rotate through, except for Alessandra, who was doing a PhD. There were no men in my house, which I know left some feeling absurdly disappointed, and even resentful. I only charged $500 in rent and paid the utilities myself. In Boston this was unprecedented, and my sister complained that I needed to raise my prices. 

“Oh, I could never. They’re all so broke. Besides,” I said, “I just like the company.” Sometimes it was like being able to take a college class, but one-on-one. They’d wander in at odd hours and more often than not, these young women from Mexico or China would be thrilled to tell me what they learned. It’s because I’m sixty. I think I remind some of their mothers back home. I just can’t risk having a man in here with so many young women around, and one little old lady.

Late August is usually crunch time. Sometimes I’ll have two or three girls a day coming through, looking for a place to stay for the upcoming semester. Most pass. My house is, after all, kind of old and worn down (like me, I like to joke!) but it's a roof, and I like to cook. I’m never lonely very long. And this time of year, when the blue birds are singing and the mourning doves are out, my inbox is always full. Like yesterday morning, when I got a message from Fazþóitétá1111@gmail.com that was just two sentences.

Can I tour? It began. It finished:

I can pay cash?

“I am not German. I am from Zō Étrilō.” She said.

“Oh.” I said, innocently.

“Is it like Austria, where they speak German?”

Her jaw clenched.

“No.”

Fazþóitétá was European, from out near Poland. I’d never heard of her nation before, but then there were so many small ones. One time my son told me about a place called Andorra and I’d said he was wrong because it wasn’t on the map, until he shoved his iPhone in my face and showed me a flag.

“Well, they can do anything with computers.” I half-teased, which drove him insane. He had a Masters of History and I didn’t like how stupid he made me feel without trying, sometimes, even as I was grateful he had it. Fazþóitétá was pretty without trying to be. I could tell. A tall, Scandinavian looking girl with an uncontrollable mess of blonde hair that some women spent hundreds at the salon trying to mimic and large brown eyes like a deer. What surprised me was her voice, sharp and flinty. If you’d blindfolded me, I’d thought she was in her forties. She said she was twenty-four.

“Well, do you like it?” I said, gesturing around the room she’d be living in. It was the last one. Her neighbor was a Chinese girl, an Indian girl, and down the hall by me was Alessandra. She eyed the room like I’d seen my uncle, who runs a dairy farm in upstate New York, eye a sick cow.

“It works.” She said. She pulled out a wad of cash. My eyes bulged in their sockets. “I can pay now?”

Three weeks later I overheard two of the other girls talking about Fazþóitétá. We all called her ‘Faz’ because no one could pronounce Fazþóitétá. I tried not to listen or interfere in their politics. But I couldn’t help it when a man from Harvard University's Department of Linguistics came by and asked if Fazþóitétá was around. I texted her. She came to the front door, looking unimpressed. This was, I think, another reason none of the other girls liked her.

“My name is Johnathan Davids, I’m with Harvard University and I study Morphology, syntax, endangered languages, Germanic-”

And then Faz turned around and marched off without another word. We looked at each other, before I apologized. He smiled sadly.

“It was worth a shot, but I’m not surprised.” He said cryptically, and then he left. So, naturally, I listened to the other girls and what they said.

“She’s a bitch.” said Saanvi.

“She’s Baltic.” Alessandra said with a light laugh. Alessandra was Italian, and knew quite a lot about Europe, compared to me at least, and would often run interference for Faz. Not that Faz ever appreciated. Or even acknowledged it. In truth, no one knew what she studied. I tried to get her to join us for the first few weeks of dinner, which was communal. But she never joined, and she was never here on Sundays. Alessandra told me that it was likely because she was Lutheran.

“They take religion more seriously than most Europeans.” Alessandra warned me. So that was all we knew. That she was Lutheran, and we knew nothing.

One night, I told Alessandra about the Harvard linguist over wine. Alessandra was fun. She was like my RA, I liked to joke. Alessandra looked like she wanted to say something, but she never did.

Faz never went out. But she had several mason jars in the fridge of pickled eggs that no one was allowed to touch. She came back from Target, once, with a little machine that you plugged in and boiled six eggs at a time with, and she stood there in awe like a caveman with fire.

She could eat half a dozen a day with a fork, fishing them out of the mason jar for breakfast.

“This,” She said, “is the greatest thing America has ever done.” She said solemnly, from behind a thick German sounding voice and a mouthful of egg that had been soaking in vinegar. “The Evoloop Rapid Egg Cooker Electric 6 Eggs Capacity, Soft, Medium, Hard Boiled, Poacher, Omelet Maker Egg Poacher With Auto Shut-Off, BPA Free?” I said, reading off the outside of the box. Faz grunted.

“Yes. Very much so.” She said, nodding deeply to herself.

“America’s people, very fat.” She said knowingly. I waited for more, but Faz had decided, I guess, that this was the end of the conversation.

There was one moment on Halloween night, and this is just something I do but no other landlord does. I go door to door with little bags of candy. Most of the girls are out partying in costumes they’d never wear if I was their mother. But everyone got a little bag. When I got to Faz’s door, as I was leaving the bag of jumbo Kit-Kats by her door, it opened quickly. She stood there looking at me, and for some reason I felt chastised.

“It’s just candy, for the holiday?” I tried. She looked at me. And she looked at me. She asked me what holiday. I explained that everyone dressed like witches and monsters, and did cute things pretending to be scary, and got food.

“This…this is not Christian.” She said gravely. And then the door closed. And the candy lied there.

Things began to get worse from there. I think, as it got colder, she became more and more homesick. But she also started doing things that frightened the other girls. For example, in early December, it rained. And the rain froze over. And while everyone else was pulling out Uggs or Sorrells, Faz pulled out a pair of boots so ugly and gross looking that even I had trouble looking at them by the front door.

“Maybe you want new ones?” I tried.

Faz was indignant.

“No. These are very good.” She said.

“What are they made of?” I asked.

“Cow.” She said, as if I was being foolish.

“And you bought them?” I asked, ignoring how in the background Saanvi began to gag. “No. I make,” She said, “back home, mother is shoemaker.”

Or the time when, as it got colder, Faz pulled out of her bag a HAM radio and began listening to NOAA every day. Or how, it would turn out, she had in almost nine weeks never turned the light on in her room and instead used candles. Or how, on the one night she tried joining us for communal dinner, she prayed to herself, quietly. After a moment everyone got awkward and she continued on like nothing had happened.

And then it became colder, and I kicked the heat on. And this I guess was the incorrect thing to do, because Faz began to complain that it was “tropical”. This continued for days. It got to the point where some of the other girls (I won’t name names) complained how she’d sleep with her window open at night. So, I decided we’d have a conversation. Faz had dug her heels in though, and insisted it was “tropical”.

“It’s fine, Faz,” I half-joked, “don’t be such a thermostat-nazi.”

Fazþóitétá froze. And at once I became aware that I had said something I absolutely should not have said. She straightened, and something in her eyes told me she was debating if she was going to tell me what I would later learn on Wikipedia. Things like how, in 1938, there were 8,000 people on her island. Or that in 1946, there were less than 2,000 left. Or that the Nazi’s stole children, and a few years ago, genetic testing had found the grandchildren of some of them and the island responded by sealing its borders for a few years more and kicking all the ambassadors out.

‘Oh.” I said to myself softly, as I kept reading about what we called World War Two, they called The Betrayal. About how, after the Nazi’s left, no one came to check on them or help them. About how until 1993, they were left alone on their island with more cemeteries than schools.

Instead of telling me these things, she walked out, shaking with barely contained rage, and looking desperately like she was trying to maintain her dignity.

And the following morning while she pickled hardboiled eggs, I sat in the corner of my own kitchen.

“I’m sorry,” I said, mangling her name. Her full name.

“It is fine.” She said, hunched over. Silence, and then a moment later, something soft came out.

“I want to go home.”

And then the semester ended a few weeks later, and she did. And I never saw her again. Later over Christmas break, alone in my home, I worked on my little project. I had a string of flags I hung outside my window, little six-inch ones like the kind you saw on sailboats. Except every student I hosted got a flag. Italian, French, Indian, Chinese, a few Americans, you know, one for everyone so everyone was included. And I went looking on Amazon for one from Zō Étrilō. There were none.

Morgan Kier is a pen name. She is an immigrant from Edinburgh, Scotland. Her debut literary work, Étris Ga Vol.VII No.I, has been published in Triptych’s Chapbook series. Other stories about the island of Zō Étrilō are found in Housebound Magazine, and forthcoming in BAUXITE Magazine. 

When not scribbling in notebooks, she can be found joyfully annoying her girlfriend with blurry photos of their restless cat, named William Howard Taft.