I had one new voice mail. It was from my mother, who described how, after months of work, her lab technician had slipped, fallen, and broken all the pipettes: “I think it was a Freudian slip.”
I put down the phone. It started ringing again almost immediately. It was Ivan. He said that he was at the student center, so if I walked toward him and he walked toward me, we would meet in the middle. It seemed to me that there was more than one way to walk to the student center and that we could miss each other, but when I started walking, there was Ivan. He seemed excited. “I was just studying for the Shakespeare final with my girlfriend—well, now my ex-girlfriend,” he said. My heart jumped. Did that mean he didn’t have a girlfriend anymore? He said he had ended up just talking to his ex-girlfriend about Shakespeare, and about the human condition, and about me, and she had brought up some interesting examples from Shakespeare, and they had talked about me and Shakespeare.
“You remind me a little bit of Shakespeare,” he said. I looked at him. Was he drunk?
We went to his room, and he took out a cardboard box full of photographs. He showed me a picture of his first motorcycle, a Honda. I was troubled by the motorcycle. He felt to me increasingly like the parody of a love interest. Several pictures had been taken in Thailand. One showed Ivan standing next to an elephant. He and the elephant had almost exactly the same facial expression. In another, Ivan was standing in front of a Buddhist temple, facing the sun, with his mother and his sister, but the shadows were so dark that you couldn’t make out their faces.
“Here’s one of my ex-girlfriend,” Ivan said. He showed me a picture of a slight girl with long reddish hair, wearing a tank top, a long skirt, and a backpack. I looked at the picture carefully, trying to figure out what made her a girlfriend. She was petite, curvy, and tough-looking, though her smile was open and almost childlike. There was a donkey in the picture. That couldn’t be relevant. Or could it?
Ivan had taken a few photos out of the box and set them aside facedown, like cards that wouldn’t be played until later. “These I don’t want you to see,” he explained, “because then you would know things about my life that I don’t want you to know.”
The openness with which he said this made me laugh. I didn’t ask, or even wonder, what was in the pictures. The role of a suspicious woman seemed like a cliché having nothing to do with me or with the time that we lived in.
“In the second semester of my junior year I started having all these complicated ideas about love,” Ivan said. “I got a C-plus in a graduate math class. I never got a C in math before. I felt so terrible.” He stared into space, apparently transfixed with horror by the recollection of the C-plus.
? ? ?
“There’s something I want to tell you about,” Ivan said, “but I don’t want you to feel pressured.” He said that his friend Peter, who was also Hungarian, and a graduate student in economics, ran a philanthropic program where he sent American university students to teach English in Hungarian villages every summer. The teachers had to buy their own plane tickets, but everything in the villages was paid for. There was even a small stipend.
“There’s one empty slot left,” he said. “If you want it, you can probably have it. I mean, Peter is my friend. And you even have experience teaching English.”
I reflected back upon the three ESL lessons I had given Joaquín, before he went blind.
“I guess that’s technically true,” I said.
“I’d be in Budapest, so we could see each other on the weekends,” Ivan said. “But otherwise, I don’t know what kind of place those villages are. You’d be surrounded by goats. But you’d be in Europe.”
I couldn’t picture it—neither Europe nor the goats. Would they be indoors? Ivan said I should think it over, and I pretended to think. But there was nothing to think about. Teaching English in a Hungarian village wasn’t something I could weigh against anything else, because I had no idea what it was, and even if I had, I didn’t know what the other possibilities were. Moreover, my policy at the time was that, when confronted by two courses of action, one should always choose the less conservative and more generous. I thought this was tantamount to a moral obligation for anyone who had any advantages at all, and especially for anyone who wanted to be a writer.
? ? ?
I met Ivan’s friend Peter in the café of the Science Center. He was way more normal than I expected. His appearance, clothes, and manner of speaking all resembled those of other people. He talked about Ivan as if he and I were regular friends or acquaintances.
“Do you think you’ll see Ivan tomorrow?” he asked.
He might as well have been asking if the interdimensional portal would be open. “I really couldn’t say,” I said.
Peter complimented my idiomatic English and asked how long I had been in America. “I’ve always lived here,” I said.
“Always?” He looked startled, like maybe he thought that I meant since 1776.
“I mean, I was born here, and never left.”
“Oh, that’s funny. Ivan identified you as being Turkish.”
“No, I’m from New Jersey.”
“What exit?”
Peter had grown up in Queens with his mother, a dermatologist. Now he was getting a Ph.D. in economics and East Asian studies. The Hungarian village program was a first step in his plan to build a global network of not-for-profit schools to teach English and computer programming in the developing world. One had to start small, with what connections one had. The connections he had were with wonderful people in village governments in Hungary and Romania, and for three years now he had been sending Harvard students to their communities. Speaking in a measured, gentle voice, he described the importance of cultivating connections, the presence of good people everywhere, the need to identify people who weren’t just good but who could make things happen, and the school system in Kyrgyzstan.
Peter gave me a leaflet describing the program. There was an application on the back, but he said I didn’t have to fill it out because Ivan had written me such a glowing letter of recommendation.
He did? I almost said, but stopped myself.
“I trust Ivan,” Peter said. “I trust his opinion of people.”
? ? ?
Summer was in the air. Bright, hot, lazy, each new day seemed to hang suspended, like a big shimmering balloon, right in front of your face. As usual, I didn’t have anything to wear. How was it I didn’t have the right clothes for any weather? I cut the legs off of my older pair of jeans and dropped the amputated legs, two frayed graying cylinders, in the dumpster.