Wearing the cutoffs with a bright yellow polo shirt and my mother’s oversized 1970s sunglasses, I walked across the quad to the philosophy building, where Peter was having an orientation meeting. Inscribed over the door in huge letters were the words: WHAT IS MAN THAT THOU ART MINDFUL OF HIM. I had seen this inscription countless times, without really thinking about it. It was a good question. What was man? It occurred to me that I could be less mindful of man, and I seemed to catch a glimpse of freedom.
There were six of us at the orientation, three girls and three boys. I was the only freshman. We played a mnemonic game to remember each other’s names. Memorization was so weird—the way it consisted of attaching one thing to another thing, with no way to root anything in place. If you wanted to remember your keys, you could imagine them in an amphitheater, but nobody ever said how you were supposed to remember the amphitheater.
Looking compact, neat, and almost nautical in shorts and a faded blue and white T-shirt, Peter told us about the program. I had thought we would all be teaching together in one school, but it turned out that each of us would be in a different village, living with a different family. We would teach every day for three or four hours. The village schoolteachers would tell us what subjects they were studying and we would think of exercises and drills and games. Simon Says was a good game for parts of the body. Twenty Questions was good for vocabulary. Music was a good learning tool, especially the Beatles, because even the littlest kid could understand “I want to hold your ha-a-a-a-and.” The most important thing was to be relaxed, patient, and playful.
In the afternoons, we would share American culture in a free-form way outside the classroom. Peter showed us some slides of previous participants sharing American culture. One guy was playing basketball with the children. He had brought the hoop from America and hammered it to a fence. Another guy was playing the guitar. He had taught the children Bruce Springsteen. After the slideshow, Peter said that one of last year’s teachers had come to talk to us about his experiences. Last year’s teacher walked in. It was Sandy from Constructed Worlds.
A fond smile hovered on Sandy’s face as he recalled his time in the Hungarian village. There hadn’t been electricity or hot water. The students had all been boys ages eight to fourteen. “They’ll try to push you,” he said.
“You really had some adventures,” Peter said.
“The antlers,” Peter and Sandy said in unison.
Sandy told us about the time when one of his students had taken down the antlers that hung for some reason on the schoolroom wall, and charged at Sandy with them. Sandy had climbed up on his desk and used his chair to try to defend himself without causing injury to either the boy or the antlers. Everyone laughed. I didn’t think I would survive being chased with antlers.
During the lunch break, Sandy and I reminisced about Constructed Worlds and talked about Ivan—it turned out he and Sandy lived in the same dormitory. “Really interesting guy,” Sandy said, seeming impressed that I was friends with him. I asked more about the antlers. He said the principal had made a big deal out of it, and that had made things worse. Whenever possible, the best course was to talk things through with the kids directly.
“You’ll have a great time,” he told me.
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It was almost exam period, and right after that we would have to evacuate the dorms. Each day was hotter than the one before. Nobody had enough cardboard boxes. Some people acted as if it were really easy to get boxes for free and only an idiot would pay for boxes. I only found one free box. Fruit flies were living in the box. Ralph and I made a date to go buy boxes.
I called my mother and asked her if it was okay to go to the Hungarian countryside for five weeks to teach English. I explained that they would pay for everything except the plane ticket, and in August I could head straight from Budapest to Turkey, to meet her and my aunts—it wouldn’t be that much more expensive to go to Budapest first.
“This is that Ivan’s idea, isn’t it?” she said. “Darling, is he a trustworthy person? Who else will be there?” I told her about Peter, how he had been doing this program for years, and was getting a Ph.D. in economics, and how his mother was a physician in Queens. It was the information about his mother that seemed to reassure her, especially when I told her that Peter had given us her phone number. He had specifically said that, although he was going to be in Mongolia for part of the summer, our parents could always find him by calling his mother in Queens.
“You really want to go?”
“Kind of, yeah.”
“You really like this boy,” she said, sounding so sad and affectionate that tears came to my eyes.
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I wrote to Ivan on Friday morning, and thought he would call me either that evening or Saturday. He didn’t. On Sunday, I studied Russian with Svetlana. Svetlana had made up a song to help memorize the declensions of irregular nouns. It was a doleful little tune, more of a chant really, with only two notes: “There are no citizens. There are no citizens. I see the citizen. I see the citizen.”
Svetlana was way better than I was at memorizing. She accepted it in her heart as something necessary. Growing up in America, I had been taught to despise memorization, which was known as “rote memorization,” or sometimes as “regurgitating facts.” The teachers said that what they wanted was to teach us to think. They didn’t want us to turn out like robots, like the Soviet and Japanese schoolchildren. That was the only reason Soviet and Japanese children did better than us on tests. It was because they didn’t know how to think.
By high school, I sensed that the teachers weren’t leveling with us. Our biology teacher would say: “I don’t want you to memorize and regurgitate, I want you to understand the elegant logic of each mechanism.” Nonetheless, on the test you had to draw a diagram of RNA transcription. When it came to science or history, reason got you only so far. Even if each step followed from the previous one, you still had to memorize the first step, and also the rule for how steps followed from each other. It wasn’t as if there was only one way the world could have turned out. It wasn’t like strawberries had to grow from bushes. There were lots of ways things could have turned out, and you had to memorize the particular one that was real.
Or . . . did you? Was there only one way the world could have turned out? If you were smart enough, could you deduce it? A tiny part of me held out the hope that you could. And that part was bad at learning Svetlana’s song.
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On Monday, my mother called. She asked about the weekend and about Ivan. I said I hadn’t heard from him.
“Not all the weekend?” she asked. “Why? What was he doing?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
There was a pause. “Selin, are you being safe?”
I had a sinking feeling. “I’m trying,” I said.
“I mean, are you using condoms?”
“What? No. I mean we’re not having sex.”
“You aren’t?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, if you do, just make sure you use protection. Even in the Hungarian villages. It’s really important.”