by David Rakoff
I take the bus back to Inverness. As we pass the LN2K museum, the parking lot attendant/entertainment, a man in full Highland attire of kilt and bandoliers, waves us farewell. The day closes in on typical gray skies and drizzle, and I have hours before the next train back to London.
I board yet another bus for a tour out of the city to Culloden Moor, site of the last battle fought on British soil, between the Jacobites and the Hanoverians in 1742. I am the only one on the double-decker with the driver. He is silent, so as not to interfere with the “tour guide,” a cunningly timed Scottish female recording that somehow knows exactly when we are passing points of local interest. On our way out of Inverness, we stop on a bridge over the river Ness to see if the city’s famous seals are making an appearance. They are not; we drive on. Farther out, by the Moray Firth, the inlet of the North Sea that boasts its very own population of bottle-nosed dolphins, the bus stops again for a photo opportunity so that we, or rather I, might take pictures of the creatures gamboling in the wind-tossed surf. But it is raining, and the dolphins, like the monster, the seals, and the tour guide, are a no-show. Besides, I have no camera. We drive on.
The battlefield itself is an inhumane, bracken-covered field, inhospitable and muddy, which makes the female guide’s bright-voiced account of the carnage all the stranger. “The Hanoverians marched out to bloody battle after a light breakfast and tots of brandy!” I decline the driver’s offer to disembark and walk by myself along the sodden ruts of the moor. We begin the drive back to town.
Talk of war now dispatched and with twenty minutes to go before the tour’s end, the disembodied guide now happily chatters on about matters generally Scottish: how many yards of cloth it takes to make a kilt (many, I forget exactly); repairing stone farm walls; and Scottish cuisine. She says: “One way that I like to prepare Scottish turnips is with a head of garlic and half a pound of butter. You should try it.” “But who are you?” I want to cry out. You cannot know until it happens to you, but there is almost nothing existentially bleaker than sitting alone on a bus in the rain with a driver who will not talk to you and being given a cooking tip by someone who does not exist.
Before settling in for the night in my inordinately cozy sleeper, I retire to the dining car. I sit, smoking and drinking a stunningly expensive beer across from a man who tucks in to his plate of haggis and peas. I smile at him in greeting. He does not know it, but this is our silent seder for two. I want to lean over to him, dip my pinkie in his red wine, and count out the plagues on the rim of his plate. We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt.
I read my book and look out the window. This far north, the evening outside is still cigarette smoke blue, even though it is well past nine. We hurtle through the Highlands. I press my face up to the glass. All I can see are a few sheep, out well past their bedtimes, white spots in the gathering dark. As I have now come to expect, they are not moving.
WE CALL IT AUSTRALIA
It all begins with that extraordinary opening shot. The camera impossibly placed in the alpine ether, coming in ever closer to the mountaintop to finally focus and settle on the turning figure—her arms outstretched, face beaming, overwhelmed with joy and music: the young novitiate, fräulein Maria. Coming in late to vespers, her color high, strange grasses in her gamine, slightly flyaway hair. How do you solve a problem like her? Send her away, carpetbag and guitar in hand. Have her tutor aristocratically unloved children, eventually tossing aside the three Rs in favor of teaching them simple harmony and vocal counterpoint. Make matching clothes out of the family curtains. Marry the Baron. Take the act on the road. Defy the Nazis. Open an inn in Vermont.
These few linear feet of film are what I think of whenever I hear the words Austrian Teacher, admittedly not a term I use all that often in my life, although about to become a staple of my vocabulary for the next eight months, starting on this sweltering July morning on the deserted campus of City College in Harlem at seven-thirty A.M.
New York City has the nation’s largest public school system, with some 65,000 teachers serving 1.1 million students. There is a dearth of qualified math and science teachers here. Coincidentally, there is a surplus in Austria, with a years-long waiting list for positions. In what seemed like the perfect solution to both problems, the New York City Board of Education put up flyers at teachers colleges in Vienna. “If you can read this,” they said in English, “have we got a job for you!” Today is the first of a projected two days of interviews of about fifty candidates for public high school teaching jobs in New York’s five boroughs.
The interviews are being conducted in English via live video teleconferencing from Vienna. New York City public educators—high school superintendents, Board of Ed muck-a-mucks, and principals—have all gathered to ask the prospective teachers a series of qualifying questions.
New York’s unorthodox plan to look for teachers so far afield has attracted a great deal of attention. In addition to myself, there are reporters from the major dailies and, most glamorous of all, a TV crew and reporter from ABC News in Washington. Two young men are busily sticking up a purple “City College” banner with brown packing tape for the news cameras’ benefit.
Any job interview is an awkward affair. Any job interview with a panel of five interviewers even more so. Everyone is nervous on both sides of the ocean. Questions are repeated, slowed down. It makes for some halting progress and the occasional awkward moment of cultural preconception. When asked what previous knowledge they have of New York schools, for example, one woman answers that she heard “the kids were having guns and using drugs.”
But for the most part, the Austrian teachers are hoping to come to New York out of just such a sense of adventure; to experience another culture firsthand and to improve their English, although for the most part they speak quite well. One fellow openly hungers for New York’s legendary multiethnic society: “I want to see the blacks. Where I am from, there is only one black people a year,” he says.
“Oh,” one of the African American principals whispers. “Vermont.”
Three of the men, when asked why they became teachers, innocently and unabashedly answer, “Because I love children.” I don’t know that an American male would answer that question in that way, even if it were true.
They all seem generally competent and acceptable. But they are almost all completely stymied by the final question: “Can you tell us anything else about yourself that should make us want to select you as one of our teachers?” Answering this question is an acquired skill even for Americans; it takes at least three job interviews before one learns that maintaining unwavering eye contact and seeming hypomanically gung ho wasn’t just not weird and arrogant, it was required. For the Austrians, trained in a kind of courtly European reserve, being asked to assert their own sterling qualities in full voice seems truly baffling. A trick question straight out of Alice in Wonderland.
The best answer comes from the undisputed star of the day, Andrea Unger. With her doctorate in genetics at age twenty-eight, perfect English, and blond movie star beauty, she has all of us, educators and reporters alike, immediately and profoundly enslaved. This being a high school world, I am hyperattuned to adolescent paradigms on this day, and she seems to be that rarest of legendary creatures: the popular girl beloved by students and faculty alike who, in addition to being pretty and smart, is also nice. She is being addressed as “Dr. Unger” scarcely four minutes into her interview. The borough superintendents are mouthing, “I want her!” out of camera range. When asked her final tell-us-why-you’re-the-best question, she answers, “I don’t know if I’m the very best, but I will do my best. And if that’s not enough, I will do much better.” We would follow her into the very mouth of hell, singing songs all the while.
“See you in September,” says one of the principals after she has left the room in Vienna.
The reasons why I am the perfect person for this story are also the reasons why I am the worst person for this story. As an adoptive New Yorker, I remember
vividly how challenging and frequently lonely it can be to move here when one is as green as new bamboo. As a Canadian, I also understand the whole Austria-Germany conundrum and what it’s like to come from a small country, seemingly culturally indistinguishable from its dominating adjacent neighbor. But these factors are part and parcel of my unhealthy investment in, more than being opened up to, being liked by the teachers. It is why I am the world’s worst reporter. I am apt to try too hard to help rather than just document my subjects. It’s only amplified when I look into the innocent faces of these young foreigners.
An innocence amplified by my own ignorance. If, on the one hand, I see the meadow-sweet purity of The Sound of Music, on the other, I’m envisioning New York’s public high schools as a sinister world of metal detectors, baggy jeans, box cutters, and white flight—an underfunded, failed social exercise; the first stop in the revolving-door prison system.
I’m not the only reporter guilty of this misapprehension. Even after a school year where there seemed to be a weekly public school shoot-’em-up everywhere in the United States but New York, the city’s reputation as a blackboard jungle is a tenacious one. It is these exact stereotypes—the guileless, defenseless foreigners being used for target practice by young toughs—that have so piqued the interest of the national media. Certainly, it is more than the clever resourcefulness on the part of the Board of Education that has gotten us up here at seven-thirty in the morning, with the temperature outside already well above eighty degrees.
It’s also what gets me and thirteen other reporters and sound and camera people all the way out to Kennedy Airport one month later on an exceptionally muggy and toxic August Friday. We sit in the California Lounge at the Delta Terminal, falling in and out of conversation, and slumber as we wait for the Austrians to get through customs.
The posters on the walls are, paradoxically, of London, Paris, and Amsterdam. Perhaps the only thing that seems authentically California to me about the California Lounge is how boring it is. Some of the reporters are talking about the official statement from the teachers union: “We’re pleased they’re here, but it’s regrettable that New York doesn’t pay its teachers more.” The starting salary for a teacher in New York City is just under $30,000, which sounds pretty good, and is even a living wage in New York, but it’s not Easy Street by any means. We are all briefly diverted when those same two young men from City College come with that same purple banner and try to tape it up on the wall. But the California Lounge will not stand for extra adornment. The banner keeps falling down, and they finally give up.
When eventually the teachers arrive, they seem tired and hot as they sit indulgently and somewhat dazed, listening to the official greetings from the Austrian consul general and people from City College and the Board of Ed. By contrast, I am energized, my heart racing a bit, as if I were in the presence of major celebrities. This is especially true when I see Andrea Unger.
Looking at them, I remember my own seventeen-year-old self, coming to New York for college. My introduction to the city was from the safe and privileged haven of a fairly cloistered campus, under the watchful eye of a well-paid, if not actually caring, administration. As public high school teachers, the Austrians will not be similarly coddled.
Andrea and three other teachers—Lutz Holzinger, Elke Rogl, and Nikolaus Ettel—are all assigned to teach at Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Bensonhurst was the scene of some racist violence a few years back. I am, quite frankly, terrified at the thought of going to Bensonhurst. As far as I knew, if you weren’t white, Italian American, and straight, you stayed out of Bensonhurst.
It’s not just a fear of inner-city New York teenagers that fuels my trepidation for them; it’s teenagers in general, having been one myself. I remember the rumor and innuendo, the erroneous, slandering lives we constructed for our teachers. If any of it were to be believed, we were being taught by the most dangerous, antisocial dregs of society, a rogues’ gallery of the kind of misshapen, alcoholic, sexual deviants that you wouldn’t even let out into the general cell block population, let alone near a bunch of kids. I shudder when I think of what I and my cutthroat little pals could have done with the accents and strange surnames of the Austrians before me.
I can hardly keep the fear out of my voice when I speak to my Austrian Four. Andrea asks me if I’ve heard of FDR and whether it’s a nice school. My response is a poker-faced, “I think, uhm . . . I think the FDR High School is going to be a completely interesting experience for you.” (You bought the old Lawson estate? Ain’t nobody lived there since that horrible murder twenty-five years ago. If you want my advice, you’ll turn around and leave this place!)
“Whatever it means, huh?” She is somewhat less than appreciative of my candor.
Nikolaus—Nikki—is a small, finely made man in his mid-twenties. He is, in a word, adorable, which to my mind also means, in a word, a goner.
“I’ve heard it’s a big school,” he says.
“It’s huge. It’s four thousand kids,” I say in a voice strangulated with panic.
“Four thousand?”
“I just found that out.”
Nikki attempts to maintain composure. “Okay. Really huge, and so I expect that it might be somehow anonymous. We will work it out very easily, I hope, and I’m glad I can come here.”
I’ve also found out that FDR’s four thousand kids are from seventy-two different countries representing thirty-two different language groups. One-third of them are identified as limited-English-speaking youngsters, meaning they’ve entered the United States within the last two or three years. Easily 60 percent of the entire student body was born outside the United States. This ethnic diversity is a bit of a surprise. Not exactly the bastion of xenophobic thuggery I’d envisioned. The Austrians will be right at home.
Still, I come by my alarmism honestly. I have learned this custom over the years as I have settled into being a true New Yorker. This is how we welcome foreigners to our shores. Because we are so often frightened by living here, we are annoyed and offended when visitors fail to show the proper signs of terror. So we try to scare the living daylights out of them.
There are those who would say that my fear is an outdated remnant of a pre–Gilded Age New York, and perhaps it is. With the city now being overrun with packs of ravening Internet millionaires, it sometimes seems like the most frightening thing for many New Yorkers is getting to Citarella before they sell the last piece of sushi-grade tuna. Where once we scared people with oblique auguries of physical peril and tales of the ignored screams of a Kitty Genovese, we now resort to frightening strangers by talking about housing.
“So do you have a place to live yet?” I ask Nikki.
“We have a dorm for a week, and I have to look for an apartment. I want to live together with some Brooklyn teachers because of low cost.”
Unmollified by his positive attitude, I continue. “Yeah, it’s a particularly expensive time in New York City. Rents are kind of . . . well, you never know. I’ll see you.” Mission accomplished for now, I move through the crowd of new arrivals to do more damage.
Luckily enough for the Austrian teachers, their introduction to life in New York City and its public school system will not be left up to the paranoid, hysterical likes of me. They will, instead, sit through a series of days of orientation sessions at City College, where they will be turned into fully functional residents, with Social Security numbers. They will see Miss Licorice—her actual name!—the representative from the Chase Manhattan Bank, about opening accounts. They will be taught how to write checks and, worst of all, look for apartments.
That seminal Feet of Clay realization in childhood when it dawned upon you that your teachers go to the bathroom is as nothing compared to watching respected pedagogues trying to find an affordable rental apartment in New York City during a Wall Street boom, no laughing matter . . . well, if it’s a laughing matter, it’s in that bitter, rueful kind of way.
I want t
o help and befriend them. In an effort to distance myself from the ubiquitous media, I have, on this day, another scorcher, donned a pair of too-short cutoffs and Birkenstocks. I give the Austrian Four my card and urge them to call me—a friendly, half-naked stranger. Not surprisingly, I do not hear from them. Moreover, against seemingly insurmountable odds, after one weekend of hitting the streets, they all have homes.
The elephant that is New York City brings out the proprietary blind man in most New Yorkers, each fiercely advocating his separate version. It has turned all of us into Stalinists of one sort or another. I get deeply worried, for example, when the sunny, retrograde, Giuliani-loving, retail-worshiping version of New York threatens to overtake all others. I still maintain that the city can be a lot tougher than the daisy-strewn Gotham of the loathsome You’ve Got Mail, and I hold fast to the idea that the teachers will find that out in short order.
But if I and the rest of the media are nervously anticipating the Austrians’ bloody defeat upon the urban battleground of inner-city schools (like the cameraman who, upon hearing that they will be teaching high school, whistles, asking no one in particular, “Anybody know karate?”). Then the educators who actually work in the New York public school system are laboring under their own set of preconceptions.
We are at the Board of Education in Brooklyn, where the Austrians are being introduced to working in public education. They are seen as buttoned up and humorless, a stereotype I roundly reject after spending the better part of fifteen minutes reading (and copying down) the back of the T-shirt of the cut-up sitting in front of me, an exhaustive, comparative religion thematic variation on the truism “Shit happens.” It is a fifteen-item list, including “Zen: What is the sound of shit happening?”, “Judaism: Why does this shit always happen to me?”, and “Jehovah’s Witness: knock knock, shit happens.”