In the Darkroom

  A dozen yellow containers of Ektachrome slides bear testament to the fatal divergence. One box is marked, in my mother’s handwriting, with her initials, denoting that these are shots of one of her summer solo treks. Inside is slide after slide of my mother in the Austrian Alps, striding up steep trails, scrambling over boulders, bundled in her orange 60/40 parka in a rainstorm, waving from a peak. She is tan, her calves muscular, her hair in girlish braids, and her face—so drawn and despairing in those wedding and early marriage pictures—illuminated with a kind of stunned joy. She is forty-four but looks younger than in the photos from her early twenties. Rarely alone, she is laughing, sharing food with the other hikers in her group, lounging on a rock soaking up the sun, clinking beer glasses in a candlelit hut. One day, armed with a handheld viewfinder, I worked my way through all the slides of my mother’s Austria trip and her other independent vacation through the Dolomites in northeastern Italy. I know Paul Simon meant the lyrics in “Kodachrome” to be ironic, yet an ingenuous version kept burbling through my head as I peered into the plastic window at my suddenly alive, suddenly-in-color mother, released for two weeks from the drab walls of her marriage. “They give us those nice bright colors. … Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah …” Four more years would pass before the divorce, but the whole story was right there in the viewfinder, visible to any but the blind.

  I opened the other boxes, the ones that held slides of my father’s solitary travels during that same period. Dozens of transparencies from his first summer in the French Alps featured what looked like an identical shot: a vast river of white ice filled the bottom half of the frame, an iron-black mass of rock the top, its leviathan shanks blotting out the sun. In all, I found only two pictures in which my father appears, both taken during his second summer trip, when he hired a guide to lead him on several alpine climbs. In one of them he is posed by a cliff face, holding an ice ax. In the other, he is a dot in an endless field of snow. No one else is in the frame. The slides were also shot with color film, not that you could tell.

  “Where was that?” I asked my father, describing an image from the first trip. We were talking over the phone.

  “Chamonix,” my father said. He didn’t stay in the village long. “I was ten days in a mountain hut. I was by myself. I even hiked by myself. When you’re alone”—she stopped—“it’s a funny feeling.”

  “Funny?”

  “Like humanity had ceased. Like you were the only human being on earth. Like the whole world had been bombed and you were left all alone. … Waaall”—I could picture her hand, brushing away my remark before I made it—“I was careful not to do anything too risky.”

  My father had hiked up from the village “to the base of Mont Blanc. What a mountain, indescribable. …”

  So that was the menacing mass of iron. And the empty field of white, the famous four-mile glacier that flows along Mont Blanc’s northern flank, the Mer de Glace. My father’s route was the same as the one that Mary Shelley’s creature followed, on the day he confronted his creator. After we got off the phone, I pulled Frankenstein off my shelf, the novel that had inspired, among so many others, Susan Stryker, whose manifesto had framed her transgender identity in terms of that lonely figure on the Mer de Glace: “I will say this as bluntly as I know how,” Stryker wrote in “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix.” “I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster.”

  I spent the rest of the afternoon leafing through my copy of Shelley’s horror story. “Am I not alone, miserably alone?” the monster says that day above Chamonix. “The desert mountains and dreary glaciers are my refuge. I have wandered here many days. …”

  Several weeks after the divorce was finalized, my father loaded up his camper with as many of his possessions as he could fit and all of his mountaineering gear, and headed west. He had decided to leave everything behind and live a bare-bones existence as a rock-climbing guide in Colorado. Before he reached the Pennsylvania Turnpike, he turned back.

  18

  You’re Out of the Woods

  On my father’s eighty-third birthday, I found myself at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, where a tribute to Harry Houdini had just opened. The exhibit chronicled the celebrated escape artist’s self-transformation, via the newly minted arts of photography and film, from impoverished Hungarian émigré to “American icon.” Along the way, Houdini had shed his name (Erik Weisz), his Budapest nativity (claiming Appleton, Wisconsin, where his family moved when he was four, as his birthplace), and his patrimony (after Rabbi Mayer Sámuel Weisz was fired from Appleton’s Reform synagogue for failing to assimilate, his son decided to become a magician). The museum show’s centerpiece was the immigrant packing trunk in which Houdini—shackled, bagged, and locked inside—had performed his first famous act, “The Metamorphosis Illusion.” His wife Bess would pull the curtain closed and, when it was drawn back seconds later, Houdini stood miraculously free, Bess now bound and imprisoned in the wood-and-metal chest. Houdini went on to ever grander escapes—breaking free of ropes slung from skyscrapers, straitjackets suspended from cranes, stocks lowered into a “Chinese Water Torture Cell,” crates dropped to the bottom of the East River.

  On the way out of the museum, I stopped in the gift shop and flipped through the picture postcards. Most of them showcased the barrel-chested illusionist picking locks and springing from iron cages—often in the nude (to prove he had nothing to hide), his manacled hands arranged to conceal his private parts. One card featured a glamour shot, the master magician as Valentino—his eyebrows tweezed to perfect arches, his black hair oiled flat and parted in the middle, his eyes come-hither coals. I bought it as a birthday greeting for a Houdini fan in Hungary who I knew would like it.

  Before my father came to the United States and before he and then she embarked on subsequent reinventions—American dad, Magyar repatriate, “overdressed shiksa”—there was a time when it seemed István Faludi had escaped the identity grid altogether. In the spring of 1948, my twenty-year-old father boarded the Carina, a former U.S. liberty ship turned Norwegian freighter docked in the port of Göteborg on Sweden’s western coast, and crossed the ocean to Brazil. It was a miraculous escape from an impossible trap. To be a Hungarian Jew in the 1940s was to be bound head to toe, locked in a trunk, dropped to the bottom of the deepest river on Earth. Through a set of ingenious contortions and illusions, my father had managed to wriggle free of his chains.

  The Brazil my father entered in 1948 was a country with a national identity wholly at odds with the one he’d just left. “The experiment of Brazil, with its complete and conscious negation of all colour and racial distinctions, represents by its obvious success perhaps the most important contribution toward the liquidation of a mania that has brought more disruption and unhappiness into our world than any other,” my father’s beloved author Stefan Zweig wrote in 1941. Zweig, like my father, was a Central European Jew who’d fled a war-ravaged continent for Brazil, a country whose inclusive ethos filled the writer, at least in 1941, with “infinite relief.” In Brazil, Land of the Future, Zweig set out his reasons for believing that his new homeland “demands not only the attention but the admiration of the whole world”:

  The allegedly destructive principle of race mixture, this horror, this “sin against the blood” of our obsessed race theoreticians, is here consciously used as a process of cementing national culture. On this foundation a nation has been building itself up, slowly but surely, for four hundred years; and the adaptation to the same climate, to the same living conditions, has created a thoroughly individual type, lacking in all the “degenerate” characteristics against which race fanatics try to warn us.

  Zweig elided certain historical evidence that ran contrary to his Panglossian image of Brazil, like the importation of millions of African slaves, the enslavement of the indigenous population, and the prewar dictatorship’s less-than-welcoming stance toward Jewish refugees. Still, the vision of Brazilian nationality t
hat pertained when Zweig arrived was a world away from the racial purity fixations of Nazi Europe, and its hopeful intermingling antipodal to Zionism. If anything, it suggested the “panhumanist” model Magnus Hirschfeld had in mind when he declared himself a “world citzen.” To Zweig, Brazil held out the promise that there would be no need to withdraw to a bunkered Jewish state, that it was possible to melt away the hatreds of the past by “continuous assimilation through perpetual interbreeding.” No one could lay exclusive claim to being a “true” Brazilian, Zweig exulted, “because there is nothing more typical of a Brazilian than that he is a man without a history.”

  ————

  I learned some of the details of my father’s escape from Hungary on the afternoon she decided to show me my “inheritance.” I followed her down the wooden steps and through the garage to the cellar door, which she unlocked with one of the many keys on her jailer’s-sized ring. When we stepped through the portal, the first thing I saw was a familiar display of sanders and power drills and the DeWalt radial arm saw: my father’s old Black & Decker home workshop. It was arranged exactly as it had been in our basement in Yorktown Heights.

  She ran her hand under the workbench peg-board covered with tools and retrieved another key, hanging by a string from a nail, and carried it over to a large steel cabinet. “This is my ‘safe,’ ” my father said. “I keep my valuables in here because it’s fireproof.” When the metal doors swung open, though, there wasn’t much to see except a cardboard carton. She retrieved the box and set it on her old worktable. Here was the lockbox I’d sought since I’d first come into the house, the repository containing the relics of István’s past.

  “If anything happens to me, you should know where this is,” my father said. She lifted the lid and rooted through yellowing papers and sepia photographs, and extracted two small square documents on crumbling parchment paper, covered with official-looking stamps and a sea of daunting Hungarian; Telekjegyzőkönyv was one of the shorter words. They were my grandfather’s deeds to the two apartment buildings he’d owned in Pest, at Ráday utca 9 and Váci út 28. The property titles were dated, respectively, April 24, 1925, and May 4, 1925, and the purchase prices listed as 2,500,000,000 and 3,000,000,000 korona, the hyperinflated currency of post–World War I Hungary.

  “This is our property that the Communists stole from us—after the war.”

  “You mean, after the Hungarians stole it,” I said, ever the historical spoilsport to my father’s mythography, “during the war.”

  “No deaaar, the Communists. The Soviet Communists.” She returned to her inspection of the documents. “What you are talking about is without significance,” she said. “The Communists came in after the war and took away private property that belonged to Hungarians.”

  She lifted another document from the box and laid it on the table. It looked like a handbill, palm-sized and printed on heavy stock. Under a Latin inscription, a line of typed words and handwritten entries ran down the side. “My high school report card,” she noted.

  “Are those your grades?” I thrilled to this rare aperture into my father’s school days.

  “A ‘good’ in Hungarian language and literature. Aaand in ‘religious ethics’!”

  She returned the card to the box and held up a square of parchment. A birth certificate.

  “István Károly Friedman,” she read out loud. “Born November 1, 1927, to Jenő Friedman, thirty-three years of age, and Rozália Grünberger Friedman, twenty-four years of age.” Under the birth name were two notations: “—Fiú.—Izr.”—Boy.—Israelite. Until the Communist era, all birth certificates listed religion. On the back was an addendum, noting that the name Friedman had been officially changed to Faludi in 1946. Another document: István’s old passport. The original date on the inside cover was July 5, 1946. The photo was of a very young and slender man, with a pencil-thin mustache and dark, unfathomable eyes.

  My father pointed to the mustache. “My disguise,” she said. “My father grew a mustache, too—in the war. But that was because he didn’t want to look Jewish.”

  “And you?”

  No response. Then, “I never looked Jewish.”

  With this passport my eighteen-year-old father left postwar Hungary in 1946 with his equally youthful business partner, Tibor Jablonszky; they had met a year earlier at the youth film club backed by the Communist Party. The two young men were heading for Denmark—the first stop on what would eventually be a journey halfway around the world—armed with freshly printed business cards and letterhead with their new company logo. My father still had a few sheets of the stationery he’d designed, embossed with a tiny plane flying over a large movie reel, next to the name of their new enterprise, Jablonszky & Faludi, a film “export-import” company.

  Jablonszky & Faludi was more import than export. The new Hungarian Communist film agency, known as Mafirt, was looking to replenish the nation’s movie stock, destroyed in the bombings. Less than a year after the war, my father and Tibor approached Mafirt with a proposition: send Jablonszky & Faludi to Scandinavia to collect new films. “The guys at Mafirt said they could get us a permit,” my father recalled, “but they warned us, ‘Don’t bring anything that will offend the Russians.’ We told them, ‘Oh no, we wouldn’t dream of it!’ ”

  The two intended to travel by train to Denmark, but rail service still went no farther than Vienna. For weeks, they wandered around Budapest looking for someone who could give them a ride to Copenhagen. They were joined by a third young member of the youth film club, Tamás Somló, the Jewish boy who lived at Ráday 9, whose pharmacist father had been deported to Mauthausen.

  After one memorable night on the town, the three young men wound up at the Kit Kat Club in Pest. “A wild place,” my father recalled, gazing at the passport picture of her mustachioed young self. “It was where you’d go to pick up prostitutes.” They followed some women to a flea-bitten hotel, where my father had his first sexual experience. “One dollar, with everything included!” The night at the Kit Kat Club was a milestone in my father’s life for another reason. “We met this Dane in the men’s room,” my father said. A bloodied Dane, thanks to certain nationality confusions. “He had been shot by a Russian who thought he was a Nazi because he was wearing a uniform, but it was the Danish Red Cross uniform,” my father explained. “Waaall, everyone was drunk. Anyway, the bullet only grazed him.” The Dane introduced the three young men to his Red Cross coworkers, who were traveling around Central Europe in a truck, distributing food to children. My father saw an opportunity. “I told them we were filmmakers and that we could make a film of them doing all their vaaary good works.”

  My father and Tibor set out the next day with the Danish Red Cross (Tamás stayed behind temporarily to take his high school exams) and passed through the northwestern countryside of Hungary and into Austria, cameras rolling. “We made a big show of it,” my father recalled. “We said the film labs in Hungary were no good anymore, but if they took us to Denmark, we could develop the movie there.”

  “What happened to that movie?”

  A sly smile played across my father’s face. “It was all a deceit. We didn’t have any film in our camera.”

  The Red Cross workers had to spend several weeks in Vienna before they hit the road, and my father and Tibor ran out of money. My father wrote home for funds; Jenő mailed his son a few Napoleon gold coins—Hungarian currency was worthless at that point. My father had to rinse the coins off in the sink. “They were all sticky because my father sent them hidden in a box of prunes.” She thought for a second. “ ‘Sun Ripe Prunes!’ That’s what it said on the box. Funny, what you remember.” The coins were soon spent. It was my father’s idea to see if the two hungry young men could get a meal from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which was providing relief rations for Holocaust refugees. “So we went over there and asked for help packages. And they said to me, ‘Well, you’re okay, but you’ ”—meaning Tibor—“ ‘you’re not Jewish!’ ?
??

  Which was correct. Tibor was Catholic.

  “But how did they know?”

  “Waaall, he was blond. The man from the Joint said, ‘You know, we can easily check this—come into the next room.’ ” He was proposing Tibor drop his trousers—a turnabout on every Jewish man’s wartime fear. Tibor feigned outrage. “He said, ‘I have never been so insulted in my entire life! I am one hundred percent Jewish!’ And the man said, ‘All right, all right, don’t get excited.’ ” Tibor got his care package.

  When the Red Cross aid workers finally finished their rounds, they made good on their end of the deal. They told the two young filmmakers to report to the Danish Red Cross villa in Vienna on the morning of December 3, 1946, where “a luxury sedan” would be waiting to take them to Denmark. The sedan belonged to a “rich exporter,” my father recalled, and was piloted by a cantankerous chauffeur with no sense of direction—“which wasn’t good because the roads through Germany were dangerous.”

  My father returned to her rummage in the box. After a while, she extracted a thin file folder. It was titled, in my father’s hand, “Letters from the Past.” There were only two inside, the first a couple of paragraphs long, the other five dense pages of single-spaced Hungarian. She handed me the longer document. “This might be of interest to you.” The paper clip holding the pages together had rusted to the disintegrating onion skin. The dateline read, “Copenhagen 1946, Christmas Eve.”