In the Darkroom

  That visit, I’d stayed with Alexander and Vera’s son, Peter Gordon, and his wife, Helga. They were kind and forbearing. Peter was a pediatrician who devoted long hours to refugee patients from Turkey and the former Yugoslavia; Helga, a new mother, had a sympathetic nature that invited confidences. “Your father came to see us in Basel after the operation,” Helga said one morning, “and she told all kinds of things to me. She said when she was a boy, she saw her mother in bed with another man.” And another thing: “Your father said that when he was ten or eleven, Rozi caught him in her corset and panties and slip. And she beat him.” It was for this transgression, Helga suspected, that my father was sent to live with the religious teacher, “to be straightened out,” since the usual straightening-out methods employed at home weren’t working. Rozi’s preferred form of punishment, my father told Helga, was to lock her young son “in a dark room.”

  When I repeated some of these stories to my father, she dismissed them as “gossip” and “stupid things,” and refused to say more. I didn’t know how much credence to give them, or what they explained, if anything. Why had my father, who claimed she had rescued her parents from imminent death during the war, disowned them afterward and during their long senescence in Israel? Was Pista the wartime savior of manipulative and neglectful parents, or the ungrateful son who’d abandoned them? And if my father’s fight was with her parents, why had she cut herself off from the rest of the family?

  Though not from everyone. My father maintained contact with one relative: Peter Gordon.

  On one of my early visits to Budapest, Peter had arrived on a predawn flight from Basel, bearing a cache of my father’s favorite Swiss chocolate.

  “Peeeeeter!” my father had greeted him at the door, “I was just telling Susan. I have found family pictures.”

  If Peter was the only Grünberger my father spoke to, that was largely thanks to Peter’s efforts, which stretched back decades. When Peter was completing his medical residency at Long Island Jewish Hospital and Mount Sinai Beth Israel Medical Center in the ’70s, he made a point of visiting my father. After my parents’ divorce, Peter looked in on his distressed cousin and often took him to dinner. And right after my father had returned from Thailand, Peter had come to Budapest to make sure she was in good health. For all of my father’s harangues about the failure of our family to “stay together,” here was one kinsman who was a paragon of fidelity.

  The family pictures my father had “found” hadn’t exactly been lost. They’d been remanded to the cardboard carton in the fireproof steel cabinet in the basement, the same lockbox where she kept the deeds to her father’s old Budapest real estate.

  “Pictures aaand a letter,” my father said to Peter, “about Susan’s birth! I’ll get them.”

  My father’s heels click-clacked down and up the basement stairs. She emerged with the carton in her arms and extracted from it a small sandwich baggie, containing a very few yellowing snapshots. She handed me one of them—of a nattily dressed middle-aged man in a tuxedo, a silk hankie folded crisply in his lapel, doing the two-step with an attractive young woman in a black chiffon gown. “That’s my father,” she said, “dancing with”—she paused, for dramatic effect—“an unknown lady! He got around!” She pulled out a second picture. “That’s me with my father.” A boy of about eight or nine holds the hand of his unsmiling parent; the two are dressed in matching dress shirts and trench coats.

  I picked up the plastic bag and pulled out a stack of faded snapshots: A stylish woman wearing a checked skirt, low heels with white anklets and a fashionable brimmed cap sits on a camel. The same woman poses beside the Great Sphinx of Giza. The woman again, mingling with a Bedouin encampment, bumping along on a donkey, strolling in the desert beside a Libyan constable, a leather pocketbook dangling from one arm. The photos are dated 1936, when Rozi and Jenő had taken an extended cruise and tour of southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. “And they visited Palestine,” my father said.

  “And—?” My father had never mentioned this trip to me, and I waited in vain for her elaboration.

  Later I’d hear accounts from relatives of the journey, Rozi and Jenő’s passage around the rim of the Mediterranean on the luxury liner Palestina, with ports of call and side trips, including Naples, Genoa, Trieste, Venice, Luxor, Pompeii, Istanbul, Rhodes, Beirut, Cairo, Alexandria, Haifa, Jaffa, and Tel Aviv. “A love boat cruise,” my father’s cousin Hanna Spiegel characterized it, “without the love part.” They were “leading the La Dolce Vita life,” my father’s cousin Dahlia Baral said. But the couple was already battling, and catastrophe waited in the wings. In the shots of Rozi disembarking at various Mediterranean ports, warships guard the harbors. Aboard the Palestina en route from Greece to Haifa, the Friedmans took a snapshot for the family album of an on-deck service by fellow passenger Rabbi Meir Bar-Ilan, a year before the founding father of the Religious Zionist movement squared off against the British partition plan and seven years before his desperate 1943 mission to Washington, D.C., to plead for the rescue of Europe’s Jewry. The second honeymoon recorded in the photographs was perched on the brink of political and personal collapse, a family soon to be decimated by war, a marriage about to implode, a son about to become an urchin on the streets of Budapest. Already, that child was alone: on their weeks-long excursion, Rozi and Jenő left young István behind.

  Poking through the box of artifacts and photos now, an older Stefánie rendered a succinct verdict on her parents’ first visit to Palestine. “They didn’t like it,” she said crisply. “But that’s not what I want to show you.” She handed me two pictures of buildings, my grandfather’s Budapest properties.

  “Here’s Váci 28, as it looked after the war,” she said. “It wasn’t bombed or anything, a miracle. And this is Ráday 9, as it looks now.”

  “Can you apply for—what is it called—restitution?” Peter asked. “Or does that not exist in Hungary?”

  “Waaall, it exists,” my father said. She turned back to the box and began rifling through papers. “But it isn’t worth anything.” My father had rejected the government’s offer of a $6,500 voucher in “compensation” for the buildings.

  “So, you didn’t—?”

  “The oldest law of Hungary says no one has the right to take away somebody’s property,” my father exclaimed, the color rising in her face. “And that goes back to the days of Saint Stephen in the year 1000.” (My father had actually pasted the relevant passage from St. Stephen’s Law into her real estate dossier: “We decide in our kingly power that every man has the right to divide his own property or give that property to his wife, sons, daughters, or the church, and after his death no one shall attempt to question it.”) My father was now shouting. “Why should I hand it over to robbers—for a few pennies?”

  Peter nodded, carefully noncommital.

  “Susan”—my father rattled my shoulder—“I have proof of our possession. That they wanted to rob us. I have a whole dossier on it—that I wrote that I want the houses back, not some stupid small change.” She turned to Peter. “And it was the correct thing to do.”

  “Sure,” Peter said.

  My father sat back in her chair, arms crossed, lips pursed, eyes on the floor. A tense silence descended over the dining room. I went into the kitchen and came back with the coffeepot. I broke off a chunk of Lindt chocolate and put it on her plate. My father studied it for a few moments, then took a bite. “The Swiss know their chocolate,” she said. “Not like that horrible Hershey’s.” She gave me a mildly accusing look, as if I, as a U.S. citizen, was responsible for the poor quality of American candy bars. She ate another square. Revived, she returned to the box and came up with a thin bundle of letters, in pale blue airmail envelopes with American and Israeli postmarks. I scooted my chair closer as she slowly unfolded each missive and reviewed its contents, reading under her breath in Hungarian and muttering a running report on her progress, or lack thereof, in English. “Ahhh, here we go! … Oh, wait, nooo, that
’s the wrong one.”

  She came to a note with familiar handwriting on it. “Aha!” Then, after a long pause, “Noooo. This one is after your birth. It says here, ‘Susan is growing well and is in good health.’ ” My mother’s words, written to my grandmother Rozi in Israel.

  My father put my mother’s letter on the table and I reached for it. She snatched it away.

  “Don’t! You’ll get them all out of order.”

  Out of the box came a small Hebrew prayer book.

  “This belonged to my mother,” she said, holding up the worn palm-sized volume with gilt-edged pages and a cloth cover.

  I leaned in. How had it wound up in my father’s possession?

  “Did you ever consider moving to Israel?” I asked. “To be closer … to family?”

  “God no,” my father said. “I went to Israel once. In 1990, right before I moved back to Hungary. Three days.”

  Another trip I didn’t know about. “Three days?”

  “Haaated it.”

  “Your mother was still alive?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” my father said. A shadow of dismay played on her face. “She conducted me to the cemetery to see my father’s grave. There she was, all fat and rosy, when poor Father’s last days, he was so thin and pasty, like a ghost.” Jenő, who suffered from chronic lung ailments, had died twenty-three years earlier, one day after the end of the Six-Day War.

  “So that’s when she gave you all these things?” I gestured to the stash on the table.

  “No!” my father said. “I got them years after she died. These are the things they wouldn’t give me.”

  “Who?”

  “The family members who live in Israel. They wouldn’t give me the deeds to the Budapest houses. Our houses. For four years they wouldn’t give them. They told a pack of lies.”

  “What sort of lies?”

  “I told you, lies.” I waited. “That my father was on bad terms with me. That he didn’t want me to have the deeds. Which was a lie. My father would never have said that. My father wanted me to have the property. My father loved me.”

  She dove back into the cardboard box, still looking for my “birth letter.” Finally, she found it. “We are reporting a great family pleasure,” she read. I looked over her shoulder and, with a start, saw that the letter was in Hungarian and recognized the handwriting. This was a letter to Rozi from my father, not my mother. All these years I’d been under the impression that my father had never written to her, that he was not, as Alexander put it, “caring about his mamma.”

  “We have had—a small daughter,” my father said, pausing between phrases to parse the translation. “Her name is Susan Faludi. She is—6 pounds, 6 ounces—in weight—a very good looking little girl. She has—nice light hair—and large blue eyes.—Mother and the child—are in good health.—Everything is prepared—at home.—Here the spring has come—and pretty soon—we will take the little Zsuzsi—into the fresh air—I work a lot—I hope you are well—and you won’t be mad—if for a while I don’t write—but here it is—sometimes—so much excitement—I don’t feel like—writing letters.”

  She stopped and began folding the paper along its ancient creases.

  “Is that the end?” I said.

  My father hesitated, her face darkening. “Yeah, yeah,” she said finally. “Then it just goes, ‘I greet you with much love, etc.’ As they say.”

  “Did she write back?” I asked. “Where are her letters?”

  There was no answer. My father dropped the letter back in the box.

  That night, Der California Exclusive careened down a dark and potholed boulevard along the river. It was pouring rain and we were lost, though my father wouldn’t admit it. We were south of the city, in a bleak stretch on the Pest side. From what I could see—and the lack of streetlights made seeing a challenge—most of the buildings we passed were boarded up. Peter sat on the front passenger side, politely offering driving suggestions. “Stefi, I think you might want to turn around—this is very far south of the address.” And a little later, “Stefi, I don’t think you want to turn there.”

  From the backseat, less delicately: “Dad, Jesus, you’re going the wrong way down a one-way street!”

  My father yanked at the wheel and the van lurched over the curb.

  We were looking for a former factory on Soroksári út, in the old manufacturing sector. Old and godforsaken. Was this what remained of the grand Communist dream to convert Hungary into an industrial behemoth? The Blade Runner mise-en-scène reminded me of the gutted urbanscape of the city’s old Jewish quarter, where young squatters had recently set up improvisational social clubs in the rubble. “Ruin bars,” they called them. Which more or less described our destination. My father had asked us to come with her to a transsexual buli, or party, a disco dance in an abandoned factory. Considering the violence that had greeted the Budapest Gay Dignity Procession, the out-of-the-way venue seemed like a smart move.

  Disco was hardly my father’s dance of choice. A year earlier, she had signed up for ballroom dancing at Eklektika Restolounge, a “lesbian friendly” bistro in Budapest that was offering same-sex group lessons in its back room. The offer was short-lived; the café’s young clientele wasn’t so interested and the lessons were soon discontinued. My father hired the instructor to coach her privately. “I told him, I want to know all the female steps,” she said. “Only the women’s parts.”

  After a half hour of wrong turns down unlit thoroughfares, we arrived at our destination, a hulking brick and cement structure on the far side of a giant and mostly empty parking lot. There were fewer than a dozen cars. My father seemed nervous. She stalled for time in the Exclusive, checking and rechecking her hair and makeup in the rearview mirror. A heavy rain drummed on the camper’s roof. “My dress is going to be soaked,” she lamented. She had worn her red sleeveless sheath for the occasion and her “ruby slippers.” I handed her my umbrella. I was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Peter had on what I would come to think of as his uniform, as I never saw him in anything else: a sweater vest and khakis. We made a run for it.

  We were drenched by the time we found the one unlocked door. A set of steep worn cement steps led up to what was once a locker room and dressing area for employees. The walls and floors were tile. A row of rusting shower heads ran along one side. I eyed them with a certain atavistic paranoia. At one end of the room, bedsheets had been pinned to clotheslines to create a few private spaces. Each of the curtained cubicles announced its purpose with a hand-drawn sign, attached to the drapery with a safety pin. “Makeup room,” my father translated. I peeked inside and saw a vanity mirror and a pink-cushioned stool. “Changing room,” said another. And in the farthest corner: “Conversation nook”—containing a couple of gone-to-seed armchairs and a listing end table. Posted all over were warning signs, in a universal language: a camera with a line drawn through it, a prohibition my father ordinarily would have deplored.

  At the door, we were each handed a ticket for a complimentary drink. The “bar” offered only soft and fruit drinks. I turned in my chit and received a Dixie cup of pear juice. At the other end of the room, a stage had been jury-rigged with boards and a bolt of red velour hung from a ceiling pipe. Repurposed Christmas decorations—hanks of tinsel and blinking colored lights—dangled overhead. American techno music blasted from the speakers. The dance floor was empty.

  The partygoers hovered in the periphery in a kind of centrifugal isolation. A few had retired to the folding chairs that ringed the dance floor, clutching cell phones. Nobody was talking, not that you could be heard above the decibels. Across the room, a statuesque platinum blonde in a sequined cocktail dress teetered on stilettos. Under the strobe light, I caught glimpses of off-the-shoulder gowns, coiffed updos, sculpted décolletage. I thought of what Jazmin, one of the reluctant members of the Hungarian Tranny Club, had told me at my father’s house party: “I don’t want a ‘trans community.’ I am not a trans. I am a woman.”

  In the cen
ter of the factory’s converted locker room, a mirrored disco ball started spinning, an enticement to the dance floor. Nobody made a move. My father cast about for a familiar face. Seeing none, she led the way to a corner sofa. We perched in a row, me in the middle. “THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO HAVE A STAGE SHOW,” my father yelled over the booming speakers. “IT STARTS AT MIDNIGHT.” I checked my wristwatch. It was ten o’clock.

  I turned to Peter and began to apologize. Surely there were more pleasant ways to spend his one evening in Budapest than being pummeled by ’80s dance music. Peter said he didn’t mind. He looked exhausted. “Maybe this is the youth your father never had,” he volunteered. I said I didn’t think so, and then wondered why I was being such a wet blanket. Much to my amazement, my father had fallen into conversation, or at least a monologue, with a partygoer seated on her other side. “Chloe,” as she identified herself, sported a teased red wig, tube top, and vinyl micro-mini.

  “WHAT ARE YOU TWO TALKING ABOUT?” I shouted. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was drowning out every other word.

  “ME, OF COURSE!” my father said. “I’M TELLING CHLOE ABOUT MY SURGERY.”

  My father’s interlocutor pointed to her cell phone and said something in Hungarian.

  “WHAT?” my father said.

  Chloe repeated her words at full bellow.

  “WHAT DID SHE SAY?” I yelled in my father’s ear.

  “CHLOE SAYS, ‘THIS IS A PICTURE OF ME!’ ”

  Chloe held up her phone. On the screen was a photo of herself posed in a field of flowers. She talked some more in Hungarian.

  “CHLOE SAYS SHE IS A COMPUTER PROGRAMMER,” my father relayed, before shouting something back.

  “WHAT DID YOU SAY?”

  “I SAID, ‘GOOD, MAYBE YOU CAN FIX MY COMPUTER!’ ”

  Chloe nodded, then fell silent. The conversation had reached its terminus, or maybe terminal.