In the Darkroom

  I went to get another pear juice, but the bar had run out. My head was beginning to pound. I retreated to the “Conversation Nook,” where no one was conversing, and collapsed for a few minutes on one of the foam-spewing armchairs, hands over ears. Midnight came and went without a stage show. By then, Peter had drifted off. His chin sagged on his chest. I envied his oblivion.

  From the speakers, Army of Lovers was belting out its gay-liberation anthem and Eurochart hit, “Sexual Revolution”:

  Love is love let’s come together

  Love is free it lasts forever

  “WHY ISN’T ANYONE DANCING?” I asked my father, as the hands on my watch inched toward one a.m.

  She shrugged and her mouth moved.

  “WHAT?”

  “I SAID, ‘THEY ARE TOO SHY.’ ”

  For all the flamboyant outfits, the room was a sea of reticence. It was half past one when, one by one, a few guests steeled their nerve and ventured onto the dance floor. For a quarter hour, my father studied their movements. Then she handed me her purse and joined them.

  I watched as she and eventually a half-dozen others gyrated in place, each in their own bubble, dancing by themselves. My mind traveled to the weekends in my adolescence when my father had tried to teach me how to dance the waltz, and then excoriated me for leading.

  Peter woke up. “Where’s your father?” he said.

  I gestured toward the dance floor. Stefi was hopping tentatively on one heel, then the other. She looked so alone out there. Everyone looked so alone. I handed Peter my father’s purse—and my own—and got up off the couch.

  My father and I circled around each other for a few minutes. Then I put out my hand and she took it. I couldn’t teach her the “female steps” to a Viennese waltz, but I’d done my time in New York’s Limelight. I knew what to do with Michael Jackson. I led her through a few moves and soon we were swinging each other around. It occurred to me that I hadn’t danced like this in ages. It occurred to me that I was having a good time.

  I glanced over at the couch, where Peter was doing his best, through drooping eyelids, to stay awake. He gave me a drowsy smile. I looked back at my father. She was grinning, and not that anxious half-grin she so often had on her face. I held up my arm and she twirled underneath it like a pro.

  22

  Paid Up

  “What we have here is a lot of broken things,” Hanna Spiegel said, teetering on a stepladder in her bedroom, wrestling with a bulky package lodged on the upper shelf of her closet. She was talking about family.

  “None of the Grünbergers are in good relations. We were left so few of us—and to end like this? It is something impossible to understand. The whole family is in bad connection.” She climbed another step on the ladder and stuck her head inside the shelf. “But your father, he has broken every connection. He has broken with everyone. All these years, he did not want to know his parents. And why? It is the great family mystery.” She gave the recalcitrant object in the closet several more yanks, then pivoted to meet my gaze. “And now, this thing”—she was referring to the news I had brought her, of my father’s operation—“now he breaks even the connection with himself.” The package came free. I followed my father’s cousin into her living room in Kfar Saba, a small city outside Tel Aviv. The name means “Grandfather’s Village.”

  Hanna placed the taped and trussed mystery lump on the table and began unwinding its dust-laden layers of cardboard, plastic, and tissue paper, as if unraveling a mummy. When she had folded back the final sheath, she reached inside and handed me the contents. I staggered with the weight.

  “That’s your grandmother’s fur coat,” she said. “Well, one of them. The least nice one.” Rozi and Jenő Grünberger had arrived in Israel in the spring of 1955 with little money and no prospects. They moved into a bleak apartment in a poor neighborhood for off-the-boat immigrants in Ramat Gan, a satellite of Tel Aviv. Jenő found work as a part-time bookkeeper; his paycheck didn’t cover the bills. “Rozi had to get this job in a factory that made these plastic aprons with tails around them, ugly like I don’t know what,” Hanna said. “It was so dreadful for her. Because she was a lady.” Rozi wheedled money from her wealthier male relatives and did her best to keep up appearances. “A new dress must be worn to every occasion, and your shoes had to be according to your pocketbook, everything to match,” Hanna recalled. At home, Rozi maintained a set of color-coordinated wash and dust cloths, each designated for a different chore. “Your grandmother would have a big fight with every maid. It was always, ‘She doesn’t know how to clean!’ Your grandmother kept her apartment like a museum, like something in a Martha Stewart magazine.” Eventually Rozi convinced various male relatives to buy her nearly a dozen custom-made fur coats, stoles, and wraps, talismen of her previous pampered existence as a haute-bourgeois princess. Several were minks, from the celebrated Israeli furrier house of Stefan Braun (Rozi’s sister’s husband was Braun’s accountant). The fur that wound up in Hanna’s closet was unborn lamb. Its sleeves were wide and flared, like angel’s wings, and its custom-made fasteners designed to close on the inside for maximum aesthetic appeal.

  I laid the heavy garment on the dining-room table and ran my fingers along the perfectly cut fur panels, the fine, almost invisible stitching. The coat seemed so alien in this tropical room with its AC and modern furnishings, as though it had wandered in from another realm, a lost but regal lamb far from its Mitteleuropean flock. For all that, it breathed a greater ghost of my grandmother than anything I’d ever encountered. Rozi and I never met.

  I had been in Kfar Saba close to a week, staying with Hanna and her husband, Yair, in their apartment. It was an indication of that “bad connection,” my father’s but also mine, that I had trouble answering the standard questions El Al’s security screeners ask at boarding: “Who are your relatives in Israel? Where do they live? When’s the last time you talked to them? …” I’d found Hanna not through family introductions but on JewishGen.org, a genealogical Internet site for researching and locating Jewish ancestors. A few days after I’d posted a query, an exclamatory e-mail appeared in my in-box:

  hi! it is a big surprise—a letter from my second cousin.a granddaughter of my aunt-Rosalia faludi grunberger!!! i took care of her for several years till her death. I am the daughter of Julius grunberger—your grandmothers brother. … i am happy that you found me!, hanna spiegel.

  She was my father’s first cousin, though she felt more like mine, both in temperament (feminist) and age (only eight years older than me). Hanna was an art therapist for traumatized combat veterans; Yair, who had lost vision in one eye and hearing in both ears in the 1970 War of Attrition, worked for the Israel Defense Forces.

  After Hanna had returned this family relic to its cardboard sarcaphogus, she opened a few rumpled baggies and cascaded old photographs onto the coffee table. It was a ritual I’d grow accustomed to in the time I spent with the Grünberger and Friedman diaspora in Kfar Saba, Tel Aviv, and Netanya, and in Basel, Prague, and New York. Everyone had their cache of photos, their visual evidence of Old World elegance and decorum, stored in plastic bags in shoe boxes and manila envelopes in bureau drawers. The black-and-white snapshots, some mounted on postcard pasteboard, showcased women in furs and heels, men with walking canes and watch fobs, posing at the mountain spas, beach resorts, ski lodges, and five-star hotels of interwar Central Europe. And a few showed a small boy in a double-breasted jacket and matching shorts or a cashmere coat and tie or a pair of custom-made lederhosen, peeking in from the edge of the frame, cavorting on the running board of a Renault, gazing from behind a rock at a beribboned girl, clutching his father’s pipe and resting a tentative hand on a cousin’s shoulder: Pista, as he would have been known to everyone else in these photos.

  Here was the whole extended, entwined family tree, branching on the Grünberger side from the great trunk of Leopold and Sidonia and the brood they raised in the grand house in Spišské Podhradie, except that the tree’s leaves now lay
fallen haphazardly onto one coffee table or another. And so I was introduced to my relatives, one by arbitrary one, in order of appearance as their images were pulled from the pile.

  A fashionable woman leans on a man’s arm in a square in Venice or poses before a pyramid in Egypt—the glamorous Grünberger girls, Rozi and her three sisters on their honeymoons and vacations and shopping sprees. “They were always in a quarrel over who was the most beautiful,” Hanna said. The girls were raised to be “accomplished,” in a nonthreatening, finishing-school sort of way, tutored in dance and tennis, French and piano. Their real calling was to be lovely ornaments, capable of drawing wealthy husbands who would keep them ornamented—and protected. Which is why, Hanna noted, every one of them married a man a decade older.

  All four sisters survived the war, though none without scars. Gabriella, the third sister, lost her husband—he was deported to Sachsenhausen, worked nearly to death, and then shot into a mass grave. On a train heading to Miskolcs, one of her husband’s former employees recognized Gabriella and her daughter, Marika, and denounced them to the authorities. Mother and child were dragged out at the next stop and sent to Ravensbrück, later to Bergen-Belsen.

  Hanna extracted several more snapshots from the pile. “Here’s Árpád,” she said. A dapper man with a cleft chin, looking sharp in a tailored suit and fedora, strolls along a boardwalk in the Czech spa town of Carlsbad in 1937, slaloms down a ski slope with friends in the High Tatras, poses in his backyard with his family, one protective hand on his wife’s shoulder, the other on his daughter’s, a little girl in braids and bows. Árpád, the oldest of Leopold and Sidonia’s four sons, who “ran the wood business with your great-grandfather,” Hanna said, and who would die with his wife, Margit, and daughter, Verushka, in 1944, when the house in which they’d taken refuge with other Jewish partisans was shot up by the SS, then doused with gasoline and burned to the ground. It was only seven years since his Carlsbad promenade. Árpád’s cleft chin, I registered, was just like my father’s, and mine.

  “And here’s your grandmother again,” Hanna said, handing me another photograph of Rozi, in a veiled cloche and bejeweled, posing with her husband, Jenő, an austere presence in a formal dark suit and bowler hat, and her son, wearing a double-breasted coat with brass buttons.

  I’d seen many photos of Rozi. When I went to Tel Aviv to visit my father’s cousin Marika Barbash (who, with her mother, Gabriella, survived Bergen-Belsen), she pulled from her grocery bag of pictures some shots of Rozi and Jenő taken in a studio, Rozi in a black dress, pearl necklace, and matching pearl earrings. “Always with the pearls,” Marika observed.

  Hanna pulled out several more photos from this period: Rozi on a shopping trip in Italy, laden with purchases; Rozi dressed for a night on the town in one of her minks and sporting an elaborate coiffure. “Rozi was very beautiful, with many lovers, and every night she was going to the theater or the opera,” Hanna said. “Pista would be brought in before she left to get his good-night kiss, and that was it. Night after night, he was alone in the house with the nanny. It was like a royal family. Pista had everything—private teachers, governesses, expensive toys—but there were no parents there.” One picture recorded a rare domestic scene: Rozi is seated on the emerald-velvet love seat in the salon at Ráday 9, the room my father described as being furnished in a “Louis the XVI style.” Seated awkwardly on her lap, as if someone has just plunked him there for the picture, is a toddler in a Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit, white kneesocks and tiny polished lace-up boots. The photograph captures an equivocal look on Rozi’s face; she peers down at the child on her lap as if she isn’t entirely sure what his relation to her might be. My father, clutching a teddy bear, pivots away from his mother and stares into the camera. “My father visited Rozi when Pista was five or six years old,” Hanna said, “and he told me he thought to himself, ‘This is a very sad child.’ He could see he had no love.”

  “Pista was a very intelligent, clever boy,” Yudit Yarden told me. Yudit was my father’s cousin from the paternal side of the family, the Friedman side. During the early years of the war, Yudit and her parents had lived in the apartment building my grandfather owned at Váci 28 and vacationed at the Friedman summer villa in the Buda Hills, where the two children swam in the pool and played together in the big yard. When I visited her small assisted-living flat in Netanya, a coastal town in northern Israel, Yudit was eighty. She greeted me like a long-lost friend: “Dear Susaaan, you come! My heart it’s made so warm!” Her English was as eloquent in its brokenness as her face was beautiful in its age.

  “Pista knew everything,” Yudit recalled over cherry brandy and a groaning platter of pastries. “He read a lot, and of technical things he was also very talented, very sophisticated.” He showed her how to take photographs and make films. “He was always rationalist, always working with the brain, not the emotions. He was very”—she struggled for the English word and closed her hand in a fist—“shut. Like the face in poker. You couldn’t guess what was it he thought.” She remembered something else from those summers. “Rozi didn’t spend time with her child. Once I heard from Pista that his mother will come, and I was … astonished. They were not warm parents.”

  And Jenő? I asked.

  “Jenő was cold,” Yudit said. “A gvir”—Yiddish for rich man—“a big prestige person in the Jewish community in Budapest. But he was … pedant. Very critical of Pista. Very very critical.” And when he wasn’t critical, he was absent. “Pista was forced to care for himself. He was awfully alone. He had two homes but not really any home.” She fixed me with her mournful wide eyes. “It’s a wound he never will be able to cure it.”

  And yet, it wasn’t the abandonment of Pista by Rozi and Jenő that posed what Hanna called “the great family mystery.” It was Pista’s abandonment of his mother.

  “He was Rozi’s only child and he wouldn’t even speak to her,” Marika told me one afternoon, as we sat drinking tea in her spanking-new condominium in Tel Aviv. The AC blasted frigid air. Overhead on a shelf were a few surviving heirlooms: a set of silver candlestick holders and a porcelain dancer in regal frills, ready for a Habsburg minuet.

  “She lost two children, you know,” Marika said.

  I said my father had told me that Rozi had miscarried once.

  “Not miscarriage, and not one,” Marika said. “They were two live births.” According to family recollection, one of the babies lived a short while, the other close to a year.

  “And then she finally has a child who lives—and he won’t talk to her,” Marika said. “She suffered. Because of your father. It was her tragedy.” Marika recalled my father’s three-day visit to Tel Aviv in 1990. He put a stone on his father Jenő’s grave, met briefly with relatives to discuss the possibility of reclaiming the apartments in Budapest, and left. “He wanted houses, not people,” Marika said.

  A couple of years after his brief touchdown in Israel, my father invited Rozi, by then eighty-nine years old, to visit him in Budapest. The news rippled to the far reaches of the Grünberger family. “It was the big event,” my father’s cousin Dahlia Baral, who was living in Australia then, told me. “Steven has called at last! We all thought that the Messianic days are approaching and here to stay.”

  And then, Rozi returned from Hungary—her leg in a massive cast. She had fallen on the front stoop of my father’s house in the Buda Hills and shattered her leg. My father had taken her to St. János Hospital, the closest medical facility. Rozi was put in a room with someone who screamed in agony night and day. My father enlisted Ilonka to tend to Rozi for the several weeks that she was recovering in the house. Ilonka described the experience to me as “the most awful month of my life.” She recalled Rozi screaming at my father all day long and treating Ilonka like the maid. “She would yell, ‘Bring in “the girl”!’ ” And she remembered my father screaming back at his mother: “You neglected me. You never loved me.”

  Rozi’s surgery was a mess. “An operation like from the d
ays of Franz Josef,” Marika said. The surgeon patched her leg together with a giant nail that soon began breaking through the skin. A hospital in Tel Aviv had to redo the entire operation. “Your father wanted her back to Israel as quick as possible,” Marika said. As soon as she could travel, he booked her a return ticket. “Rozi said, ‘He got rid of me.’ She was devastated. Everything she had lost, it all came up again.”

  “It was sad,” Marika went on, “but Rozi dealt with it. She cut herself off from things.” She made a chop-chop motion with her hands. “You know about her will,” she added.

  No, I said, I didn’t.

  “It said, ‘And for my son, only one shekel.’ ”

  Marika’s anecdote was correct concerning the generational rejection but wrong in the details, as I discovered when I talked to Hanna, who had nursed Rozi through her final decline and sorted her papers after her death. Hanna said my father had indeed been cut off but that Rozi wasn’t the offender: “Your grandfather wrote the will.” Hanna recalled the words Jenő had set down in the 1960s, when the lira, not the shekel, was the basic coin of Israeli currency. They appeared on the last page of the will, at the bottom of a list of inheritors and the percentages each would receive: “To my son, István Faludi, one lira.” The man my father had mythologized as “my guardian angel” had left his only child spare change.

  Early in my visit to Tel Aviv, after Marika and her cousin Dahlia had led me on a tour of the Arab market in Jaffa, we stopped to take in the view of the harbor. We’d been talking about family history and about my father’s sex change. I’d just finished telling them about the night my father and I went to see La Juive at the Dohány synagogue, and my father’s assessment of the wealthy Jewish alte kockers in the audience: “They are looking at me and saying, ‘There’s an overdressed shiksa. ’ ”

  Marika considered. “Maybe he was thinking, if you change one thing, you change the other.” She meant gender and religion. “The two go together.”