In the Darkroom

  I asked Edit how she’d come to join Szim Salom.

  “I was Jewish but I didn’t know it,” she said.

  “You weren’t raised Jewish?”

  “It was the Socialist era,” she said. “Many people were hiding their Jewishness.” She gave a sad smile. Her parents, she recalled, would light candles on Friday and Saturday nights, and have some sort of ceremony to which only their relatives would come. “But they didn’t tell me what it was about. I thought it was just a family custom.”

  Edit was well into her thirties before she learned the truth. “My mother told me. She just said it, like, ‘Oh, by the way, we’re Jews.’ ” Edit received the news as revelation. “I always felt there was something different about me, but I didn’t know what it was,” she said. “I couldn’t adapt to other people. I felt things differently.” She began to read up on Judaism, and a friend directed her to Bálint House, the one Jewish community center in Hungary. More recently, she discovered Szim Salom. It felt comfortable and welcoming, she said, and she liked its politics. From a stack of papers on the folding table, she extracted an English-language statement of Szim Salom’s principles. They included: “We welcome everybody, regardless of his/her familiarity with Jewish liturgy and tradition”; “We reject any fundamentalist approach to Jewish tradition”; and “We affirm equal rights for women and men to participate in all aspects of religious life.” I pointed to the last statement and gave her a thumbs-up. She returned my enthusiasm with a big smile.

  Szim Salom had been established only two decades ago, the first Jewish Reform community in Hungary. Its organizers had applied for formal recognition from the state, a requirement for public funding. The request was denied. “They told us,” Edit said, “ ‘You can’t be recognized because you don’t have a cemetery, you don’t have a school, you don’t have this, you don’t have that.’ But we didn’t have the money to make a school and a cemetery. If we got recognition, we could get support. We could buy a place to have a permanent synagogue.” Instead, in the last twenty years, Szim Salom had moved from one apartment and storefront to another, wanderers at the whim of various landlords. Right now, they were renting from a man who owned two flats in Ráday 9. He lived in the other one, next door. How long he’d allow them to stay, no one knew.

  “These people are thieves,” my father put in. “They are trafficking in stolen goods.” She switched to Hungarian and talked for a long time. I didn’t ask for a translation. I could tell it was my father’s diatribe about our family’s lost real estate.

  Edit listened patiently, nodding every once in a while. When my father paused to take a breath, Edit interjected that her grandmother had owned a store in Buda before World War II. It sold glass and dishware. “They took it away from our family, too,” she said. She led us to the reception area and the folding table where a large leather-bound volume sat. It was their guest book. “Would you sign it?” she asked. My father sat down and deliberated, then wrote for a while in her old-fashioned Hungarian lettering.

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “I was very surprised,” she translated, “to see that at my father’s house, there is now a synagogue. I found it on the Internet. I will keep the connection. Toda raba.” She looked up at me. “That means ‘Thank you very much’ in Hebrew.” She had signed it, the traditional Hungarian way, last name first: “Faludi Stefánie.”

  My father checked her watch. “Oh, it’s already five o’clock,” she said. We had to rush. Rosh Hashanah services and dinner to follow were being held across town at a hotel. Szim Salom was expecting a larger-than-usual turnout; the flat at Ráday 9 was too small.

  The Hotel Benczúr was a generic modern conference center in the upper-crust embassy district that runs alongside Andrássy út, a few blocks from Heroes’ Square. Shadows were lengthening as we came up from the subway’s Millennium Underground line. The first thing I saw was the archangel Gabriel, perched on the thirty-six-meter-high pillar of Heroes’ Square’s Millennial Monument, the Holy Crown of Saint Stephen in one hand, the double-barred apostolic cross in the other. After two blocks we turned off Andrássy and walked the smaller silent streets girded by palatial consulates. Their formidable facades stared down at us from behind iron gates. My father grew nervous, then accusatory. “I thought you said you looked at a map,” she said. “This can’t be the right way. There’s nothing here. We should go back.”

  I said I was sure. “Just two and a half more blocks.”

  “I told you, this isn’t right. This is not a Jewish area.”

  We turned the corner, and I pointed to a string of twinkling lights: the entrance to the Hotel Benczúr. We headed toward the revolving door behind two teenage girls, dark-haired and in formal dress. My father eyed them. “Do they look Jewish?” she murmured to herself.

  The services were in the Budapest Room, a conference room off a corridor lined with identical suites. The space was shoebox-shaped, antiseptic, and harshly lit. Two folding tables had been set up on the far end. Metal stacking chairs ran in rows down the middle. The ceremonies had just started. An usher handed us the text for the evening, a sheath of Xeroxed stapled pages. My father grimaced. “This is not a prayer book,” she grumbled as we headed down the aisle.

  We took seats toward the back. I noted with dismay the many available chairs. I counted about seventy attendees, including several children, two infants, and a dog. The services were informal. Rabbi Katalin Kelemen, a tolerant woman with a sensible bowl haircut and laughing eyes, smiled encouragingly at the speakers, no matter how badly they mauled their Hebrew recitations, and doled out hugs and kisses. Most of the assembled, as was evident even to my untutored ear, were new to Judaism. Like me, they picked their way awkwardly through the Shema and its blessings—the call to learning, the charge to remember the liberation from Egypt, the promise of prosperity. One congregant wasn’t having trouble with the words: the one seated next to me.

  The cantor rose to sing a haunting melody. The Torah scrolls were taken from the ark and placed on a lectern, and the rabbi invited some young people from the audience to help with the holiday’s readings: Isaac’s miraculous birth to Sarah, who at the age of ninety had given up hope of bearing a child, and Abraham’s near sacrifice of their son, his hand stayed by an intervening angel. “This is a controversial story,” Rabbi Kelemen said, my father whispering a translation in my ear. “We need to not just accept it. It’s good to debate.” Then a young woman was called up front to conclude with the evening’s haftarah passage: the prayer of the barren Hannah, despondent because she has no children, whose appeal to God was answered on Rosh Hashanah. “And in due time Hannah conceived and bore a son, and she called his name Samuel, for she said, ‘I have asked for him from the Lord.’ ”

  Rosh Hashanah is also known as Ha’rat Olam, the Pregnancy of the World. The Jewish New Year celebrates the birth of the universe, but other births as well. So many of the prayers involve pregnancy, motherhood, a yearning for children—Sarah’s, Hannah’s, Rachel’s. I looked over at my father, who was sitting very still. And thought: What of your mother, Stefi, who grieved the loss of two newborns before she had you, yet left her only child with nannies and nursemaids and went out on the town every night? And what of your father, who left you to fend for yourself on the streets of wartime Budapest? Who didn’t come to your bar mitzvah? Who wrote in his will, “To my son, István Faludi, one lira”? And what of your daughter, who didn’t have the grandchildren you wished for, and who let you evict her from your life until, by an act of extraordinary reinvention or reassertion, you invited her back in?

  I pulled out my notebook to scribble down some thoughts. A hand flew down and pounced on my pen. “Stop writing!” she hissed in my ear. “It’s not allowed on Holy Days.” Chagrined, I returned my notebook to my purse. Even in this anything-goes Reform ceremony, I was getting the fundaments wrong.

  The rabbi rose to give long-winded remarks. The audience became restive. The children behind us began to whisp
er and giggle. On the other side of the aisle, the dog let out a loud yap, and everyone laughed. Everyone except my father. “It’s not funny,” she said. “This is a serious occasion, and they are mocking it.”

  When the Torah was carried down the aisle, my father nudged me to touch my shawl to the scroll’s sheathing and kiss it. An elderly man was summoned to the front to blow the shofar. And then the services closed, per tradition, on the mourner’s Kaddish.

  The rabbi invited everyone to proceed to the banquet hall for dinner. My father picked up the photocopied “prayer book,” then put it back down on the chair, then picked it up again.

  “I think it’s okay to take that,” I said.

  “I only want the last page,” she replied. She carefully pulled the final sheet off the staple, folded it, and put it in her purse. “I want to say Kaddish,” she told me. “For my parents.”

  We joined the others heading down the corridor. I found myself walking beside the rabbi’s husband, an American. He asked what I was doing here. I said I was visiting.

  “So, you are related?” he said, pointing to my father. I nodded. “But you don’t speak Hungarian?” he said.

  “Susan was born in the United States,” my father interjected, in English. “When I used to live there.”

  “Ah, so you are”—the rabbi’s husband looked at my father—“her grandmother?”

  “No,” my father said. “I am her …” She left it to me to finish the sentence.

  I paused, not wanting to get into explications, yet also not wanting to cause any pain. One way or another, I thought, an identity would be denied.

  “… mother,” I said.

  A Kaddish for a parent, indeed.

  25

  Escape

  In 2004 I set out to pursue the stranger who was my father. I didn’t anticipate a laying down of arms, nor did I achieve one. In the years to come, our relationship would lurch from contention to détente to contention again. But by the fall of 2014, when we ushered in the imminent Jewish New Year in the room where my father had hidden as a teenage fugitive, we seemed to have arrived at an understanding, even a closeness. The accord came just in time. When I visited her that September, my father was as lucid and strong as I’d ever seen her. Less than half a year later, her constitution was in ruins.

  They say that dementia is a disintegration of the self, a bleeding away of identity. Watching it take over my father’s life that winter, I was tempted to think of it as the opposite: an onrush of all that she had been, all that she had experienced, suffered, fled. The paranoia and hallucinations afflicting her were rooted in the realities of her past, the histories she had walled off. Those histories now flooded into every synapse. My father’s mind seemed to me like the limestone beneath Castle Hill; it was being hollowed out by what welled up from below. She thought that her mother was sleeping in the room next to hers. She thought that her ex-wife had come to see her in Budapest. She thought that she was living in the old summer villa down the block, that Nazis were battering down her front door. One late night in February 2015, my father’s shouts that criminals were breaking into the house brought the police and then an ambulance, which escorted its unwilling passenger to a hospital. She spent an uncomfortable night in a chair in a corridor of the ER, with nurses and doctors asking “stupid things.” Near dawn, she gave them the slip and hailed a cab.

  “I escaaaped!” my father gloated when I reached her on the phone later that day. She sounded her usual self, preening over her aptitude for evasion, filibustering without apology, recasting traumatic experience as escapade. “A to-do over nothing!” she said. “They put me in a horrible ambulance, very unusable. Everything squeaking and shaking all over the place, I thought the wheels were coming off. It took forever to get there, aaand …” Her monologue culminated with a report on an endless taxi ride home and a final feat of deception: not only had she skipped out on the hospital, she’d skipped out on the fare.

  “Waaall,” my father said when I pressed her on why she’d fled the hospital’s care, “they pretended it was for my own good. But that’s not the reason.”

  “So what is?”

  “At the hospital, they kept asking, ‘So, do you believe you’re a woman?’ They didn’t seem to know that we are in the late twentieth century.”

  “Early twenty-first,” I corrected.

  “They have old ways of thinking. They don’t like trans people.”

  Later that day, she settled on a new reason for her incarceration. “I got through this crisis, the other time—I always protected myself,” she told me when we talked again. “I thought I was away from danger. I thought I had escaped them.”

  “Who?”

  “These people who broke in, the police, the ambulance people, the people who called these people. I realize who they are: typical Arrow Cross. They think it’s a crime, what I am. They see me and they are saying, ‘You are a Jew.’ ”

  If identity is the one thing you can’t escape, my father’s dementia presented her identity in concentrated form, relentless as a posse. “Did we fly to Israel this morning?” she asked me when I arrived in Budapest shortly after her “escape” from the hospital. “The plane was hipping and hopping, but when I looked out the window, it was the same view as here.” The question at least displayed a remnant of self-skepticism. The more my father deteriorated, the more certain she became that her psychic landscape was real. A technician who arrived to repair her broadband Internet service was an undercover spy altering her online identity. Hordes of night intruders were storming through her house, rifling through kitchen cabinets and bureau drawers and her purse, painting the walls in invisible ink, and replicating all her books, Hans Christian Andersen volumes proliferating on every shelf.

  My attempts to persuade her to accept assistance or come to the United States for treatment met with fury. “Get this circus out of here! Leave or I’ll call the police!” she yelled when I arrived in February with her primary-care doctor and a home nursing service in tow; she chased me down the hall with a flurry of punches. The hallucinations were true because she believed them to be true. There was no use reasoning—she was adamant, impervious to logic. Sometime between her first breakdown in February and her final one in May, I learned not to argue. It seemed to relieve her when I entered into her mental road map, acknowledged her perceptions, no matter how fantastical.

  One afternoon as we talked on the phone, my father brought up, apropos nothing, Tivadar Puskás, Thomas Edison’s assistant.

  “Waaall, a Hungarian came up with the telephone greeting.”

  Yes, I said, she’d mentioned Puskás before.

  “ ‘Hallo’ means ‘I’m listening.’ ”

  Yes, I said, she’d told me.

  “Hey listener!” my father said, laughing, and then her words turned earnest. “You are the one who listens to me.”

  And so I listened. Yes, I’d say, how awful to have strangers flocking through your house at night. Yes, how exasperating that your mother has installed herself in the guest room. Yes, the ambulance driver must be a card-carrying Arrow Cross officer. And yes, I said in early May, when I reached my father by phone in the psychiatric ward of St. János Hospital. Yes, it’s terrible that someone sneaked into the basement and tried to burn the house down.

  From the phone by her hospital bed, my father described to me the events of the previous night: She’d noticed a light on in the cellar and crept down the stairs to investigate. A man was standing by the gas tank, “blowing on the gas valve,” attempting to start a fire. My father confronted him. “He wouldn’t say anything,” she recounted. “He wouldn’t identify himself.” She locked the arsonist in the cellar, ran back upstairs, and called the police. “But the police mixed everything up,” she said. They took her away instead. “Which I violently opposed. I saved the house from burning down, and I am being punished for putting out the fire. It’s aaabsolutely ridiculous. I save the lives of people and the least I ask for saving a life is don’t th
row me to the wolves. I’m the good guy. They totally miscast me. You need to talk to these doctors and get it all cleared up.” Yes, I said, and bought a plane ticket.

  From the taxi stand on Diósárok út, St. János Hospital looks like a Victorian asylum of the “moral architecture” variety, its Gothic brick-and-stone dormitories ranged sociably around landscaped grounds gone slightly to seed, gnarled vines crawling up the crumbling facades, a chapel to the patron saint of sick paupers stationed at the main entrance. I had stood outside these wrought-iron gates many times before, waiting to catch a ride up the hill to my father’s house. The #59 tram terminates across the street from St. János, and when the connecting bus was late, I’d grab a cab at the hospital. But on the afternoon of May 13, I passed through the gates and hauled my luggage up four flights of dirty stairs—there was no elevator—and headed toward the internal-medicine ward.

  From within, St. János appeared more Bedlam than beneficent. Years of draconian budget cuts had taken their toll. Many of the nurses were on strike, protesting their paltry wages of $200 to $300 a month. The bathrooms had no soap and no toilet paper. Patients were expected to bring their own. Likewise with dishes and utensils. I hurried down a long corridor and veered into a small overpacked room, its eight beds occupied by acutely ill women. It was unseasonably hot for May, and there was no air-conditioning. The late afternoon sun beat through a cranked-open window.

  My father lay atop a thin mattress on what looked like an old army cot. She wore a frayed hospital gown and gave off the musky odor of someone who hadn’t been bathed. She was half her size, or so she seemed to me. Her eyes were sealed shut, lips livid and cracked, her mouth frozen open in a grimace. She appeared to be comatose and breathed with a terrible rasp.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, the hysteria rising in my voice. My father’s neighbor and friend, Ágnes, who was accompanying me, did her best to translate my frantic rush of words into Hungarian. An orderly replied with a shrug, beads of sweat on his brow. “What’s happened to her?” I asked. “Where’s her doctor?” I stroked my father’s thin arm, smoothed her hair, a wild unwashed tangle. On the night table, beside a canister of opened but untouched yogurt, sat a plastic sip cup with a name written shakily in Magic Marker, “Stefi.”