In the Darkroom

  By then, he was working in a darkroom in the city, commuting to a windowless chamber that would become as thoroughly his domain as our suburban basement. He became a master of photographic development and manipulative techniques: color conversions, montages, composites, and other transmutations of the pre-Photoshop trade. “Trick photography,” he called it. He always smelled of fixer.

  My father was particularly skilled at “dodging,” making dark areas look light, and “masking,” concealing unwanted parts of the picture. “The key is control,” he liked to say. “You don’t expose what you don’t want exposed.” In the aquarium murk where he spent his daytime hours, hands plunged in chemical baths, a single red safelight for navigation, he would shade and lighten and manipulate, he would make body parts, buildings, whole landscapes disappear. He had achieved in still photography what he had thought possible only in film. He made the story come out the way he wanted it to.

  His talent made him indispensable in certain quarters—most notably in Condé Nast’s art production department. From the ’60s to the ’80s, Condé Nast relied on my father to perform many of the most difficult darkroom alterations for the photography that appeared in its premier magazines, Vogue, Glamour, House & Garden, Vanity Fair, Brides. For years a note that one magazine art director had sent to another hung in my father’s studio: “Send it to Steve Faludi—don’t send it to anyone else!” My father performed his “tricks” on the work of some of the most celebrated fashion photographers of the time—Richard Avedon, Francesco Scavullo, Irving Penn, Bert Stern—at several commercial photo agencies and, later, on his own at his one-man business, Lenscraft Studios, in a garment-district loft previously occupied by fashion photographer Hank Londoner. He also worked his magic on many vintage photographs whose negatives had been lost; he could create a perfect copy from a print. Among the classic images he worked on were those by the preeminent Hungarian photographer (and World War II Jewish refugee), André Kertész. My father’s handiwork “was so precise and close and meticulous, there would be no bleeding of color or light,” Dick Cole, the director of Condé Nast’s art production department in that period, told me many years later, as we sat in his living room in Southern California, leafing through glossy coffee-table books that featured my father’s artifice. “It was amazing. You could never tell what had been changed. You couldn’t tell the original from the copy.”

  Occasionally as a small child I would take the commuter train to the city with my father and visit one of the series of Manhattan photo agencies where he worked. He’d lead me to the other side of the partitioned studio, where men perched on high stools before light tables, effacing with fine-tipped brushes the facial imperfections of fashion models. He regarded retouching as the crowning glory of the photographic arts. He would hold up the before-and-after shots of ad copy for me to appreciate. See, she no longer has that unsightly mole! Look, no more wrinkles! He admired the men bent over those light tables, obliterating blemishes. My father rarely involved himself with my educational or professional prospects. But he did, several times, advise me to become a retoucher. Which was peculiar counsel for a daughter who was consumed, from the day she first joined the staff of her grade school newspaper, with exposing flaws, not concealing them. At the heart of our relationship, in the years we didn’t speak and, even more, in the years when we would again, a contest raged between erasure and exposure, between the airbrush and the reporter’s pad, between the master of masking and the apprentice who would unmask him.

  4

  Home Insecurity

  Hegyvidék (literally, “mountain-land”), the XIIth district of Budapest, is high in the Buda Hills. Always an exclusive enclave—home to embassies, villas, the residences of the nouveaux riches—its palatial properties were hot investments in post-Communist, new-millennial Budapest. As the broken-English text from one online real estate pitch I read put it, Hegyvidék is “the place where the luxury villas and modern detached houses—as blueblood estates—are ruling their large gardens in the silent milieu.” To reach my father’s address required negotiating several steep inclines and then a series of hair-raising tight turns on increasingly potholed and narrow roads.

  “Damn Communists,” my father said, as the Exclusive plunged in and out of craters in the macadam. “They never fix the streets.”

  “Weren’t they fifteen years ago?” I said.

  “Waaall, they call themselves the ‘Socialists’ now”—she was speaking of the party in power at the time—“but it’s the same thing. A bunch of thieves.”

  The camper wheezed up the final precipice and around a tight curve. A house loomed into view, a three-story concrete chalet. It had a peaked roof and stuccoed walls. A security fence ringed the perimeter, with a locked and alarmed gate. A large warning sign featured a snarling, and thankfully nonexistent, German shepherd.

  I wasn’t sure whether the bunkered fortress was an expression of my father’s hypervigilance or that of the culture she’d returned to. Later, I read Colin Swatridge’s A Country Full of Aliens, a reminiscence of the British author’s residence in Budapest in the ’90s, and was struck by his remarks on the Hungarian fetish for home protection:

  You may peer at the grandiosity of it all—at the grey-brick drive and the cypress trees, and the flight of steps, and the juttings, and the recesses, and the columns and the quoins—but you may do this only through the ironwork of the front gates, under the watchful eyes of a security camera, and of movement-sensitive security lights. It is fascinating, this need to reconcile security and self-display. The house must show its feminine lacy mouldings, its leggy balusters, its delicate attention to detail, its sinuous sweep of steps; yet it must also show its teeth, and muscular locks, and unyielding ironwork. It must be at once coy and assertive, like a hissing peacock—a thing beautiful and ridiculous. …

  What is, perhaps, characteristically Hungarian about these green-belt houses, these kitsch castles in the Buda Hills and the Pilis Hills, by Lake Balaton and the Bükk, is the conflation of exhibitionism with high security. It is akin to the confusion of the feminine and the masculine that is a feature of the language.

  I knew all about that linguistic confusion. It was a staple of my childhood. “Tell your mother I’m waiting for him,” my father would say. Or “Your brother needs to clean up her room.” Hungarians are notorious for mixing up the sexes in English. Magyar has no gendered pronouns.

  My father steered the camper to the far shoulder and yanked on the parking brake. She teetered perilously across the road in her white heels and keyed in the code in a box installed on the defending wall, and the gate creaked open—and shut again as soon as we’d pulled through. The camper labored up the steep driveway and came to a halt in a grassy patch—it was too tall to fit in the house’s two-car garage. A twenty-five-foot flagpole presided over the front lawn. It had three ropes, “so I can show all my flags,” my father told me. “I put up the Hungarian flag on March 15”—National Day, commemorating Hungary’s failed 1848 revolution against the Austrian Empire—“and the U.S. flag on July 4.” The third rope periodically hoisted the banners of my father’s other past residences, Denmark and Brazil.

  My father scrambled down from the pilot’s seat and swung her purse over one shoulder. We stood in the drive for what felt to me like a good quarter hour while she fussed with various security measures. First she had to reengage the VW’s internal burglar alarm. Then she had to reset an outdoor surveillance system that “protected” the driveway. Once it was armed, we had sixty seconds to hurry to the front door, the one on the right. The house was a duplex; the other side-by-side identical unit, a doppelgänger residence, stood empty.

  Before we entered, my father disarmed a third alarm system—and reactivated it as soon as we got inside. While she punched in numbers, I tried to find my bearings in the gloom. We were standing in a dark hallway. To the right was a stairwell, shrouded in shadow. Wooden steps ascended two levels. At the far end of the hall, through an open door, I
caught a glimpse of yellow kitchen cabinets, the same cabinets that had adorned his Manhattan loft. (My father had shipped them, along with the refrigerator, dishwasher, oven, and everything else he owned at the time, including a giant stash of lumber and his VW van, in a forty-foot crate.) She led me down the hall and through another door on the left, which led to a large tiled living room and, off it, a dining room with a chandelier and a display case full of Zsolnay china.

  A wall of glass with French doors overlooked the front terrace, but they, too, were dark, the thick drapes closed. “Someone could look in and want to steal my electronic equipment,” she said. She had a lot of it to steal. A wall-mounted cabinet system in the living room was filled, floor to ceiling, with monitors, receivers, amplifiers, speakers, woofers, CD, DVD, VHS, and Betamax players, a turntable, even a reel-to-reel tape machine. The last served to play her old opera recordings, the same ones my father used to blast every weekend in our suburban living room in Yorktown Heights. A half dozen cabinets contained a thousand or more operas on CDs, tapes, videos, and record albums.

  Bookshelves lined the opposite wall. On one end were all my father’s old manuals on rock climbing, ice climbing, sailboat building, canoeing, woodworking, shortwave-radio and model-airplane construction. The My-Life-as-a-Man collection, I thought. Not that there was a corresponding woman’s section. Other shelves were populated with works devoted to all things Magyar: Hungarian Ancient History, Hungarian Fine Song, Hungarian Dog Breeds, and thick biographies of various Hungarian luminaries, including a two-volume set of memoirs by Countess Ilona Edelsheim Gyulai, the daughter-in-law of Admiral Miklós Horthy, the Regent who ruled Hungary during all but the final months of World War II.

  Another section of books belonged to a genre that was as lifelong a preoccupation of my father’s as opera: fairy tales. Even as a girl, I understood that the puppet theater and the toy-train landscapes my father constructed were only ostensibly for his children. They gratified his craving for storybook fantasy. And the more extravagant the fantasy, the better. Likewise with opera. He hated a production that wasn’t lavishly costumed and staged. The two obsessions were, in fact, conjoined. One of my father’s most treasured childhood memories is of the night when his parents first took him to the Hungarian Royal Opera House. He was nine, and the opera was Hansel and Gretel.

  “I wish I still had that book,” my father said, gazing over my shoulder at her impressive assortment of fairy tales. She was referring to a children’s anthology that the first of several nannies had read to Pista in his infancy. The nursemaid was German, and her mother tongue would become her young charge’s first language. “Leather binding, thick pages, gorgeous illustrations,” my father reminisced. “A gem. Whenever I go to a bookstore, I look for it.” Over the years she’d amassed many similar volumes, most featuring the tales of her most beloved storyteller, Hans Christian Andersen. She owned editions of his works in Danish, German, English, and Hungarian. (And could read them all. Like so many educated Hungarians, my father was a polyglot, fluent in five languages, plus Switzerdeutsch.) In 1972, when we took a family vacation to Denmark, my father made repeated pilgrimages to the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen’s harbor. I remember him standing for a long time by the seawall, pondering the sculpture of the sea nymph who cut out her tongue and split her tail to become human. I had studied him as he studied the statue, a girl in bronze on a surf-swept rock, her pain-racked limbs tucked beneath a nubile body, her mournful eyes turned longingly toward shore. My father had taken many pictures.

  In idle moments on my first visit to Hegyvidék, and on the visits to come, I would take down from the shelf the English version of Hans Christian Andersen’s collected stories and leaf through its pages, repelled and riveted by the stories of mutilation and metamorphosis, dismemberment and resurrection: The vain dancing girl who has her feet amputated to reclaim her virtue. The one-legged tin soldier who falls in love with a ballerina paper cutout and, hurled into a stove, melts into a tiny metal heart. The lonely Jewish servant girl who dreams her whole life of being a Christian—and gets her wish at the resurrection. And most famously, the despised runt of the litter who grows into a regal cygnet. “I shall fly over to them, those royal birds!” says the Ugly Duckling. “It does not matter that one has been born in the hen yard as long as one has lain in a swan’s egg.” And I’d wonder: if the duckling only becomes a swan because he is born one, if the Little Mermaid cleaves her tail only to return to the sea, what kind of transformation were these stories promising?

  On still more shelves on the living-room wall kitty-corner to the electronic equipment, stacks of photo albums contained snapshots from my father’s multiple trips to Odense, Andersen’s birthplace. “I took Ilonka there once,” my father said. “I think she was a little bored.” Flipping through them, I was startled to find a familiar townscape: the distinctive step-gabled roof of Vor Frue Kirke (the Church of Our Lady), a GASA produce shop (a Danish market cooperative), and the half-timbered inn of Den Gamle Kro (there’s an inn by that name a block from the Hans Christian Andersen Museum). Had my father reproduced the city of Odense in the train set he’d installed in our playroom? Later, when I inspected the two photos I still had of our childhood model railroad, I admired all the more the particularity of my father’s verisimilitude. The maroon snout of the toy locomotive bore the winged insignia and royal crown of the Danish State Railway.

  Above the Odense photo albums, on two upper shelves, a set of figurines paraded: characters from The Wizard of Oz. My father had found them in a store in Manhattan, after my parents divorced and he’d moved back to the city. They were ornately accessorized. Dorothy sported ruby-red shoes and a woven basket, with a detachable Toto peeking out from under a red-and-white-checked cloth. The Tin Man wore a red heart on a chain and clutched a tiny oil can. The Scarecrow spewed tufts of straw, and the Lion displayed a silver-plated medal that read COURAGE. My father had strung wires to the head and limbs of the green-faced Wicked Witch of the West, turning her into a marionette. I paused before the dangling form and gave it a furtive push. The witch bobbled unsteadily on her broom.

  My father pulled the drapes aside a few inches so we could slip through a glass door onto the terrace. I’d asked to see the view. The deck ran the length of the house and was lined with concrete flower boxes. Nothing was growing in them, except weeds. “You have to plant geraniums in May,” my father said, by way of explanation. In May, she had been lying in a hospital room in Thailand.

  The lawn sloped steeply to the street. Down the center, a path of paving stones was shaded by huge and gnarled chestnut trees, an arboreal specter that put me in mind of Oz’s Haunted Forest (“I’d Turn Back If I Were You …”). Smashed shells and shriveled bits of nut meat littered the steps. From our aerie, you could see down a series of hills to a thickly wooded valley. To the right of the deck was a small orchard my father had planted when she first moved in. She enumerated the varieties: sour cherry, peach, apricot, apple, walnut. “Strange, though,” she said, “this year they bore no fruit.” Her horticultural inventory reminded her of the long-ago resident gardener who had tended the grounds of the Friedman villa in the Buda Hills, the villa where my father had spent every summer as a boy. “The gardener’s family lived in the cottage on our property,” she recalled.

  She leaned over the far edge of the deck and pointed to a bungalow a half block below us, the only small structure on the street. “He lives there,” my father said.

  “Who?”

  “Bader.”

  “Bader?”

  “Baaader,” my father enunciated, correcting both my pronunciation and my failure to recognize the name. “Laci Baaader.” Laci, diminutive for László. “The gardener’s son.”

  “You were playmates?”

  “Haaardly. I was one of those.” Jews, she meant.

  “That’s weird,” I said.

  “What?”

  “The coincidence. His living on your street now.”

  My father
didn’t think so. “He lives in his father’s house.” The gardener’s cottage that sat on my grandfather’s property. She pointed to one of the residential McMansions a stone’s throw from the Bader cottage. I could just see over the high concrete wall that moated it. It was, she said, the old Friedman villa. “There!”

  The news rattled me. I had suspected that my father had purchased Buda Hills real estate as a way of recovering all that the Friedmans had lost. I hadn’t understood that my father had bought a house directly overlooking the scene of the crime.

  “Waaall, it waaas there,” she amended. “They remodeled it, into that atrocity.” Nonetheless, some weeks after my father had arrived in Budapest on an exploratory visit in 1989, he’d tried to buy the atrocity. “It wasn’t for sale.” When a house nearby came on the market that fall, he’d paid the asking price at once, $131,250, in cash.

  The house proved to be a disaster zone of shoddy and half-finished construction. My father summoned Laci Bader. “He took one look and he said, ‘This is no good!’ ” The roof was a sieve, the pipes broken, the insulation missing, the aluminum wiring a crazy-quilt death trap. “If you drilled into the wall, you’d get electrocuted.” It took most of a year, and tens of thousands of dollars more, to make the place habitable.

  The house still needed significant maintenance, for which my father often enlisted Bader. “Now that I’m a lady, Bader fixes everything,” she said. “Men have to help me. I don’t lift a finger.” My father gave me a pointed look. “It’s one of the great advantages of being a woman,” she said. “You write about the disadvantages of being a woman, but I’ve only found advantages!” I wondered at the way my father’s new identity was in a dance with the old, her break from the past enlisted in an ongoing renegotiation with his history. She hadn’t regained the family property, but by her change in gender, she’d brought the Friedmans’ former gardener’s son back into service.