In the Darkroom

  In the next station of our Castle Hill cultural tour (the Budapest History Museum), my father lingered admiringly before another hagiographic painting of another lionized Hungarian. This one was at least more modern than Vajk. He was dressed in a naval uniform, pinned with rows of medals: the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, whose governance of the country from 1920 to 1944 encompassed the arc of my father’s youth. Her reverence for the man who presided over the deportation of nearly a half-million Jews galled me.

  A make-believe royal, I pointed out. (Horthy was elected Regent by the Hungarian National Assembly in 1920, intended as a placeholder for the exiled Habsburg king, who never reclaimed the throne.) And what’s with the “Admiral”? A navy in a landlocked state?

  “You don’t know anything,” my father said. “Trianon took away the Hungarian coast. A tragedy. A catastrophe.”

  She was right about the coast. The treaty at the end of World War I, which dealt Hungary the harshest penalties of any warring state (including Germany), had stripped the nation of its seaports, along with 65 percent of its waterways, 88 percent of its forests, and all of its coal, salt, and silver mines. In the Second World War, Horthy’s Hungary would ally itself with the Axis in hopes of resurrecting “the lost territories” (and Hitler, indeed, returned two land parcels that Trianon had lopped off). When my father and I would finally make it down into the city, I’d notice the ubiquitous image—plastered on walls, affixed to bumpers, appliquéd onto backpacks—of the map of pre-Trianon “Greater Hungary,” also known as “the mutilated motherland.” The map featured the nation as a butchered torso, surrounded by its four severed appendages. The defenders of Hungarian honor call Trianon “the amputation.”

  “It destroyed the motherland!” my father said now, her voice rising. “It cut his body into pieces.”

  “Hers,” I corrected.

  My father hiked up her purse on a camera-burdened shoulder and headed for the exit.

  We left the museum and, instead of descending to the streets of the city I so wished to visit, we climbed even higher to Fisherman’s Bastion. My father wanted to take some “panoramic” pictures.

  A turnstile blocked the entrance. You had to buy a token if you wanted to see the view. My father forked over some forints, and we were admitted to the Neo-Romanesque stone arcade punctuated by viewing turrets, viewing balconies, and seven viewing lookout towers (in honor of the seven Magyar tribes). Despite the name, the bastion wasn’t built for fishermen; it was designed in the 1890s as a viewing terrace. “It was meant to be like a fairy tale,” as one chronicler put it, to “feel like history rather than be history.” Follow the Yellow Brick Road, I thought, as I morosely trailed my father’s footsteps.

  She stopped at one of the designated lookout towers to take some shots of the city across the river. “A good thing I brought the telephoto,” she said, wrestling the lens out of her purse. While she clicked away, I leaned through a vaulted arch to bask in the fading autumn sun and, despite my cynicism, admire the view. The Danube was a broad dusky ribbon under the city’s seven bridges. To my left, I could see the enchanted greensward of Margaret Island and, beyond it, the approaching river’s long bend to the south.

  On the far shore, Pest was a hazy blur. The Hungarian Parliament, a Neo-Gothic wedding cake encrusted with half a million precious stones and nearly a hundred pounds of gold, took up nine hundred feet of prime waterfront real estate. This temple to democracy, the largest parliament building in Europe and the third largest in the world, was built in the late nineteenth century, when Franz Josef reigned and less than 10 percent of the Hungarian population could vote.

  On this side of the river, the red incline train, the Sikló (“the Little Snake”), was inching down the cliff. Directly below, the Chain Bridge arced across the water toward the Neo-Renaissance splendor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The learned society was inaugurated by the same man who spearheaded the construction of the Chain Bridge, Count István Széchenyi, a preeminent Hungarian statesman of the nineteenth century. Széchenyi’s quest for an authentic national culture would end in personal despair. “We have no national habits,” Széchenyi lamented once. “Our existence and knowledge depend on imitation.” Subsequent seekers of Hungarianism have been equally riddled with doubt. They have generated two centuries of literature, journalism, and oratory devoted to the question that doubles as the title for many of their angst-ridden jeremiads: “Who Is a Hungarian?” Long before Erik Erikson coined the phrase, Hungarians were having an identity crisis.

  My father traced the descent of the shiny red funicular with her camera lens. “I was so happy when they reopened the Sikló,” she said. “The first time I saw it, I cried.”

  I asked why and she said, “Because the Russians had destroyed it.” The Sikló was bombed, along with pretty much everything else along this stretch of the Danube, during the Siege of Budapest, the fifty-day Soviet campaign in the winter of 1944–45 to evict the die-hard Waffen-SS and Hungarian troops bunkered along Castle Hill.

  “Would you have preferred the other side won?” I asked.

  “You have a very stupid American concept of this.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “The Russians destroyed everything that was Hungarian.”

  Later I would pick up a brochure on the history of the Sikló and take a perverse pleasure in finding that it was put back in service in 1986, under Soviet rule. I didn’t bring it up with my father. By then I knew better than to stick a pin in Hungarian “grand illusion.”

  8

  On the Altar of the Homeland

  I learned to time my more probing questions to my father’s golden hour. She was at her most expansive over late-afternoon coffee, which she took with a slice of Linzer torte or Sacher torte or Dobos torte or some other confection evoking the Austro-Hungarian era. Cake was always served with a hefty dollop of freshly whipped cream, because that’s “the correct Viennese way to do it.” The Habsburg Empire lived on in my father’s prandial habits.

  The ritual was lifelong, though in Yorktown Heights confined to the weekends and the selection from American bakeries, which my father found contemptible. Even in his guise as suburban dad, my father had asserted his Old European taste. Weekends, he’d sit in his armchair in his beret and cravat, a demitasse balanced on one knee and classical music thundering on the hi-fi, and heap scorn on Reddi-wip, Cheez Whiz, and ice cubes in drinking water, along with his American children’s proclivity for pop tunes with drum tracks and sitcoms with laugh tracks. He went into a swivet once when it became clear I had never heard of one of his treasured European authors, the Austrian (and Jewish) writer Stefan Zweig. “You have no culture,” he yelled, ripping out of my hand whatever “tacky” novel I’d been reading. On a series of weekend afternoons, my father attempted to get me to master the basic waltz steps in our burnt-orange-carpeted living room, Johann Strauss on the turntable. The lessons ended badly. “You are leading again!” he would shout as I stepped on his foot, not always entirely by accident. “How many times do I have to tell you? The woman does not lead.”

  In the years after my father moved back to Hungary, he made regular pilgrimages to Vienna, often with his friend Ilonka in tow, to shop for the “correct” Viennese comestibles and tour the faded palaces and hunting lodges and architectural glories of Emperor Franz Josef’s nearly seventy-year reign, photographing the last vestiges of the empire that collapsed with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. Or he’d take Ilonka to Switzerland, where they paid homage to the ancient Habsburg Castle, the dynasty’s original seat. Or to Germany, where he made a long detour so they could cruise past the Bavarian villa of the then still living Archduke Otto of Austria, last crown prince to the Austro-Hungarian throne. “The best time was under the Habsburgs,” my father told me. “Even as a young child, I could still feel its good influence. If only we could bring the monarchy back—all of Hungary would welcome it.”

  My father’s latest
transition, from man to woman, debuted in the Habsburg emperor’s former guesthouse. Over coffee and Esterhazy cake one afternoon, she waxed nostalgic about the scene at what was now the Parkhotel Schönbrunn, where she attended the LGBT Rainbow Ball the year before her operation.

  “Everybody was beautifully dressed, very elegant,” she said.

  “Yes, I know,” I said. She had shown me the video she’d made of the ball, formal dancers in white satin gowns and black tie, white gloves, and cummerbunds, stepping in stately minuet formation across a polished parquet floor while an all-female orchestra played “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.” At the end of the evening, each performer received a single rose.

  “They always have good taste in Vienna,” my father sighed, licking the last speck of whipped cream from her demitasse spoon. “Even Ilonka enjoyed it.” In my father’s image gallery in the attic, she kept a photograph of the two of them at the ball. In the picture, he (still pre-op) is wearing a bleach-blond wig and a midnight-blue velour evening gown with spaghetti straps; Ilonka is in a plain navy sheath. They are holding hands. My father stares straight into the camera, with a pasted-on smile. Ilonka is looking away from my father, her mouth downturned. Her eyes are sorrowful.

  “She didn’t want you to have the operation,” I said, a question.

  “Ilonka thought it was a game. She never thought I’d go all the way with it. Ilonka wants nothing to change. Everything has to be the same way it was in the past. She even has to sit in the same pew in the church. I’m not like that. I get used to new things in five minutes!”

  She grinned and took another forkful of cake. It seemed like a good moment to press my inquiry.

  “Are you used to being a woman?” I asked.

  “Waaall, that was easy.”

  “How so?”

  She held up her arms, as if for surrender. “Look at this,” she said, waggling her arms up and down, a fledgling out of the nest. “Does this look like a man’s body? I never developed. There’s hardly any hairs on my body.” Did this mean the Ugly Duckling had been a swan all along? “Waaall, I had the organs, I did my job, as a man. But I didn’t fit the role. They didn’t approve of me.”

  “Who didn’t approve of you?”

  “Women didn’t approve of me. I didn’t know how to fight and get dirty. I’m not muscular, I’m not athletic, I had a miserable life as a man. And it became more miserable when I wasn’t accepted for the umpteenth time. By your mother.” My father liked to characterize her that way, your mother. “She didn’t accept me and she threw me away.”

  “She didn’t—”

  “I wasn’t in the proper role. They can sense that. Now, as a woman, women like me more. I fit my role now better as a woman than when I was miscast in the wrong role.”

  I flashed on hostile Magyar babushkas. “Why do you have to cast yourself in any role? Why can’t—?”

  “Before, I was like other men, I didn’t talk to people. Now I can communicate better, because I’m a woman. It’s that lack of communicating that causes the worst things.”

  “Like what?”

  “They see you as some sort of monster. Because you are not doing the things others are doing. They don’t know what you do. You’re vermin. They gas you. They—”

  We had fallen through one of my father’s verbal trapdoors.

  “—don’t want you around. It’s like once when I was flying to Hungary, and the stewardess heard this man sitting across from me talking and she said, ‘Oh, you’re Hungarian!’ And this man said very angrily, ‘I am not Hungarian! I’m Israeli!’ This is a provocative attitude we don’t need. It helps that I’m a woman. Because women don’t provoke.”

  “Some women do,” I provoked.

  “You can’t switch back and forth,” my father said. “You have to develop a habit and stick to it. Otherwise, you’re going to be a forlorn something, not a whole person. The best way is not to change someone into someone else, but to put the person back as the person he was born to be. The surgery is a complete solution. Now I am completely like a woman.”

  Completely, I thought, or completely like?

  “You have to get rid of the old habits. If you don’t, you’re going to be like a stranger all the time, with this”—she fished around for the right words—“this anxiety of non-belonging.”

  She repeated the phrase. This anxiety of non-belonging. She polished off the remains of her cake. “That would make a good title for your book,” she said.

  She got up and started collecting the dishes. “Back to the kitchen!” she trilled as she left the room. “A woman’s place!”

  I didn’t budge from my chair as she washed the cups and saucers.

  “Susaaan!” My father was standing at the foot of the stairs. It was early morning, and I’d hoped to sleep in. My father had other plans. “Susaaan, come down here! You’ll be interested in this.” I threw on some clothes and stumbled into the dining room. She had set out on the table the contents of a file folder marked “Stefi.”

  “These are my media appearances,” she said, pointing to a fanned-out collection of articles, a cassette tape, and a book. She’d given interviews about “The Change” to a Hungarian LGBT magazine (the only one at the time), an alternative radio station called Tilos Rádió (Forbidden Radio), an academic social-sciences journal called Replika, and a freelance photojournalist who was putting together a coffee-table book titled Women in Hungary: A Portrait Gallery, in which my father was featured, described as a “feminista.” I studied the stash with some astonishment. All of Steven’s life, he’d been behind the camera; Stefi, it seemed, had decided she’d be in front.

  The Stefánie who appeared in these pages and recordings was a bit of a coquette. She told her interlocutors that she was a “typical woman” who “loved gossip.” When they asked how old she was, my father answered coyly, “Now, it’s not appropriate to ask a lady her age!” In the photo spread for Mások, the Hungarian LGBT magazine, my father perches on the edge of a planter on her deck, in a floor-length floral dress with a ribbon at the waist. She is clutching two daisies. As she made clear in the accompanying article, she was 100 percent female, “a woman in complete harmony with her wishes.” She was taking dance lessons, she told the magazine, and could waltz “all the female steps,” and had attended a ball “in an elegant full dress.”

  The longest account appeared in the academic journal Replika. A young PhD student studying social anthropology had come to my father’s house to interview her for two days. The resulting Q & A was nearly twenty-five thousand words. That morning and for several mornings to follow, my father translated the text for me, altering the parts she didn’t like. (“Don’t write that down! It sounds better if you have me say it this way. …”) While the purpose of the interview was to discuss her change in sex, my father had been eager to expound on life in Hungary before the “catastrophe”—the catastrophe, that is, of 1920.

  “The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a very peaceful world,” my father said, reading (and revising) her words from the opening pages of the interview. “Hungary grew very fast. Railroads came in, economies were growing. It was a world of plenty. One minority, the Jews, dealt especially with commerce. Many were managers of noble estates. I had an uncle who was managing a noble’s estate and also my great-grandfather was the director of some estates of the wealthy. … Then came the tragedy. Trianon. The country lost its thousand-year-old borders. And the era when minorities still lived nicely together came to an end. Whatever they say, there was no persecution of minorities in that time.”

  “No persecution?” I sputtered.

  My father gave me one of her you-know-nothing looks. “It was the best time,” she said. “The best time for the Jews.”

  Her history wasn’t so Pollyanna. From the 1867 passage of the Jewish Emancipation Act, granting Jews civic and political equality, until the 1920 signing of the Treaty of Trianon, an extraordinary set of circumstances led to the “Golden Age” of Hungarian Jewry. The era yielded a spe
ctacular opportunity for the bourgeois Jewish population. And unprecedented acceptance. For a significant subset of the country’s Jews in that period, it seemed possible to be “100 percent Hungarian.” Our family was among them. A century before my father changed gender, her forebears had crossed another seemingly unbreachable border.

  My father’s parents, Jenő and Rozália Friedman, came to Budapest out of the hinterlands of what was then northeastern Hungary (and after Trianon, part of Czechoslovakia, and now Slovakia). The members of my grandmother’s side of the family, the Grünbergers, were among the most prominent Jews in the town known in Hungarian as Szepesváralja and later, in Slovak, as Spišské Podhradie—both of which translate roughly as “The Place under the Beautiful Castle.” Overlooking the town atop a limestone cliff is a hulking twelfth-century ruin, the largest castle in central Europe and erstwhile home to Magyar nobles. (It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and perennial location for Hollywood movies, among them Dragonheart and Kull the Conqueror.)

  As I later learned from my Grünberger relatives, the baron of the town’s commercial age was Rozália’s father, my great-grandfather, Leopold Grünberger, who owned the biggest lumber enterprise in the region. The train tracks into town terminated in front of his mill. He had risen from poverty in a nearby village, served in the Habsburg cavalry in World War I, and was a Hungarian patriot and avid believer in Central European culture; he reportedly abhorred Zionism. He sat on the town council and was head of the Jewish community, the latter position due less to his piety, which was pro forma Orthodox, than to his wealth and philanthropy, both of which were substantial.