In the Darkroom (14 page)

Nothing came of my father's 1990s membership in the Smallholders. When all else failed, he tried to establish a beachhead on Ráday utca another way, investing in a mountaineering-equipment store—in a country with no real mountains. He loaned seed capital to the store's two young entrepreneurs, who were strapped for cash. The shop was located, at my father's urging, just down the block from Ráday 9.

“I'd like to go to the actual place you lived in,” I said, predictably.

“There's nothing to see,” my father replied, predictably.

She was right in a way. What of her early years could possibly remain after all this time? And yet our proximity to the landmarks of her youth exerted an irresistible pull. Throughout my childhood there had always been the specter of the royal apartment in the 1911 Secession building designed by Gyula Fodor, a prominent Hungarian Jewish architect whose career came to an abrupt end in the 1930s.

“Tell me about your parents,” I said.

“There's nothing to tell,” my father replied, then returned to the part she'd already told me, many times. “A stupid business, their divorcing. Totally unnecessary. But in the end I brought them together.” Her eyes fixed on mine. “
I
brought my parents together,” she repeated.
Unlike you
, she meant. It was my turn not to answer.

By 1940, my grandparents' domestic battles had led to separation. Jenő and Rozi, whose marriage had been such a sparkling match, began protracted and acrimonious divorce proceedings. Lawyers were hired, accusations and counteraccusations of infidelities were exchanged. Before Friedman v. Friedman could make it to the docket, a bigger war intervened.

“Did your mother actually have a lover?” I asked.

“Waaall,” my father said.

“Well, what?”

“Back then one didn't speak of such things in front of the children. ‘
Nicht für Kinder!
' ”

“But you suspected.”

“There was a lawyer she ran around with,” my father said. And a manufacturer. “Chasing after the rich ones,” she said with a grimace. “My mother was a real gold digger.”

Jenő also was rumored to have had several affairs, including with their cook and at least one of their maids. “He was always one for the women of the
volk
,” my father said approvingly. “This sort of thing was accepted in European society.” For men, anyway. The maids were Christian peasant girls. One of them, my father recalled, was named Maryska. She wore “traditional” Magyar attire around the house.

“She put me in one of hers once,” my father offered suddenly. A folk dress. “I was probably seven or eight.” She looked down at her own skirt and smoothed the pleats.

“It was a little native costume,” she continued. “Polka-dotted. Maryska told me I'd make a cute girl.”

“And did you?”

“Probably. My mother was always complaining that I looked like a weakling. She'd tell the cook to fatten me up.”

“Maybe she was worried about your health.”

My father's face darkened. “All my mother worried about was one thing: her appearance.”

When my grandparents separated, Jenő moved into the Hotel Astoria, a luxury hotel modeled on the Waldorf-Astoria, and dispatched his estranged wife to a furnished studio. He sent his only child to board with a teacher from the Jewish high school, “because they couldn't decide who I should live with,” my father said. The teacher was a “straitlaced” Orthodox Jew, an austere disciplinarian who forced religion on his unhappy young tenant. “Terrible time,” my father said, refusing to elaborate. The most I could get out of her was that it was “not good for a child.”

The exile lasted for a couple of years. “It was while I was living with that teacher that I almost got hit by the tram,” my father said. “Either I was careless, or—”

“Or?” I asked.

“Or I just didn't want to live anymore.”

Young István had stepped off the curb to cross the Nagy Körút, the broad Ring Road that runs in a semicircle around inner Pest. “I was standing right across from the National Theater.” He was alone and didn't see, or chose not to see, the #6 tram careening around the curve. “And just then, out of nowhere, a hand grabs me and pulls me back to safety.” The hand belonged to his father, who happened to be on the same corner at the same time. “It was a
miracle
,” she said. “He was my guardian angel.” A guardian living the high life at a luxe hotel, I thought, having stowed his son with a religious martinet, his wife in a bed-sit.

While living with the teacher, István turned thirteen. And received from his father the extravagant gift that would spark a lifelong infatuation with film: the Pathé 9.5mm movie camera. The present, it turned out, was in lieu of a parental presence. My father's bar mitzvah ceremony was held that fall in the synagogue at the Jewish high school, the Zsidó Gimnázium. Neither Jenő nor Rozi attended.

“That's awful,” I said.

“Waaall, they were too busy with their own problems. Which
they
created.”

I suggested we go see the high school, another futile proposal.

“Why?”

“Why?” My voice began to shake. “Because I'd like to see
one thing
that has to do with
your
life in Budapest.”

My father turned back to the computer screen and pondered the out-of-focus Google shot of the apartment building on Ráday Street. “This is not a very good picture,” she said after a while.

“No,” I said. “It isn't.”

She pursed her lips. “I told you, it's not my life anymore. It's ancient history.”

“I don't care,” I said. “I just want to see something. I want to get out of the house.”

“You need to calm down,” she said. “You are being irrational.”

“You are making me irrational,” I said, irrationally.

“You don't understand,” she said.

“
What
don't I understand?” No answer.

What was I doing here? She seemed to be the same old impenetrable, walled-off person he had always been. As far as I could tell, becoming a woman had only added a barricade, another false front to hide behind. Every road to the interior was blocked by a cardboard cutout of florid femininity, a happy housewife who couldn't wait to get “back to the kitchen,” a peasant girl doing the two-step in a Photoshopped dirndl. No wonder my father loved
The Wizard of Oz
. She was that wizard: “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

When I came down to breakfast the next day, she was rummaging through her video library for a copy of
Joy and Revival
, the film she'd made of a Zsidó Gimnázium reunion, a 2001 gathering of the surviving members of my father's high school class in Toronto. “The reunion you didn't come to,” she reminded me. We watched it on the jumbo television monitor in the living room.

After a slow pan of the Toronto Four Seasons (as the sound track blasted Brahms's “Academic Festival Overture”), the camera moved on to scenes of aged men hobnobbing over wine and hors d'oeuvres in a hospitality suite. My father makes a brief appearance in a khaki cameraman's vest, clutching a large microphone. The action culminated in a long dinner in a hotel banquet room, where each former classmate of the Zsidó Gymnázium rose in turn to speak, almost exclusively in Hungarian. I understood only a few words: “Bergen-Belsen … Buchenwald … ghetto … SS.”

“What are they saying?”

“Waaall, a lot of ancient history,” she said. “Anyway, you've seen it.” She got up to check the coffee.

I was quiet over breakfast.

“You should try this sausage,” my father said, pushing a plate of sweaty sliced links across the table. “
Gyulai kolbász
! Genuine Hungarian.”

I said I wasn't hungry. She helped herself to several slices and cast a sidelong glance at her aggrieved daughter.

After a while, she said, “You know, it's not Jewish anymore.” She meant the building that once housed the Zsidó Gymnázium. It hadn't been for a while, ever since it was shut down during the war—and reopened afterward as the Royal Catholic Teachers College and Training School. “So, you see, there's nothing to see.”

————

My father pulled into a weedy lot by a tram stop and parked Der California Exclusive. A few blocks down the street, facing the tracks, was a Communist-era concrete apartment building, a low-slung unpainted bunker built above a set of identical garages. A snarl of satellite dishes hung crookedly from the flat roof. It was hot for an autumn day, and my father was wearing her “light summer dress,” blue with white dots, and red-sequined heels, which she complained pinched her toes, but she wore them anyway. They were her favorite. She called them “my ruby slippers.” It was two days before my return to the United States. I was feeling somewhat cheered, and not just because I was getting on a plane soon. We were out of the house.

From a tiny balcony on an upper floor, a woman leaned over a flower box of geraniums and waved. It was Ilonka. I was dispatched to collect her. Since the operation, my father said, Ilonka's husband had banished Stefánie from the premises.

The apartment was small and dark, with heavy oversized furniture that made it feel even smaller. Crosses and icon paintings adorned the walls; a sideboard displayed Madonna figurines. Ilonka's husband, a compact, muscular man with the sort of roughly misshapen build that comes from a life of manual labor, rose to greet me. “
Kezét csókolom
,” he said. It was a Hungarian phrase I knew, an old-fashioned greeting from a man to a woman, which meant, literally, “I kiss your hand.” Ilonka was short and zaftig and radiated maternal warmth. I noticed she was wearing pearl earrings, a gift from my father from years earlier, when my father was still a man. She cooed endearments and presented me with a prayer card from her church, a picture of the Madonna. After a while, she took my hand and we headed toward the camper.

To my dismay, my father again drove to Castle Hill, to a spot a stone's throw from the viewing turrets of the Fisherman's Bastion. Ilonka wanted to show me the celebrated Matthias Church, the Church of Our Lady. “Waaall,” my father said, “Ilonka always has to go to church.” On their travels across Europe, the two of them had stopped at every shrine dedicated to Mary, along with many cemeteries, catacombs, and crypts. “Ilonka is a bit of a necrophiliac,” my father joked. “But open-minded!” The Matthias Church was the site of the “Mary-wonder” of 1686. During the Battle of Buda between the occupying Ottoman Turks and the “liberating” Holy League, my father related, cannon fire had blasted one of the walls, revealing a hidden votive statue of the Madonna. At the sight of the Virgin Mary, the morale of Muslim Turk soldiers buckled and the city fell to the Holy League that day. “That's the story, anyway,” she said. We wandered through the sanctuary's shadowy recesses, my father's ruby slippers clacking on the stone floors. Ilonka lit some candles at Our Lady's shrine.

Afterward, we stopped at an outdoor stand where some elderly women dressed as Gypsies were selling “traditional” Hungarian embroidered pillowcases and handbags that looked suspiciously mass-produced. My father considered some clutch purses. “Perfect for the opera,” she said. As we picked through the merchandise, Ilonka recalled how she first learned of my father's interest in feminine attire. “He always wanted to buy me clothes,” she told me, my father translating. “And I was always thinking, ‘What a gentleman!' But then I realized he really wanted them for himself.” One day, she said, they were standing in a department store and she saw my father lingering in the women's sleepwear section. Ilonka picked up a nightgown and cocked her head toward the fitting room. My father stepped into one of the stalls. Ilonka slipped the gown under the door and stood guard while he tried it on. “From then on, we collaborated,” Ilonka said. They would pick out outfits together and bring them home—he would model, she would photograph.

“Ilonka helped me design my best costume!” my father interjected. The project had started one night when they were watching
Dinner at Eight
, the 1933 comedy of manners directed by George Cukor (son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants), with Jean Harlow as the gold-digging chorus girl (“I'm going to be a lady if it kills me!”). My father loved the film, owned copies in Betamax, VHS, and DVD, and watched it at least once a year. When the gold digger's chambermaid appeared on the screen, my father hit the Pause button. The servant girl was dolled up in a French maid's garb, a particularly outlandish version with a velvet-and-lace headdress and a flounce-ridden apron tied in a giant bow. My father asked Ilonka to make a precise drawing of the dress—“Ilonka is a very good draftsman”—and took the results to the Katti Zoób Szalon, a couture design house in Pest run by a former theatrical costume designer, where, for a considerable fee, the outfit was replicated down to the last ruffle. This was the costume my father was modeling in her Screen Saver image.

Ilonka's collaboration continued for the next several years. When my father first ventured into a meeting of the Trans-X club, an Austrian transgender organization that convened periodically at a café in Vienna, Ilonka accompanied him. “He was scared to go alone,” she recalled. They sat together on a bench outside the restaurant for a long time, my father said, Ilonka holding his hand while “I screwed up my nerve to go in there.” Of the subsequent meeting, my father remembers little, except for a story that one of the club members related over lunch. “When this guy was a boy, he was caught wearing a dress,” my father told me. “His father sent him to an officer who was a Nazi—an
actual
Nazi. And this officer beat him. Regularly. To ‘cure' him.” The story still disturbed her.

For the next two years, my father attended Trans-X events, including a Christmas party (“I brought a very good Hungarian cake”) and weekend field trips sponsored by Transgender In Austria, one to a hotel in the south of Sweden, where fashion and beauty consultants dispensed (as the handouts described it) “personal color and style analysis” and designed an “evening dress handmade just for your body,” followed by a modeling session before “one of Denmark's hottest photographers.” Ilonka came along. “I enjoyed looking at the clothes, the shoes,” she told me. “It was like watching a movie.” On another jaunt, which Ilonka also joined, club members camped in Croatia and sunbathed topless on the beach. A day into the Croatia trip, my father flew into a rage at one of the campers—“he interrupted a story I was telling about Ilonka”—and packed the VW and drove away. “Ilonka and I went on an excursion without them,” my father said. “Aaaand we had a very nice time!”