In the Darkroom (3 page)

I asked about her health, my pen poised above my reporter's notebook, seeking safety in a familiar role. A deluge commenced. The notepad's first many pages are a scribbled stutter-fest of unfinished sentences. “Had to pick up the papers for the name change, but you have to go to the office of birth records in the Seventh District for—, no, wait a minute, it's the Eighth because the hospital I was born in—, waaall, no, let me see now, it maaay be …” “I'm so busy every day, I don't have time for dilation, and they tell you to dilate three times a day, four times at first, waaall, you can do it two times probably, but—, there are six of these rods, and I'm only on the number 3. …”

The operation, I noted, had not altered certain tendencies—among them, my father's proclivity for the one-sided rambling monologue on highly technical matters. When I was young, he had always operated on two modes: either he said nothing, or he was a wall of words, a sudden torrent of verbiage, flash floods of data points on the most impersonally procedural of topics. To his family, these dissertations felt like a steel curtain coming down, a screech of static jamming the airwaves. “Laying down covering fire,” we had called it. My father could hold forth for hours, and did, on the proper method for wiring an air conditioner, the ninety-nine steps for the preparation of authentic Hungarian goose pâté, the fine print in the regulatory practices of the Federal Reserve, the alternative routes to the first warming hut on the Matterhorn, the compositional revisions to Wagner's score of
Tannhäuser
. My father had mastered the art of the filibuster. By the time he was finished, you'd forgotten whatever it was you'd asked that had triggered the oral counteroffensive—and were as desperate to flee his verbal bombardment as he was to retreat to his cone of silence.

“I could have gone to Germany, they cover everything,” my father rattled on, “but they make you jump through so many hoops, and, waaall, in the U.S., the surgery is vaaary expensive and it's not in the front line, but, now, in Thailand, they have the latest in surgical techniques, the hospital has an excellent website where they go into all the procedures, starting with …” “I have to change the estrogen patch twice a week, it was fifty micrograms before the operation, but after the operation it gave me hot flashes, now it's twenty-five micrograms and …” “I got the first hair implant in Hungary, five hundred thousand forints, it came out pretty good, but it's still short in front, but maybe my hairdresser can do something, waaall, I could get another one, but it might be better in Vienna, yaaas but to go just for—, I'm taking hair growth medication, so—”

I quit trying to get it down verbatim.

“Long speech abt VW cmpr stolen,” I wrote. “Thieves evywhre. Groc store delivry this wk., many probs.” “Great trans sites online, evrythng on Internet, many pix dwnloaded.”

My attempts to cut through his verbal eruption—“Why have you done this?”—only inspired new ones.

“Waaall, but you couldn't do it for a long time, waaall, you could, but it was risky. In Thailand, the hospital has greaaat facilities, faaantastic. In every room, bidets with special sprayheads, a unique nozzle that …”

I asked if she'd been dressing as a woman before.

“No. Waaall … Maybe a little. … I have to pick up the papers to get my passport changed, and I need to get my name changed with the Land Registry, but first you have to go to the municipality office and get a certificate to bring to the Ministry of …”

“Why didn't you tell us before you had the operation?”

“Waaall … I didn't talk until everything was all right,
successful
. Dr. Sanguan Kunaporn, he was faaantastic, trained with one of the leading surgeons of vaginoplas—, his name was—, it's—, no, wait—waaall, he is well-known as the best of—”

I lost my patience.

“You never talk to me. You aren't talking to me now.”

Silence.

“Hello?” I ventured.
Hallom?

“Waaall, but it's not my fault. You never came here. Every year, you never came.”

“But you—”

“I have a whole dossier. They stole our property.” My father was referring to the two luxury apartment buildings that my grandfather once owned in Budapest. They had been commandeered by the Nazi-allied state during the Second World War, nationalized under the Communist regime, and then sold off to private owners after 1989. “You showed no interest whatsoever.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“You're a journalist. You should at least somewhere mention it. They're consorting with thieves. Your country of birth, you know.”

“Mention to whom?” I asked, thinking:
the country of
my
birth?

“A family should work together to get back their stolen property. A normal family stays together. I'm still your father.”

“You're the one who—”

“I sent you the notice about my school reunion, and you never came,” my father said. The surviving members of my father's high school class in Budapest had gathered in Toronto three years ago. Guilty as charged: I didn't attend. “I sent you a copy of the movie I made of the reunion, and you never said anything.” She wasn't finished. “One of my classmates lives near you, right in Portland, and I e-mailed you the Google map with his address, and you never contacted him. You never …”

I wasn't sure how to respond to this writ of attainder.

After a while, I said, “I'm sorry.”

Then: “You said you were going to write my life story, and you never did.”

Had I said that?

“Is that what you want?”

We both went mute. I scanned my list of questions. What I wanted to ask wasn't on the page.

“Can I come see you?”

I could hear her breathing in the silence.

In the arrivals hall at Ferihegy Airport, a line of people waited to greet passengers. I reluctantly scanned the faces. Maybe I wouldn't recognize him as her. Maybe she wouldn't be here. Maybe I could turn around and fly home. Salutations in two genders were gridlocked on my tongue. I wasn't sure I was ready to release him to a new identity; she hadn't explained the old one. Did she think sex reassignment surgery was a get-out-of-jail-free card, a quick fix to a life of regret and recrimination? I can manage a change in pronoun, I thought, but paternity? Whoever she was now, she was, as she herself had said to me on the phone, “
still your father
.”

I spotted a familiar profile with a high forehead and narrow shoulders at the far end of the queue, leaning against an empty luggage cart. Her hair looked thicker than I remembered his, and lighter in color, a henna-red. She was wearing a red cabled sweater, gray flannel skirt, white heels, and a pair of pearl stud earrings. She had taken her white pocketbook off her shoulder and hung it from a hook on the cart. My first thought, and it shames me, was: no woman would do that.

“Waaall,” my father said, as I came to a stop in front of her. She hesitated, then patted me on the shoulder. We exchanged an awkward hug. Her breasts—48C, she would later inform me—poked into mine. Rigid, they seemed to me less bosom than battlement, and I wondered at my own inflexibility. Barely off the plane, I was already rendering censorious judgment. As if how one carried a purse was a biological trait. As if there weren't plenty of “real” women walking around with silicone in their breasts. Since when had I become the essentialist?

“Waaall,” she said again. “There you are.” After a pause: “I parked the camper in the underground lot, it's a new camper, a Volkswagen Caaalifornia Exclusive, much bigger than my last one, the biggest one they make, the next-to-the-fastest engine, I got it from the insurance for the old one, it was one year on the market because the German economy is bad, the first one I bought was six years old, eighty thousand marks—forty-six thousand euros—fifty thousand dollars, the new one they sold to me for forty thousand euros, the insurance paid twenty thousand euros, it's parked by the guard booth, it's safer there, waaall, nothing's safe, thieves stole my old camper right out of the drive, I had the alarm on, they must've disabled it, climbed the fence, thieves were probably watching the house, they saw no one was home for weeks and—”

“Dad, Stefánie, how are you? I want—” My desire got lost in my own incoherence.

“—and they came right into my yard, and the neighbors did aaabsolutely nothing, no one saw anything, waaall, that's what they said. But they were great at Rosenheim, the man there was vaaary nice, he said to me, ‘Oh,
meine gnädige Frau
, it's not safe for a woman to travel alone!' ”

“Rosenheim?” I asked. I put my luggage on the cart, and she led the way to the parking garage. I trailed behind, watching uncomfortably the people watching us. The dissonance between white heels and male-pattern baldness was apparently drawing notice. Some double-chinned matrons gave my father the up-and-down. One stopped in her tracks and muttered something. I didn't understand the words, but I got the intent. When her gaze shifted to me, I glared back.
Fuck off, you old biddy
, I thought.

“Rosenheim VW,” my father said, “in Germany, where I bought the new camper, aaand my old one, they do all my servicing and maintenance, aaand I register the camper there, you can't trust anyone else to work on it, waaall, they're German, they're very good, and the man was very courteous. Now that I'm a lady, everyone treats me very nicely.”

We had no trouble finding the van. It was, as advertised in the brochure my father still had at home, VW's biggest model (eight and a half feet high), “Der California Exclusive.” It looked like a cruise ship beached in a parking lot, a ziggurat on wheels. A heavily defended ziggurat: my father had installed a wrap-around security system, which she set off twice while trying to unlock the driver's door. Right there in the airport lot, she gave me the tour: the doll-sized kitchenette (two-burner gas cooker, fridge, sink, fold-out dining table, and pantry with pots and pans and well-stocked spice rack), a backseat bench that opened into a double bed (an overhead stowaway held duvet, linens, and pillows), a wardrobe with a telescopic clothesrail, and, in the very rear, a tiny bathroom and closet (with towels, toiletries, wall-mounted mirror). She opened up the cabinets to show me the dishware she'd just purchased, a tea service in a rosebud pattern.

I couldn't quite put the disparities into focus:
Motor Trend
meets
Marie Claire.
Was this why I'd flown fifty-six hundred miles? Here we were, meeting after twenty-seven years, a high-stakes reunion after a historic Glasnost, and she was acting like she'd just returned from Williams-Sonoma by way of NAPA Auto Parts.

“Ilonka helped me pick it out,” my father said, handing me a saucer to admire.

Ilonka—I had met her; for some years after my father returned to Hungary she'd been what he called his “lady friend.” She had accompanied my father to a family wedding in California, but I hadn't gleaned much from our encounter: she spoke no English. I  wasn't clear on their relationship—though Ilonka would tell me later that it was platonic. She was married and very Catholic. For years she seemed to function as an unpaid housekeeper for my father, cleaning, cooking, sewing. She helped him pick out the furnishings for his house, from the lace curtains to the vintage Hungarian Zsolnay porcelain (purchased to impress a snooty couple, distant kin of Ilonka's, who had come to dinner at my father's house one night; the husband had claimed to be a “count”). My father had taken Ilonka on trips around Europe and loaned money to her family. When one of her grandchildren was born, my father assumed the duties of godfather, now godmother.

“How is Ilonka?” I asked.

My father made a face. “I don't see her so much.” She took the saucer from me and placed it carefully on the cabinet shelf with its mates. The problem evidently was Ilonka's husband. “It was fine with him when I was the man buying things for his wife and giving money to his family. But now that I'm a woman, I've been banished.”

She shut and secured the cupboard doors. We went around to the front. It took some effort to hoist ourselves into the elevated cockpit. My father disengaged the clutch and shifted into reverse and we lurched backward, nearly plowing into a parked car. I noted with dismay that the makers of the well-appointed Exclusive had excluded one feature: a usable rear window. The tiny transom above the commode showed only empty sky.

At the pay booth, she fished through her purse for her wallet. The ticket taker, another Magyar babushka, stuck her head out the window and gave my father the once-over. As the bills were counted, I studied my father, too. I could see the source of her thickening hair (a row of implant plugs) and the lightened color (a dye job). Her skin had a glossy sheen. Foundation powder? Estrogen? What struck me most forcefully, though, wasn't what was new. I'd spotted it in the airport—that old nervous half-smile, that same faraway gaze.

On the road, she steered the lumbering Gigantor into the fast lane. It was rush hour. A motorist trailing us in a rusted subcompact blasted his horn. My father leaned out the window and swore at him. The honking stopped. “When they see I'm a laaady, they pipe right down,” she said.

We merged onto a highway, and I gazed out the window at the dilapidated industrial back lots flying by, a few smokestacks belching brown haze, boarded-up warehouses with greasy windows, concrete highway dividers slathered in graffiti. We passed through a long stretch of half-finished construction, grasses growing high over oxidizing rebar. Along the shoulder, billboards proliferated, shiny fresh faces flashing perfect teeth, celebrating the arrival of post-Communist consumption: Citibank, Media Markt, T-Mobile, McDonald's. Big balls of old mistletoe parched in the branches of trees. Along the horizon, I could make out the red-roofed gables of a distant hamlet.