In the Darkroom (40 page)

German origin? One of my mother's grandparents was German. Is this how my father saw her? I wondered why the psychologist found this significant enough to include in a document that was only a page and a half long.

Otto continued: “They had two children. He felt that the marriage was good, but despite this fact, his wife divorced him. According to his story, he still doesn't know the reason for the divorce. … He feels his relationship with his children is good, and in spite of geographical distance, they keep in contact.”

Otto translated the “Exploration's” last paragraph:

Part II was titled “Examination.” It recounted the outcome of various psychological and personality tests that the psychologist had conducted on my father, including—how quaint!—a Rorschach.

“Oh, this awful
Germanic
language,” Otto groaned.

We arrived at Part III, “Vélemény,” or Opinion, the all-important determination of whether the patient is eligible for surgery:

“The language here is very ambiguous,” Otto said. “But I think what this psychologist is trying to say is that he doesn't think—
she
doesn't think—that your father knows what he wants to do. Or who he wants to be.”

Several years after my father had flown to Thailand to establish his gender identity “without a doubt,” Hungary's identity crisis, building since 1989, reached its own Rubicon. The crisis was, in its own way, as “disordered” and “problematic” as my father's, with all the insistence of a generation raised to believe it was one thing, Soviet-subject Communist, only to discover that it had been something else all along. “Step by step,” as Gábor Vona, the founder of the far-right Jobbik Party and Magyar Gárda militia, had declared to his followers in 2008, “we have to rebuild our identity as a nation.” That summons proved to be one of Jobbik's greatest draws, especially among the younger electorate. (Nearly half of Jobbik's voters in the 2010 national election were under thirty-five.) In a survey of Jobbik's Facebook fans, the party's supporters chose this phrase as one of their top three reasons for backing Jobbik: “the protection of identity.”

That quest for nationhood played out not as an intermediary adjustment or evolutionary progression, but as a thoroughgoing renunciation of one self-definition to assert its opposite. The identity that the post-1989 generation was seeking to assume was 180 degrees from the one it had been born into, an abrupt flip from atheist Bolshevik to Christian authoritarian. By the late 2000s, Kuruc.info, a far-right electronic portal, had become a popular news site for young Hungarians; reactionary heavy-metal bands were rocketing to the top of the charts; and the extremist Szent Korona Rádió (Holy Crown Radio) ranked as one of the nation's top ten online stations. These were the forums where young Internet-savvy Hungarians were flocking to defend a “true” Magyar self. When Hungarian sociologist Pál Tamás reviewed the 2008 results of a general population poll, he was alarmed by what he found: a surge in extreme rightist sentiments and a profound longing for a reigning strongman. Three-quarters of the respondents agreed with this statement: “We need a resolute leader who rules this country with an iron fist.” Such views were now so widespread, Tamás wrote, that “in some sense, we can hardly call these extreme anymore.”

Totalism, Erik Erikson had cautioned, could set in when the search for identity becomes an insistence on a “category-to-be-made-absolute,” displacing psychological complexity and self-awareness. Instead of teasing out the component desires and conflicts and injuries that shape a personality, instead of inspecting (and confronting) the social and economic conditions and history that form and deform individual lives, identity could dangle the dangerous panacea of a single global fix. Could a nation succumb to the same temptation? What happens when a government champions a unitary image as a substitute for reckoning with its country's real historical baggage and grappling with its citizens' real problems? The political equivalent of totalism was totalitarianism.

It was no mystery why my father had deep-sixed her psychological report: it blocked her path to the operating room. But I suspected there were other reasons. Its analysis had concentrated on the particulars, on details from a past my father preferred to keep buried. And it highlighted contradictions in a psychology—what transgender writer Sandy Stone would describe as “the complexities and ambiguities of lived experience”—that my father did not want examined. The larger questions the report raised were the very ones my father hoped to quash with a category-to-be-made-absolute surgery. The psychologist saw a patient troubled by “disharmony of the desires,” whose “impersonal eroticism” was entangled with “feelings of guilt” and whose mental landscape was “impregnated with an uncertainty” that ranged far beyond sexuality and gender. What my father wanted the psychologist to see and validate was a patient whose conflicts were either contained within or irrelevant to a single problem of identity, which could be resolved with a physical solution.

“There's no ‘problem,' ” my father told me. It was the summer of 2010, a few months after the national election, and we were sitting in her living room, watching the news on her giant television set. She was talking about her nation's politics. “It's democracy in action,” she said.

In the wake of the country's humiliating fiscal collapse and rampaging rates of poverty and unemployment, the Hungarian right had swept the ballot. The Fidesz Party, which had undergone a wholesale transformation from liberal to conservative, landed commanding victories even in historically more left-leaning Budapest and in virtually all the local and county governments. The far-right Jobbik Party won nearly a fifth of the electorate and a quarter of voters between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine, making it the nation's third-largest party. I suppose that it was just a creepy coincidence that Jobbik took the same percentage of the vote in 2010 as the Arrow Cross did in 1939. Still, it was hard not to see in the aftermath of the elections a shadow play haunted by ghosts from Hungary's darkest years.

My father voted for Fidesz.

Now we watched as more than a thousand black-shirted supporters of the Magyar Gárda who had rallied in the capital's Erzsébet Square paraded before the news cameras, hurling bottles at police and brandishing air guns. Or rather, these were black-shirted supporters of the Új Magyar Gárda, the
New
Hungarian Guard. A year earlier, the courts had ruled that the Gárda had “overstepped” its constitutional rights as an association and ordered it dissolved. Unfazed, the guard reorganized under a new name, declaring itself a “civil service association” dedicated to “cultural and nation-building” activities, and carried on as before.

“It
is
a problem,” I retorted. “The Gárda are terrorizing innocent people.” She waved away the remark and scootched her chair closer to the TV screen, where several Jobbik MPs and a priest were extolling the demonstrators, who marched with raised fists beneath the “Árpád stripes” banner that so closely resembled the Arrow Cross insignia.

“Terrorizing
your
people,” I added.

Since its inauguration, the Gárda, along with a proliferating constellation of other far-right groups, had been pursuing an ever more aggressive campaign against the two identities it regarded as “foreign” threats to Magyar selfhood. They were the same two identities the Hungarian fascist authorities had sought to purge from the nation in 1944, Jew and Roma. Throughout the aughts, the assault would intensify: Jewish cemeteries were desecrated, monuments mutilated, synagogues vandalized, worshippers beaten, religious leaders accosted. In the countryside, vigilante “patrols” beset Roma villages. Black-booted thugs—some armed with whips, axes, and snarling dogs—harangued residents and hurled slurs and threats like this one, caught on a cell-phone video: “Dirty Gypsies! We should exterminate all the Roma and their children.” In 2012, after the patrols stormed the streets of a town north of Budapest for two months (while the police largely turned a blind eye), the Red Cross evacuated six busloads of traumatized Romani women and children. In the late 2000s, human-rights workers recorded more than sixty hate crimes against Romani citizens in two years: beatings, shootings, arson, and the deaths of seven adults and two children. More than a third of the attacks involved firearms, Molotov cocktails, or hand grenades. In Budapest, hate crimes were also accruing against Jews: a ticket office in a Jewish district torched, the home of a prominent rabbi stoned on Passover, bloodied pigs' feet hung around the neck of the statue of Swedish Holocaust hero Raoul Wallenberg in St. Stephen's Park. These insults were less alarming to some Hungarian cultural observers than the proliferating reformulations of history: Holocaust denial, rehabilitation of the Horthy regime, a poisonously coded politics.

Rightist politicians lent their support, both tacit and open. During the campaign for the 2010 national election, Jobbik announced its alliance with a far-right Hungarian police union that declared anti-Semitism to be “the duty of every Hungarian homeland lover” and instructed its forces to “prepare for armed battle against the Jews.” The cover of the election eve issue of
Barikád
, Jobbik's party magazine, displayed a photomontage of the statue of Saint Gellért, the patron saint of Budapest, holding a menorah instead of a cross over the capital. The caption read, “Wake up, Budapest! Is this what you want?” Csanád Szegedi, Jobbik's twenty-eight-year-old vice chairman, was particularly voluble, accusing Jews of desecrating Hungarian national symbols, conducting “massive real estate purchases” throughout Hungary “to bring in Israeli residents,” and entering into an alliance with the Roma to turn “pure” Hungarians into a minority in their own nation. Szegedi demanded that Roma families be forced out of their homes and “sealed off” in “public order protection camps.” By 2012, Jobbik's deputy parliamentary leader Márton Gyöngyösi was pressing for another sort of roundup. On the floor of the parliament, he called on the government to draw up a list of Jewish residents “who, indeed, pose a national security risk” to Hungary.

The party made no apologies for its explosive rhetoric. Jobbik deputy chair Levente Murányi told the media he was proud to be a “Nazi, a fascist, an anti-Semite if that is what is necessary to represent the true Hungarian interests and the sanctity of the thousand-year-old Hungarian state.” His words resonated: public opinion polls found that the proportion of Hungarians who felt extreme antipathy for Jews had doubled between 2003 and 2010. Hungary now ranked as one of the most anti-Semitic nations in the European Union. Among young adults, that hostility was at its highest levels since the fall of Communism: by 2013, one-third of Hungarian citizens between the ages of eighteen and thirty-nine were telling pollsters they harbored animosity toward Jews. Sociologist András Kovács, the leading researcher on contemporary anti-Semitic attitudes in Hungary, observed that anti-Semitism was operating as an “identity peg,” symbolically useful to bond people who were drawn to the right wing for many conflicting reasons. The “primary function” of anti-Semitism for parties like Jobbik, Kovács concluded, is to make “members of the group recognizable to each other”—that is, “to establish a common identity.” Earlier generations had used anti-Semitism as a way to express their opposition to modernity; “nowadays,” Kovács wrote, “Hungarian antisemitism on the extreme right seems to serve as code for the political identity of those who oppose the system of parliamentary democracy.” To be a Hungarian rightist in the 2000s, as in the years leading up to World War II, was
not
to be a Jew.

“How can you watch this?” I said to my father as the “new” Magyar Gárda marched through Erzsébet Square.

“Should they have shot the Nazis when they marched in Skokie?” my father said. “Should the American police exterminate the Klan?”

“Dad, I wasn't saying they should be
killed
.”

“It's a democratic country now. They were freely elected.”

“No one elected the Magyar Gárda.”

“Waaall,” my father said, “we elected the Fidesz Party. And Fidesz will put Hungary back on a good path. Viktor Orbán”—Fidesz's founder and now Hungary's prime minister—“will stand up to all these EU people who are bankrupting the country with their stupid policies.”