In the Darkroom (50 page)

The rabbi invited everyone to proceed to the banquet hall for dinner. My father picked up the photocopied “prayer book,” then put it back down on the chair, then picked it up again.

“I think it's okay to take that,” I said.

“I only want the last page,” she replied. She carefully pulled the final sheet off the staple, folded it, and put it in her purse. “I want to say Kaddish,” she told me. “For my parents.”

We joined the others heading down the corridor. I found myself walking beside the rabbi's husband, an American. He asked what I was doing here. I said I was visiting.

“So, you are related?” he said, pointing to my father. I nodded. “But you don't speak Hungarian?” he said.

“Susan was born in the United States,” my father interjected, in English. “When I used to live there.”

“Ah, so you are”—the rabbi's husband looked at my father—“her grandmother?”

“No,” my father said. “I am her …” She left it to me to finish the sentence.

I paused, not wanting to get into explications, yet also not wanting to cause any pain. One way or another, I thought, an identity would be denied.

“… mother,” I said.

A Kaddish for a parent, indeed.

In 2004 I set out to pursue the stranger who was my father. I didn't anticipate a laying down of arms, nor did I achieve one. In the years to come, our relationship would lurch from contention to détente to contention again. But by the fall of 2014, when we ushered in the imminent Jewish New Year in the room where my father had hidden as a teenage fugitive, we seemed to have arrived at an understanding, even a closeness. The accord came just in time. When I visited her that September, my father was as lucid and strong as I'd ever seen her. Less than half a year later, her constitution was in ruins.

They say that dementia is a disintegration of the self, a bleeding away of identity. Watching it take over my father's life that winter, I was tempted to think of it as the opposite: an onrush of all that she had been, all that she had experienced, suffered, fled. The paranoia and hallucinations afflicting her were rooted in the realities of her past, the histories she had walled off. Those histories now flooded into every synapse. My father's mind seemed to me like the limestone beneath Castle Hill; it was being hollowed out by what welled up from below. She thought that her mother was sleeping in the room next to hers. She thought that her ex-wife had come to see her in Budapest. She thought that she was living in the old summer villa down the block, that Nazis were battering down her front door. One late night in February 2015, my father's shouts that criminals were breaking into the house brought the police and then an ambulance, which escorted its unwilling passenger to a hospital. She spent an uncomfortable night in a chair in a corridor of the ER, with nurses and doctors asking “stupid things.” Near dawn, she gave them the slip and hailed a cab.

“I escaaaped!” my father gloated when I reached her on the phone later that day. She sounded her usual self, preening over her aptitude for evasion, filibustering without apology, recasting traumatic experience as escapade. “A to-do over nothing!” she said. “They put me in a horrible ambulance, very unusable. Everything squeaking and shaking all over the place, I thought the wheels were coming off. It took forever to get there, aaand …” Her monologue culminated with a report on an endless taxi ride home and a final feat of deception: not only had she skipped out on the hospital, she'd skipped out on the fare.

“Waaall,” my father said when I pressed her on why she'd fled the hospital's care, “they pretended it was for my own good. But that's not the reason.”

“So what is?”

“At the hospital, they kept asking, ‘So, do you
believe
you're a woman?' They didn't seem to know that we are in the late twentieth century.”

“Early twenty-first,” I corrected.

“They have old ways of thinking. They don't like trans people.”

Later that day, she settled on a new reason for her incarceration. “I got through this crisis, the other time—I always protected myself,” she told me when we talked again. “I thought I was away from danger. I thought I had escaped them.”

“Who?”

“These people who broke in, the police, the ambulance people, the people who called these people. I realize who they are: typical Arrow Cross. They think it's a crime, what I am. They see me and they are saying, ‘You are a Jew.' ”

If identity is the one thing you can't escape, my father's dementia presented her identity in concentrated form, relentless as a posse. “Did we fly to Israel this morning?” she asked me when I arrived in Budapest shortly after her “escape” from the hospital. “The plane was hipping and hopping, but when I looked out the window, it was the same view as here.” The question at least displayed a remnant of self-skepticism. The more my father deteriorated, the more certain she became that her psychic landscape was real. A technician who arrived to repair her broadband Internet service was an undercover spy altering her online identity. Hordes of night intruders were storming through her house, rifling through kitchen cabinets and bureau drawers and her purse, painting the walls in invisible ink, and replicating all her books, Hans Christian Andersen volumes proliferating on every shelf.

My attempts to persuade her to accept assistance or come to the United States for treatment met with fury. “Get this circus out of here! Leave or I'll call the police!” she yelled when I arrived in February with her primary-care doctor and a home nursing service in tow; she chased me down the hall with a flurry of punches. The hallucinations were true because she believed them to be true. There was no use reasoning—she was adamant, impervious to logic. Sometime between her first breakdown in February and her final one in May, I learned not to argue. It seemed to relieve her when I entered into her mental road map, acknowledged her perceptions, no matter how fantastical.

One afternoon as we talked on the phone, my father brought up, apropos nothing, Tivadar Puskás, Thomas Edison's assistant.

“Waaall, a Hungarian came up with the telephone greeting.”

Yes, I said, she'd mentioned Puskás before.

“ ‘Hallo' means ‘I'm listening.' ”

Yes, I said, she'd told me.

“Hey listener!” my father said, laughing, and then her words turned earnest. “You are the one who listens to me.”

And so I listened. Yes, I'd say, how awful to have strangers flocking through your house at night. Yes, how exasperating that your mother has installed herself in the guest room. Yes, the ambulance driver must be a card-carrying Arrow Cross officer. And yes, I said in early May, when I reached my father by phone in the psychiatric ward of St. János Hospital. Yes, it's terrible that someone sneaked into the basement and tried to burn the house down.

From the phone by her hospital bed, my father described to me the events of the previous night: She'd noticed a light on in the cellar and crept down the stairs to investigate. A man was standing by the gas tank, “blowing on the gas valve,” attempting to start a fire. My father confronted him. “He wouldn't say anything,” she recounted. “He wouldn't identify himself.” She locked the arsonist in the cellar, ran back upstairs, and called the police. “But the police mixed everything up,” she said. They took her away instead. “Which I violently opposed. I saved the house from burning down, and I am being punished for putting out the fire. It's aaabsolutely ridiculous. I save the lives of people and the least I ask for saving a life is don't throw me to the wolves. I'm the good guy. They totally miscast me. You need to talk to these doctors and get it all cleared up.” Yes, I said, and bought a plane ticket.

From the taxi stand on Diósárok út, St. János Hospital looks like a Victorian asylum of the “moral architecture” variety, its Gothic brick-and-stone dormitories ranged sociably around landscaped grounds gone slightly to seed, gnarled vines crawling up the crumbling facades, a chapel to the patron saint of sick paupers stationed at the main entrance. I had stood outside these wrought-iron gates many times before, waiting to catch a ride up the hill to my father's house. The #59 tram terminates across the street from St. János, and when the connecting bus was late, I'd grab a cab at the hospital. But on the afternoon of May 13, I passed through the gates and hauled my luggage up four flights of dirty stairs—there was no elevator—and headed toward the internal-medicine ward.

From within, St. János appeared more Bedlam than beneficent. Years of draconian budget cuts had taken their toll. Many of the nurses were on strike, protesting their paltry wages of $200 to $300 a month. The bathrooms had no soap and no toilet paper. Patients were expected to bring their own. Likewise with dishes and utensils. I hurried down a long corridor and veered into a small overpacked room, its eight beds occupied by acutely ill women. It was unseasonably hot for May, and there was no air-conditioning. The late afternoon sun beat through a cranked-open window.

My father lay atop a thin mattress on what looked like an old army cot. She wore a frayed hospital gown and gave off the musky odor of someone who hadn't been bathed. She was half her size, or so she seemed to me. Her eyes were sealed shut, lips livid and cracked, her mouth frozen open in a grimace. She appeared to be comatose and breathed with a terrible rasp.

“I don't understand,” I said, the hysteria rising in my voice. My father's neighbor and friend, Ágnes, who was accompanying me, did her best to translate my frantic rush of words into Hungarian. An orderly replied with a shrug, beads of sweat on his brow. “What's happened to her?” I asked. “Where's her doctor?” I stroked my father's thin arm, smoothed her hair, a wild unwashed tangle. On the night table, beside a canister of opened but untouched yogurt, sat a plastic sip cup with a name written shakily in Magic Marker, “Stefi.”

The doctor, the orderly said, wouldn't be in until eight p.m. “Come back later,” Ágnes translated.

“Stefi?” I whispered, laying aside the Lindt chocolates and P. Howard pulp novels I'd brought to cheer her up. “Stefi, can you hear me?” She gave no response. “Stefi, please wake up. It's Susan. Talk to me.”

Four hours later, the doctor appeared. The room was dark now, a radio announcer chattering from a boom box on the other side of the ward. My father's breath came in guttering gasps. Her condition hadn't improved.

Dr. Anna Mária Molnárné advised me (though she spoke English) to relay my questions through Ágnes and answered them in streams of Hungarian, not meeting my eye.

“Maybe gallbladder inflammation,” Ágnes summarized.

Another flood of words.

“Maybe an infection. Or it could be a little stroke.” Ágnes hesitated. “The doctor says, ‘You should prepare yourself for the worst.' ”

I returned that night to my father's house. The doctor's words hadn't sunk in, or rather, I hadn't let them. I was thinking I needed some sleep to prepare for tomorrow's rounds: a morning appointment with a dementia-care specialist, a strategy phone session with a home nurse I'd hired, an afternoon consultation with a guardianship lawyer. I was plotting how to spring my father from St. János. I let myself in the front door—blessedly, in the haste of her forced departure, she hadn't armed the burglar alarm—and wandered through the silent rooms. I'd never been in the place alone. I'd so often felt confined here by my father's overweening presence. Now her absence overwhelmed me. I opened the fridge, considered the pizza that Ágnes had kindly left for me, closed the door again. I wasn't hungry. I climbed the dark wooden stairs to bed.

Toward morning, a nightmare gripped me, a terrible one. In the dream, I am lying in bed in my father's house. A noise startles me. Someone has broken in. I arm myself with a serrated grapefruit knife and make my way into the hall. I see that my father's bedroom door is shut. I reach for the knob, but it's locked. I hear a sound behind me. I turn. My father is racing up the stairs, her raised arm brandishing a cleaver.

Terror woke me. The clock on the bedside table read 5:15 a.m. I lay awhile, quelling my panic. Was I still so afraid of her, even as she lay unconscious in a hospital room? Or was it her fear I was channeling? Maybe the meat cleaver wasn't aimed at me but intended for one of the many invaders of the many homes she'd spent her life defending, “saaaving.” Or maybe, for all our recent intimacy, I remained among the invaders. I drifted in a troubled twilight until the phone rang. It was just past six a.m.

“Hallo,” the voice in the receiver said. “This is Dr. Molnárné.”

Yes, I said, unsure if I was awake or still in a dream.

“I'm sorry to inform you. Your father is dead.”

“What? How could … this be?”

“Some time after five this morning.”

“I see,” I said, now alert—and accusatory. “What was the cause?”

“Nothing special,” the doctor said. “She just died.”

What was the cause? How could this be?
The deeper questions weren't for the doctor. But the person I wanted to ask them of was gone. Days later, compelled by an inchoate urgency, I would search the recesses of the house for answers.
What was the cause? How could this be?
In the cellar, I found the key hanging from its string beneath the workbench pegboard, unlocked the steel cabinet, and yanked out the cardboard box that contained the “important” documents she'd allowed me only glimpses of. “
If anything happens to me, you should know where this is
.” What trove of illumination did it hold?

Here were the property deeds and the high school report card she'd shown me years before, the many lapsed passports and her U.S. naturalization papers. Here was my parents' divorce decree, my father's letter of application to repatriate in Hungary, my mother's handful of letters to my grandparents in the late 1950s, with the addendum from my father announcing my birth. Beneath them was a manila envelope with five aerogrammes from the early to mid-'90s, addressed in spidery handwriting in Hungarian, postmarked Tel Aviv: letters from my grandmother Rozi in the last decade of her life. Later I would have them translated. They were appeals for a response: “My health is very bad.” … “I have been very weak and I am still weak.” … “I have a horrible life.” … “My Pistike, do not leave me!” The last letter, dated October 27, 1995, when Rozi was 95, ended this way: “Please write me, Pista. I suffer very much because you do not think of me. I am very alone, please let me know that you are alive, how you live, about your work. Please reply immediately. With many loving kisses, Mommy.”