In the Darkroom (13 page)

Stripped of its ironies, “The Old Lady's Tango” in Leonard Bernstein's
Candide
could have described much of the Jewish community in Budapest's Golden Age. Until the era crashed. My father, however, meant it to describe her own life in current-day Hungary. “I blend in very well,” she said, drying her hands on her apron, a yellow checked print with a frilled hem. “I have had absolutely no difficulties. Don't believe all this nonsense.”

“What nonsense?”

“About there still being anti-Semitism here.”

“Oh?” Our argument had concerned a small item I'd pointed out in the
Budapest Sun
, the English-language daily. It was an article about a neo-Nazi group putting up posters claiming to be followers of Ferenc Szálasi, the 1940s leader of the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian Nazi Party that ruled the nation in the last months of World War II. The posters were emblazoned with what seemed to be a replica of the Arrow Cross crest, a violation of the government's ban on such symbols. The police regarded the insignia acceptable, the
Sun
reported, because the neo-Nazi group had slightly altered its configuration. My father, a fan of alterations, deemed the news “of no importance.”

“What about that glazier you told me about?” I asked. Some years earlier, my father had hired a glass company to install French doors in the living room. Unhappy with the work, my father threatened not to pay—inspiring the glazier to yell, “This is why you people should have all been gassed.”

“Waaall,” she said now, “but that was an exception. There's really very little anti-Semitism here.”

I recalled another “exception” that had occurred on one of my father's earliest scouting trips to post-Communist Budapest in the '80s. After reacquainting himself with the famous pastries at Gerbaud's and paddling in the wave pools at the Hotel Gellért, my father had decided to film a local edifice, or rather, the bombed-out remains of one. The Dohány Street Synagogue, the “Israelite Cathedral” ornamented with the eight-pointed stars, was still boarded up (as were so many Jewish temples—no wonder we hadn't visited any synagogues on our family vacation to Hungary). A group of locals stopped to watch the American photographer assembling his tripod. They began talking among themselves, assuming he didn't understand Hungarian. He understood all right. “They couldn't see why anyone would want to take pictures of that building,” my father recounted. “They were saying ‘Look at that rich Jew. Those people ruined Hungary. They took its wealth. The dirty Jews deserved to die.' ”

It seemed to me that the Hungary my father had returned to had taken its identity not from the Golden Age of Jewish-Magyar collaboration but from the era immediately following. In the wake of World War I, Hungarian Jews went from being the most assimilated in Europe to being among the most reviled, subject to the earliest anti-Semitic legislation of the new century, deprived by the late '30s of their property, professions, and freedoms, and ultimately targeted by one of the most systematic extermination campaigns of the Holocaust. “Finally, O Jew, your day is dawning,” Kiss had crowed in 1868. Three-quarters of a century later, nearly half a million Hungarian Jews would be sent to Auschwitz in the finale of what Winston Churchill described as “probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.”

Theodor Herzl, for one, had predicted as much. In a 1903 letter to a Hungarian Jewish member of parliament, the founder of Zionism had warned: “The hand of fate shall also seize Hungarian Jewry. And the later this occurs, and the stronger this Jewry becomes, the more cruel and hard shall be the blow, which shall be delivered with greater savagery. There is no escape.”

One morning my father summoned me to her office in the attic, where she was seated at her computer, in a blue housedress with orange flowers and terry cloth slippers. A photograph waited on the screen. She'd scanned it in some years earlier, she told me, and saved it to an electronic folder titled “Family.” It was dated 1943.

In the picture, three rows of people are arranged for a group portrait. The occasion was a “Golden Jubilee,” my father's paternal grandparents' fiftieth wedding anniversary in their well-appointed estate in Kassa. My great-grandfather and great-grandmother, Sámuel and Frida Friedman, are seated in the front row, surrounded by thirteen brothers and sisters, children, and grandchildren. The men are in suits and ties, the women in formal dresses, primped and coiffed. Sámuel is holding a large metal wreath, each of its golden leaves bearing the name of another member in the extensive family tree. At the far left end of the last row, I see a rail-thin boy, who would have then been sixteen years old but who looks much younger. He strikes a hand-in-waistcoat Napoleon pose: my father.

I studied the assembled in their tailored jackets and ivory brooches, this photographic paean to Golden Age prosperity, this un-Photoshoppable testament to a world that had once been, and thought to myself: There are no Jews in Kassa anymore.

—————

“Let's go see the apartment where you grew up,” I suggested. We were back in front of the computer. Today it was Hungarian folk-dancing videos and transsexual speech-alteration tutorials. (“How to Develop a Female Voice,” by Melanie Anne Phillips: “Nothing gets you read faster than a voice that doesn't match your appearance. … Clothes may make the man, but it is voice that makes the woman.”)

My father didn't answer.

I repeated the proposal. “You know, on Ráday Street,” I said. The one whose Louis XVI furnishings and vitrines stocked with Rosenthal porcelain I'd heard so much about, the “royal apartment.”

My father clicked over to her NASA moonshot collection.

“Let's look at some of
your
pictures,” I proposed. “The ones you actually took.”

“Your mother has those,” she said.

Actually, my mother didn't, not anymore. The spring before my first trip to Budapest, a sagging cardboard box held together by packing tape had arrived at my door in Portland. My mother, in a spasm of spring cleaning, had mailed me the Faludi picture collection. For years, she'd stored the photos in an old hope chest in her apartment that also held woolen sweaters and blankets, and when I unsealed the box, it stank of mothballs. Inside, under trays of slides of old hiking trips and layers of loose shots that humidity had turned into clotted sediment, was our one photo album—
Family Memories
embossed in gilt on its red cover, fading to brown.

Pasted on one page was a photograph of my mother posing in a billowing bridal gown in the fall of 1957, her face pale and strained. There were pictures of my mother from the wedding itself, with her roommate and an uncle as her only witnesses. Her parents, even her Jewish father (who had changed his family name from Levi to Lanning), had refused to come, because she was marrying a Jew, and, worse, marrying him in a synagogue. There were other pictures of my mother in her early years of housewifery in Queens, and of me and my brother as infants, then toddlers, then pimply adolescents in scalloped-cardboard yearbook frames. Where were the pictures of my father's marital years? The album's fading pages revealed the traces of a willful erasure. I could see the dark squares where photos had once been glued. My mother had engaged in a little “masking” of her own. Several snapshots were simply ripped down the middle. Her handiwork was thorough if not deft: she left no record of my father's two decades of American domesticity.

“Does your mother have that picture of me from when I was a little child?” my father asked now. “The one where I have long golden curls?”

I said I didn't think so. Thinking, wasn't your hair always black?

“I'm taking a bath in the kitchen sink. My hair was
blond
. I look like a little Goldilocks.”

I knew one picture that filled the bill, a toddler with light-colored curls bathing in a kitchen sink. I'd seen it in the
Family Memories
album. Except the sink was in Queens. The child was me.

As I struggled for an answer, my father moved on to another memory.

“Remember that folk dress I got you?” she said. “When we went to Hungary—as a
family
?” She stressed the last word.

I nodded.

“You hated it!” my father said.

“I did!” I said, absurdly thrilled that she'd remembered.

She laughed and so did I.

“I don't know why you hated that dress so much,” she said. “Take a look at this.”

She abandoned NASA and scrolled through a sea of folders until she came to one marked “Traditional Folk Costumes,” then clicked through many shots of whirling
Csárdás
dancers in beribboned bell skirts and embroidered dirndls, each annotated: “Traditional peasant costumes, 1936,” “Hungarian folk dance, 1938 …”
Csárdás
dances enjoyed a revival in the same years as Hungarian fascism. The image my father came to rest on was modern day.

“There I am.” It was a photo of my father in The Dress, or a dress very much like the one over which we'd had so many pitched battles: the same lace-up bodice, ballooning skirt, and tulip-and rosebud-dotted apron he insisted I wear to middle school. My father looked to be in mid-dance-step.

I said, “You own one of those?”

“I wish!” she said. “I found a picture of it, on the Internet.” And Photoshopped it onto her physique.

I'd wondered whether my latent-female father had tried on my mother's or my clothes when we lived in Yorktown Heights. I asked her directly one afternoon, during one of our coffee-and-cake tête-à-têtes, and received one of her trademark non-reply replies: “Waaall. No. Maybe.” Now I wondered if the dress she'd forced me to wear was an outfit she'd wished for herself.

“Why do you like these so much?” I asked now, pointing to the costume on the screen.

“I'm a Hungarian patriot,” she said. “It reminds me of the way the country used to be, when I was a little boy.”

I saw my opening. “So let's go see the house where you used to live, when you were a little boy.”

“There's no point,” she said.

“But, I want—”

“I don't want to go all the way over there,” she said, as if Pest were a day's journey and not a fifteen-minute drive.

“Anyway, it's unnecessary. You can see it on the Internet.” My father hit a few keys on the computer and up popped a photograph of the block that she'd lived on as a boy.

“See,” she said, pointing at a partial and blurred shot of a building halfway down a street. “That's my room there,” she said, indicating a smudge that might have been a window, three stories up. What caught my attention, though, was the way she'd called up the image. She hadn't typed in the address on Google. She had retrieved the link from a folder on her hard disk marked “Deleted Items.” Deleted, but not deleted. My father had an odd way of erasing the past.

When my father first returned to Hungary, he had launched a full-bore campaign to reclaim Ráday 9, as well as Váci 28, the two Pest apartment buildings that had belonged to my grandfather. My father unearthed the original deeds and typed up a letter detailing how the Friedmans' property had been “stolen” by the Communist regime. He delivered his screed to various authorities and each of the building's current occupants. Nothing came of it. Post-Communist Hungary had a restitution system for state-nationalized property, but it was parsimonious in the extreme, a system of vouchers with long delays and paltry payments. In my father's case, two prime-location apartment buildings certainly worth millions were judged worthy of a total reimbursement of $6,500. (My grandfather had been forced to sell the summer villa during the war, making it ineligible for restitution.)

My father wrote in protest to the prime minister's office, the Hungarian justice and agriculture ministers, and several Hungarian MPs, as well as the U.S. embassy, the U.S. ambassador to Hungary, and two U.S. congressmen with Hungarian roots. Those appeals went nowhere, too. Then he joined the conservative-right Independent Smallholders Party—after its leaders started demanding the return of property nationalized under Communism. My father also had a more personal, and older, relationship to the party, which also involved real estate. In 1946, Smallholders leader Ferenc Nagy was elected prime minister in Hungary's first democratic election, a post he held for a little more than a year before the Communists claimed power. Nagy had resided at Ráday 9 since the '30s. He and my grandparents were friendly (too friendly, my father suspected, in the case of my grandmother Rozi, who before the war met Nagy for afternoon confabs in the patisserie on Ráday 9's ground floor). Over the years, Nagy had done several favors for the Friedman family. “Nagy was a great man,” my father told me. “They say—and it's true!—he could have straightened up the entire country if it weren't for the Communists. And we had a very good connection with him.”