In the Darkroom (10 page)

There was no sign of my father. A stout matron in a guard uniform inspected me darkly from her wooden chair in the corner. Maybe it was me. Maybe these battle-axes weren't staring at my father in a dress, after all. Maybe they disapproved of a girl wearing jeans. Or maybe they just didn't like foreign women. After a while, I got tired of the evil eye and retraced my steps. I found my father many rooms back, transfixed before Gyula Benczúr's
The Baptism of Vajk
, an operatic depiction of the tenth-century christening of Hungary's first king. The Magyar tribesman Vajk kneels bare-shouldered before the holy font and gilded chalice, about to shed his pagan name and receive his new Christian one: István, Stephen. My father's namesake.

I studied the baptism of the former Vajk over the former István's shoulder.

“Isn't it a bit”—I searched for the proper word—“histrionic?”

“It's a work of true greatness,” she said with a flourish of matching grandiosity, her polka-dot skirt billowing with her enthusiasm. “It's characteristically Hungarian.”

In an eggheaded attempt to prepare for my visit, I'd read István Bibó's scathing inspection of “Hungarianism,” in an essay published at the end of World War II. The political scientist saw his country's identity as Potemkin, a society “deceiving itself” and held together by little more than “wishful” thinking and “frills and veneers.” “Today's Hungarians are among Europe's least well-defined groups,” Bibó wrote—and Hungarianism a “grand illusion.” As I recalled Bibó now, the afternoon's displays threatened to turn hallucinogenic. Everything we were looking at seemed oddly, fatally confectionary, the face of a nation montaged onto one fantasia after another: The anointed Saint Stephen was the “patriarch” whose patrimony had no heirs; Prince Eugene was the (French-born) Austrian Imperial Army general who freed Hungary from the Ottoman Empire only to hand it over to the Habsburgs; Lajos Kossuth was the Father of Hungarian Democracy whose 1848 bid for Hungarian independence (celebrated every March 15 on National Day) was stillborn; the Turul was mythical herald to a thousand-year Magyar reign that never hatched.

I considered the illusions hanging from these walls. As we worked our way back through the echoing galleries, I looked at my father in her polka dots and the image that flashed momentarily through my brain was of a tour guide in theme-park costume, leading me through a tarted-up history that concealed a darker past, a Tinker Bell guide to a storybook culture, neither person nor place what they really were. What the Magyars were was humiliated. Just about every power that had ever dealt with Hungary—whether the Mongols in 1241 or the Turks in 1526 or the Austrians in 1711 and 1848 or the Soviets in 1956—had seen fit to kick it in the teeth.

In the next station of our Castle Hill cultural tour (the Budapest History Museum), my father lingered admiringly before another hagiographic painting of another lionized Hungarian. This one was at least more modern than Vajk. He was dressed in a naval uniform, pinned with rows of medals: the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, whose governance of the country from 1920 to 1944 encompassed the arc of my father's youth. Her reverence for the man who presided over the deportation of nearly a half-million Jews galled me.

A make-believe royal, I pointed out. (Horthy was elected Regent by the Hungarian National Assembly in 1920, intended as a placeholder for the exiled Habsburg king, who never reclaimed the throne.) And what's with the “Admiral”? A navy in a landlocked state?

“You don't know anything,” my father said. “Trianon took away the Hungarian coast. A tragedy. A
catastrophe
.”

She was right about the coast. The treaty at the end of World War I, which dealt Hungary the harshest penalties of any warring state (including Germany), had stripped the nation of its seaports, along with 65 percent of its waterways, 88 percent of its forests, and all of its coal, salt, and silver mines. In the Second World War, Horthy's Hungary would ally itself with the Axis in hopes of resurrecting “the lost territories” (and Hitler, indeed, returned two land parcels that Trianon had lopped off). When my father and I would finally make it down into the city, I'd notice the ubiquitous image—plastered on walls, affixed to bumpers, appliquéd onto backpacks—of the map of pre-Trianon “Greater Hungary,” also known as “the mutilated motherland.” The map featured the nation as a butchered torso, surrounded by its four severed appendages. The defenders of Hungarian honor call Trianon “the amputation.”

“It destroyed the motherland!” my father said now, her voice rising. “It cut his body into pieces.”

“Hers,” I corrected.

My father hiked up her purse on a camera-burdened shoulder and headed for the exit.

We left the museum and, instead of descending to the streets of the city I so wished to visit, we climbed even higher to Fisherman's Bastion. My father wanted to take some “panoramic” pictures.

A turnstile blocked the entrance. You had to buy a token if you wanted to see the view. My father forked over some forints, and we were admitted to the Neo-Romanesque stone arcade punctuated by viewing turrets, viewing balconies, and seven viewing lookout towers (in honor of the seven Magyar tribes). Despite the name, the bastion wasn't built for fishermen; it was designed in the 1890s
as
a viewing terrace. “It was meant to be like a fairy tale,” as one chronicler put it, to “
feel like history
rather than
be history
.”
Follow the Yellow Brick Road
, I thought, as I morosely trailed my father's footsteps.

She stopped at one of the designated lookout towers to take some shots of the city across the river. “A good thing I brought the telephoto,” she said, wrestling the lens out of her purse. While she clicked away, I leaned through a vaulted arch to bask in the fading autumn sun and, despite my cynicism, admire the view. The Danube was a broad dusky ribbon under the city's seven bridges. To my left, I could see the enchanted greensward of Margaret Island and, beyond it, the approaching river's long bend to the south.

On the far shore, Pest was a hazy blur. The Hungarian Parliament, a Neo-Gothic wedding cake encrusted with half a million precious stones and nearly a hundred pounds of gold, took up nine hundred feet of prime waterfront real estate. This temple to democracy, the largest parliament building in Europe and the third largest in the world, was built in the late nineteenth century, when Franz Josef reigned and less than 10 percent of the Hungarian population could vote.

On this side of the river, the red incline train, the Sikló (“the Little Snake”), was inching down the cliff. Directly below, the Chain Bridge arced across the water toward the Neo-Renaissance splendor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The learned society was inaugurated by the same man who spearheaded the construction of the Chain Bridge, Count István Széchenyi, a preeminent Hungarian statesman of the nineteenth century. Széchenyi's quest for an authentic national culture would end in personal despair. “We have no national habits,” Széchenyi lamented once. “Our existence and knowledge depend on imitation.” Subsequent seekers of Hungarianism have been equally riddled with doubt. They have generated two centuries of literature, journalism, and oratory devoted to the question that doubles as the title for many of their angst-ridden jeremiads: “Who Is a Hungarian?” Long before Erik Erikson coined the phrase, Hungarians were having an identity crisis.

My father traced the descent of the shiny red funicular with her camera lens. “I was so happy when they reopened the Sikló,” she said. “The first time I saw it, I cried.”

I asked why and she said, “Because the Russians had destroyed it.” The Sikló was bombed, along with pretty much everything else along this stretch of the Danube, during the Siege of Budapest, the fifty-day Soviet campaign in the winter of 1944–45 to evict the die-hard Waffen-SS and Hungarian troops bunkered along Castle Hill.

“Would you have preferred the other side won?” I asked.

“You have a very stupid American concept of this.”

“Enlighten me.”

“The Russians destroyed everything that was Hungarian.”

Later I would pick up a brochure on the history of the Sikló and take a perverse pleasure in finding that it was put back in service in 1986, under Soviet rule. I didn't bring it up with my father. By then I knew better than to stick a pin in Hungarian “grand illusion.”

I learned to time my more probing questions to my father's golden hour. She was at her most expansive over late-afternoon coffee, which she took with a slice of Linzer torte or Sacher torte or Dobos torte or some other confection evoking the Austro-Hungarian era. Cake was always served with a hefty dollop of freshly whipped cream, because that's “the correct
Viennese
way to do it.” The Habsburg Empire lived on in my father's prandial habits.

The ritual was lifelong, though in Yorktown Heights confined to the weekends and the selection from American bakeries, which my father found contemptible. Even in his guise as suburban dad, my father had asserted his Old European taste. Weekends, he'd sit in his armchair in his beret and cravat, a demitasse balanced on one knee and classical music thundering on the hi-fi, and heap scorn on Reddi-wip, Cheez Whiz, and ice cubes in drinking water, along with his American children's proclivity for pop tunes with drum tracks and sitcoms with laugh tracks. He went into a swivet once when it became clear I had never heard of one of his treasured European authors, the Austrian (and Jewish) writer Stefan Zweig. “You have
no culture
,” he yelled, ripping out of my hand whatever “tacky” novel I'd been reading. On a series of weekend afternoons, my father attempted to get me to master the basic waltz steps in our burnt-orange-carpeted living room, Johann Strauss on the turntable. The lessons ended badly. “You are
leading
again!” he would shout as I stepped on his foot, not always entirely by accident. “How many times do I have to tell you? The woman does not lead.”

In the years after my father moved back to Hungary, he made regular pilgrimages to Vienna, often with his friend Ilonka in tow, to shop for the “correct” Viennese comestibles and tour the faded palaces and hunting lodges and architectural glories of Emperor Franz Josef's nearly seventy-year reign, photographing the last vestiges of the empire that collapsed with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. Or he'd take Ilonka to Switzerland, where they paid homage to the ancient Habsburg Castle, the dynasty's original seat. Or to Germany, where he made a long detour so they could cruise past the Bavarian villa of the then still living Archduke Otto of Austria, last crown prince to the Austro-Hungarian throne. “The best time was under the Habsburgs,” my father told me. “Even as a young child, I could still feel its good influence. If only we could bring the monarchy back—all of Hungary would welcome it.”

My father's latest transition, from man to woman, debuted in the Habsburg emperor's former guesthouse. Over coffee and Esterhazy cake one afternoon, she waxed nostalgic about the scene at what was now the Parkhotel Schönbrunn, where she attended the LGBT Rainbow Ball the year before her operation.

“Everybody was beautifully dressed, very elegant,” she said.

“Yes, I know,” I said. She had shown me the video she'd made of the ball, formal dancers in white satin gowns and black tie, white gloves, and cummerbunds, stepping in stately minuet formation across a polished parquet floor while an all-female orchestra played “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.” At the end of the evening, each performer received a single rose.

“They always have good taste in Vienna,” my father sighed, licking the last speck of whipped cream from her demitasse spoon. “Even Ilonka enjoyed it.” In my father's image gallery in the attic, she kept a photograph of the two of them at the ball. In the picture, he (still pre-op) is wearing a bleach-blond wig and a midnight-blue velour evening gown with spaghetti straps; Ilonka is in a plain navy sheath. They are holding hands. My father stares straight into the camera, with a pasted-on smile. Ilonka is looking away from my father, her mouth downturned. Her eyes are sorrowful.

“She didn't want you to have the operation,” I said, a question.

“Ilonka thought it was a game. She never thought I'd go all the way with it. Ilonka wants nothing to change. Everything has to be the same way it was in the past. She even has to sit in the same pew in the church. I'm not like that. I get used to new things in five minutes!”

She grinned and took another forkful of cake. It seemed like a good moment to press my inquiry.

“Are you
used to
being a woman?” I asked.

“Waaall, that was easy.”

“How so?”

She held up her arms, as if for surrender. “Look at this,” she said, waggling her arms up and down, a fledgling out of the nest. “Does this look like a man's body? I never developed. There's hardly any hairs on my body.” Did this mean the Ugly Duckling had been a swan all along? “Waaall, I had the organs, I did my job, as a man. But I didn't fit the role. They didn't approve of me.”

“Who didn't approve of you?”

“Women didn't approve of me. I didn't know how to fight and get dirty. I'm not muscular, I'm not athletic, I had a miserable life as a man. And it became more miserable when I wasn't accepted for the umpteenth time. By
your mother
.” My father liked to characterize her that way,
your mother.
“She didn't accept me and she threw me away.”

“She didn't—”

“I wasn't in the proper role. They can sense that. Now, as a woman, women like me more. I fit my role now better as a woman than when I was miscast in the wrong role.”