In the Darkroom (23 page)

Our rental was in a once showy and still respectable Art Nouveau building, across the street from the opera house. As the season warmed, musicians flung open the windows of the practice studios. We woke many mornings to a celestial mash-up, tenors and trumpeters tuning up for the evening's performance. We'd feel our way down the stairs in the dark—the hall lights were perpetually burned out—and linger over coffee and croissants at the neighborhood café (where the manager, seeing the Americans coming, rushed to play Johnny Cash on her ancient jukebox, drowning out the Verdi). Since the fall of Communism, parts of the city center had undergone frenetic gentrification: the magnificent old Nyugati (Western) Railway Terminal, designed by the architects of the Eiffel Tower, was now in the shadow of the two-million-square-foot WestEnd City Center, the largest mall in Central Europe with two hundred shops, seventy shoe outlets, fifty jewelry stores, a casino and poker club, and a fourteen-screen cinema that played “the latest Hollywood blockbusters.” Along the ceremonial thoroughfare of Andrássy Boulevard, the city's Champs-Élysées inaugurated in 1876, upscale chain stores had proliferated: Louis Vuitton, Hugo Boss, Nespresso, wine bars, mobile phone dispensaries, and Internet cafés. But the district where we lived, like so many pockets of Pest, nevertheless showed its age, the stucco facades crumbling, the stair treads bowed by foot traffic, the wizened grandmothers in their faded finery inspecting us from behind lace curtains and window-box geraniums. I'd miss that worn elegance when I returned to the United States and all its prefab uniformity, miss the way every grand-dame edifice on the út or utca wore its history on its face, its beauty munitions-pocked from multiple twentieth-century battles. My delight at the past's insistent presence wasn't universally shared. Alongside a doorway on the street that ran behind the opera house, someone had painted—perhaps in defiance of Nietzsche's observation?—a graffiti message in large Day-Glo letters: “
LEARN TO FORGET
.”

In a funny way, the metropolis's transformation offered a window on my father's. Like her, the city was attempting a rebirth at an advanced age. Like her, it had undergone an identity makeover from one end of the spectrum to the other. Hungarians had a name for the about-face from Communism to capitalism: they called it “The Change.” Wandering the streets of Pest and sitting at my father's table in Buda had a strangely unitary feel. In both places I was watching people engaged in an intense negotiation with the meaning of identity—and the possibility of leaving the past behind, of learning to forget.

On the occasion of one visit, my father had presented me with a gift, a coffee-table book of Hungarian history. Sandwiched between sun-splashed and unsubtly retouched photographs (the Danube an electric blue, the browned-out Great Hungarian Plain as Astroturfed as a putting green), the text proceeded in chronological lockstep from Magyar Conquest through centuries of national martyrdom to the 1989 “Rebirth of Parliamentary Democracy.” One historical moment was forgotten. The entirety of World War II had been tucked discreetly, weirdly, in the chapter titled “Hungary in the Inter-War Years,” and its casualties enumerated thusly: “40,000 soldiers of the Second Hungarian Army were killed and 70,000 captured by the Soviet troops” and “heavy damage was inflicted on Hungarian towns by the air raids of the Allies.” The mass murder of two-thirds of the nation's 825,000 Jews received a parenthetical mention in a dependent clause to a sentence about additional Hungarian troop deployments. Their fate was attributed to “the Gestapo.” (Of the persecution and murder of thousands of Roma, there was not a word.) And what of the Hungarian government, gendarmerie, military, and civil service, and the central role they played in the internal evisceration of the last intact Jewish community in Axis Europe? The text was silent.

This was a dodging and masking my father seemed to approve of. The Budapest she wished me to see had the same strange erasure, purposefully scrubbed of the chapter that had left its shrapnel scars on seemingly every building and on my father's character. I thought often of Nobel laureate Imre Kertész's assessment of his former home: “Nothing has been worked through, everything is painted over with pretty colors. Budapest is a city without a memory.” When I lured my father into Pest, she gravitated to the generic shopping centers and retail outlets. We walked together only once through the Jewish quarter, site of the infamous and murderous wartime ghetto, and only on the way to her favorite wienerschnitzel restaurant.

On the way back, and at my insistence, we stepped into the Hungarian Jewish Museum, which adjoins the Dohány Street Synagogue in the old Jewish quarter. My father's mood, already sour at this detour, curdled when we reached the Holocaust Room. Alongside deportation rosters and a nation-by-nation breakdown of the toll (Hungary: 565,000 Jews perished) was a large photograph of the Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy, the same Horthy before whose portrait in the Budapest History Museum my father had stood in adoration. He was shaking hands with Hitler. My request that my father translate the text on some displayed street posters of World War II vintage—grotesque caricatures of rich Jewish men with jug ears and giant hooked noses, their wives in diamond earrings and fur—elicited her customary wave. “This is of no interest,” she said. She was ready to go. She glared at a tour guide from Tel Aviv who was orating at the top of his lungs. “Who can think with that braying?” She turned and elbowed her way through the crush of Israeli tourists.

Just before the exit, she jolted to a halt. In front of her on the wall was a photograph, a grainy black-and-white image of a muddy yard in which a group of men in fedoras and raincoats stood behind a small wooden table, observed by a cluster of passersby clutching umbrellas. It was the grounds of the Jewish Maros Street Hospital where, on January 11, 1945, all but one of its ninety-three patients, nurses, and doctors were murdered by the Arrow Cross. In front of the table were three rows of bodies, exhumed from the mass grave by the Soviets a few weeks after the liberation of Budapest. “I was there,” my father said quietly. The Soviet soldiers had invited a newly organized youth film club to witness the exhumation. My father was one of the club's charter members.

So many of the pictures of my father's life were missing, lost in the rubble of the Friedman family's fate or torn by his ex-wife from our family album. Or willfully purged from my father's recollection. Here on the museum wall was a moment she couldn't expunge. “The smell,” she said, raising her hand to her face. “You could not get it out of your nose.”

On occasion as we ambled through her buffed and burnished Budapest, she found herself accosted by the past. One day we were standing outside the brand-new and government-funded House of Terror, a multimedia-experiential museum dedicated to Hungary's twentieth-century torments that, despite its name, did a masterful job of eliding the horror of the Hungarian Holocaust (in favor of showcasing Hungary's victimization by the Soviets). My father was hit by another wartime memory. The forbidding edifice that housed the museum was once the most feared address in Budapest. Andrássy út 60 was the headquarters of the fascist Arrow Cross, and later, under Communism, of the secret police. The building's new House-of-Terror interior (the handiwork of a Hollywood set designer) was heavy on theme-park spectacle, its pounding music, flashing video screens, and pulsating lights calculated to induce maximum fear of the Red menace.

My father and I had sped through the twenty-nine galleries—only two of which (one a hallway) paid any notice to the anti-Jewish blood fest that the Arrow Cross directed from this building—and hurried to the exit. Outside, my father surveyed the boulevard. The history that was absent within the museum had assailed her on the sidewalk. “I was
here
,” she said. “Right here. In front of this building. When they brought Szálasi in.” In the spring of 1945, the former Arrow Cross leader and Hungarian prime minister, captured by Allied troops, was returned here in shackles. My father's youth film club was invited to watch. Noted movie director Béla Pásztor was there, too, filming Szálasi's capture for a newsreel. “They brought in Szálasi in this cage with iron bars,” my father recalled. “And Béla Pásztor—the greaaat Hungarian filmmaker!—went up to him and said, ‘Mr. Szálasi, would you be
so good
as to put those hands, which did
so much good
, on those bars,
please
,' and he filmed him.” Immediately thereafter, the ex–prime minister was taken to a cell in the basement of Andrássy út 60. He was executed the following March.

My father stood there in the hot sun, ruminating. “Mr. Szálasi,” she repeated, relishing the lacerating irony beneath Pásztor's words, “would you be
so good
as to put those hands, which did
so much good
, on those bars,
please
.” My father gave a knowing smile. “Waaall,” she said, “you know what Pásztor was.”

“No, what?”

“A Jew, of course.”

After a Saturday evening dinner at Menza, a glossy new restaurant in downtown Pest, my husband and I were strolling down Andrássy Boulevard when we heard a rhythmic martial thumping. The sound of tramping boots drew closer, and a color guard high-stepped toward us on the sidewalk. The flag bearers swept past, pressing us against the Hugo Boss display window. There followed a procession of young men (and a few women) in loose formation, uniformed in black boots, black trousers and vests, and black caps adomed with golden lions and red stripes.

That was my introduction to the Magyar Gárda, the Hungarian Guard, the newly established militia devoted to the “protection of Hungarian traditions and culture.” Its appearance on the most glamorous thoroughfare of Pest was just one manifestation of a mounting national discontent. The much-touted bounty of free enterprise hadn't yielded its promised dividends. After high hopes in the early '90s, Hungary's new market economy cratered and by the mid-aughts lagged behind most of the former Communist-bloc nations. Poverty and unemployment were escalating, and government policies only amplified the blows. As the fiscal crisis deepened, Hungary, unlike every other Eastern European country, cut unemployment assistance, lowered the public minimum wage, and eliminated family supports. At the same time, the country was reeling from massive debt and a currency in free fall. In 2008, Hungary was forced to accept a $25 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, and the World Bank. Budapest was looking better than when I'd seen it last, but feeling worse. The shiny retail face of “The Change” might imply that old beleaguered Hungary was, as my father would put it, “dead aaalso,” a thing of the past. The bitterness on the street said otherwise.

The Gárda was the paramilitary offspring of Jobbik (“The Movement for a Better Hungary”), a young and fast-growing right-wing party established by university students. In 2007, the Gárda inducted its first recruits at the Royal Palace on Castle Hill, before a replica of the Holy Crown of St. Stephen. These and future rites were presided over by leading politicians and blessed by prominent bishops and priests. Six hundred guardsmen had recently taken their vows in Heroes' Square, beside the statues of the Seven Chieftains of the Magyars and the Archangel Gabriel (holding another copy of the Holy Crown), pledging to “defend a physically, spiritually, and intellectually defenseless Hungary.” Toward the end of the ceremony, Gábor Vona, a former history teacher and the founder of both the Gárda and Jobbik, rose to remind his troops of their sacred duty: to “save” the “true Hungarians” from humiliations that dated to the end of World War I. “Trianon dismembered the body, the Communists beheaded the nation,” Vona told them. “Step by step, we have to rebuild our identity as a nation.” What identity was under reconstruction? The Gárda's coat of arms—with its red-and-white “Árpád stripes”—closely resembled the 1940s insignia of the fascist Arrow Cross.

“You are making too much of this,” my father said when I described the Saturday night goose-stepping through the heart of Pest. “It's not a problem.” I wasn't soothed. I remembered a story my father had let slip a few days earlier: She had been coming home on the bus the previous fall when a group of young men with shaved heads got on. “They were coming from some demonstration on Castle Hill,” my father said. They started singing an anti-Semitic ditty. My father recognized it; she had heard it as a teenager: “If the head rabbi gets exterminated …”

“What did the other passengers do?” I asked.

“Nothing,” my father said, momentarily pensive. Then: “Waaall, they were just kids, wanting to upset the grown-ups.” Who evidently weren't upset.

One day in her book-lined study on the edge of Buda, sociologist and LGBT-rights expert Judit Takács talked to me about the linked phenomena of Hungary's self-pity and brutality. I had come to her confused on the issue of how “Trianon dismembered the body” could lead so directly to “the head rabbi gets exterminated.” “Hungary is a very
normalizing
society, more than others, and it's definitely not inclusive,” she told me. “Hungary has this very tragic self view—‘We are special because we are the losers of history.' And that self-pitying mentality doesn't lend itself to being welcoming to people who are different.”

There was a moment a few years earlier when it looked like Hungary might become more welcoming. In May 2004, the same time that my father had undergone surgery and joined the female gender, the Hungarian government had announced its own transformation and joined the European Union. In both cases, membership in the new “community” involved a display of assimilation: my father had to pass as a woman; Hungary had to pass as a “socially inclusive” state.

Admission to the EU requires that a nation show evidence that its social policies promote “respect for and protection of minorities.” Those policies include prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, age, sex, and (starting in 1998) sexual orientation—and actively monitoring and promoting the equal treatment of marginalized groups. In 2003, Hungarian legislators, intent on making their country one of the first post-Communist bloc nations to join the EU, hurried into law the Equal Treatment Act; in their eagerness to give the EU what it wanted, the parliamentary members kept adding to the list of “protected groups.” Ultimately, the bill included twenty protected categories—a list that went beyond the usual concerns of race, religion, and sex to include “family status,” “motherhood,” “fatherhood,” “circumstances of wealth and birth,” “social origin,” “state of health,” “language,” “part-time work status,” and “trade union representatives.” And, remarkably, “gender identity,” which two human-rights NGOs managed to slip into the legislation. Hungary became the first nation in the world to guarantee equal protection to transgender people.