In the Darkroom (37 page)

————

Brazil's freedom was oxygen that not every European expatriate could breathe, even its most celebrated Jewish refugee. Stefan Zweig finished another book a year after his ecstatic
Brazil, Land of the Future
, and
The World of Yesterday
may have expressed more truthfully his state of mind: it was an elegy for an epoch lost forever. In its pages, he set down a succinct diagnosis of his terminal condition: “I belong nowhere, and everywhere am a stranger.” On February 22, 1942, less than a week after attending Carnaval, Stefan Zweig and his second wife, Lotte, killed themselves with massive overdoses of sleeping pills.

And what had been the relationship between my young father and the Land of the Future, the land of “hot (35 degree) love,” where no matter what went wrong, nothing would go wrong, because “we will figure it out here”? “In Brazil, I had a great life,” my father told me. “The climate was wonderful, I had a solid job with a lot of freedom, I was making movies. They even gave me a VIP card that got me in everywhere. State receptions! Executive banquets! And there was no discrimination. No one ever asked me in Brazil if I was a Jew.” If there was a fairy-tale chapter to my father's otherwise constricted and disappointed life, it would seem to be here in the lush abundance of one of the most ecologically diverse countries on earth. In the movie version of my father's story, this is where the film goes from black and white to living color.

Back in Yorktown Heights when
The Wizard of Oz
enjoyed its annual television broadcast, my father never missed a showing. He seemed as rapt as his children. The movie belonged to the storybook side of my childhood, of a piece with my father's confectionary constructions—the marionette theater, the train set with its elaborate Odense toy town of cottages and churches, the lavishly illustrated Hans Christian Andersen anthologies that lined the shelves. My own favorite scene in
Oz
was the one where Dorothy and her companions shake off the fatal slumber of the Deadly Poppy Field and, linking arms, skip toward the glittering gates of the Emerald City. I thrilled to the song that accompanied their liberation, no doubt because liberation was what I craved.

Now I think that anthem more rightly belonged to my father, the sound track to her South American years. Whenever I'd mention to an expatriated Hungarian Jew that my father had returned to their homeland, I'd always get the same horrified response: “How could he go back to Hungary?” I had another question: how could he have left Brazil? He'd escaped from the abattoir of identity-turned-death-sentence and skipped into one of the freest places on the face of the earth. He'd gone from a world of enforced and fatal racial classifications to a land of none. If identity is what you choose to be, not the thing you can't escape, then my father's arrival in Rio ushered in a period when every choice was open to him, occupationally, religiously, racially, sexually. He was free, more than free. He could take flight. The fantasy he'd had for himself, the desire he'd engraved on Jablonszky & Faludi letterhead—with a soaring plane and an unspooling reel of film—had come true. Why did he forsake it?

Partly it seemed for love, his infatuation with the one woman he knew in the United States, a childhood sweetheart, a Hungarian Jew who had survived a death march and found her way to New York after the war. “I often feel like crying that I cannot be with you,” he wrote from Rio. “Believe me, You are the only being with whom I have a serious emotional bond.” In one letter he enclosed a photograph of himself: the dashing film director in a bow tie and jacket, framing a shot with his tripod. “Time, however, somehow passes, because I always have a lot of work, and while one is young all kinds of entertainment are possible, which however do not sustain the spirit. You know I'm entering the age when one starts to be seriously preoccupied with thoughts about marriage and family,” a state he philosophized about. “Man, being a social animal, needs family and a sexual partner,” he wrote. “I don't really believe in the possibility of a perfectly happy married life with a foreign woman brought up in a different milieu, though there are exceptions and one can, as a last resort, modify oneself as well.”

So there was that—his longing for a future with a woman of his “milieu” held within it a longing for a vanished prewar past, as miraculously preserved as an Árpádfalva in a Brazilian forest. “Do you still remember the harvest fair, the Disznófő and the Normafa, summer vacations and winter skiing?” he wrote. “Those were beautiful times, full of variation. I remember you had a Skoda and we had a Renault and once I was on a vacation near the Balaton and I invited you to come play ‘Swallows and Amazons' with me on a real sailboat, but the contemporary spirit did not allow for such naughty acts.”

On the very last day of 1953, my father boarded a Braniff International flight for the United States. He descended from the DC-6 Cloudmaster at Idlewild Airport many hours later, carrying a formal tie and dinner jacket in his suitcase. It was New Year's Eve and he had anticipated ringing in 1954 with his old flame. She, however, had plans for the evening—with her fiancé, an American GI. “I guess she couldn't resist the American man in uniform,” my father told me wanly one night in Buda. In a matter of hours, Braniff's Cloudmaster had transported him from expectancy to disappointment, from the freewheeling polymorphism of mid-century Brazil to the gender demarcations of postwar America.

Blondie, the parrot with the golden topknot, accompanied my father to the United States. “They made me leave him in quarantine for a while,” my father said, “but finally I got him back.” By then, my father had moved into a dreary studio on the west side of Manhattan. “I was at work every day. The poor thing was so lonesome. He was used to living on a sunny veranda. Now he was locked into a dark room all day with no sound.” The bird languished, stopped channeling the woman's voice, then stopped eating. My father came home one day to find Blondie dead in his cage.

“What's this?” I said.

It was another day in the attic, and we were at our routine, me in the folding chair, my notebook open, my father presiding from behind her desk, going through a manila folder marked “Changes.” It contained the paperwork of her operation, including the letter I'd just asked her about, two pages of single-spaced Hungarian text with an official-looking medical logo at the top, above the heading:

A “psychological opinion,” my father's name and birth date.

She made a scoffing sound. “Just life history. Things I told her.” She turned to the second page, perused it quickly. “But it's no good.” She swept the letter aside. “That psychologist didn't know what she was talking about.”

“So, this is … what?”

“An idiotic thing. Not relevant.”

“One of the letters you submitted to the surgeon?” I meant, one of the all-important two letters stipulated under the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care, the protocols first devised by “the father of transsexualism” in the 1960s for treating transsexuals, which have since become the World Professional Association for Transgender Health Standards of Care. Those standards call for written evaluations from two independent mental-health professionals, verifying the patient's eligibility for surgery.

“I
told
you, it's not relevant.”

I pulled the letter toward me and studied the incomprehensible type.

“Originally, I had the idea I'd have the operation on November first,” my father said as she continued to rummage through the file. “On my birthday. It would be a rebirth.” But a year of hormone treatment is customary before surgery, and my father had barely begun the regimen. “So now my birthday is May seventh.”

“Aha!” My father had found what she was looking for. This was a document she was eager for me to inspect—once she got it out of its protective wrappings. The extraction took a while: she kept it in a plastic sheath inside a hardback folder bound in elastic straps. It seemed to be some sort of diploma.

“Beautiful!” my father said, handing it over to me with a flourish, then leaning over my shoulder to admire it. “You see how nice and official it is? With that stamp, too.” She pointed to the imprint of a blue medical cross, floating over a blue ocean wave. “Signed by Dr. Sanguan Kunaporn himself. The great magician!” The document was titled, in English, in all caps, “POST-OPERATIVE MEDICAL CERTIFICATE.” Its declaration, also in English, was sloppily typed, whether due to language difficulties or assembly-line haste, I couldn't say. It read as follows:

“Nineteen thirty-seven?” I said.

“Yaaas”—she had altered the birth date on her medical records, shedding a decade—“they might not have operated on someone of my advanced age.”

She returned to the filing cabinet in search of more folders. I returned to studying the cast-aside letter from the psychologist who “didn't know what she was talking about.” I looked up at my father. Her back was to me. I looked down at the letter.

Who was I in that moment? Girl reporter, snooping on her own family member? My father's daughter, exhibiting the same craftiness and stealth? A common thief? It wasn't an act I would have condoned in my professional life. And yet, as my hand slid the letter soundlessly across the desk, I was already formulating my rationale: You think you can alter your story? Fine. I intend to document mine.

————

“Susaaan!” My father was standing at the foot of the stairs. “Susaaan!” I had retreated to my room with a book, intent on five minutes alone. Then, reveille. “Susaaan! Come here! I want you to see this.”

“See what?”

“Just come down. It's on the screen.”

I dreaded the summons to her monitor, never knowing which of her obsessions would be on display: her favorite Leni Riefenstahl films, her favorite mountaineering films, her favorite Leni Riefenstahl
in
mountaineering films, her favorite Wagner opera productions, her favorite hagiographies of Hungarian martyrs, her favorite NASA videos of simulated Mars landings.

“Susaaan! Come look!”

She was waiting for me in the hallway in the Little Red Riding Hood bathrobe. Reluctantly I followed into the living room.

“Sit there,” she said, waving the remote control toward one of the Naugahyde movie-screening chairs. She settled in the other one and hit the Play button. Nothing happened, a not unusual occurrence. She went over to the recalcitrant VCR player and began twisting at knobs, pulling at wires, then peering in the slot with a flashlight.

“It was working fine a second ago.” Pause. “Did you touch the remote control?”

“I just got here!”

“Waaall, don't touch it,” my father said. She peered behind the VCR player. “Oh wait a minute, wait a minute, maybe we need to switch from Channel 3 to Channel 4.” I braced myself, for the verbal torrent. “Okay, no, no, wait, it may be the cable is in the wrong jack. Yes, that must be it. No, yes, waaall. … Aaah-haaa!, Okay, so now this one goes to ‘Line Out,' so if we move it to Line In,' no, yes, wait, now that's the other wire that needs to …”

“I think you need to click where it says ‘VCR' on the remote control.”

“No,
deaaar
, that's not the problem.” A filibuster on the intricacies of A/V input-output plugs followed.

I reached over and hit the VCR button. The video began to roll. My father inspected me doubtfully, then sat back down.

On the TV screen, an operating theater appeared. The camera wheeled around, then zoomed in on a bloody midsection. A surgery was under way. Hers.

“I don't want to see this.”

“It's well done,” my father said. “I sent a copy to my endocrinologist, and he found it very interesting.”

I said I didn't care. “I still don't want to see it.”

But I sat there watching anyway. All I could think of was a cooking show, Julia Child in surgical scrubs:
Slice the fish lengthwise. Fillet with a well-sharpened paring knife. Set aside the skin for later. …
At least Julia would have been armed with a stiff drink.

After a few minutes, I studied the floor.

“You're not watching!”

I raised my head, keeping my eyelids at half-mast. Which didn't block the sound track, a tinkly “inspirational” medley that repeated every ten seconds.

“It's Thai pop,” my father said. “They put it on there for me.”

“They” being the Thai hospital staff who had agreed, at my father's request, to record the surgical procedure with her video equipment. “They only did the highlights,” my father said. The film clicked off. I got up and left the room.