In the Darkroom (44 page)

In the center of the factory's converted locker room, a mirrored disco ball started spinning, an enticement to the dance floor. Nobody made a move. My father cast about for a familiar face. Seeing none, she led the way to a corner sofa. We perched in a row, me in the middle. “THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO HAVE A STAGE SHOW,” my father yelled over the booming speakers. “IT STARTS AT MIDNIGHT.” I checked my wristwatch. It was ten o'clock.

I turned to Peter and began to apologize. Surely there were more pleasant ways to spend his one evening in Budapest than being pummeled by '80s dance music. Peter said he didn't mind. He looked exhausted. “Maybe this is the youth your father never had,” he volunteered. I said I didn't think so, and then wondered why I was being such a wet blanket. Much to my amazement, my father had fallen into conversation, or at least a monologue, with a partygoer seated on her other side. “Chloe,” as she identified herself, sported a teased red wig, tube top, and vinyl micro-mini.

“WHAT ARE YOU TWO TALKING ABOUT?” I shouted. Michael Jackson's “Thriller” was drowning out every other word.

“ME, OF COURSE!” my father said. “I'M TELLING CHLOE ABOUT MY SURGERY.”

My father's interlocutor pointed to her cell phone and said something in Hungarian.

“WHAT?” my father said.

Chloe repeated her words at full bellow.

“WHAT DID SHE SAY?” I yelled in my father's ear.

“CHLOE SAYS, ‘THIS IS A PICTURE OF ME!' ”

Chloe held up her phone. On the screen was a photo of herself posed in a field of flowers. She talked some more in Hungarian.

“CHLOE SAYS SHE IS A COMPUTER PROGRAMMER,” my father relayed, before shouting something back.

“WHAT DID YOU SAY?”

“I SAID, ‘GOOD, MAYBE YOU CAN FIX MY COMPUTER!' ”

Chloe nodded, then fell silent. The conversation had reached its terminus, or maybe terminal.

I went to get another pear juice, but the bar had run out. My head was beginning to pound. I retreated to the “Conversation Nook,” where no one was conversing, and collapsed for a few minutes on one of the foam-spewing armchairs, hands over ears. Midnight came and went without a stage show. By then, Peter had drifted off. His chin sagged on his chest. I envied his oblivion.

From the speakers, Army of Lovers was belting out its gay-liberation anthem and Eurochart hit, “Sexual Revolution”:

“WHY ISN'T ANYONE DANCING?” I asked my father, as the hands on my watch inched toward one a.m.

She shrugged and her mouth moved.

“WHAT?”

“I SAID, ‘THEY ARE TOO SHY.' ”

For all the flamboyant outfits, the room was a sea of reticence. It was half past one when, one by one, a few guests steeled their nerve and ventured onto the dance floor. For a quarter hour, my father studied their movements. Then she handed me her purse and joined them.

I watched as she and eventually a half-dozen others gyrated in place, each in their own bubble, dancing by themselves. My mind traveled to the weekends in my adolescence when my father had tried to teach me how to dance the waltz, and then excoriated me for leading.

Peter woke up. “Where's your father?” he said.

I gestured toward the dance floor. Stefi was hopping tentatively on one heel, then the other. She looked so alone out there. Everyone looked so alone. I handed Peter my father's purse—and my own—and got up off the couch.

My father and I circled around each other for a few minutes. Then I put out my hand and she took it. I couldn't teach her the “female steps” to a Viennese waltz, but I'd done my time in New York's Limelight. I knew what to do with Michael Jackson. I led her through a few moves and soon we were swinging each other around. It occurred to me that I hadn't danced like this in ages. It occurred to me that I was having a good time.

I glanced over at the couch, where Peter was doing his best, through drooping eyelids, to stay awake. He gave me a drowsy smile. I looked back at my father. She was grinning, and not that anxious half-grin she so often had on her face. I held up my arm and she twirled underneath it like a pro.

“What we have here is a lot of broken things,” Hanna Spiegel said, teetering on a stepladder in her bedroom, wrestling with a bulky package lodged on the upper shelf of her closet. She was talking about family.

“None of the Grünbergers are in good relations. We were left so few of us—and to end like this? It is something impossible to understand. The whole family is in bad connection.” She climbed another step on the ladder and stuck her head inside the shelf. “But your father, he has broken
every
connection. He has broken with everyone. All these years, he did not want to know his parents. And why? It is the great family mystery.” She gave the recalcitrant object in the closet several more yanks, then pivoted to meet my gaze. “And now, this thing”—she was referring to the news I had brought her, of my father's operation—“now he breaks even the connection with himself.” The package came free. I followed my father's cousin into her living room in Kfar Saba, a small city outside Tel Aviv. The name means “Grandfather's Village.”

Hanna placed the taped and trussed mystery lump on the table and began unwinding its dust-laden layers of cardboard, plastic, and tissue paper, as if unraveling a mummy. When she had folded back the final sheath, she reached inside and handed me the contents. I staggered with the weight.

“That's your grandmother's fur coat,” she said. “Well, one of them. The
least
nice one.” Rozi and Jenő Grünberger had arrived in Israel in the spring of 1955 with little money and no prospects. They moved into a bleak apartment in a poor neighborhood for off-the-boat immigrants in Ramat Gan, a satellite of Tel Aviv. Jenő found work as a part-time bookkeeper; his paycheck didn't cover the bills. “Rozi had to get this job in a factory that made these plastic aprons with tails around them, ugly like I don't know what,” Hanna said. “It was so dreadful for her. Because she was a
lady
.” Rozi wheedled money from her wealthier male relatives and did her best to keep up appearances. “A new dress must be worn to every occasion, and your shoes had to be according to your pocketbook, everything to match,” Hanna recalled. At home, Rozi maintained a set of color-coordinated wash and dust cloths, each designated for a different chore. “Your grandmother would have a big fight with every maid. It was always, ‘She doesn't know how to
clean
!' Your grandmother kept her apartment like a museum, like something in a Martha Stewart magazine.” Eventually Rozi convinced various male relatives to buy her nearly a dozen custom-made fur coats, stoles, and wraps, talismen of her previous pampered existence as a haute-bourgeois princess. Several were minks, from the celebrated Israeli furrier house of Stefan Braun (Rozi's sister's husband was Braun's accountant). The fur that wound up in Hanna's closet was unborn lamb. Its sleeves were wide and flared, like angel's wings, and its custom-made fasteners designed to close on the inside for maximum aesthetic appeal.

I laid the heavy garment on the dining-room table and ran my fingers along the perfectly cut fur panels, the fine, almost invisible stitching. The coat seemed so alien in this tropical room with its AC and modern furnishings, as though it had wandered in from another realm, a lost but regal lamb far from its Mitteleuropean flock. For all that, it breathed a greater ghost of my grandmother than anything I'd ever encountered. Rozi and I never met.

I had been in Kfar Saba close to a week, staying with Hanna and her husband, Yair, in their apartment. It was an indication of that “bad connection,” my father's but also mine, that I had trouble answering the standard questions El Al's security screeners ask at boarding: “Who are your relatives in Israel? Where do they live? When's the last time you talked to them? …” I'd found Hanna not through family introductions but on
JewishGen.org
, a genealogical Internet site for researching and locating Jewish ancestors. A few days after I'd posted a query, an exclamatory e-mail appeared in my in-box:

She was my father's first cousin, though she felt more like mine, both in temperament (feminist) and age (only eight years older than me). Hanna was an art therapist for traumatized combat veterans; Yair, who had lost vision in one eye and hearing in both ears in the 1970 War of Attrition, worked for the Israel Defense Forces.

After Hanna had returned this family relic to its cardboard sarcaphogus, she opened a few rumpled baggies and cascaded old photographs onto the coffee table. It was a ritual I'd grow accustomed to in the time I spent with the Grünberger and Friedman diaspora in Kfar Saba, Tel Aviv, and Netanya, and in Basel, Prague, and New York. Everyone had their cache of photos, their visual evidence of Old World elegance and decorum, stored in plastic bags in shoe boxes and manila envelopes in bureau drawers. The black-and-white snapshots, some mounted on postcard pasteboard, showcased women in furs and heels, men with walking canes and watch fobs, posing at the mountain spas, beach resorts, ski lodges, and five-star hotels of interwar Central Europe. And a few showed a small boy in a double-breasted jacket and matching shorts or a cashmere coat and tie or a pair of custom-made lederhosen, peeking in from the edge of the frame, cavorting on the running board of a Renault, gazing from behind a rock at a beribboned girl, clutching his father's pipe and resting a tentative hand on a cousin's shoulder: Pista, as he would have been known to everyone else in these photos.

Here was the whole extended, entwined family tree, branching on the Grünberger side from the great trunk of Leopold and Sidonia and the brood they raised in the grand house in Spišské Podhradie, except that the tree's leaves now lay fallen haphazardly onto one coffee table or another. And so I was introduced to my relatives, one by arbitrary one, in order of appearance as their images were pulled from the pile.

A fashionable woman leans on a man's arm in a square in Venice or poses before a pyramid in Egypt—the glamorous Grünberger girls, Rozi and her three sisters on their honeymoons and vacations and shopping sprees. “They were always in a quarrel over who was the most beautiful,” Hanna said. The girls were raised to be “accomplished,” in a nonthreatening, finishing-school sort of way, tutored in dance and tennis, French and piano. Their real calling was to be lovely ornaments, capable of drawing wealthy husbands who would keep them ornamented—and protected. Which is why, Hanna noted, every one of them married a man a decade older.

All four sisters survived the war, though none without scars. Gabriella, the third sister, lost her husband—he was deported to Sachsenhausen, worked nearly to death, and then shot into a mass grave. On a train heading to Miskolcs, one of her husband's former employees recognized Gabriella and her daughter, Marika, and denounced them to the authorities. Mother and child were dragged out at the next stop and sent to Ravensbrück, later to Bergen-Belsen.

Hanna extracted several more snapshots from the pile. “Here's Árpád,” she said. A dapper man with a cleft chin, looking sharp in a tailored suit and fedora, strolls along a boardwalk in the Czech spa town of Carlsbad in 1937, slaloms down a ski slope with friends in the High Tatras, poses in his backyard with his family, one protective hand on his wife's shoulder, the other on his daughter's, a little girl in braids and bows. Árpád, the oldest of Leopold and Sidonia's four sons, who “ran the wood business with your great-grandfather,” Hanna said, and who would die with his wife, Margit, and daughter, Verushka, in 1944, when the house in which they'd taken refuge with other Jewish partisans was shot up by the SS, then doused with gasoline and burned to the ground. It was only seven years since his Carlsbad promenade. Árpád's cleft chin, I registered, was just like my father's, and mine.

“And here's your grandmother again,” Hanna said, handing me another photograph of Rozi, in a veiled cloche and bejeweled, posing with her husband, Jenő, an austere presence in a formal dark suit and bowler hat, and her son, wearing a double-breasted coat with brass buttons.

I'd seen many photos of Rozi. When I went to Tel Aviv to visit my father's cousin Marika Barbash (who, with her mother, Gabriella, survived Bergen-Belsen), she pulled from her grocery bag of pictures some shots of Rozi and Jenő taken in a studio, Rozi in a black dress, pearl necklace, and matching pearl earrings. “Always with the pearls,” Marika observed.

Hanna pulled out several more photos from this period: Rozi on a shopping trip in Italy, laden with purchases; Rozi dressed for a night on the town in one of her minks and sporting an elaborate coiffure. “Rozi was very beautiful, with many lovers, and every night she was going to the theater or the opera,” Hanna said. “Pista would be brought in before she left to get his good-night kiss, and that was it. Night after night, he was alone in the house with the nanny. It was like a royal family. Pista had everything—private teachers, governesses, expensive toys—but there were no parents there.” One picture recorded a rare domestic scene: Rozi is seated on the emerald-velvet love seat in the salon at Ráday 9, the room my father described as being furnished in a “Louis the XVI style.” Seated awkwardly on her lap, as if someone has just plunked him there for the picture, is a toddler in a Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit, white kneesocks and tiny polished lace-up boots. The photograph captures an equivocal look on Rozi's face; she peers down at the child on her lap as if she isn't entirely sure what his relation to her might be. My father, clutching a teddy bear, pivots away from his mother and stares into the camera. “My father visited Rozi when Pista was five or six years old,” Hanna said, “and he told me he thought to himself, ‘This is a very sad child.' He could see he had no love.”