by Susan Faludi
I couldn’t quite put the disparities into focus: Motor Trend meets Marie Claire. Was this why I’d flown fifty-six hundred miles? Here we were, meeting after twenty-seven years, a high-stakes reunion after a historic Glasnost, and she was acting like she’d just returned from Williams-Sonoma by way of NAPA Auto Parts.
“Ilonka helped me pick it out,” my father said, handing me a saucer to admire.
Ilonka—I had met her; for some years after my father returned to Hungary she’d been what he called his “lady friend.” She had accompanied my father to a family wedding in California, but I hadn’t gleaned much from our encounter: she spoke no English. I wasn’t clear on their relationship—though Ilonka would tell me later that it was platonic. She was married and very Catholic. For years she seemed to function as an unpaid housekeeper for my father, cleaning, cooking, sewing. She helped him pick out the furnishings for his house, from the lace curtains to the vintage Hungarian Zsolnay porcelain (purchased to impress a snooty couple, distant kin of Ilonka’s, who had come to dinner at my father’s house one night; the husband had claimed to be a “count”). My father had taken Ilonka on trips around Europe and loaned money to her family. When one of her grandchildren was born, my father assumed the duties of godfather, now godmother.
“How is Ilonka?” I asked.
My father made a face. “I don’t see her so much.” She took the saucer from me and placed it carefully on the cabinet shelf with its mates. The problem evidently was Ilonka’s husband. “It was fine with him when I was the man buying things for his wife and giving money to his family. But now that I’m a woman, I’ve been banished.”
She shut and secured the cupboard doors. We went around to the front. It took some effort to hoist ourselves into the elevated cockpit. My father disengaged the clutch and shifted into reverse and we lurched backward, nearly plowing into a parked car. I noted with dismay that the makers of the well-appointed Exclusive had excluded one feature: a usable rear window. The tiny transom above the commode showed only empty sky.
At the pay booth, she fished through her purse for her wallet. The ticket taker, another Magyar babushka, stuck her head out the window and gave my father the once-over. As the bills were counted, I studied my father, too. I could see the source of her thickening hair (a row of implant plugs) and the lightened color (a dye job). Her skin had a glossy sheen. Foundation powder? Estrogen? What struck me most forcefully, though, wasn’t what was new. I’d spotted it in the airport—that old nervous half-smile, that same faraway gaze.
On the road, she steered the lumbering Gigantor into the fast lane. It was rush hour. A motorist trailing us in a rusted subcompact blasted his horn. My father leaned out the window and swore at him. The honking stopped. “When they see I’m a laaady, they pipe right down,” she said.
We merged onto a highway, and I gazed out the window at the dilapidated industrial back lots flying by, a few smokestacks belching brown haze, boarded-up warehouses with greasy windows, concrete highway dividers slathered in graffiti. We passed through a long stretch of half-finished construction, grasses growing high over oxidizing rebar. Along the shoulder, billboards proliferated, shiny fresh faces flashing perfect teeth, celebrating the arrival of post-Communist consumption: Citibank, Media Markt, T-Mobile, McDonald’s. Big balls of old mistletoe parched in the branches of trees. Along the horizon, I could make out the red-roofed gables of a distant hamlet.
Half an hour later, we entered the capital. My father threaded the monster vehicle through the tight streets of downtown Pest, shadowed by Art Nouveau manses nouveau no longer, facades grimy and pockmarked by a war sixty years gone. A canary-yellow trolley rattled by, right out of a children’s book. We drove past the back end of the Hungarian Parliament, a supersized gingerbread tribute to the Palace of Westminster. In the adjacent plaza, a mob of young men in black garb and black boots were chanting, waving signs and Hungarian flags.
“What’s that about?” I asked.
No answer.
“A demonstration?”
Silence.
“What—”
“It’s nothing. A stupid thing.”
Then we were through the maze and hugging an embankment. The Royal Palace, a thousand-foot-long Neo-Baroque complex perched on the commanding heights of Castle Hill, swung into view on the far bank of the Danube, the Buda side. My father swerved the camper onto a ramp and we ascended the fabled Chain Bridge, its cast-iron suspension an engineering wonder of the world when it opened in 1849, the first permanent bridge in Hungary to span the Danube. We passed the first of the two pairs of stone lions that guard the bridgeheads, their gaze stoical, their mouths agape in perpetual, benevolent roar. A faint memory stirred.
The camper crested the bridge and descended to the Buda side. We followed the tram tracks along the river for a while, then began the trek into the hills. The thoroughfares became leafier, the houses larger, gated, many surrounded by high walls.
“When I was a teenager, I used to ride my bicycle around here,” my father volunteered. “The Swabian kids would say, ‘Hey, you dirty little Jew.’ ” She lifted a hand from the wheel and swatted at the memory, brushing away an annoying gnat. “Yaaas but,” she answered, as if in dialogue with herself, “that was just a stupid thing.”
“It doesn’t sound—” I began.
“I look to the future, never the past,” my father said. A fitting maxim, I thought, for the captain of a vehicle without a rear window.
Growing up, I’d heard almost nothing about the paternal side of my family. My father rarely spoke of his parents, and never to them. I learned my paternal grandfather’s first name in 1967, when a letter arrived from Tel Aviv, informing us of his death. My mother recalled aerogrammes with an Israeli postmark arriving in the early years of their marriage, addressed to István. They were from my father’s mother. My mother couldn’t read them—they were in Hungarian—and my father wouldn’t. My mother wrote back a few times in English, bland little notes about life as an American housewife: “Between taking care of Susan, cooking, and housekeeping, I’m very busy at home. … Steven works a lot, plus many evenings doing ‘overtime.’ ” An excuse for his silence? By the early ’60s, the aerogrammes had stopped.
I knew a few fundamentals. I knew my father’s birth name: István Friedman, or rather, Friedman István; Hungarians put the surname first. He’d adopted Faludi after World War II (“a good authentic Hungarian name,” my father had explained to me), then Steven—or Steve, as he preferred—after he’d moved to the United States in 1953. I knew he was born and raised Jewish in Budapest. I knew he was a teenager during the Nazi occupation. But in all the years we lived under the same roof, and no matter how many times I asked and wheedled and sometimes pleaded for details, he spoke of only a few instances from wartime Hungary. They were more snapshots than stories, visual shrapnel that rattled around in my childish imagination, devoid of narrative.
In one, it is winter and dead bodies litter the street. My father sees the frozen carcass of a horse in a gutter and hacks off pieces to eat. In another, my father is on a boulevard in Pest when a man in uniform orders him into the Grand Hotel Royal. Jews are being shot in the basement. My father survives by hiding in the stairwell. In the third, my father “saves” his parents. How? I’d ask, hungry for details, for once inviting a filibuster. Shrug. “Waaall. I had an armband.” And? “And … I saaaved them.”
As the camper climbed the switchbacks, I gazed out at the terra-cotta rooftops of the hidden estates, trying to divine the outlines of my father’s youth. As a child and until the war broke out, he’d spent every summer in these hills. The Friedmans’ primary address was on the other side of the Danube, in a capacious flat in one of the two large residential buildings my grandfather owned in fashionable districts of Pest. My father referred to the family quarters at Ráday utca 9 as “the royal apartment.” But every May of my father’s childhood, the Friedmans would decamp, along with their maid and cook, to my grandfather’s other property
in the hills, the family villa. There, an only child called Pista—diminutive for István—would play on the sloping lawn with its orchards and outbuildings (including a cottage for the resident gardener), paddle in the sunken swimming pool, and, the year he contracted rheumatic fever, lie on a chaise longue in the sun, tended by a retinue of hired help. As we ascended into the hills of Buda I thought, here I am in the city that was the forge of my father’s youth, the anvil on which his character was struck. Now it was the stage set of her prodigal return. This proximity gave me a strange sensation. All my life I’d had the man without the context. Now I had the context, but with a hitch. The man was gone.
3
The Original from the Copy
I’d met the lions on the Chain Bridge before, when I was eleven. We were on a family vacation in the summer of 1970: my mother, my father, my three-year-old brother, and me. It was, all and all, a vexed journey. One evening we drove across the river to attend an outdoor performance of Aida. I remember the crossing for its rare good cheer; family trips were always fraught affairs. The car seemed to float over the Danube, the cable lights winking at us from above, the leonine sentries heralding our arrival to the city. My father reminisced about how his nurse used to push his pram past the lions and over the bridge to the base of the Sikló, a charming apple-red funicular that chugged up the Castle Hill palisade. He told us the story about the sculptor who had forgotten to carve tongues for the lions: a child had pointed out their absence at the opening ceremonies, and the humiliated artist leaped off the bridge into the Danube. It was a popular tale in Hungary, he’d said, but “probably not true.”
Castle Hill, my father informed us, was honeycombed with subterranean caverns, carved out of the limestone millennia ago by thermal springs coming up “from the deep.” The occupying Turks had turned them into a giant labyrinth. “They say Vlad the Impaler—the real-life Dracula!—was locked up down there.” During World War II, the caves were retrofitted to accommodate air raid shelters and a military hospital. Thousands of the city’s inhabitants took refuge here for the fifty days of the Siege of Budapest. “It’s said that some people even had their mail delivered here,” my father reported. “But that’s probably a made-up story, too.”
Some days earlier, we had driven to Lake Balaton, south of Budapest. I remember walking a long way out into the shallow lake, the water only reaching my thighs. No matter how far I fled from shore, I could still hear my parents, their voices raised in acrid argument. The sour climate extended beyond our domestic circle. A scrim of sullenness seemed to hang over every encounter: the long waits in queues to receive a stamp so that we could proceed to other long queues to be issued other certifications of approval from scowling apparatchiks; the pitiful settee spitting yellowed foam in the guest room my father had rented; our aged landlady’s resentful eyes, sunk deep in a walnut-gnarled face, as she gave us each morning a serving of boiled raw milk, a thick curdled rind floating on its surface; the murky intentions of the “priest” in vestments who approached us one day after we’d toured the Benedictine monastery of Pannonhalma, asking my father if he’d deliver a letter to “friends” in the States—a government agent, my father said. The day we crossed the border into Hungary from Austria, customs officers combed through every inch of our luggage. My father stood to the side, uncomplaining, eager to please, a strange servility in his voice.
Throughout that visit, my father was in search of “authentic” Magyar folk culture. Driving through the countryside, we stopped to watch “traditional village dances” that were, in fact, staged tourist attractions: the government paid locals to whirl in what was billed as the national dress, the women in ornamental aprons and floral wreaths, the men in black vests and high leather boots. (As I’d learn later, the outfits and dances were only marginally traditional: they had been enshrined by urban nationalists in the mid-nineteenth century, and again in the interwar years, to create the impression of an ancient Magyar heritage.) In a village shop, my father insisted I try on folk dresses. As I modeled elaborately embroidered frocks, while cradling an elaborately clad Hungarian doll in my arms, my father took what felt like far too many rolls of film. The shop owner played stylist. Eventually my father purchased a lace-up bodice-and-dirndl number with a puffy-sleeved embroidered chemise, bell-shaped blue skirt, and a starched white apron with a tulip and rosebud motif. He thought I could wear it to school. His American daughter thought there was no way in hell she was going to junior high dressed as the Hungarian Heidi.
That fall, there ensued a series of tense standoffs over The Dress. My father would demand I put it on in the morning before school. I’d wait until he left for work, then run upstairs and change. He caught me once in suburban mufti. I was ordered to wear the costume to school the next day, which I did in a state of high mortification. Eventually he lost interest, and I banished the dress to the back of my closet. A year or so later, with hippie garb in vogue, I dug the offending garment out from its purgatory, detached the embroidered chemise from the rest of the outfit, and paired it with acid-washed jeans. It was my attempt at an au courant peasant look. Which was about as “authentic” as my father’s Hungarian folk fashions.
The visual chronicle of this vacation resides in a stack of Kodak carousels that my father kept for the rest of her life in an attic closet, slide after slide of my mother and me and my brother in the shadow of Gothic cathedrals and castle ruins, leaning against the rails of a Danube cruise boat, waving from a train at a saluting Pioneer scout in starched uniform and red neckerchief, or staring up at the mammoth Hungarian Parliament topped by a red star. We often face away from the camera. Many of the shots are taken from a distance, as if my father were on safari, tracking a fleeing herd.
On that long-ago trip we took a break from sightseeing one day to visit two apartment buildings in Pest, fin de siècle Vienna-Secession edifices once grandly appointed, now derelict and coated in soot. Tatty shutters hung catawampus over the graceful arched windows of Váci út 28; the ceremonial balconies of Ráday utca 9 were visibly rotting. At Ráday 9, we climbed a set of dimly lit stairs to knock on a door. And toured a series of high-ceilinged rooms, partitioned now with plywood boards, shabbily furnished and overflowing with tenants, several families jammed into living quarters meant for one. I remember especially my father’s distress. This building, like the other one, once belonged to my grandfather. The flat was my father’s childhood domicile, the “royal apartment.” On the sidewalk again, my father looked back up at the dingy facade of Ráday 9, where a blond girl in a white hair ribbon peered down from a crumbling double balcony, the one attached to the opulent rooms where a boy named Pista had grown up. He took a photograph. It was the last frame on the roll.
In 1940, when Pista turned thirteen, he’d received a Pathé 9.5mm movie camera. It was a bar mitzvah gift from his father. From then on—in Hungary where he joined an amateur film society during the war and a youth film club right after, in Denmark where he started a movie-distribution business, in Brazil where he made documentaries in the rain forests and on the pampas—my father would continue to prefer the moving picture over the still one. “With photography, you get one chance,” my father told me once. “You’re stuck with that shot. With film, you can cut it up and change it all around. You can make the story come out the way you want it.”
For a brief time in my infancy, my father’s filmmaking enterprises were domestic. In a box in my cellar, I possess the results, salvaged from a trash can, where my mother had relegated them after the divorce. A set of metal canisters holds the reels of the 16mm home movies my father had made from 1959 to 1961, the two years following my birth. My parents and I were living then in Jackson Heights, Queens, in a tiny upstairs rental in a brick duplex, and the films record the banal milestones of newlywed life: my mother large with child and eating pizza in her third trimester, my mother pushing a baby stroller and washing diapers in a plastic bucket, my first birthday, my first day at the beach, my first Easter Parade and Christ
mas. The “director,” as my father listed himself in the credits, makes an occasional appearance. In a shot filmed with the aid of a tripod, my father poses just inside the front door of our apartment, impersonating the man he aspired to be. He is wearing a suit and tie, a herringbone coat, leather gloves, a fedora. His gaze is trained on the camera. He leans over to give my mother an awkward peck on the cheek. Then he gives a stagy wave and mimes something in the direction of my mother, his eyes still fixed on the lens, and heads out the door. It’s a silent film, but I can script the “Father Knows Best” voice-over.
The longest reel is dedicated to Christmas. The camera lingers on the tree—reverential close-ups of frosted ornaments, tinsel strands, a large electric nativity star. Then a slow pan over the three red-and-white-striped stockings tacked to the wall in descending order. Poppa Bear, Mama Bear, Baby Bear. And finally the ceremonial unwrapping of the gifts: my father holds up each of his to the camera—tie, striped pajamas, Champion Dart Board. He mugs a forced grin and mouths, “Just what I wanted for Christmaaas!” My mother sits cross-legged on the floor in a ruffled blouse and pleated skirt, staring at her gifts with a wan expression: apron, bedroom slippers, baby-doll nightie.
In the final minutes of “Susie’s First Christmas,” the camera shifts to an eight-month-old me, wobbling to a precarious standing position before the full-length hall mirror, baby-fat fingers scrabbling along the slick surface for a purchase. I press my nose and then crush my whole face against the mirror, as if searching for something behind the reflection. What the film hid, I thought as I watched it decades later, was my father. Who was nowhere more absent than in the brief moments when he appeared on-screen, surrounded by the props of his American family, parading an out-of-the-box identity before the camera, splicing himself, frame by frame, into a man whose story had been replaced by an image, an image of anyone and no one.
