In the Darkroom

by Susan Faludi

  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 e
xpert 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.

  On paper. On the street, any urge to celebrate Hungary’s declared tolerance was undercut by fear.

  Soon after I arrived that summer of 2008, my father threw a party to introduce me to “my new trans friends.” I was pleased. For one thing, she was celebrating my presence. She even bought a cake for the occasion, a Sacher torte she had decorated with the message, “Susan—Welcome to Hungary!” For another, it seemed she had found a way to break out of a lifelong isolation. “Before, I was like other men,” she said. “I didn’t talk to other people. Now I can talk to anybody.” Now, not only was she hosting a party; she was trying to assemble what she called, rather hopefully, “the Hungarian trans community.”

  A few years earlier, my father had stumbled upon TS-Online, at the time the only Hungarian transsexual website. She e-mailed a few of the people who had posted comments and nearly two dozen agreed to get together. My father volunteered her front deck as their gathering place.

  At the first meeting, the group settled on a name: the Hungarian Tranny Club. (The term “tranny,” regarded as a slur in the United States, had no such resonance in Hungary then.) My father proposed they make it an official organization, registered with the state. Her efforts met with resistance. Some were afraid to have their names on a government list in a hostile society; others felt ambivalent about the very idea of making common cause with other transgender people. “I don’t want a ‘trans community,’ ” Jazmin, one of the Tranny Club’s reluctant members, told me when we met, clipping the air with a karate chop. “I am not a trans. I am a woman, and that’s it.”

  The second meeting of the Hungarian Tranny Club convened at the home of Lorelei, a retired police officer who only used that name when he wore women’s clothes; he had not changed his sex and wasn’t sure that he wanted to. For now, he considered himself a transvestite and cross-dressed in secret; in his public life, he lived as a man. My father showed up early and received a warm welcome. “Lorelei was glad to have someone his age to talk to!” my father told me. The other club members were decades younger. My father settled into a chair and surveyed Lorelei’s living room. “He had a lot of books,” she said. “The walls were lined with books.” My father took a closer look. “And there were all these books about how bad the Jews were. Nazi books. Mein Kampf.”

  Others arrived. “And they looked at the books, too,” my father said. “And one of them says, ‘Oh, you have Mein Kampf aaalso!’ And another says, ‘There’s some good things in that book.’ ” My father, who had been sitting quietly, spoke up. “Hitler was an idiot,” she said. There was an awkward pause. Then, my father recalled, another guest said: “Oh no, Hitler wasn’t an idiot. He had some good things to say.”

  With that, the subject was dropped, and my father presented her research: to set up a state-recognized organization, members had to pay an annual fee of 10,000 forints (about $40 at the time), and at least ten members had to sign a petition requesting official status. At the end of the meeting, the petition was passed around the room. Only five signed it. My father was furious. “They are a bunch of ’fraidy cats.” When she got home, she solved the signature problem: “I faked them.”

  Thus constituted, the Tranny Club soon disbanded. One member, a financial adviser who feared losing clients, announced that she didn’t feel “safe” belonging to a club. Lorelei said he didn’t want to appear anywhere publicly in a dress. Another member said she didn’t want to participate because she was “a married woman.” Still another said she was too busy adopting a baby. Then several transsexuals said they didn’t want any transvestites in the club.

  “You mean you want to discriminate?” my father retorted.

  In the end, they agreed not to have an organization at all—just a website. One afternoon as we were sitting, per usual, at her computer, my father showed me the club’s home page, which she had illustrated with a picture of horses grazing on the Great Hungarian Plain and a photo of herself, posed in her backyard swing. The caption under the picture read, “Stefánie Faludi, Presiding Woman.”

  My father invited all the former members of the Hungarian Tranny Club to the “Susan—Welcome to Hungary!” brunch. Two accepted: Jazmin and Lorelei. A third guest, also a male-to-female transsexual, was added at the last moment: Tatianna, a Hungarian expat who happened to be visiting the country from Florida. My father filled out the roster with some non-trans guests: two feminist professors she’d met at a literary salon, a young woman who wrote for a weekly city magazine, and the sociologist and LGBT scholar Judit Takács. And Ilonka. “She can help me with the cooking,” my father said.

  Early that morning, Ilonka arrived with ten bags of groceries and housekeeping supplies. My father had asked her to clean the house, too. While we were setting the table, Tatianna showed up, wrung out from the climb on a blazing hot day. She’d taken the bus from Pest. She was wearing red suede boots, a black knee-length skirt, and, over her henna-red wig, a jaunty wide-brimmed straw hat, which, by the time she arrived at the top of my father’s steep street, was perched at a perilous angle. She staggered in the door, batting hat and hair back in place with a devil-may-care swat. At the age of sixty-three, Tatianna wasn’t trying to play the ingénue. I liked her at once.

  “I nearly killed myself coming up your hill,” she announced to my father, collapsing into the nearest chair and kicking off her boots. She patted her midriff. “But it’s okay, I need to lose some weight.” From her purse, she extricated a jumbo bag of mini-Hershey’s chocolate bars and passed it around. “Not too much weight!” she added.

  My father uncorked a bottle of Hungarian pálinka and poured a shot for each of us while Tatianna told her story. This was her fifth trip to Hungary since she’d emigrated to Venezuela with her parents in 1947, when she—then a he—was a toddler. As an adult, still a male, he’d moved to Florida, married and raised two sons, worked as an engineer, and pursued photography and collected cameras in her free time. (Her latest purchase�
�a big digital camera—dangled from one shoulder.)

  “I started wearing women’s clothes when I was seven or eight,” Tatianna said. “As soon as my parents went to the movies, I’d be in my mother’s underwear drawer, I’d be putting on her makeup.” In 2006, Tatianna had checked into a hospital in Trinidad, Colorado. “Sex-Change Capital of the World!” she noted. (The late Dr. Stanley Biber, a pioneering sex-reassignment surgeon, performed thousands of sex-change operations there between 1969 and his retirement in 2003, at the age of eighty, after which he was replaced by a surgeon who was herself a transsexual.) Afterward, Tatianna’s family refused to recognize her new status. So, Tatianna was still presenting herself as male much of the time, even as her anatomy and every piece of identification in her wallet declared her a woman. Later, when we exchanged e-mails, I noticed she went by a man’s name even on the Internet—a name that wasn’t her original male name, a new male identity that concealed a new female identity.

  “It must be a relief,” I ventured, “being away from home and getting to dress how you want.”

  Tatianna gave a pained laugh. When she’d arrived in Budapest a week earlier, she’d reported to the state agency that issues Hungarian ID papers. (She’d retained her old citizenship, and Hungarian citizens living in Hungary are expected to carry state-issued identification cards.) The state bureaucrats would only recognize her as male, because that’s what it said on her original Hungarian birth certificate. The clerk behind the desk “wanted me to take off my wig and all my makeup, right on the spot, so she could take my picture as a ‘man.’ ” Tatianna stood her ground. It took several days of fights with various supervisors up the food chain, but eventually she got her ID.