In the Darkroom

by Susan Faludi

  “But you know what?” Dahlia said, shaking her head furiously. “It doesn’t work. Once a Jew, always a Jew. You can’t escape it. You can’t, you can’t, you can’t, you can’t.”

  I leaned against the railing, gazing out to the Mediterranean. Marika touched my arm. “Your father did something heroic,” she said. “He saved his parents from the Arrow Cross.”

  I was electrified. I’d lived with his boast since childhood. This was my first confirmation.

  “Rozi told me,” Marika said. “She was very proud of it.”

  More confirmation would come to me on that trip. Yudit Yarden spent much of 1944 in Váci 28, my grandfather’s building, which was by then a Yellow Star house. In early November of that year, after the Arrow Cross took over, the Yardens fled to a Swiss protected house. There they shared a room with forty others, including Rozi and Jenő, the estranged couple tossed back together by the vicissitudes of war. Yudit vividly recalled the bitter cold her family endured in the unheated room. She remembered, too, the absence of food, the sound of shooting by the river, and the rumors that the Arrow Cross were invading protected houses. In her memories of the Swiss safe house, one day in particular stood out—the day my father, impersonating an Arrow Cross guard, came and “took your grandparents away.”

  As Yudit told me this story, just as when Marika related the story she’d heard from Rozi, I wondered once again how this spectacular display of filial devotion could coexist with a lifetime of estrangement.

  My father’s cousin Peter Gordon recalled the showdown, back in the late ’70s, when he and his father Alexander had visited my father in New York. Alexander had begun questioning his nephew Pista: Why did he neglect Rozi? How could he be so cold to his own mother? “What are you? What is your character?” When Alexander kept pressing, my father exploded. Peter remembered the words my father had yelled: “When I saved my parents during the war, I was paid up, and that was it. I owed them nothing anymore.”

  As it turned out, my teenage father’s rescue of his parents wasn’t his only act of valor. Some days later, Yudit’s father, Gyula Yarden, was also taken from the Swiss protected house—by an actual Arrow Cross officer—and held in a detention center. Yudit remembered the destination as Andrássy út 60, the main headquarters of the Arrow Cross, but she wasn’t positive. Days went by with no news. “We were … desperated,” Yudit told me. She and her mother sought out Jenő and Rozi Friedman for support, but the couple made it plain there was nothing they could, or would, do. Then, a few days later, Yudit’s father returned to the Swiss protected house. “I think he was tortured by the fascists very hard,” Yudit told me, “because after that he always had big troubles with his legs and stomach.” But she could only speculate. “I know nothing for sure, because he never would speak of it.” He would speak of only one thing: how he was able to escape.

  Yudit leaned forward and rested her gnarled hands on my knees. “I must tell you that your father was very brave at 1944,” she said. “He saved my father from death.” She told me what her father had told her: Pista had marched into the building where the Arrow Cross was holding Gyula Yarden and announced, “I am taking this man to execution.” Pista was wearing an armband and carrying a rifle. Yudit’s father “went a step before him, and Pista walked after him with the gun. … And he brought him back to the Swiss house.”

  The Yardens were astonished at his nerve, and by something else. “My father couldn’t understand it,” Yudit said. “Why they didn’t think he was Jewish? Because Pista had a very Jewish face.”

  If I found the possibility of my father invading the fortress at Andrássy 60 mind-boggling, my father, for her part, found it inaccurate. “She’s not remembering it right,” she said when I relayed Yudit’s story. My father recalled rescuing Gyula Yarden not from Arrow Cross headquarters but from the walled-in ghetto in Budapest’s old Jewish quarter. “It wasn’t that hard to get into the ghetto,” she told me. “They weren’t very organized.” My father, whose accounts of wartime valor I’d always suspected of inflation, was downplaying her courage.

  23

  Getting Away with It

  “Can I ask you a question?’ My father and I were sitting on her deck. It was a perfect late summer afternoon in June 2010. Bees were making lazy circles around the sugar bowl and coffee cups. A woodpecker was tapping away overhead, fruitlessly—he was drilling for grubs on my father’s satellite dish. My father was in one of her rare expansive moods, holding forth into my recorder on past adventures in ’60s Manhattan, ’50s Rio de Janeiro, ’40s Copenhagen. I was glad for it. There were times when she was not as sanguine about our mutual project.

  “I see what you are doing,” she had said to me one morning as we sat in front of her computer. The subject was Richard Avedon’s photography, but not the high-fashion Avedon shots that my father had spent so many years printing and color converting for Condé Nast. “I was at Avedon’s studio one day, and he had those pictures of his father,” she said. “They were frightening.”

  What my father had seen were the famous portraits that Avedon took of his ailing parent between 1969 and 1973, chronicling in excruciating clarity and detail, under unforgiving light drained of sentiment, his father’s long and terrible surrender to cancer. Avedon had hoped the portraits would, among other things, repair their relationship; they had been estranged for many years. As Avedon tried to explain in a letter to his father, he was hoping to show him as he really was. “When you pose for a photograph, it’s behind a smile that isn’t yours,” he wrote. “You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. … Do you understand?” Whether he understood or not is hard to say. After Jacob Israel Avedon died, his son’s letter was found in the inside pocket of his best suit—the suit he never wore.

  “I see what you are doing,” my father had said to me that morning in front of the computer. She gestured to my pen, racing across my notebook. “Just what Avedon did.”

  Yet in 2010 we seemed to be collaborating better than ever. She resorted only occasionally to her wall-of-words defensive maneuver. One morning of the visit, she presented me with a color print of the two of us. It was a photograph my husband had taken two years earlier. In the shot, my father and I are seated close to each other at the deck table, my father holding forth, me leaning forward, pen poised to catch every word in my reporter’s notepad. We are both laughing. “This is a very nice picture,” my father said as she handed it to me. “You are a very thorough interviewer, aaand”—the finger held aloft in exclamatory mode—“a good writer.” She had captioned the photo with a Latin phrase she remembered from her classical training at her old Jewish high school: “Verba volant scripta manent,” “spoken words fly away, written words remain.”

  As my father finished off her slice of Black Forest cake and nursed an espresso on the deck, it seemed as good a time as any to push into thornier territory.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure,” she said, puzzled that I was seeking permission. “You are aaalways asking questions.”

  “Well, this is a hard one.” My voice squeaked, betraying my anxiety. I wasn’t sure what I would be unleashing. I checked the red light on my recorder.

  My father picked at crumbs from her plate. The woodpecker made another assay of the satellite dish.

  “What happened that night?”

  “Which night?”

  “In Yorktown, in ’76. The night you broke into the house.” I delivered these words to the placemat. I left unsaid: the night you nearly killed the man my mother was dating. My heart was pounding.

  When I looked up, my father was still picking lackadaisically at the crumbs.

  “That’s an easy question,” she said. “I wanted to throw him out of the house, of course.”

  “How’d you even know he was there?”

  My father considered. “Maybe the private eye told me.”

  “So,” I pounced, a bad imitation of Perry Mason, “you did hire a detective.
”

  “Sure,” my father said, unperturbed. “But he wasn’t much use. And a terrible photographer. His pictures were useless. Now, if I had been taking the pictures, I would—”

  I returned us to the scene of the crime. “So, you got to the house and—”

  “And I punctured his tires. So he wouldn’t escape.”

  I walked her through what came next: the door crashing open, the stomping footfall on the stairs. The bloodcurdling scream on the landing. “Were you furious? Frightened?”

  “I wouldn’t say furious.”

  “You gave this terrifying yell.”

  “To frighten,” my father said, “but he wasn’t afraid. He came at me.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but you had a baseball bat.”

  “The baseball bat, that was a stupid thing,” she said. “I wanted to protect myself. But then he hit me. Let that be a lesson to me! Like Jesus said, ‘A man is going to be killed by a sword if he raises the sword.’ Or something like that.” Despite the shelves of Hour of Power videos, the New Testament was not my father’s strong suit.

  The lighthearted tone unnerved me. My questions seemed to bounce off her bonhomie. I felt like the woodpecker, hammering at steel.

  “And you stabbed him,” I prompted.

  “He came at me, and I knew I wouldn’t be effective. I can’t handle a baseball bat. If I was strong and muscular, I would have beat him out of the house with it, but I had no such fantasies. I let the bat drop. And he hit me. And to defend myself, I got out my Swiss Army knife. Which isn’t really a lethal weapon. But I made him bleed a little.”

  “A little?”

  “I stabbed him a couple of times. But I didn’t direct it into his chest, not where the heart is.” She was quiet for a moment. “It was dangerous,” she said. “They say that you could bleed to death that way. But eventually he got to the hospital. The police came. And the ambulance. You remember the ambulance I used to go with, to save people?”

  I hadn’t forgotten my father’s years as an EMT volunteer.

  “The driver who came was the same one I used to ride with.”

  My father recalled how he climbed in the back; he had been “injured,” too, a cut on the head. “Waaall, it was just a superficial wound.” Once it was bandaged, “the police came and took me to jail.”

  Where, I noted, he was granted bail before morning.

  “Yes, and then I went right back to the city and had a picture taken, with me bleeding and everything.”

  “What for?”

  “For proof,” she said. “What else?”

  “When I phoned 911 that night,” I said, “the dispatcher told me that someone had already called to report an incident.” Now some pieces were falling into place. “That was you, wasn’t it?”

  “Sure.”

  “But why?” Why call the cops before you commit the crime?

  “I wanted the proof,” she said. “The police took me away. It was all right. “I wanted to set up a precedent. With witnesses.”

  I didn’t get it.

  “I was creating an incident.”

  “What, like a staged event?”

  “Yaaas. And it looked good, the enraged husband trying to chase the—what do you call it—in dramatic terms, the ‘seducer.’ ” My father made air quotes with her fingers. “I set up this whole thing. To establish that she brought a man into the house, and I was the ‘wronged husband.’ ” Another air quote.

  “It looked like there was a fight over jealousy, you know,” my father continued, “and that I’m the house’s owner and married to this woman, and I was beating the guy out of the house and he resisted it. I created an incident. But nobody could prove I created an incident.”

  To what end?

  “Proof of so-called ‘in-fi-del-i-ty.’ ” More air quotes. “Waaall, she didn’t get any alimony.”

  “You mean you put on this whole show so you wouldn’t have to pay alimony?”

  “No! The point was”—she batted at one of the circling bees, exasperated by my slow comprehension—“okay, sure, I didn’t have to pay. But that wasn’t …” Her face looked suddenly leaden.

  “There was one time I got very sick,” she said. “At the end of the divorce. I had these pains all over. Pretty soon I couldn’t walk. I never had anything like that in my life.” By then, my father had been exiled from the house and was living in Manhattan. “Finally, I called a taxi and told the driver to take me to this doctor I knew—Dr. Kraus, he worked on rock climbers.” Hans Kraus, “the father of sports medicine,” was also the unofficial founder of rock climbing in the United States, having pioneered the sport on the cliff faces of the Shawangunk Mountains, where my father and I used to spend our weekends. An Austrian Jew who had fled Nazi Europe in the ’30s, Kraus was past seventy, “semiretired,” by the time my father came calling.

  “What did he do?”

  “Some sort of electrical treatment, with a machine. I went several times. Eventually I began to be better.”

  I thought of the language my father had insisted on inserting in the divorce decree: that my mother’s withdrawal of affections had “caused the defendant to receive medical treatment and become ill.”

  “What was wrong with you?”

  My father shrugged. “Dr. Kraus didn’t say.”

  “What do you think was wrong?”

  My father looked at me and her face crumpled. “Despite everything I tried, it all collapsed. I was—broken. I was”—she groped for a more precise term to describe her condition—“abandoned.” She gazed into her coffee cup. “I didn’t want the divorce. I was trying to show that it was forced on me.”

  Show who?

  “I was trying to make your mother forget the whole thing,” she said. “To throw out this whole stupid thing of breaking up the family. I was trying to keep the family together.”

  Had the home invasion all been kabuki? In my effort to establish who my father really was, had I mistaken artifice for essence? But I’d heard his howls, and the rage I’d heard was genuine. The blood I’d cleaned off the floor wasn’t from surface wounds but from stabbings deep in the stomach. And his violence wasn’t confined to one incident. “I created you, and I can destroy you.” I’d felt his wrath the night he’d hit my head against the floor for my religious infidelity. Could that be bracketed by air quotes, too? Or was there another side that was “aaalso true”?

  One evening, my father, my husband, and I headed to Horgásztanya Vendéglő, the Fish-Farm Inn, a restaurant in Buda close to the Danube where my father liked to order the halászlé, a traditional spicy fish soup larded with enough paprika to burn out your brain on the first sip. The last time we’d gone, I had committed the gaucherie of ordering a glass of water to counteract the pound and a half of high-octane paprika floating in my soup. Worse, I had ordered my water with ice. My father had lambasted me. “Ice cubes?” she had pronounced with revulsion. “No European with any class would be caught dead putting those tacky things in a drink.” Every time I reached for the glass, she would start up again, declaring herself “embarrassed” to be seen with such a boorish dinner partner.

  “Maybe we could try a new place tonight.”

  No dice. My father was a stick-in-the-mud when it came to restaurants. I followed her crankily into the dining hall, its walls festooned with drift nets, floats, and anchors. An entire dinghy with oars still attached hung from the ceiling. “Tacky,” I thought to myself.

  “I love this place,” my father said, and I practically lip-synched the next words along with her: “It’s aaauthentic Hungarian.” She wasn’t just referring to the cuisine. She loved the old-school waiters, elderly gents with formal manners, greeting my father with courtly deference and pulling out her chair, kissing her hand with a “Kezét csókolom.”

  It seemed unlikely to me that she looked particularly womanly to the waiters. As usual, my father wasn’t wearing a wig. She had her white purse slung like a sailor’s duffel over her blue double-breasted captain�
��s jacket, an ocean-faring motif for a seafood dinner perhaps, though more Admiral Horthy than Empress Sisi.

  My father tilted her pate coquettishly and chatted away to the grizzled server, who was all smiles and obsequious nods.

  When the waiter left the table, I remarked on his deference.

  “Waaall, they have to ‘csókolom’ me now.”

  “Why ‘have to’?”

  “Because,” she said, “I’m tough.”

  We opened the heavy tasseled menus. I decided to exercise some toughness of my own. I announced I was forgoing the fish soup.

  “Susan is such a picky eater,” my father grumbled to my husband. “When Tibor and I were in Vienna, we hardly ate either, but that’s because we didn’t have any money.” One of her time-out-of-joint remarks. A conversation with her was like a ride in a run-amok submersible. One minute you were bobbing on the surface; the next you were trawling the ocean floor, or, in this case, traveling through her adventures in Austria in 1946.

  The waiter returned and set a large glass of water on my placemat.

  My father had ordered it for me, a liquid olive branch. “But I told him,” my father said, “ ‘No ice!’ ”

  I said maybe I’d try the fish soup, after all.

  “It’s made the correct way here,” my father said. “Halászlé should only be made with river fish, because Hungary is a landlocked nation. Or lake fish. But never saltwater. It can be carp, perch, catfish. … Now the Tisza River has excellent fishing. … Lake Balaton can also be …”

  “Have you been back to Balaton?” my husband interjected, to foreshorten the ichthyology disquisition.

  “… Balaton’s the largest freshwater lake in Europe,” my father continued. “Waaall, the largest in Central Europe, but it’s known for …”

  The waiter arrived with the soup, in a cast-iron kettle hanging from a flimsy tripod. He removed the lid with an ostentatious flourish and began ladling out its contents, starting with my father’s bowl.