In the Darkroom

by Susan Faludi

  “Ladies first!” my father quipped. She looked pleased with her own sophistry—a trickster mocking and simultaneously enforcing convention. I stirred the fire-engine broth in my bowl. A carp head floated to the top. Across the table, my father took several happy slurps, savoring the burn.

  “Balaton,” she said after a while. “That’s how we ended up hearing it on the radio.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The doctor and his family at Ráday 9. They lived on the second floor. But they went to Lake Balaton that summer.”

  Another dive into history—now it was the late spring and early summer of ’44, the time when Jenő Friedman and his sixteen-year-old son took cover in the doctor’s apartment, hiding behind drawn curtains, listening “very quietly” to the BBC on the radio. “That’s how we heard the Germans had taken away the Jews of Kassa,” she said now. My grandfather’s hometown. “My father, he started to cry. He told me, ‘They have killed my parents.’ ”

  She ladled out another serving of soup. The BBC’s report, she added, wasn’t entirely a bolt from the blue. Weeks earlier, “my father had heard something bad was going to happen out there.”

  “So did Jenő try to get his parents out of Kassa?” I asked.

  “Waaall, he sent Gaal.” Gaal was the groundskeeper for Ráday 9. “He paid Gaal to go to Kassa and sort of check things out.” A wasted investment. Gaal was back in a hurry. “He said there was nothing he could do.”

  “Did Jenő consider going himself?”

  My father studied the tablecloth and said nothing.

  “Aaanywaaay,” she said finally, “he couldn’t have known.” That they would be murdered, she meant. “It was something that had never happened before.”

  “You did something,” I said. “You saved your parents.”

  “My cousin Friczi and those Betar guys he was with, they were going to ‘save’ people, too.” He was referring to the Zionist uprising hatched in a Budapest “bunker” that ended in disaster. “They didn’t even know how to use a gun. Foolishness.”

  “But didn’t you,” I persisted, “have a gun you didn’t know how to use when you marched up the stairs of the Swiss protected house? Wasn’t that ‘foolishness,’ too?”

  “Yaaas, but my gun wasn’t loaded.”

  “So?”

  “So, it’s very simple. I believed it. So they believed it. I took part in their game. If you believe you are whoever you pretend to be, you’re halfway saved. But if you act funny, if you act afraid, you’re halfway to the gas chamber.”

  My father folded her napkin carefully and put it on the table. “Waaall, I have these wisdoms,” she said. “But I believe them!”

  For dessert, my father ordered gesztenyepüré—a traditional Hungarian delicacy, chestnuts pureed through a potato ricer into “noodles” and then laced with rum and vanilla. Seeing the name shook loose a surprisingly nostalgic association: my father sometimes made the dish on Sunday afternoons in Yorktown. The restaurant purée arrived in a gigantic goblet, crowned with a minaret of whipped cream.

  “This role-playing during the war,” my father said as she tackled the towering confection, “that was a similar process.”

  “To what?”

  “I can sit down with anyone now, and he kisses my hand. It strengthened me for life that I did these things back then. That I could live as not myself but as a non-Jewish person. And that I could get away with it. So now I can do this other thing.” Meaning her change in sex. “Because if you are convinced you are this other person, everybody else will be convinced. … I impersonate myself.”

  “So, what you’re doing now,” I asked, “is that playing another ‘role,’ too?”

  “I was role-playing as a man,” she said, “but I wasn’t totally accepted by women as a capital-letter-‘M’ man. I didn’t have the wherewithal. Now as a woman, I’m not role-playing anymore. I don’t have to.”

  “Because this is who you were all along? This is your true self?”

  “Waaall, it’s who I am now,” she said. “Since the operation. I have developed another personality.”

  With a difference from the wartime attempt, I thought. As a Jewish young man in Nazi Europe, no matter how brilliant the performance, no matter how convincingly he wore the Arrow Cross armband or gave the “Heil Szálasi!” salute, my father still had to live with the terrifying knowledge that his enemies always held the trump card: the minute they ordered him to the back room and pulled down his pants, it was over. This time she had declared herself a woman, and if the gender police took her in the back room, she could prove it.

  “Which has been easier for you,” I asked, “to be accepted as a woman after being born a man, or to be accepted as a Magyar after being born a Jew?”

  My father thought about it for a few moments, holding her spoon before her like a hand mirror. “As a woman,” she said. “Because I am a woman—with a birth certificate that says I’m a woman. So I must be a woman.”

  My father polished off the remains of the gesztenyepüré.

  “So, is the inquisition over now?” She grinned and waved her spoon at me. “The Lives and Crimes of Stefánie Faludi! Oh my God!”

  We filed out past the dust-laden fishing nets and into the night air. The Danube lay before us, obsidian in darkness. My father tugged at my sleeve.

  “Getting away with it,” she said. “Susaaan, don’t forget that line. That’s the key to it all. Because a lot of people got discovered that they were Jewish, and they were shot.”

  “It’s a beautiful day,” I said to my father. We’d been looking for hours at the latest videos she’d received from NASA, and I was desperate to get outside. “Why don’t we take a walk in Pest?” I said, and then added, with as casual an air as I could muster, “You can show me the Kazinczy Street Synagogue”—the synagogue where my father and his parents had gone to services every Saturday morning.

  “I’ve told you, I already went once to the Jewish quarter. I took Ilonka and we ate at that kosher restaurant. Such bland food! There’s nothing more to see.”

  “But you didn’t go to see your synagogue.”

  “Why would I want to do that? It was ruined.”

  “But they’ve rebuilt it.” Albeit only recently—the synagogue had sat in its wartime rubble for decades and reopened only a few years ago.

  “Waaall, it can’t be the same as it was.”

  “How do you know if you’ve never been?”

  Silence.

  “Don’t you want to see the place you went every weekend—with your family?”

  “Waaall, my father wouldn’t go to Dohány Synagogue because it had an organ. Too Christian.”

  I know, I said. “You told me.”

  “After services, we would walk down Kazinczy utca to Rákóczi út, to the Corso, and then we’d walk up and down, promenaaading.” My father’s slippered feet scuffed the floor, back and forth, in time with the memory. “The Christians promenaded there on Sunday, the Jews on Saturday,” my father said. “Then we’d go home, and the maid would get the warmed cholent out of the oven from the bakery downstairs.”

  I nodded. I’d heard the story many times. It seemed like a good moment to close the deal. “So, let’s go to the synagogue—we can walk on the Corso after.”

  My father considered.

  “Yaaas, but,” she said, “we can’t. It’s the Pentecost.”

  What?

  “The Pentecost, deaaar. The end of the Easter season.”

  A synagogue closed for a Christian holiday? Unlikely. “Anyway,” I pointed out, “today is Monday.” The Pentecost was the day before.

  “It’s ‘Pentecost Monday,’ ” my father said.

  I pulled the keyboard onto my lap and speed-typed “Kazinczy Street Synagogue” into Google. I was looking for a phone number to prove her wrong. The website of the “Hidden Treasures Tours of Jewish Budapest” listed the synagogue’s visiting hours—Monday–Thurs., 10–3:30—and noted that it closed only for Jewish High Holi
days and “Hungarian national holidays,” a phrase that was highlighted. When I clicked on the text, the list of federal Magyar holidays popped up. My father looked over my shoulder and pointed to a notation halfway down the page: Pünkösdhétfő, the Monday after Pentecost.

  “I told you,” she said smugly.

  Two days later, I came down to breakfast and found on the kitchen counter, next to the coffee cups awaiting their morning brew, a slip of scrap paper. My father had jotted some notes on it in her looping Old European script, some Hungarian words I couldn’t read, followed by “10–15:30.”

  She came into the room, dressed in a pale blue sheath and carrying her white pocketbook. “I was thinking,” she said. “This might be a good day to go to Kazinczy.”

  ————

  You don’t approach the Kazinczy Street Synagogue so much as stumble on it. The Orthodox house of worship is wedged into a corner of a maze of narrow streets and cobblestoned courtyards. If the Dohány Synagogue was the Versailles version of worship—its diva splendor primping before a wide plaza for maximum visibility—Kazinczy was its vestpocket secret sister.

  The enclosed, almost medieval warren enveloping the synagogue was once a self-sufficient Orthodox community, containing the shul, mikveh, winter prayer room, kosher restaurant, kosher poultry butchery, kosher dairy, matzoh factory, apartments owned by the Orthodox community, outdoor wedding chuppah, an open water pipe for Jews to cast their sins into the sea on Rosh Hashanah, and a Jewish burial society. The morning we approached, the streets were deserted; the sound of our heels on the cobbled pavement echoed off the high stone walls. I followed my father up the four marble steps to the exposed red-brick facade with its high-arched windows and carved stone battlements. Above the wrought-iron doors was a prominently displayed symbol. Unlike Dohány’s, this star had six, not eight, points. Inscribed in the frieze was Jacob’s cry upon waking from his dream, the words displayed in Hebrew lettering: “This is none other than the abode of God, and that is the gateway to Heaven.”

  The interior was, in point of fact, heavenly, an exquisite chamber of serenity, eggshell-blue frescoes with menorahs and Stars of David on the walls, shafts of soothing blue light piercing the reticulated floral windows set into the ceiling. The floor plan was traditional, with the rostrum, or bimah, in the center of the room, and two staircases leading to the upper two galleries, the seating for women. There was no organ.

  We had made it only a few steps past the threshhold when a short balding man in a knee-length gray coat and a chai symbol dangling from a chain around his neck hurried over to see who was disturbing the peace. He was the shammes, the synagogue’s caretaker, and we were his first and, at least for the time that we were there, his only visitors that day. He glanced at my father, then reached into a basket and fished out a plain blue cloth. My father studied it with momentary perplexity. Then the shammes leaned over and draped it around my father’s bare shoulders. The color, I noted, matched her dress.

  I asked how big the current congregation was. My father translated and the shammes said that the building could seat 500 men downstairs, 500 women in the galleries, but that most services were attended by no more than 150 people in the summer—many of them foreign visitors—and as few as 30 in the winter. “The community is very small because a lot of people living here during Communism lost their Jewishness,” he said. “They were afraid they would lose their jobs and endanger their families if they would go to synagogue. … And, of course, many were killed or deported in the Shoah.” He pointed to a framed image hanging by the entrance: a photograph of the ruins of the synagogue in 1944, a heap of splintered wood, shattered glass.

  My father revealed that she came here as a child. The shammes brightened. They began to reminisce. They discussed the synagogue’s former illustrious rabbi, Koppel Reich, who presided over the 1905 convention that codified the rules of the Hungarian Orthodox community and, at 89, was elected representative to the Upper House of the Hungarian Parliament in 1927, the year of my father’s birth. My father recalled how the synagogue used to be “air conditioned” in the summer—with buckets of ice poured inside the floor vents. “Very modern!” And she remembered the crabby shammes who was always shushing the children.

  “He was this giant, with a long beard,” my father said. “He would scare the kids to death, yelling, ‘Shah! Shah!’ ”

  The shammes laughed. “We still do!” he said.

  After a while, the caretaker returned to his duties and invited us to make ourselves at home. My father and I wandered up the aisle.

  “Where did you used to sit?” I asked.

  “Ssshh!” my father said. “It’s a good thing he doesn’t understand English.”

  I realized my stupidity: my father used to sit downstairs.

  We toured the perimeter, admiring the wall frescoes (“The colors are even brighter than when I was a child!” my father marveled), and paying our respects to Rabbi Reich’s chair, which stood to the left of the ark, retired in homage to his eminence. After a while, my father walked down the right aisle. She stopped at the fourth center row, deliberating. Then she made her way to the fifth chair and sat down. I followed and perched beside her.

  “These were the Friedman seats,” she said in a low voice, patting the arms of my chair and hers: Jenő’s and István’s. Rozi sat upstairs. Congregants paid for specific seats, my father explained, and the better the location, the more they cost. These were considered to be among the best. She reached in front and lifted the lid of a small wooden compartment. “This is where we’d keep our prayer books and tallis.”

  My father touched her head, a nervous gesture. “I’ve never been in a synagogue without a kippah,” she said. “It’s okay, I get used to things in ten minutes.”

  She pulled the blue cloth tighter around her shoulders. “At first, I didn’t know why he was giving me this shawl,” she said. “I thought I was supposed to cover my head, like a burka. I thought, Oh my God, I’m in the wrong place!”

  We both laughed and then we sat for a few moments in companionable silence, gazing at the gleaming marble-columned enclosure of the ark, and the bas-relief emblem above it, of two hands held out to deliver the ancient Sabbath benediction. My father held out her own hands in imitation, then lifted them above my head.

  “Ye’varech’echa Adonoy ve’yish’merecha,” she said.“Ya’ir Adonoy panav eilecha viy’ chuneka. Yisa Adonoy panav eilecha, ve’yasim lecha shalom.”

  My father’s religiously illiterate daughter had to ask for a translation.

  “May God bless you and protect you. May God’s face shine toward you and show you favor. May God look favorably upon you and grant you peace.”

  It was the blessing parents said over their children on Sabbath. There were other blessings that were specific for sons or daughters, my father said, but this was the one for both sexes.

  She fell silent again.

  “I was very upset that time,” she said after a while. “In Yorktown. … When you wanted to see the priest to become a Christian.”

  I waited. We had never discussed that night. I had never brought it up. I’d figured she’d long ago filed it in that mental safe-deposit case of memories she refused to revisit.

  I created you. And I can destroy you.

  “Do you remember what you said to me?” I asked.

  “I remember exactly what I said,” she answered. “That they exterminated the Jews. And how could you do this?”

  I didn’t correct her. Whatever the actual words, I understood, this is what they meant to her.

  She looked down at her hands, resting now in her lap. “I shouldn’t have been so angry,” she said.

  I reached over and squeezed her wrist. “It’s okay,” I said.

  A few minutes later, we stood up and made our way to the entrance. My father had remembered a café she was partial to, just a short walk from here, outside the old Jewish quarter. “They make excellent Viennese cakes.”

  24

&
nbsp; The Pregnancy of the World

  In 2014, Time magazine hailed the “Transgender Tipping Point” in a cover story that, with a thousand concurring stories from all corners of the media, enshrined gender identity as the cutting edge of civil rights. That same year, the United Nations passed a resolution condemning discrimination and violence based on gender identity, and governmental bodies from the Danish and Dutch parliaments to the New York state legislature and New York City mayoral office proclaimed the right of citizens to change their birth certificates to match their chosen gender, even without surgery.

  The drumroll continued into 2015, when President Obama tweeted Caitlyn Jenner to commend her “courage” (hours after she appeared in a satin corset on the cover of Vanity Fair), and transgender rights became a slogan on the presidential campaign trail. In the media, trans identity was fast solidifying into an emblematic narrative, with all the requisite tropes of victimization, heroism, and celebrity. Rarely did the fanfare convey the daily texture of complicated ordinary lives.

  In the summer of that year, I received a letter from Mel Myers, who, back when he was Melanie, ran Melanie’s Cocoon, the guest house in Phuket, Thailand, where my father had recovered from her operation in 2004. Mel had finally succeeded in moving his longtime Thai girlfriend to the United States, but at a cost. “When it came time to bring her to America and get married, I had to transition back to male,” Mel wrote. “My facial feminization surgery is covered with a beard, my reassignment surgery makes bathroom trips awkward, and I cover my beautiful breasts with loose fitting clothes.” He said that sometimes he wished he’d continued as Melanie and sometimes he wished he’d hadn’t had the operation in the first place, “now that I find myself living in limbo. … I had my previous life as a male, I had my life as Melanie, and now I have my life as neither male nor female or both female and male.” He remembered the time when she, as Melanie, had served as “a poster child of sorts, someone who trans girls would look to for guidance and encouragement,” but those days were in the past.