In the Darkroom (15 page)

As we meandered through the cobblestoned streets of the Castle District, Ilonka took my father's arm and spoke for a long time in Hungarian.

“What is she saying?”

“Ilonka's talking about when I went to Thailand.” For the operation. “She says she was so upset, she had a heart attack. Waaall, she
thought
she had a heart attack. She had chest pains and went to the hospital. They never figured out what was wrong.”

“I always thought he'd come back without doing it,” Ilonka told me later. “I thought it was a joke. Had I known, I would have done anything to persuade him not to. When he called me from Thailand, I was shocked. I took it really badly.”

A day after my father returned, a despondent Ilonka came over with groceries, and for the next few weeks of my father's recuperation, cooked meals and cleaned house. A maid without a costume. She was one of the few in my father's former circle who stood by her after the operation. “Everyone kept a distance,” Ilonka recalled. A former business associate refused to speak to my father, and when Stefi kept calling, he changed his number. The Smallholders Party officials who'd welcomed his membership now shunned her.

“If you hadn't become a woman,” I asked my father, “what would have happened with you and Ilonka?”

“Waaall, it was no good—she was taken.”

“And if she had divorced? Would you have married her?”

We walked another block before my father answered.

“Ilonka was the woman for me. … But she's Catholic. They don't divorce.”

Ilonka talked some more. My father laughed, a rueful but sincere laugh. “Ilonka says she always wanted to be a nun. … Waaall, and now maybe her wish has come true.”

We were done with the Castle District, and the day was half over. As we climbed back in the camper, I floated a proposal. “I'd love to see that mountaineering shop you helped start in Pest.” My maneuvering seemed transparent, at least to me. I wasn't interested in the store, only its location—down the street from the royal apartment. To my surprise, my father agreed.

We found a parking space a few blocks away—a feat, given the amount of pavement Der Exclusive required—and strolled down Ráday, which had recently been converted to a pedestrian promenade. The sidewalks were lined with café tables. My father seemed pleased. “When I first came here in '89, it was a dump, filthy, nothing painted since the war,” she said. “Only Gypsies lived here.” We wandered past boutiques, galleries, a photo shop, then a long strip of trendy bars and restaurants: the Pink Cadillac; Paris, Texas; Top Joy; Drive 911; the Soul Cafe; and the Lizard Café Island of Calmness. Not exactly authentic Hungarian, I thought. The afternoon was warm, the sidewalk tables full. Diners chatted under red and blue café umbrellas branded with American product names: Marlboro, Red Bull. My father led the way to the store.

The shop was bright and smelled of freshly milled wood and new paint. It was also empty of customers. “Business is bad,” my father said. The next time I returned to Budapest, the store was gone, replaced by an espresso bar. “And here is the line of shoes I found,” my father said, gesturing to a wall of hiking boots by a German manufacturer. “I used to smuggle these in from Germany in my old camper. I hid them in the cabinets under the seat,” to avoid paying the tariffs. “I'd just show my American passport and they'd say, ‘Go right ahead, Mr. Faludi.' ”

I hefted a boot and read the label, Hanwag. “Short for Hans Wagner,” my father said, the company's founder. He'd designed the boots for the Third Reich's ski team in the 1936 Olympics. My father had visited Wagner a few times and took him out for beer once when he came to Budapest. “I'd pick up the shoes right from his factory. And you know where it was?”

“Where?”

“Dachau.”

Shoes from Dachau. I returned the Hanwag to its stand and suggested we take a walk. Out on the street, I turned left. My father and Ilonka followed. After a block and a half, I gestured to a shabby but once elegant Vienna Secession apartment house across the street. The five-story stone-and-stucco facade was ornamented with sinuous Art Nouveau figures. Just below the roof, three moderne caryatids balanced on fluted columns. On the first floor, a bas relief depicted a mother with her arms wrapped protectively around two children, a girl and a boy. The boy cradled a miniature house in his arms.

“Which window was yours?” I asked.

I waited. My father didn't say anything, but she didn't storm off either. Pedestrians jostled by on the sidewalk. A bus boy clearing café tables paused to inspect us. Ilonka patted my arm. After a while, my father pointed to a small balcony on the third floor.

“I used to raise radishes on the windowsill,” she said. She pointed to the double balcony to its right. “That was my parents' terrace.” She turned around and looked up at the building behind us. “This was my view,” she said. “But it's painted such bright colors now. It used to be very gray. Full of pigeons.” I fished my tape recorder out of my bag. My father watched as I fidgeted with the buttons, then turned and lifted her camera up to her eye, aiming it toward the third floor of Ráday 9. She didn't take a picture but kept studying the building through the lens.

“When the war ended,” she said, “people came up from the cellars.” Including the Friedmans, who had been hiding in a basement of an abandoned apartment building across town. “My father and I went to see if our property was still standing.”

It was, but an artillery round had ripped a massive hole through the double balcony and right into the apartment. “You could see the snow and wind blowing through,” my father said. “It was very cold.”

“What did you do?”

“We went in.” The viewfinder was still plastered to her eye. “It was all rubble inside.” The shops on the ground floor had been plundered, she recalled, their display cases looted. “Eventually my father found a vacant unit in the building, more or less livable, on the first floor.”

“That was fortunate.”

“A high-ranking Hungarian officer used to live there. A real Nazi type. He'd fled to Germany, we heard.” Later, she said, Smallholders Party leader Ferenc Nagy moved from his flat in the building into the larger Friedman apartment. “He was in the government, so he could get money to do the repairs.”

“Shall we cross the street?” I said.

My father lowered the camera. “Why?” I heard a clatter of dishes and the sound of people laughing. The café umbrellas fluttered in a gust of wind.

“To see it better.”

“You can see fine from here.”

I crossed the street anyway and tried the knob on the heavy front door. The door glass was framed in dark wood and reinforced with a metal lattice in a geometric design. It was locked. I studied the list of names on the gilt-plated building registry.

I sensed a presence and turned to find my father behind me, her lips pressed together in a thin, tight line.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“I'm going to buzz someone.” There were a few businesses listed among the tenants—a tax consultant, an ice cream shop, a beauty parlor. I opted for the button next to Várady Szalon. My father pushed my hand away.

“You are bothering people.”

“I just want to see—”

“I told you, there's nothing to see.”

I hit the buzzer.

“You are making a pest of yourself.”

No one answered. I tried the tax consultant.

“Stop it!”

Just then, a man came out of the building. I stuck my foot in the door before it closed.

“Two minutes. Just show me the lobby.”

Ilonka, who had followed us across the street, touched my father's elbow and said something in a low voice. They filed in after me into the foyer.

The front hall was refurbished. The red-tiled wainscoting gleamed, and the freshly painted walls glowed a warm creamy yellow, white moldings buffed to a high shine. The interior Art Nouveau friezes had been restored; they ran in a long white panorama down either side of the hallway and across the ceiling. I gazed upon the lithe nudes in playful motion: a girl in ecstatic mid-twirl with arms flung wide; two nubile dancers prancing together with wild abandon, their fingers interlaced; a muscular and naked Adonis reclining with a book. Had these been the daily muses of my father's boyhood?

The beautification project came to an abrupt halt at the end of the corridor. To the right, a dim, sour-smelling stairwell led to the upper floors. Half the lights were burned out. In an alcove under the steps, garbage overflowed from trash bins. Graffiti spattered the walls, which bore a few chipped remnants of a once colorful geometric mosaic. A rusted cage elevator sat at its center, its walls patched with plywood. Directly ahead, the corridor led to a large interior courtyard, open to the sky. Four levels of yellow-brick galleries with floral-ornamented iron railings ran around its sides, like an inverted layer cake. The apartment doors opened onto the galleries. The geometric floor tiles were torn up. Exposed wiring dangled from the walls. A withered plant potted in a plastic canister sat in the center of the courtyard, its spindly stem drooping, half its leaves scattered on the ground.

I picked my way across the shards of tiles, then turned to look back. My father was standing by the potted plant. “The
sukkot
booth was here,” she said. “My father would build it right in the courtyard.” She was talking about the small temporary hut made of branches to mark the Jewish harvest festival, a tribute to the ephemeral abodes of the Israelites during their forty-year exile in the desert.

“See how dark it gets toward the back of the building?” she said.

I nodded.

“My father was very ingenious. He hung giant mirrors in the courtyard. So all the lower apartments at the back would get the light.”

We began to make a slow circuit of the courtyard. The ground-floor shops that had thrived in my father's youth—the patisserie, the furrier, the beauty parlor—were all gone. The storefront that housed the patisserie—where my father used to eat Bavarian pastries (its specialty; the owner was German) and where Rozi Friedman used to take coffee with Ferenc Nagy—was now home to the Várady Szalon. A sandwich sign announced its services in a mongrel Hunglish: kozmetica, masszage, manicure, tarot. Not everything was new. In the opposite corner of the courtyard, behind a padlocked iron grate, a set of cinder-block steps descended into darkness. Bolted to the wall, a small sign with an arrow pointing down the stairs announced,
ÓVÓHELY
. Bomb shelter. The sign had been hanging there since World War II.

“For a little bit during the war,” my father said, pointing to the
szalon
but referring to the vanished confectionary, “I worked here with my friend Tamás—after we couldn't go to school.” Tamás Somló was a boy a few years younger than my father, whose family rented one of the apartments in Ráday 9. The Somlós were Jews who converted to Catholicism in the 1930s. When the war came, Tamás's father, the neighborhood pharmacist, was sent to forced labor and then, after returning to Budapest in the fall of 1944, arrested and deported to Mauthausen. “There wasn't much business,” my father recalled of István and Tamás's brief wartime stint behind the counter of the German patisserie. “We got to eat the leftover pastries before they got thrown out.”

I proposed we go upstairs. My father shook her head and backed toward the front hall. When she reached the alcove with the elevator, she froze.

“Look at what they've done,” she said. She pointed an accusatory finger at the oxidizing shell of a once glamorous lift. “It was glass and hand-carved wood, mirrored walls. A beauty.” She turned and gestured toward the bare cement of the alcove. “There used to be a beautiful mosaic here. … LOOK AT THIS! THEY'VE STOLEN EVERY TILE.”

My father whipped around and started toward the foyer. “I need to get the camper,” she said over her shoulder. “It's not safe to leave it on the street.”

“
But couldn't we—”

“I BROUGHT YOU HERE. I SHOWED IT TO YOU. ENOUGH.” Her raised voice ricocheted off the bare walls.

“Don't yell at me.”

“I wrote them a letter,” she said. She had lowered her voice but not her rage.

“Who?”

“The people who live in our apartment. I wrote them that I'm the family owner of this house and they shouldn't buy this property, because the ones who are selling it, it's not theirs to sell. … I TOLD YOU THIS. YOU SHOWED NO INTEREST WHATSOEVER.”

She turned away and headed down the corridor at a furious pace, her heels clip-clopping on the tiled floor. The street door opened and shut with a heavy thud. Ilonka murmured an apology and scurried after my father. I stood alone in the gloom of the alcove, trying to picture the mirrored walls of the elevator, the giant mirrors my grandfather had hung in the courtyard that once brought light into the dark recesses of my father's youth.

My father was waiting by the camper, her shoulders bunched in a posture I'd known since childhood, and knew to fear. She disabled the alarm and unlocked the doors. Ilonka took the backseat. I envied her refuge. We rode for a long time before my father broke the silence. Our silence. She wasn't the only one in a rage. “I had to get the car,” my father said, her jaw tight. “They
steal
things.”

My recorder, which I'd forgotten to shut off, caught my subsequent meltdown. I was dismayed when, months later, I transcribed that segment, and not just because for the first ten minutes the traffic had drowned out half the words. I had remembered the drive home as a culmination, the moment when we finally, coherently, grappled with the demon in the room. But when I played the tape, what I heard was a jumble of disconnected words, unfinished sentences, repetitions that went nowhere, dialogue from a Mamet play, or the non-dialogue of my childhood.