In the Darkroom (45 page)

“Pista was a very intelligent, clever boy,” Yudit Yarden told me. Yudit was my father's cousin from the paternal side of the family, the Friedman side. During the early years of the war, Yudit and her parents had lived in the apartment building my grandfather owned at Váci 28 and vacationed at the Friedman summer villa in the Buda Hills, where the two children swam in the pool and played together in the big yard. When I visited her small assisted-living flat in Netanya, a coastal town in northern Israel, Yudit was eighty. She greeted me like a long-lost friend: “Dear Susaaan, you come! My heart it's made so warm!” Her English was as eloquent in its brokenness as her face was beautiful in its age.

“Pista knew everything,” Yudit recalled over cherry brandy and a groaning platter of pastries. “He read a lot, and of technical things he was also very talented, very sophisticated.” He showed her how to take photographs and make films. “He was always rationalist, always working with the brain, not the emotions. He was very”—she struggled for the English word and closed her hand in a fist—“shut. Like the face in poker. You couldn't guess what was it he thought.” She remembered something else from those summers. “Rozi didn't spend time with her child. Once I heard from Pista that his mother will come, and I was … astonished. They were not warm parents.”

And Jenő? I asked.

“Jenő was cold,” Yudit said. “A
gvir
”—Yiddish for rich man—“a big prestige person in the Jewish community in Budapest. But he was … pedant. Very critical of Pista. Very very critical.” And when he wasn't critical, he was absent. “Pista was forced to care for himself. He was awfully alone. He had two homes but not really any home.” She fixed me with her mournful wide eyes. “It's a wound he never will be able to cure it.”

And yet, it wasn't the abandonment of Pista by Rozi and Jenő that posed what Hanna called “the great family mystery.” It was Pista's abandonment of his mother.

“He was Rozi's only child and he wouldn't even speak to her,” Marika told me one afternoon, as we sat drinking tea in her spanking-new condominium in Tel Aviv. The AC blasted frigid air. Overhead on a shelf were a few surviving heirlooms: a set of silver candlestick holders and a porcelain dancer in regal frills, ready for a Habsburg minuet.

“She lost two children, you know,” Marika said.

I said my father had told me that Rozi had miscarried once.

“Not
miscarriage
, and not
one
,” Marika said. “They were two
live
births.” According to family recollection, one of the babies lived a short while, the other close to a year.

“And then she finally has a child who lives—and he won't talk to her,” Marika said. “She suffered. Because of your father. It was her tragedy.” Marika recalled my father's three-day visit to Tel Aviv in 1990. He put a stone on his father Jenő's grave, met briefly with relatives to discuss the possibility of reclaiming the apartments in Budapest, and left. “He wanted houses, not people,” Marika said.

A couple of years after his brief touchdown in Israel, my father invited Rozi, by then eighty-nine years old, to visit him in Budapest. The news rippled to the far reaches of the Grünberger family. “It was the
big event
,” my father's cousin Dahlia Baral, who was living in Australia then, told me. “Steven has called at last! We all thought that the Messianic days are approaching and here to stay.”

And then, Rozi returned from Hungary—her leg in a massive cast. She had fallen on the front stoop of my father's house in the Buda Hills and shattered her leg. My father had taken her to St. János Hospital, the closest medical facility. Rozi was put in a room with someone who screamed in agony night and day. My father enlisted Ilonka to tend to Rozi for the several weeks that she was recovering in the house. Ilonka described the experience to me as “the most awful month of my life.” She recalled Rozi screaming at my father all day long and treating Ilonka like the maid. “She would yell, ‘Bring in “the girl”!' ” And she remembered my father screaming back at his mother: “You neglected me. You never loved me.”

Rozi's surgery was a mess. “An operation like from the days of Franz Josef,” Marika said. The surgeon patched her leg together with a giant nail that soon began breaking through the skin. A hospital in Tel Aviv had to redo the entire operation. “Your father wanted her back to Israel as quick as possible,” Marika said. As soon as she could travel, he booked her a return ticket. “Rozi said, ‘He got rid of me.' She was devastated. Everything she had lost, it all came up again.”

“It was sad,” Marika went on, “but Rozi dealt with it. She cut herself off from things.” She made a chop-chop motion with her hands. “You know about her will,” she added.

No, I said, I didn't.

“It said, ‘And for my son, only one shekel.' ”

Marika's anecdote was correct concerning the generational rejection but wrong in the details, as I discovered when I talked to Hanna, who had nursed Rozi through her final decline and sorted her papers after her death. Hanna said my father had indeed been cut off but that Rozi wasn't the offender: “Your grandfather wrote the will.” Hanna recalled the words Jenő had set down in the 1960s, when the lira, not the shekel, was the basic coin of Israeli currency. They appeared on the last page of the will, at the bottom of a list of inheritors and the percentages each would receive: “To my son, István Faludi, one lira.” The man my father had mythologized as “my guardian angel” had left his only child spare change.

Early in my visit to Tel Aviv, after Marika and her cousin Dahlia had led me on a tour of the Arab market in Jaffa, we stopped to take in the view of the harbor. We'd been talking about family history and about my father's sex change. I'd just finished telling them about the night my father and I went to see
La Juive
at the Dohány synagogue, and my father's assessment of the wealthy Jewish
alte kockers
in the audience: “They are looking at me and saying, ‘There's an overdressed shiksa. '  ”

Marika considered. “Maybe he was thinking, if you change one thing, you change the other.” She meant gender and religion. “The two go together.”

“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.

“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.