In the Darkroom (46 page)

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.

“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.”