In the Darkroom (29 page)

Some months later I would read how, in the winter of 1944, several inmates of the city's fenced-in Jewish ghetto who were slated for deportation escaped by squeezing through a narrow, hand-dug breach in the perimeter—through a wall of the building that now housed the Jewish Museum and Archives. As the authors of
Jewish Budapest
noted, “The Jewish Museum was the single tiny chink in the wall of the Pest ghetto.”

One afternoon I managed to lure my father out of the house with the promise of sweets. I suggested we check out a pastry shop in Pest known for its Viennese tortes. Its appeal to me was the address, not the menu. It was near the Grand Hotel Royal and the spot where my father said that she, as a teenage boy, had been grabbed off the street by an Arrow Cross officer and almost killed in a cellar. This was another of the anecdotes my father had told me as a child. Or at least the Royal was the place where she said it “probably” had happened. The hotel was a storied establishment. Opened in 1896 in honor of the Millennial Jubilee, its French Renaissance palatial quarters had boasted a spa, a
cour d'honneur
with palm garden and a “royal ballroom,” where Béla Bartók regularly conducted concerts. The Royal was requisitioned during the war by both the Arrow Cross and the SS. The patisserie was a couple of blocks away.

Over two Dobos tortes, an eight-layer sugar mountain of sponge cake and chocolate buttercream, to which my father insisted on adding a snowcap of whipped cream, I did my best to steer the conversation to the drama that may or may not have unfolded down the street more than sixty years earlier. My father did her best to steer it away.

“The Urania was maaarvelous,” she said, a fork overloaded with whipped cream poised in midair. The Urania National Film Theater, an early cinema with a lavishly gilded and mirrored Moorish interior, was another landmark from my father's childhood, a Taj Mahal that young István used to haunt. “It had mostly first-run German movies. Waaall, it was German owned. And I also used to go to the Savoy Theater, near where we lived on Ráday. I got free tickets there because my father had ‘befriended' the ticket lady. Waaall, he had many lady friends.”

“And the Hotel Royal …”

“Then after the Urania,” my father plowed on, “I'd go to the film rental shop next door.” She recalled its furnishings: richly embroidered upholstery in gold and red threads, velvet drapes, brocaded walls. “You could get all the old silent films there. Sixteen millimeters. I rented
Metropolis
, all the great classics. It was just a
jewel
. It was”—she stopped to summon the proper word; her eyes had a childlike glimmer; I'd rarely seen her so enchanted—“like being inside a music box.”

“Were you already making your own films then?” I asked.

“Now,
this
is an interesting story,” my father said. “The nine-and-a-half-millimeter Pathé my father gave me had a perforation in the middle of the film, a stupid thing.” The sprocket holes were between the frames, “right in the middle of the picture! Waaall, the French have to make something completely different for no purpose. But don't write that down. We don't want to offend the French! So anyway, I bought a sixteen-millimeter camera, and a sixteen-millimeter projector, too. I bought the camera from a Hungarian engineer who had manufactured it himself. In his cellar! He copied the American Bell & Howell model. He sold it cheaper to me because I was a kid. And later I aaalso managed to acquire a Swiss Bolex movie camera.”

“When was this?”

“In the '40s.” In the middle of the war, my teenage father was out shopping for better film equipment.

“I'd also go to this Hungarian filmmakers' society,” she continued. “They called themselves the Amateur Narrow-Film Group, because they used the narrower sixteen-millimeter film.” The society, she recalled, “was full of fascists.” My father was unfazed. “I was so interested in amateur films, I'd go all the time.
This
interested me, not the stupid Nazis.”

“Did they know you were Jewish?”

“I didn't tell them.”

After the war, my father would be one of the first members of another moviemaking group, the youth film club sponsored by the Hungarian Communist Party. Young István suggested the site of its first clubhouse: the abandoned offices of the German Nazi film archives in Pest. And proposed its first activity: splicing the 16mm newsreels left behind there into counter-narratives. “You know, Eisenstein film theory,” my father said. “We turned them from Nazi to
anti-
Nazi films.”

I said that sounded like a gratifying exercise.

“The power of editing!” she said. “Waaall, I have to edit everything I do.”

She got up and went to retrieve her purse, which she'd hung on the coatrack across the room.

“You shouldn't leave that there,” I said.

“Why not?”

“It will be stolen,” I said. And thought, here I go again with the purse.

We paid the bill and wandered down the street. As we passed the Royal, I suggested we take a look inside.

The marbled entrance faced a sweeping staircase and, beyond it, a six-story glass atrium. The Grand Hotel Royal was now the Corinthia Hotel Budapest, a five-star resort run by a multinational chain based in Malta. A brochure on the information desk trumpeted the building's transformation into “the very best in 21st century spa luxury” with “levels of comfort and convenience” that are “all reassuringly up to date.” In the lobby, a series of captioned photographs recounted the hotel's history, with one elision; the exhibit's chronology leaped from 1928 to the anti-Communist uprising of 1956. From the sports bar down the hall came the shouts of fans and the flicker of large-screen TVs. A soccer match was under way.

I turned to look at my father, and she was shaking her head.

“No,” she said. “No, no, no!” She pivoted on a heel and headed back toward the grand revolving door.

“What's—?”

“This isn't it,” she said. “This isn't where it happened.” I started after her. Had it happened at all?

On the sidewalk, she paced back and forth. After a while, she crossed to the other side of the wide curving Ring Road, called Erzsébet körút in this segment, and headed south. I followed. Two blocks later, she came to a halt on the corner of Wesselényi utca.

“This is where I turned left onto the
körút
,” she said. “There were dead bodies lying all over on the sidewalk here, dead horses, frozen, and”—she rotated in a slow circle, eyeing a line of rundown apartment buildings—“my God, there it is.” She stared up at a four-story faux stone edifice with Gothic arched windows and soot-blackened gargoyles. Two carved owls perched over the front portal, which was embossed with a coat of arms of crossed hooks that looked eerily like a swastika. A homeless man with a crutch was sleeping on the front ledge. The windows were covered in wrought-iron bars.

“All these years,” she said, eyes locked on the owls. “All these years I thought it was the Royal.”

The entry door was unlocked. We went inside.

A smell of mildew pervaded. In the foyer, three bare bulbs dangled from a chain, one of them burned out. We passed through the main hall—where a shop selling “Western cowboy boots with spurs” was shuttered—and proceeded to a gloomy interior courtyard, girdled by three floors of arcaded galleries with groin-vaulted ceilings. I felt like we'd wandered into a Romanesque monastery. The place was deathly quiet.

My father took a few tentative steps up the first set of worn concrete stairs. Then she came around and started down the staircase that led to the cellar. She didn't get far. The way was barred by a locked metal cage.

“I was going to get food at Váci 28,” she began. The Christian building manager, the Friedmans' former employee, had agreed to sell young Pista a small portion of lard and beans if he could make it over there. “I shouldn't have gone on the big
körút
, that was my mistake.”

As he had passed the building, my father recalled, a young man in an Arrow Cross uniform had waved him over. My father recalled the man's words: “ ‘Brother!'—they always called each other that—‘Brother! Why are you wearing that armband. Don't you know the two parties are united?' ” The Arrow Cross and the Hungarian Renewal-National Socialists, another fascist party, had recently combined forces and were all now wearing the Arrow Cross crest. My father was sporting the wrong insignia. “I acted very confident and said, ‘Oh, yaaas, brother, I know! I'll go get a new armband.' ”

The guard ordered my father to go inside and report to the cellar. My father went in, then paused before the stairwell. The building was a hive of Arrow Cross activity, armed young men striding through the corridors. He heard gunshots. “They were shooting people in the basement.” The Royal was where the Arrow Cross displayed its public face. This was the place, one of several in the city, where executions were carried out.

My father demonstrated what happened next. “I made like I was going down”—she took a few steps toward the locked metal cage—“but I saw no one was looking, so I went up and around.” She strode purposefully up the first flight, as if heading for an appointment, and stopped at a shadowy recess at the bend of the stairs. “I stayed there awhile.” She pressed herself flat against the wall, the floral pattern of her dress fading into the gloom. We waited. A door slammed upstairs, and I jumped.

“How long?” I asked, mainly to break the tension.

My father didn't move. I thought she was going to reenact the interval, rather than describe it, but then she said, “Long enough so the guard would think I was doing what he said.” She eased away from the wall. “I took off my armband, and then I marched back down.” She demonstrated, goose-stepping stiffly down the stairs in her heels. “I went past the guard and gave the Nazi greeting”—she shifted her purse to the other shoulder and shot out her arm in illustration—“and I said, ‘Thank you very much,
brother
!' and I walked away.” Either the guard was a different one from the one who'd ordered him in, or my father's confident posture, even sans armband, had convinced him that István Friedman had passed his credentials check and was, indeed, a “brother.”

“And then?”

“And then I went to Váci út and collected the lard and beans.”

“You can always tell it's my name day,” my father said to me as we climbed the steps of the block-long cathedral. She meant her former “name day,” the feast day of the saint who shared her former name. “Because no one's at work,” she explained. St. Stephen's Day is a state holiday. Every August 20, the entire country pays homage—starting with early-morning Holy Mass and ending with late-night fireworks—to the canonized first king of Hungary.

The gilded dome of St. Stephen's Basilica is one of the city's most visible beacons: at exactly ninety-six meters tall—in honor of 896, the supposed year of the Magyar Conquest—it is one of the two tallest buildings in the city. (The other, the Hungarian Parliament, is also exactly ninety-six meters high; government regulations mandate that no city structure exceed in height that prized number.) The basilica's construction involved three architects, five decades, and fifty types of marble. Once inside, we struggled to get our bearings in the vast and echoing darkness. The ornately carved wooden pews can seat eighty-five hundred worshippers. I could just make out the main altar, where a giant marbled figure of Saint Stephen presided, the archangel Gabriel hovering above, clutching the Holy Crown.

“Where is it?” I asked my father.

She nodded toward the far left of the altar, where a long queue had formed. We joined it. Half an hour later, we arrived at the guards' station. A velvet rope swung aside and we were admitted to the Chapel of the Holy Right. Paintings of various saints adorned the chamber. Against the far wall, the object we came to see was shrouded in shadow. You had to drop 200 forints in a coin box to illuminate it. The lights went up on what looked like a jewel-studded dollhouse, a heavily ornamented golden reliquary encased in a glass sarcophagus. Inside the arches of the miniature shrine was an amputated hand: Hungary's cherished Christian relic, the Holy Right, the mummified right hand of Saint Stephen. It was the miracle-dispensing hand with which the dying king is said to have lifted the Holy Crown of Hungary in 1038 and pledged his throne to the Virgin Mary. After a minute, the light shut off.

On August 20, 1990, and in celebration of the fall of heathen Communism and the restoration of Christianity, the Holy Right was allowed out of its sepulcher for what would become an annual excursion. Actually, it led a parade. Priests bearing aloft the relic in its sealed glass case headed up a procession, tens of thousands of people marching through the streets of Budapest. Hundreds of thousands more watched the live broadcast on television.

The post-Communist preoccupation with Saint Stephen's hand was part of a larger reconstruction of a mythological history, the myth of Hungary as originally and quintessentially Christian.
^*
The Communist regime had suppressed religious practice of all stripes. After 1949, the government ceased collecting religious affiliation in the national census and omitted religion from identity cards. Citizens were supposed to be Communists, first and last. The suppression of religion led to a new erasure for Hungary's embattled Jews. In 1989, the year marking the end of Communist rule, Hungarian historian Peter Kende published a book on Hungarian Jewry that included a chapter titled, “Are There Jews in Hungary Today?” It was a reasonable question. When the post-Communist Hungarian census restored religious affiliation to its count, the results were as follows in 1992: Roman Catholics, 67.8 percent; Calvinists, 20.9 percent; Lutherans, 4.2 percent; Jews, 0 percent.