In the Darkroom (34 page)

I spent the rest of the afternoon leafing through my copy of Shelley's horror story. “Am I not alone, miserably alone?” the monster says that day above Chamonix. “The desert mountains and dreary glaciers are my refuge. I have wandered here many days. …”

Several weeks after the divorce was finalized, my father loaded up his camper with as many of his possessions as he could fit and all of his mountaineering gear, and headed west. He had decided to leave everything behind and live a bare-bones existence as a rock-climbing guide in Colorado. Before he reached the Pennsylvania Turnpike, he turned back.

On my father's eighty-third birthday, I found myself at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, where a tribute to Harry Houdini had just opened. The exhibit chronicled the celebrated escape artist's self-transformation, via the newly minted arts of photography and film, from impoverished Hungarian émigré to “American icon.” Along the way, Houdini had shed his name (Erik Weisz), his Budapest nativity (claiming Appleton, Wisconsin, where his family moved when he was four, as his birthplace), and his patrimony (after Rabbi Mayer Sámuel Weisz was fired from Appleton's Reform synagogue for failing to assimilate, his son decided to become a magician). The museum show's centerpiece was the immigrant packing trunk in which Houdini—shackled, bagged, and locked inside—had performed his first famous act, “The Metamorphosis Illusion.” His wife Bess would pull the curtain closed and, when it was drawn back seconds later, Houdini stood miraculously free, Bess now bound and imprisoned in the wood-and-metal chest. Houdini went on to ever grander escapes—breaking free of ropes slung from skyscrapers, straitjackets suspended from cranes, stocks lowered into a “Chinese Water Torture Cell,” crates dropped to the bottom of the East River.

On the way out of the museum, I stopped in the gift shop and flipped through the picture postcards. Most of them showcased the barrel-chested illusionist picking locks and springing from iron cages—often in the nude (to prove he had nothing to hide), his manacled hands arranged to conceal his private parts. One card featured a glamour shot, the master magician as Valentino—his eyebrows tweezed to perfect arches, his black hair oiled flat and parted in the middle, his eyes come-hither coals. I bought it as a birthday greeting for a Houdini fan in Hungary who I knew would like it.

Before my father came to the United States and before he and then she embarked on subsequent reinventions—American dad, Magyar repatriate, “overdressed shiksa”—there was a time when it seemed István Faludi had escaped the identity grid altogether. In the spring of 1948, my twenty-year-old father boarded the
Carina
, a former U.S. liberty ship turned Norwegian freighter docked in the port of Göteborg on Sweden's western coast, and crossed the ocean to Brazil. It was a miraculous escape from an impossible trap. To be a Hungarian Jew in the 1940s was to be bound head to toe, locked in a trunk, dropped to the bottom of the deepest river on Earth. Through a set of ingenious contortions and illusions, my father had managed to wriggle free of his chains.

The Brazil my father entered in 1948 was a country with a national identity wholly at odds with the one he'd just left. “The experiment of Brazil, with its complete and conscious negation of all colour and racial distinctions, represents by its obvious success perhaps the most important contribution toward the liquidation of a mania that has brought more disruption and unhappiness into our world than any other,” my father's beloved author Stefan Zweig wrote in 1941. Zweig, like my father, was a Central European Jew who'd fled a war-ravaged continent for Brazil, a country whose inclusive ethos filled the writer, at least in 1941, with “infinite relief.” In
Brazil, Land of the Future
, Zweig set out his reasons for believing that his new homeland “demands not only the attention but the admiration of the whole world”:

Zweig elided certain historical evidence that ran contrary to his Panglossian image of Brazil, like the importation of millions of African slaves, the enslavement of the indigenous population, and the prewar dictatorship's less-than-welcoming stance toward Jewish refugees. Still, the vision of Brazilian nationality that pertained when Zweig arrived was a world away from the racial purity fixations of Nazi Europe, and its hopeful intermingling antipodal to Zionism. If anything, it suggested the “panhumanist” model Magnus Hirschfeld had in mind when he declared himself a “world citzen.” To Zweig, Brazil held out the promise that there would be no need to withdraw to a bunkered Jewish state, that it was possible to melt away the hatreds of the past by “continuous assimilation through perpetual interbreeding.” No one could lay exclusive claim to being a “true” Brazilian, Zweig exulted, “because there is nothing more typical of a Brazilian than that he is a man without a history.”

————

I learned some of the details of my father's escape from Hungary on the afternoon she decided to show me my “inheritance.” I followed her down the wooden steps and through the garage to the cellar door, which she unlocked with one of the many keys on her jailer's-sized ring. When we stepped through the portal, the first thing I saw was a familiar display of sanders and power drills and the DeWalt radial arm saw: my father's old Black & Decker home workshop. It was arranged exactly as it had been in our basement in Yorktown Heights.

She ran her hand under the workbench peg-board covered with tools and retrieved another key, hanging by a string from a nail, and carried it over to a large steel cabinet. “This is my ‘safe,' ” my father said. “I keep my valuables in here because it's fireproof.” When the metal doors swung open, though, there wasn't much to see except a cardboard carton. She retrieved the box and set it on her old worktable. Here was the lockbox I'd sought since I'd first come into the house, the repository containing the relics of István's past.

“If anything happens to me, you should know where this is,” my father said. She lifted the lid and rooted through yellowing papers and sepia photographs, and extracted two small square documents on crumbling parchment paper, covered with official-looking stamps and a sea of daunting Hungarian;
Telekjegyzőkönyv
was one of the shorter words. They were my grandfather's deeds to the two apartment buildings he'd owned in Pest, at Ráday utca 9 and Váci út 28. The property titles were dated, respectively, April 24, 1925, and May 4, 1925, and the purchase prices listed as 2,500,000,000 and 3,000,000,000 korona, the hyperinflated currency of post–World War I Hungary.

“This is our property that the Communists stole from us—after the war.”

“You mean, after the Hungarians stole it,” I said, ever the historical spoilsport to my father's mythography, “
during
the war.”

“No
deaaar
, the Communists. The
Soviet
Communists.” She returned to her inspection of the documents. “What you are talking about is without significance,” she said. “The Communists came in after the war and took away private property that belonged to
Hungarians.
”

She lifted another document from the box and laid it on the table. It looked like a handbill, palm-sized and printed on heavy stock. Under a Latin inscription, a line of typed words and handwritten entries ran down the side. “My high school report card,” she noted.

“Are those your grades?” I thrilled to this rare aperture into my father's school days.

“A ‘good' in Hungarian language and literature. Aaand in ‘religious ethics'!”

She returned the card to the box and held up a square of parchment. A birth certificate.

“István Károly Friedman,” she read out loud. “Born November 1, 1927, to Jenő Friedman, thirty-three years of age, and Rozália Grünberger Friedman, twenty-four years of age.” Under the birth name were two notations: “—
Fiú.—Izr
.”—Boy.—Israelite. Until the Communist era, all birth certificates listed religion. On the back was an addendum, noting that the name Friedman had been officially changed to Faludi in 1946. Another document: István's old passport. The original date on the inside cover was July 5, 1946. The photo was of a very young and slender man, with a pencil-thin mustache and dark, unfathomable eyes.

My father pointed to the mustache. “My disguise,” she said. “My father grew a mustache, too—in the war. But that was because he didn't want to look Jewish.”

“And you?”

No response. Then, “I never looked Jewish.”

With this passport my eighteen-year-old father left postwar Hungary in 1946 with his equally youthful business partner, Tibor Jablonszky; they had met a year earlier at the youth film club backed by the Communist Party. The two young men were heading for Denmark—the first stop on what would eventually be a journey halfway around the world—armed with freshly printed business cards and letterhead with their new company logo. My father still had a few sheets of the stationery he'd designed, embossed with a tiny plane flying over a large movie reel, next to the name of their new enterprise, Jablonszky & Faludi, a film “export-import” company.

Jablonszky & Faludi was more import than export. The new Hungarian Communist film agency, known as Mafirt, was looking to replenish the nation's movie stock, destroyed in the bombings. Less than a year after the war, my father and Tibor approached Mafirt with a proposition: send Jablonszky & Faludi to Scandinavia to collect new films. “The guys at Mafirt said they could get us a permit,” my father recalled, “but they warned us, ‘Don't bring anything that will offend the Russians.' We told them, ‘Oh no, we wouldn't dream of it!' ”

The two intended to travel by train to Denmark, but rail service still went no farther than Vienna. For weeks, they wandered around Budapest looking for someone who could give them a ride to Copenhagen. They were joined by a third young member of the youth film club, Tamás Somló, the Jewish boy who lived at Ráday 9, whose pharmacist father had been deported to Mauthausen.

After one memorable night on the town, the three young men wound up at the Kit Kat Club in Pest. “A wild place,” my father recalled, gazing at the passport picture of her mustachioed young self. “It was where you'd go to pick up prostitutes.” They followed some women to a flea-bitten hotel, where my father had his first sexual experience. “One dollar, with everything included!” The night at the Kit Kat Club was a milestone in my father's life for another reason. “We met this Dane in the men's room,” my father said. A bloodied Dane, thanks to certain nationality confusions. “He had been shot by a Russian who thought he was a Nazi because he was wearing a uniform, but it was the Danish Red Cross uniform,” my father explained. “Waaall, everyone was drunk. Anyway, the bullet only grazed him.” The Dane introduced the three young men to his Red Cross coworkers, who were traveling around Central Europe in a truck, distributing food to children. My father saw an opportunity. “I told them we were filmmakers and that we could make a film of them doing all their
vaaary
good works.”

My father and Tibor set out the next day with the Danish Red Cross (Tamás stayed behind temporarily to take his high school exams) and passed through the northwestern countryside of Hungary and into Austria, cameras rolling. “We made a big show of it,” my father recalled. “We said the film labs in Hungary were no good anymore, but if they took us to Denmark, we could develop the movie there.”

“What happened to that movie?”

A sly smile played across my father's face. “It was all a deceit. We didn't have any film in our camera.”

The Red Cross workers had to spend several weeks in Vienna before they hit the road, and my father and Tibor ran out of money. My father wrote home for funds; Jenő mailed his son a few Napoleon gold coins—Hungarian currency was worthless at that point. My father had to rinse the coins off in the sink. “They were all sticky because my father sent them hidden in a box of prunes.” She thought for a second. “ ‘Sun Ripe Prunes!' That's what it said on the box. Funny, what you remember.” The coins were soon spent. It was my father's idea to see if the two hungry young men could get a meal from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which was providing relief rations for Holocaust refugees. “So we went over there and asked for help packages. And they said to me, ‘Well, you're okay, but you' ”—meaning Tibor—“ ‘you're not Jewish!' ”

Which was correct. Tibor was Catholic.

“But how did they know?”

“Waaall, he was blond. The man from the Joint said, ‘You know, we can easily check this—come into the next room.' ” He was proposing Tibor drop his trousers—a turnabout on every Jewish man's wartime fear. Tibor feigned outrage. “He said, ‘I have
never
been so insulted in my entire life! I am
one hundred percent
Jewish!' And the man said, ‘All right, all right, don't get excited.' ” Tibor got his care package.

When the Red Cross aid workers finally finished their rounds, they made good on their end of the deal. They told the two young filmmakers to report to the Danish Red Cross villa in Vienna on the morning of December 3, 1946, where “a luxury sedan” would be waiting to take them to Denmark. The sedan belonged to a “rich exporter,” my father recalled, and was piloted by a cantankerous chauffeur with no sense of direction—“which wasn't good because the roads through Germany were dangerous.”