In the Darkroom (9 page)

“People you know?”

“People who have websites. You know, ‘Internet friends.' ”

My father had bookmarked some of these “friends' ” websites: Annaliese from Austria who, according to her page, “dresses sexy,” is “a size 12,” and “loves to go shopping.” Margit from Sweden, who “loves” bustiers, plush teddy bears, and “the color pink.” Genevieve of Germany, whose blog featured shots of herself topless on a nude beach and a timeline of “my second birth.”

“These pictures aren't retouched,” my father said, unimpressed. “They aren't as good as mine.”

“Where are your family photographs?” I asked. Suddenly, I'd had all I could handle of bustiers and second births. “From your childhood.”

My father gave her dismissive wave. “I don't look at those.”

“But where are they?”

Silence. Then, airily: “Oh, somewhere.”

“Somewhere
where
?”

She shrugged, kept clicking through her images. Finally: “I keep all the old stuff, the important documents, in the basement. In a lockbox.”

“Could I see them?”

“It's irrelevant,” she said. “It's not me anymore.”

I looked at the clock; the day was half over. Day Five in the fortress.

“Dad, Stefi, please,” I said. “Let's go out. You can show me the places you love in the city. Show me where you used to go in Pest as a child.”

“It doesn't pay to live in the past,” my father said. “ ‘Get rid of old friends, make the new!' ”

“I don't think that's how it goes,” I said. At any rate, I was here to see if I could make a new sort of friend: her. If only she could drop her age-old obstinance long enough to allow it. But our interactions were persistently one way: instead of mutual exchange, a force-fed guided tour of frou-frou fashions and hard-drive fantasies. When was she going to let in the daughter she wouldn't let out?

“I don't want to go to old places,” my father said. “It's not interesting.”

“It interests
me
,” I said, hating my whininess, my own age-old obstinance.

“You are off the subject,” she said, tapping an insistent pink-polished nail on my notepad. “I'm Stefi now.”

One late afternoon, we stood in the kitchen, my father peeling an apple with her latest Swiss Army pocket knife. It was the “ladies' ” version, she noted, with an emery board and cuticle scissors.

“Can I ask
you
a question?” my father said.

I nodded, hopeful. She was never the one who asked the questions. Maybe this was the start of an actual conversation.

“Can you leave your door open?” she said. “You close it every night when you go to bed.”

I drew back, speechless.

“Can you leave it open?”

“Why?”

“Because I want to be treated as a woman. I want to be able to walk around without clothes and for you to treat it normally.”

“Women don't ‘normally' walk around naked,” I said.

The blade snapped shut, and the conversational opportunity, if that's what it had been, shut with it. She returned her ladies' knife to an apron pocket.

That night, I closed the bedroom door. Then I reconsidered, and opened it a crack. As much as her intrusions disturbed me, I sensed that she wasn't really targeting me. Or, if she was, it was only me as a mirror. After a while, a hesitant knock.

“Can you help me with something?”

My father was standing with her back to the door. She was in her bedroom slippers but still wearing her dress.

“I can't get the zipper. … Will you do it?”

I stood there for a moment, then reached for the zipper pull. I stopped when it was halfway down her back.

“You can get it from there,” I said.

“Thanks,” she said.

“You're welcome.”

I watched her pad back down the hall. And wondered: how could someone so hidden be so intent on being unzipped? If, indeed, that's what she wanted. All these exposures and disclosures seemed, literally, skin deep.

In the days to follow, my father continued her guided tour of surface ephemerality, leading me through the dresses in her closets, the lingerie in her bureau drawers, the cosmetics in her vanity table, the estrogen patches and dilation rods in her medicine chest, all the secret curiosities in her many Cabinets of Wonder. I couldn't tell if she thought she was dispensing revelations or distracting me from the real secrets. Look at me, but don't look at me. As the daughter of a photographer, I knew that letting light into a darkroom can illuminate the evidence or destroy it, depending on your timing. My father and I were in a battle over time, past and present. She wanted me to admire the decorations in Stefi's new display windows. I wanted to know the contents of another sealed chamber: the lockbox in the basement.

On the sixth day of the visit, my father decided to lift the house arrest. “If you want to see something authentically Hungarian,” she said, “we could go to the Castle District.”

The Castle District, the former domicile of nobility, sits atop the two-hundred-foot-high limestone escarpment of Castle Hill, overlooking the Danube on the Buda side. It is now a high-toned tourist trap, home to the Royal Palace and, perched above that, the colonnaded Fisherman's Bastion, a viewing terrace and promenade of turrets and parapets from which seemingly every panoramic picture postcard of Budapest is taken. It is as removed as my father's own redoubt from the city I wanted to see. Still, it was out of the house.

We rode over in Der California Exclusive in the early afternoon. My father dressed for the excursion in a polka-dotted skirt, white-heeled sandals, and her usual pearl earrings. “Before I decided on Stefánie,” my father told me, “I was thinking of naming myself Pearl.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I like how it sounds,” she said. “Pearl” in Hungarian, which also serves as a female name, is Gyöngy. I flashed on one of my father's attempts at forced feminization fiction, titled
Gyöngyike Becomes a Maid: Confession of Sissy Gyöngyike—Let the Party Start
. “Anyway,” my father said, “I love pearls.”

“And Stefánie?” I pressed. I knew that it was also the name of one of my paternal grandmother's three sisters. “Did you pick it for your aunt Steffy?”

My father shrugged. No more divulgences were forthcoming.

There was no place to park and we made many circles in the camper before my father backed into a space of questionable legality. “It doesn't matter if I get a ticket,” she said. “The camper's registered in Rosenheim. They can't get me.” She reached for the two cameras she'd brought, strapping one to each shoulder. I put my notebook in my back pocket. I was wearing blue jeans.

We descended the cobblestoned steps to the broad forecourt of the Royal Palace, a magisterial muddle of Neo-Medieval and Neo-Baroque architecture, topped off by a gigantic dome in the shape of a studded helmet. Presiding over the parade grounds was a heroic equestrian statue of Prince Eugene of Savoy, whose armies beat back the Turks from Hungarian territory in 1717, and a giant bronze of the Turul, the mythical bird that, according to legend, engendered the country's thousand-year Magyar rule, the fabled “Hungarian Millennium.” The Royal Palace was now showcase to the National Library, the National Gallery, and the Budapest History Museum, a diadem set atop the city, containing the glittering artifacts of Hungarian antiquity and culture. I was pleased. Not only had I convinced my father to leave her own castle on the hill, I'd managed to get her to visit a palace that housed her past—or at least her nation's past. Or at least the past her nation claimed to have, for its history was as shrouded in fancy as my father's.

The Hungarian Millennium is said to have begun when Árpád and six other Magyar chieftains rode over the mountains from somewhere in the East and conquered the great Carpathian Basin sometime in the ninth century, setting the stage for their heirs to establish a Christian monarchy, the Hungarian Kingdom, sometime around the year 1000. What actually happened is hard to say. The story of the “Magyar Conquest” is derived from the
Gesta Hungarorum
, an account written three hundred years later by a royal notary identified as P. dictus magister (“P. who is called master”), who drew on folk ballads, medieval romances, and the Bible to create a cast of Magyar heroes and the enemies that they allegedly vanquished. The Árpád dynasty, in any event, was extinct by 1301. Kings drafted from foreign dynasties (but generally claiming a drop of Árpád blood) occupied the throne for the next two centuries. And for even more centuries the country was ravaged by invasions, defeats, and occupations from foreign forces—Mongols, Turks, Russians, Habsburg Austrians, Germans, and Russians again. With few exceptions, Hungary's liberators, like so many of the country's most celebrated figures, were “foreign,” too. As Paul Lendvai observed in
The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat
:

In other words, not Magyar.

Hungary achieved its cultural zenith in Europe's Belle Époque—under the rule of the Austrian Habsburgs. In 1867, Habsburg emperor Franz Josef loosened the reins by creating the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy—usually called the Dual Monarchy—a compromise that granted Hungary a large measure of self-determination and ushered in a cultural and economic revival. The country's long sense of itself as an autonomous kingdom seemed validated, though the Dual Monarchy's sole monarch was still Franz Josef. The fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I finally brought full independence, albeit with destruction hot on its heels.

The Treaty of Trianon, the 1920 peace agreement reached at the Grand Trianon Palace in Versailles, forced Hungary to relinquish a whopping three-fifths of its population and two-thirds of its landmass to the successor states of Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Austria. If the nation was thus constricted, its self-image as sacrificial lamb was confirmed. “We are the most forsaken of all peoples on this earth,” Hungary's national poet Sándor Petőfi had written in the mid-nineteenth century. After Trianon, Hungary became all the more a martyr among nations, a people identified by its stigmata. “The realm held together by the Holy Crown has been dismembered, and the lopped off limbs of the Holy Crown's body are faint with the loss of blood,” jurist Kálmán Molnár pronounced at the time, in language as typical as it was overheated. “In a swoon, they await death or resurrection.” To Hungary's more recent irredentists, Trianon remains the unholy desecration, a devastating wound, an appalling act of national identity theft undimmed by the passage of more than eighty years.

My father and I headed for the Hungarian National Gallery, which was offering a retrospective of Mihály Munkácsy. The celebrated Hungarian painter had been born and buried in Hungary, but little else. Born Michael von Lieb to German parents, he was trained in Munich and Düsseldorf, spent most of his career in Paris, and died in a sanitarium in Germany. Nonetheless, he was one of Hungary's most venerated artists—venerated especially for having been celebrated as a “great Hungarian” in the world beyond Hungary. After Munkácsy's death in 1900, the authorities gave him a state funeral in the city's sacred Heroes' Square, his body displayed, beside the plaza's galloping statuary of the seven Magyar chieftains, on a forty-five-foot-high catafalque surrounded by flaming bronze torches.

The museum's ticket taker, another crabby granny, scowled at my father as she handed us our passes. I couldn't tell if the disapproval registered; my father gave no sign. In the exhibition hall, I gravitated to Munkácsy's earliest efforts, bleakly realistic renderings of impoverished peasant life. (The desperate conditions of the rural Magyar populace, deep in semifeudal penury well into the twentieth century, earned Hungary the moniker “The Country of Three Million Beggars.”) My father frowned; this period didn't put Hungary in a “positive” light. “You're making too much of that,” she said, pulling my sleeve as I lingered before paintings of careworn women gathering firewood and tending to hungry children. My father was eager to move on to Munkácsy's later and more famous creations: the salon portraits of fashionable Austro-Hungarian aristocracy and the epic extravaganzas of biblical dramas and victorious scenes from the Magyar Conquest. “This is
authentic
Munkácsy,” my father said, directing me to the walls that displayed the artist's final blast of bombastry.

When we'd exhausted the Technicolor lollapaloozas, she led the way to the permanent collection, a labyrinth of galleries dominated by lugubrious melodramas of Magyar affliction displayed in heavy gilt-edged frames. I sped through the next dozen halls showcasing scenes from Hungary's genesis—from the heralded arrival of Prince Árpád to the nineteenth-century revolution led by Lajos Kossuth, “The Father of Hungarian Democracy”—and sank onto a bench in a corridor to wait for my father. The room was hushed and dark; light filtered weakly through a set of high grated windows. I thought of catacombs, and that endless trip we took as a family to Hungary in 1970, when my father was so insistent that we tour the nation's cathedrals and monasteries. Endless, that is, from the perspective of an eleven-year-old who experienced the sepulchral quarters, the cloying smell of candle wax, and the echo of heels clattering on yet another cold marble ambulatory as her own private purgatory. Why, I wondered, did we never visit a synagogue?