In the Darkroom (22 page)

In March 1939, more than two years before Hungary even entered the war, the Hungarian government declared Jewish men unfit for military action. (The judgment still enraged my father seventy years later. “Israel knocked that idea out flat in the Six-Day War,” she exclaimed, slamming her fist on the table. To my father, Israel was among other things an experiment in the restoration of manhood.) Instead, the Hungarian Labor Service System, unique to Hungary, conscripted all male Jews between the ages of twenty and forty-eight (and later, eighteen and forty-eight) into forced work units that served alongside the Hungarian army divisions. (My father was lucky enough not to turn eighteen until November 1945.) Conscripts were deprived of army boots and uniforms (other than yellow armbands identifying them as Jews; white for Jews who were Christian converts). And weapons: designated “unreliables,” Jewish men were sent to the front unarmed. When Hungary entered the war, these men provided the slave labor, assigned the most humiliating, punishing, and life-threatening duties. They were barely fed, pitifully clothed, and brutally treated—used in place of dray horses, marched ahead of the regular troops through mine fields, shoved off cliffs and tortured for the delectation of sadistic officers and their troops. Some would argue that forced labor at least kept some of the men out of the ovens. Still, the laborers died in epidemic numbers, forty-two thousand
before
the German occupation.

By the time the Arrow Cross Party took over in the fall of 1944, just about every man who wasn't old or infirm was in military service. Any male on the streets of Budapest without a uniform was suspect. Jewish men, no matter how convincing their false identity papers, risked what was euphemistically known as “trouser inspections” every time they ventured out. Tivadar Soros, the father of philanthropist George Soros, described the daily danger in his wartime memoir,
Masquerade.

Soros acquired forged medical certificates for himself and his two sons, which claimed they had been circumcised for “phimosis,” a rare condition requiring the removal of constricted foreskin. He knew the documents were unlikely to provide protection. “The foreskin problem,” Soros wrote, was “a constant threat haunting our pseudo-Christian lives.”

My father's cousin, Dahlia Baral, married a man who would be plagued by the memory of that threat for the rest of his life. When Martin Baral was a boy, his mother attempted to save her two sons from the betraying mark of their religion by arranging for a “foreskin restoration” surgery. The procedure, conducted in the middle of the war in an abandoned basement by a psychiatrist with limited surgical experience, was a disaster. Martin described it to me one day when he and Dahlia were visiting New York from Sydney, Australia, where they eventually settled after the war. The “so-called operation,” he called it. There was no anesthestic. Their mother gave him and his younger brother a slug of vodka and a cigarette. The doctor told everyone to grab an arm and a leg and hold the patients down. “I fainted,” Martin told me, “which was a good thing.” The operation didn't work, but it did leave the two brothers with raging infections for a year. As it did a third older man they knew, who also had the operation the same day. “Later, some Nazis caught this man on the street, and they pulled his pants down to see if he was a Jew,” Martin recalled. They eyed his mauled member. He said it was from syphilis. “And it looked so bad, they believed him. So you could say the operation worked after all.”

And my own father? “I was never afraid of that,” she said breezily when I asked her about the “foreskin problem” of wartime Budapest. “I wasn't an idiot. I knew how to behave. I
never
wore the yellow star.”

“But even without the star—” I tried again.

“Waaall, I never got caught,” my father said. “It's not relevant.” End of discussion.

————

A month after our dinner, Otto Szekely called me. He had received an e-mail from another member of the Class of '45. Attached to the message was an e-mail the man had received from my father, announcing her sex change. Otto wasn't the only recipient; the man had forwarded my father's e-mail to all of the surviving classmates.

Otto didn't know what to think. “The boys have been discussing it,” he said of his septuagenarian fellow alumni, “and they think Pista wanted to shock us.” Otto scrambled for precedents. “One of the surgeons at the institute I used to work with once did an operation like this,” he told me, “but that was for a woman who was born without a vagina but had a uterus.” A biological woman, he meant. “It must be some kind of a … a pathology of self-conflict,” Otto stumbled on, grabbing for medical handholds inside of his expertise to explain my father. “There must be a predetermined psychosomatic syndrome, which could be triggered by an experience early in life. That could make sense.” Except it didn't, not to him anyway. “The important thing is that he—, that the conflict—, … that it doesn't get more and more in the way of …” He left the sentence unfinished. “I can't say I understand.”

“Would you care to talk about this over lunch?” I asked.

“It would be a mitzvah.”

A few days later Otto eased himself into a banquette at a restaurant in downtown Portland and pushed across the table a sheath of computer printouts. The e-mail from my father that had been forwarded to all the “boys” was less exposition than exhibition—or rather, I thought irritably, exhibitionism. My father had chosen two images to send. In one she was posed in Empress Sisi's imperial garden in Vienna. In the other, she was wearing a platinum blond wig and a red skirt with white lilies. They were the same photographs she had e-mailed me to announce the birth of Stefánie. I felt the stirrings of an obscure resentment. Was I just one of many recipients of this visual form letter?

Some of the classmates had responded with a few choice remarks. To wit: what a ridiculous and embarrassing thing for an old man to do. My rancor instantly attached to a new target. Who were these men, who had barely exchanged two words with my father since 1944, to pass judgment?
They
should be embarrassed, passing around photos like teenagers sniggering over dirty pictures.

Stapled to the photos was another set of e-mails, an exchange between my father and a classmate in Israel. They were several pages in number and entirely text. And all in Hungarian. The only word I could read in my father's e-mail was the last one: “Shalom.”

I recognized the correspondent's name, Jaacov Steiner, my father's “best friend” from school. Otto ran his eyes dolefully down the first page of the e-mails.

“Steiner writes to your father that he hopes he is satisfied with the operation, and that he has only one question: ‘Why wait till now?' ”

My father wrote back the next day.

Otto translated the response. “I apologize that I inform you one by one,” it began, “but as Stefi I'm a little bit shy now.” Otto looked up at me, his vaulted eyebrows arching a notch higher, then returned to the reading. “Honestly I never thought that I would be alive in the twenty-first century, and now I'm here as a relatively pretty lady.”

My father's account burbled on in that everything's-coming-up-roses style familiar to me from the early trans memoirs in the Portland library: “The Thai people are all very nice.” “In two weeks I had a complete recovery.” “I was very satisfied with all the operations in Thailand.” “I have had no problems since I got back home.” “All my acquaintances are very nice to me now.”

The e-mail's last paragraph: “My daughter made many notes here about me and maybe her next book will be about me and the problems of transsexual people. Wishing you a happy New Year. Shalom, Stefi.”

Otto thumbed through the pages, looking for something. He found it in a subsequent e-mail, written to him privately from Steiner. Otto had underlined a couple of sentences in red ink.

“Steiner writes here that when Pista was young, his behavior became ‘unbearable.' He was acting very aggressive, and because of this, he was sent to live with the teacher. Many times he kicked the live-in maid.”

I wondered why Otto had underlined those words. Was he considering whether this childhood incident with the maid could be a factor in my father's latest reinvention? I was dubious. No doubt many privileged children of the era mistreated their servants. It made them obnoxious, but it didn't make them transsexuals.

“I think it was a terrible time in my father's life,” I said.

“Yes,” Otto said, “Steiner writes that his parents were in a big war over their divorce.”

“And the other war,” I said. “It must have been terrifying. My father claims to never think about being a Jew in the war,” I said, “but I don't buy it.”

Otto took off his glasses and ran a hand over his face. “Those of us who survived, we didn't have any ‘PTSD syndrome' after the war. I mean, I'm sure we carry psychot—, neurotic—, stress. I have the guilt of a survivor, but I don't—” He stopped and started over.“Maybe on an individual level, if someone gets exposed at a particular period of time, it can enhance, trigger, whatever, that syndrome. The connection exists somewhere at the individual level, but it is very difficult to prove.”

“Prove what?” I wasn't following.

“Your father probably had this desire in him as a child, and, by accident, the war came at the same time,” Otto said. “I have the feeling you want to find a connection between your father and the Holocaust. But I don't think the Holocaust can
make
someone—”

“I don't think so either,” I said.

“It's like with a mass murderer, where they say on TV, ‘Oh, this thing happened in his childhood! That explains it!' ”

“Otto, I'm not saying the Holocaust explains my father's sex change.”

He nodded, somewhat placated. “It's like when, all of a sudden, I have a headache,” he said, “and I'll try to figure out why. I'll go back in an associative way, trying to think of what triggered it—and sometimes, if I'm lucky, I figure it out.”

“But most of the time you can't,” I said. “Most of the time there is no single ‘trigger.' ”

He was quiet for a few moments. Then he said, “Still, what you are doing, trying to investigate the connections, it's a legitimate idea. It makes good sense.” The empirical-minded Dr. Szekely seemed to be in a struggle with the existential Otto. “But if you try to prove it, you may find that you will wind up going on a long, long circle around.”

“And wind up where I started.”

“Not where you started,” he said. “Many facts may come up. But in the end, the mind is a black box.”

My father was seated at the dining-room table, pen in hand, the alumni roster of the Zsidó Gimnázium's Class of '45 before her. She was shuffling the several mimeographed pages and putting an X next to name after name.

“What are you doing?” I asked. Four years had passed since I'd resumed seeing my father. On my subsequent visits, we'd made a few excursions around the city and I'd pried some family history from her. We'd even gone to another of her high school reunions, this one in Budapest. We were there only briefly; she had stormed out, irritated by “all the whining about ‘Oh, how we suffered.' ” Most of the time, though, we wound up where we were right now, sitting in my father's house.

“What are you doing?” I asked again.

“Marking the people who are dead.”

She drew her Xs in an odd sideways fashion. They looked more like crosses. The class roster soon resembled a cemetery—a Christian one.

“These people,” she said to me, after a while. “They are just frozen in time. Ghosts.” She meant the names that weren't marked with an X, her classmates at the Budapest reunion. “There was one man there who looked so old, he might as well have been dead.”

My father ran her finger slowly down the roster one more time, checking to see if she'd missed anybody. She stopped at her own name. She studied it for a moment, then drew a sideways X in the margin.

“What's that for?” I asked.

She shook the pen a few times and reapplied the ink, darkening the X.

“Steven Faludi aaalso,” she said. “Steven Faludi is dead.”

By 2008, Budapest was no longer terra incognita to me. I knew my way to my father's house, knew the tram and bus schedules, had made some friends in Pest, and had labored through a year's worth of (largely ineffective) Hungarian lessons. Inside the fortress on the hill, some things had changed. My father wasn't conducting compulsory tours of her real and virtual wardrobe. The robe didn't fall open with the same regularity. The visual evidence of her new identity was no longer on 24/7 exhibition. My father's abiding self, though, remained very much resistant and elusive, especially and reliably when it came to matters of history, personal or public. Her inspection of the Zsidó Gymnázium class roster was a rare confrontation with the specters of the past.

My husband and I had rented an apartment that summer in downtown Pest. “It's a stupid thing, not staying in the house,” my father complained. And when that didn't work, “You are embarrassing me—in front of everybody.” I wasn't sure who “everybody” was—she didn't seem to have a lot of acquaintances—but we stayed in the city, anyway. We'd found a favorite library and a favorite watering hole, and anyway, I was glad to be out of range of my father's still relentless surveillance.