In the Darkroom (42 page)

“I did it once,” my father said.

“So?”

“So, I don't need to do it again. It's boring.”

I didn't buy that. “The grande dame of the gay parade!” she'd exulted two years earlier, after the 2006 march. “Waaall, old dame, anyway!” She'd sent me pictures she'd taken with young revelers, and she couldn't stop talking about it. Boring?

“It's the signature event of the LGBT community,
your
community. Don't you want to be there?”

She gave her signature wave.

“It's an irritant. Some of the transes don't dress tastefully, you know?”

I didn't know. But I knew enough about the parade's reception to be secretly relieved she was planning on missing it.

My father stacked the plates in the cupboard. She wiped down the counters, slowly, and took her time folding the matching yellow floral dish towels. Then she met my eye. “There could be trouble,” she said.

The previous year, right-wing thugs had attacked the paraders as they marched down Andrássy Boulevard and beat up revelers at the after party at Buddha Beach, two so severely that they had to be hospitalized. The police were conspicuously absent. According to a subsequent investigation by Amnesty International, a parade member who called the police was told that, having chosen to partipate in the march, she “should take its consequences.” On the streets of Pest that day, two assertions of identity had collided, with bloody consequences for one of them.

In the weeks leading up to this year's procession, the signs were even more ominous. The Hungarian right-wing media and blogosphere were roiling with fury. The “communiqué” issued by the rightist Hunnia organization and the Sixty-Four Counties Youth Movement was typical:

The Battle of Pressburg took place in 907.

Jobbik parliamentary members attempted to ban the parade (and, later, introduced legislation to make the “promotion of sexual deviations,” including “homosexuality, transsexuality, transvestitism, bisexuality, and pedophile behaviors,” punishable by up to eight years in prison). In June, the Budapest police chief tried to cancel the parade, claiming that the march might “impede the circulation of mass transit and vehicle traffic.” The ban was rescinded after an international protest by LGBT and human-rights organizations.

That same month, the far-right website Kuruc.info posted the names and addresses of LGBT gathering spots in Budapest. A few days later, a gay bar and bathhouse, both on the website's list, were firebombed. Kuruc hailed the attacks in a post titled, “Cleansing Fire Licks Another Mini Sodom.” By then, more than a dozen Hungarian far-right groups were mobilizing against the march. The Hungarian Self-Defense Movement (known by its Hungarian acronym, MÖM) announced its intent to attack the parade “out of self-defense” and appealed to “all Hungarians” to “expel the pederast horde once and for all.” A soccer-fan club promised to meet the marchers “with weapons if we must, with bare hands if we must, but we will not let things stand as they are!” On Jobbik's website a warning appeared that invoked Leviticus 20:13: “If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”

The night before the 2008 Gay Dignity Procession, and after another protest by human-rights groups over the lack of security measures, the Budapest police installed high metal fences at the starting point of the parade and deployed two thousand officers along the route. The barricade, along with the water cannons and tear gas the officers wielded, failed to deter the assault.

Bands of self-styled “Hungarian patriots” broke through the fences and hurled smoke bombs, firecrackers, cobblestones, bottles, acid-filled eggs, rotting food, and feces. They accosted parade-goers and policemen alike, beat up a well-known liberal radio reporter, and attacked a Roma performer so viciously that the march's concert had to be canceled. They slapped and spat at a Socialist politician who was on record as supporting the march, and set on one vehicle with particular furor, smashing its windows: the car carrying former equality minister Katalin Lévai and Gábor Szetey, the Socialist human-resources secretary and the first openly gay government official. On the street, marchers tried to shield themselves from the fusillade with their placards and rainbow-colored umbrellas. Many fled through an underground tunnel to the nearest subway station.

The opening ceremonies of the Gay Pride Festival had been held a few days earlier in a downtown theater. Lévai delivered the keynote speech. She talked about the rights and the desires of LGBT people to build a community by making their “identity” public. “A community,” she said, “may only find dignity if it becomes visible.” But the threats convinced many, like my father, to stay home. More police officers policed the event than there were marchers marching. In the years to come, the parade would literally be placed out of sight: the police banned spectators and cordoned off the route a full block to either side.

In the course of the Dignity Procession, the predictable epithets were hurled—“dirty queers,” “filthy fags,” “perverts rot in hell,” and so on. One particular chant seemed to capture the crowd's fancy. It was heard all along the parade route: “Buzikat a Dunába, zsidókat meg utána.” Faggots into the Danube, followed by the Jews.

————

Pronouncing such categorical death sentences required being very certain of one's own category. To document the “purity” of his own Hungarian blood, one Jobbik parliamentary minister even submitted to a DNA test with a medical diagnostic company and posted the reassuring results on a far-right website: “No genetic trace of Jewish or Roma ancestors.” Not all were so fortunate. Jobbik vice chairman Csanád Szegedi, the reliable fount of anti-Semitic assertions, bragged that he could trace his “thousand-year-old” Hungarian family ancestry back to the original Magyar tribes. Then, in 2010, some political adversaries went looking for dirt, and found it in a local registry of vital statistics: his grandmother's birth certificate. In 1944, Szegedi's maternal grandmother had been deported to Auschwitz. She was the sole survivor of her extended Jewish family. After the war, she had concealed her religion. Thus did Csanád Szegedi come to know that he was a Jew.

The grandmother's damning birth certificate was uploaded to a far-right website, and Szegedi resigned from Jobbik. The party demanded he also abandon his post in the European Parliament, and one Jobbik official told Szegedi that really only one solution would suffice: “The best thing that could happen now is for someone to shoot you in the head, and for you to be reborn as an eighteen-year-old without any Jewish origins.”

Szegedi tried to finesse his new status. “The important thing is the way one behaves as a Hungarian.” He was not really a Jew, he said, just someone with “ancestry of Jewish origin—because I declare myself 100 percent Hungarian.” Some months later, Szegedi issued another statement, informing the media that he had been learning Hebrew, attending Shabbat services every Friday at an Orthodox synagogue, and eating kosher. He was now, he announced, Dovid Szegedi. “This is my true identity.”

When I asked my father what she thought about the Szegedi flap, she considered for a few moments, then burst into song.

“This is the song we used to sing about Imrédy's little ‘problem,' ” my father said. She was talking about an earlier and equally rabid anti-Semitic political leader, Prime Minister Béla Imrédy, who, in 1939, had fainted dead away over the news, likewise uncovered by a rival, of his Jewish origins. Imrédy had championed the anti-Jewish laws of the late '30s that defined Jewishness along genetic bloodlines. The tune my father was remembering reworked the words of an anti-Semitic ditty popular in interwar Hungary. “The first line is just nonsense words, like ‘Hickory Dickory Dock,' ” my father explained. In truth, it was all fairly nonsensical. She sang it again in English:

“What Szegedi did is absolutely right,” my father said. She was talking about his belated embrace of Judaism. “Because it is his ancestry, his
family's
ancestry.”

A family ancestry that my father shared but had seemingly disavowed.

“Is it his ‘true identity'?” I asked.

“Waaall—”

“What does that mean to you?” I pressed.

“Identity is”—she deliberated—“it's what society accepts for you. You have to behave in a way that people
accept
, otherwise you have enemies. That's what I do—and I have no problems.”

I was startled to hear my father espouse the importance of family ancestry, she who had for so many years rejected and renounced her closest kin. My father's alienation from her parents was an open family wound that still disturbed the peace of the extended Grünberger clan. Just how open was made clear to me one afternoon in 2010 in Basel. I'd come to talk to my ninety-five-year-old uncle, retired pediatric pulmonologist and my grandmother's only living sibling, Alexander Gordon (formerly Sándor Grünberger). “All the family was angry at Pista!” Alexander burst out suddenly. We were drinking shots of homemade slivovitz in the Gordons' cozy flat on Clarastrasse, a few blocks from the Three Kings Hotel where Zionist founder and Hungarian expatriate Theodor Herzl was famously photographed on the balcony during the first World Zionist Congress in 1897. Alexander's wife, Vera, sat beside me on the sofa, plying us with cake and cookies. “Your grandmother Rozi,” Alexander said, “she was always crying, ‘Why do I have a son who doesn't want to know anything about his mother?' Pista didn't write to her, he didn't speak to her, nothing! It was a big conflict within the whole family.” Alexander recalled the day when, on a trip to New York City in the late 1970s, he'd finally confronted my father. “I said to Pista, ‘Why, why? Why are you not caring about your mamma?' ” No answer. “He just said, ‘We don't speak about it.' ” Alexander threw his arms in the air. “And after Rozi died, all he wanted was the documents for those apartment buildings. You don't speak to your mother, and then after you come and you want houses?” Alexander seemed to be addressing my father directly, as if his nephew Pista were sitting on the couch instead of me. “My mamma is dead, and you, you have the possibility to have contact with your mother and you don't do it? What are you? What is your character?”

Vera tried to calm her husband. “You have to understand,” she said to me. “Pista had a terrible childhood. And his parents used him in the divorce in a very terrible way. They put him in a place no child should be.” She related a story that had made the rounds among the women in the family. “Jenő had your father hide behind the stove—to watch Rozi when Jenő wasn't at home, and report if she was with one of her boyfriends. He wanted Pista to get information he could use in the divorce—he was using Pista as a witness.” Alexander listened, then waved his hand in dismissal. I recognized the gesture.

That visit, I'd stayed with Alexander and Vera's son, Peter Gordon, and his wife, Helga. They were kind and forbearing. Peter was a pediatrician who devoted long hours to refugee patients from Turkey and the former Yugoslavia; Helga, a new mother, had a sympathetic nature that invited confidences. “Your father came to see us in Basel after the operation,” Helga said one morning, “and she told all kinds of things to me. She said when she was a boy, she saw her mother in bed with another man.” And another thing: “Your father said that when he was ten or eleven, Rozi caught him in her corset and panties and slip. And she beat him.” It was for this transgression, Helga suspected, that my father was sent to live with the religious teacher, “to be straightened out,” since the usual straightening-out methods employed at home weren't working. Rozi's preferred form of punishment, my father told Helga, was to lock her young son “in a dark room.”

When I repeated some of these stories to my father, she dismissed them as “gossip” and “stupid things,” and refused to say more. I didn't know how much credence to give them, or what they explained, if anything. Why had my father, who claimed she had rescued her parents from imminent death during the war, disowned them afterward and during their long senescence in Israel? Was Pista the wartime savior of manipulative and neglectful parents, or the ungrateful son who'd abandoned them? And if my father's fight was with her parents, why had she cut herself off from the rest of the family?

Though not from everyone. My father maintained contact with one relative: Peter Gordon.

On one of my early visits to Budapest, Peter had arrived on a predawn flight from Basel, bearing a cache of my father's favorite Swiss chocolate.

“Peeeeeter!” my father had greeted him at the door, “I was just telling Susan. I have found family pictures.”

If Peter was the only Grünberger my father spoke to, that was largely thanks to Peter's efforts, which stretched back decades. When Peter was completing his medical residency at Long Island Jewish Hospital and Mount Sinai Beth Israel Medical Center in the '70s, he made a point of visiting my father. After my parents' divorce, Peter looked in on his distressed cousin and often took him to dinner. And right after my father had returned from Thailand, Peter had come to Budapest to make sure she was in good health. For all of my father's harangues about the failure of our family to “stay together,” here was one kinsman who was a paragon of fidelity.