In the Darkroom (51 page)

At the very bottom of the box, swathed in several layers of plastic, I discovered a six-inch stack of yellowing papers bearing stamps and seals and button-and-string closures, scores of sheets, individually folded. I sunk to the floor and pawed through them, looking for what, I couldn't say.

Certificate after certificate after certificate, some of them duplicates. And duplicates of duplicates. In a quarter of an hour, I'd reached the end of a cache of legal identities, opaque and unenlightening.

I couldn't get into the attic. My father had locked it, and when she'd summoned the police that fateful night, they'd taken the interior keys. And then lost them. I called a locksmith to break into the attic, and then into the attic's two inner rooms.

The reconstructed darkroom was just as it had been when my father gave me the tour of the house in the fall of 2004. Dust covered every surface of every piece of equipment: wall-mounted enlargers, developing sinks, processing trays, brown jugs for fixer and developer fluid, printing tongs, timer, safelight. … A steel cabinet against one wall held a retinue of top-of-the-line cameras: Hasselblads, a Rolleiflex, a Leica, Olympuses, a bellows camera with mahogany frame. Another cabinet bulged with lenses, battery packs, cables, filters, tripods, video cams, lightboxes, a sound-recording console. On the floor, beside a furled projector screen and tucked into carrying bags and leather cases, were a half-dozen movie cameras of various generations, including the old Swiss Bolex that a teenage István had purchased during World War II. I thought: my father's house was already a mausoleum when she was alive. She had locked up her history in every room: her boyhood in a cabinet in the basement, her profession behind an attic door, her cross-dressing “flamboyance” in a wardrobe in the upstairs hall. I closed the door and headed for the attic's neighboring inner sanctum.

This room was also part darkroom. The six-foot-high photo-print drum dryer was strung with cobwebs. The cabinets behind it were stuffed with studio lights, more tripods, and box after box of contact sheets. The husks of several beetles and a wasp lay on the floor. A large mound rose beside the drying machine, covered with a utility blanket. For a crazy moment, I thought the drape hid a body. I lifted a corner and peered beneath to find a mountain of discarded men's clothes: suits, coats, blazers, trousers, vests, button-down shirts, polos, dress shoes, hiking boots, mountain parkas, and a dozen or more large plastic bags into which male apparel had been sorted by category: pajamas, undershirts, briefs, belts, ties. One bag contained nothing but shoelaces. I stared at this midden heap of masculinity for a long time before letting the curtain fall. My presentiment had been right; a corpse was hidden here.

I called the locksmith again and asked him to replace the locks on the attic doors. For so long I had been determined to decode the riddle of my father. Now, it seemed important to honor her inscrutability.

On the morning of May 14, an hour after the doctor's phone call, I climbed the four flights of stairs in the internal-medicine building of St. János and traveled a long corridor to its terminus at the physician's station, where Dr. Molnárné was seated.

“Explain to me why she died,” I insisted, but she insisted she didn't know. “Sepsis, heart problem, stroke. Could be anything.”

She gestured toward a large transparent trash bag. “Here,” she said. “Don't forget this.” The sack contained my father's “effects”: damp towels, her compression hose (for varicose veins), a set of unwashed eating utensils, her reading glasses, her terry cloth slippers, and the plastic sip cup with her name on it.

A maid making a desultory show of mopping the floor began prodding me out of the way with her mop handle.

“Stop it!” I snapped. She made a face and plowed past me.

“Do you want to view the body?” Dr. Molnárné asked.

————

My father lay on the far cot by the window in the overpopulated ward, the cot where I'd sat with her the day before. She'd died without privacy, but at least, I consoled myself, she hadn't died alone. Early morning shadow dimmed the room. A sheet covered the bed and her body, a white rose placed on top of it. I inched the sheet aside to find another shroud beneath, wound around her. I felt for the beginning of the winding and unspooled it slowly from her head and shoulders. Her face was turned toward the window. Her eyes, so resolutely shut during her last miserable days, were open. I began to shake, and then, control faltering, to sob. An elderly patient in the adjacent bed leaned over to pat my back. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she said. I was grateful for her touch. And oddly comforted by the knowledge that my father had died here in the female wing, surrounded by women.

I studied my father's face, averted as it so often had been in life. All the years she was alive, she'd sought to settle the question of who she was. Jew or Christian? Hungarian or American? Woman or man? So many oppositions. But as I gazed upon her still body, I thought: there is in the universe only one true divide, one real binary, life and death. Either you are living or you are not. Everything else is molten, malleable.

As I tucked the sheet back around my father, a nurse came into the room. She presented me with a repurposed bandage envelope, containing two small items that hadn't made it into the trash bag of my father's loose effects. The nurse had collected them while preparing the body.

When I left for the United States a few days later, I would take the items with me, along with another token of remembrance, the cloth-bound prayer book my father had received on the occasion of her bar mitzvah, on the day a boy became a man. “For you,” the nurse said, as she handed me the envelope. “Stefánie's.” Inside it was a pair of pearl earrings.

S
USAN
F
ALUDI
is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of
The Terror Dream
,
Stiffed
, and
Backlash
, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. A former reporter for
The
Wall Street Journal
, she has written for
The New Yorker
,
The New York Times
,
Harper's
, and
The Baffler
, among other publications. You can sign up for author updates
here
.

 

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Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Preface: In Pursuit

PART I

1. Returns and Departures

2. Rear Window

3. The Original from the Copy

4. Home Insecurity

5. The Person You Were Meant to Be

6. It's Not Me Anymore

7. His Body into Pieces. Hers.

8. On the Altar of the Homeland

9. Ráday 9

PART II

10. Something More and Something Other

11. A Lady Is a Lady Whatever the Case May Be

12. The Mind Is a Black Box

13. Learn to Forget

14. Some Kind of Psychic Disturbance

15. The Grand Hotel Royal

16. Smitten in the Hinder Parts

17. The Subtle Poison of Adjustment

18. You're Out of the Woods

19. The Transformation of the Patient Is Without a Doubt

PART III

20. Pity, O God, the Hungarian

21. All the Female Steps

22. Paid Up

23. Getting Away with It

24. The Pregnancy of the World

25. Escape

Also by Susan Faludi

About the Author

Copyright