In the Darkroom

7

His Body into Pieces. Hers.

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:

One of the most astounding traits of Hungarian history, subsequently suppressed or flatly denied by nationalistic chroniclers, is that the makers of the national myths, the widely acclaimed heroes of the Ottoman wars, the political and military leaders of the War of Independence against the Habsburgs, the outstanding figures of literature and science, were totally or partly of German, Croat, Slovak, Romanian or Serb origin.

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?

There was no sign of my father. A stout matron in a guard uniform inspected me darkly from her wooden chair in the corner. Maybe it was me. Maybe these battle-axes weren’t staring at my father in a dress, after all. Maybe they disapproved of a girl wearing jeans. Or maybe they just didn’t like foreign women. After a while, I got tired of the evil eye and retraced my steps. I found my father many rooms back, transfixed before Gyula Benczúr’s The Baptism of Vajk, an operatic depiction of the tenth-century christening of Hungary’s first king. The Magyar tribesman Vajk kneels bare-shouldered before the holy font and gilded chalice, about to shed his pagan name and receive his new Christian one: István, Stephen. My father’s namesake.

I studied the baptism of the former Vajk over the former István’s shoulder.

“Isn’t it a bit”—I searched for the proper word—“histrionic?”

“It’s a work of true greatness,” she said with a flourish of matching grandiosity, her polka-dot skirt billowing with her enthusiasm. “It’s characteristically Hungarian.”

In an eggheaded attempt to prepare for my visit, I’d read István Bibó’s scathing inspection of “Hungarianism,” in an essay published at the end of World War II. The political scientist saw his country’s identity as Potemkin, a society “deceiving itself” and held together by little more than “wishful” thinking and “frills and veneers.” “Today’s Hungarians are among Europe’s least well-defined groups,” Bibó wrote—and Hungarianism a “grand illusion.” As I recalled Bibó now, the afternoon’s displays threatened to turn hallucinogenic. Everything we were looking at seemed oddly, fatally confectionary, the face of a nation montaged onto one fantasia after another: The anointed Saint Stephen was the “patriarch” whose patrimony had no heirs; Prince Eugene was the (French-born) Austrian Imperial Army general who freed Hungary from the Ottoman Empire only to hand it over to the Habsburgs; Lajos Kossuth was the Father of Hungarian Democracy whose 1848 bid for Hungarian independence (celebrated every March 15 on National Day) was stillborn; the Turul was mythical herald to a thousand-year Magyar reign that never hatched.

I considered the illusions hanging from these walls. As we worked our way back through the echoing galleries, I looked at my father in her polka dots and the image that flashed momentarily through my brain was of a tour guide in theme-park costume, leading me through a tarted-up history that concealed a darker past, a Tinker Bell guide to a storybook culture, neither person nor place what they really were. What the Magyars were was humiliated. Just about every power that had ever dealt with Hungary—whether the Mongols in 1241 or the Turks in 1526 or the Austrians in 1711 and 1848 or the Soviets in 1956—had seen fit to kick it in the teeth.

In the next station of our Castle Hill cultural tour (the Budapest History Museum), my father lingered admiringly before another hagiographic painting of another lionized Hungarian. This one was at least more modern than Vajk. He was dressed in a naval uniform, pinned with rows of medals: the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, whose governance of the country from 1920 to 1944 encompassed the arc of my father’s youth. Her reverence for the man who presided over the deportation of nearly a half-million Jews galled me.

A make-believe royal, I pointed out. (Horthy was elected Regent by the Hungarian National Assembly in 1920, intended as a placeholder for the exiled Habsburg king, who never reclaimed the throne.) And what’s with the “Admiral”? A navy in a landlocked state?

“You don’t know anything,” my father said. “Trianon took away the Hungarian coast. A tragedy. A catastrophe.”

She was right about the coast. The treaty at the end of World War I, which dealt Hungary the harshest penalties of any warring state (including Germany), had stripped the nation of its seaports, along with 65 percent of its waterways, 88 percent of its forests, and all of its coal, salt, and silver mines. In the Second World War, Horthy’s Hungary would ally itself with the Axis in hopes of resurrecting “the lost territories” (and Hitler, indeed, returned two land parcels that Trianon had lopped off). When my father and I would finally make it down into the city, I’d notice the ubiquitous image—plastered on walls, affixed to bumpers, appliquéd onto backpacks—of the map of pre-Trianon “Greater Hungary,” also known as “the mutilated motherland.” The map featured the nation as a butchered torso, surrounded by its four severed appendages. The defenders of Hungarian honor call Trianon “the amputation.”

“It destroyed the motherland!” my father said now, her voice rising. “It cut his body into pieces.”

“Hers,” I corrected.

My father hiked up her purse on a camera-burdened shoulder and headed for the exit.

We left the museum and, instead of descending to the streets of the city I so wished to visit, we climbed even higher to Fisherman’s Bastion. My father wanted to take some “panoramic” pictures.

A turnstile blocked the entrance. You had to buy a token if you wanted to see the view. My father forked over some forints, and we were admitted to the Neo-Romanesque stone arcade punctuated by viewing turrets, viewing balconies, and seven viewing lookout towers (in honor of the seven Magyar tribes). Despite the name, the bastion wasn’t built for fishermen; it was designed in the 1890s as a viewing terrace. “It was meant to be like a fairy tale,” as one chronicler put it, to “feel like history rather than be history.” Follow the Yellow Brick Road, I thought, as I morosely trailed my father’s footsteps.

She stopped at one of the designated lookout towers to take some shots of the city across the river. “A good thing I brought the telephoto,” she said, wrestling the lens out of her purse. While she clicked away, I leaned through a vaulted arch to bask in the fading autumn sun and, despite my cynicism, admire the view. The Danube was a broad dusky ribbon under the city’s seven bridges. To my left, I could see the enchanted greensward of Margaret Island and, beyond it, the approaching river’s long bend to the south.

On the far shore, Pest was a hazy blur. The Hungarian Parliament, a Neo-Gothic wedding cake encrusted with half a million precious stones and nearly a hundred pounds of gold, took up nine hundred feet of prime waterfront real estate. This temple to democracy, the largest parliament building in Europe and the third largest in the world, was built in the late nineteenth century, when Franz Josef reigned and less than 10 percent of the Hungarian population could vote.

On this side of the river, the red incline train, the Sikló (“the Little Snake”), was inching down the cliff. Directly below, the Chain Bridge arced across the water toward the Neo-Renaissance splendor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The learned society was inaugurated by the same man who spearheaded the construction of the Chain Bridge, Count István Széchenyi, a preeminent Hungarian statesman of the nineteenth century. Széchenyi’s quest for an authentic national culture would end in personal despair. “We have no national habits,” Széchenyi lamented once. “Our existence and knowledge depend on imitation.” Subsequent seekers of Hungarianism have been equally riddled with doubt. They have generated two centuries of literature, journalism, and oratory devoted to the question that doubles as the title for many of their angst-ridden jeremiads: “Who Is a Hungarian?” Long before Erik Erikson coined the phrase, Hungarians were having an identity crisis.

My father traced the descent of the shiny red funicular with her camera lens. “I was so happy when they reopened the Sikló,” she said. “The first time I saw it, I cried.”

I asked why and she said, “Because the Russians had destroyed it.” The Sikló was bombed, along with pretty much everything else along this stretch of the Danube, during the Siege of Budapest, the fifty-day Soviet campaign in the winter of 1944–45 to evict the die-hard Waffen-SS and Hungarian troops bunkered along Castle Hill.

“Would you have preferred the other side won?” I asked.

“You have a very stupid American concept of this.”

“Enlighten me.”

“The Russians destroyed everything that was Hungarian.”

Later I would pick up a brochure on the history of the Sikló and take a perverse pleasure in finding that it was put back in service in 1986, under Soviet rule. I didn’t bring it up with my father. By then I knew better than to stick a pin in Hungarian “grand illusion.”

8

On the Altar of the Homeland

I learned to time my more probing questions to my father’s golden hour. She was at her most expansive over late-afternoon coffee, which she took with a slice of Linzer torte or Sacher torte or Dobos torte or some other confection evoking the Austro-Hungarian era. Cake was always served with a hefty dollop of freshly whipped cream, because that’s “the correct Viennese way to do it.” The Habsburg Empire lived on in my father’s prandial habits.