“How is Ilonka?” I asked.
My father made a face. “I don’t see her so much.” She took the saucer from me and placed it carefully on the cabinet shelf with its mates. The problem evidently was Ilonka’s husband. “It was fine with him when I was the man buying things for his wife and giving money to his family. But now that I’m a woman, I’ve been banished.”
She shut and secured the cupboard doors. We went around to the front. It took some effort to hoist ourselves into the elevated cockpit. My father disengaged the clutch and shifted into reverse and we lurched backward, nearly plowing into a parked car. I noted with dismay that the makers of the well-appointed Exclusive had excluded one feature: a usable rear window. The tiny transom above the commode showed only empty sky.
At the pay booth, she fished through her purse for her wallet. The ticket taker, another Magyar babushka, stuck her head out the window and gave my father the once-over. As the bills were counted, I studied my father, too. I could see the source of her thickening hair (a row of implant plugs) and the lightened color (a dye job). Her skin had a glossy sheen. Foundation powder? Estrogen? What struck me most forcefully, though, wasn’t what was new. I’d spotted it in the airport—that old nervous half-smile, that same faraway gaze.
On the road, she steered the lumbering Gigantor into the fast lane. It was rush hour. A motorist trailing us in a rusted subcompact blasted his horn. My father leaned out the window and swore at him. The honking stopped. “When they see I’m a laaady, they pipe right down,” she said.
We merged onto a highway, and I gazed out the window at the dilapidated industrial back lots flying by, a few smokestacks belching brown haze, boarded-up warehouses with greasy windows, concrete highway dividers slathered in graffiti. We passed through a long stretch of half-finished construction, grasses growing high over oxidizing rebar. Along the shoulder, billboards proliferated, shiny fresh faces flashing perfect teeth, celebrating the arrival of post-Communist consumption: Citibank, Media Markt, T-Mobile, McDonald’s. Big balls of old mistletoe parched in the branches of trees. Along the horizon, I could make out the red-roofed gables of a distant hamlet.
Half an hour later, we entered the capital. My father threaded the monster vehicle through the tight streets of downtown Pest, shadowed by Art Nouveau manses nouveau no longer, facades grimy and pockmarked by a war sixty years gone. A canary-yellow trolley rattled by, right out of a children’s book. We drove past the back end of the Hungarian Parliament, a supersized gingerbread tribute to the Palace of Westminster. In the adjacent plaza, a mob of young men in black garb and black boots were chanting, waving signs and Hungarian flags.
“What’s that about?” I asked.
No answer.
“A demonstration?”
Silence.
“What—”
“It’s nothing. A stupid thing.”
Then we were through the maze and hugging an embankment. The Royal Palace, a thousand-foot-long Neo-Baroque complex perched on the commanding heights of Castle Hill, swung into view on the far bank of the Danube, the Buda side. My father swerved the camper onto a ramp and we ascended the fabled Chain Bridge, its cast-iron suspension an engineering wonder of the world when it opened in 1849, the first permanent bridge in Hungary to span the Danube. We passed the first of the two pairs of stone lions that guard the bridgeheads, their gaze stoical, their mouths agape in perpetual, benevolent roar. A faint memory stirred.
The camper crested the bridge and descended to the Buda side. We followed the tram tracks along the river for a while, then began the trek into the hills. The thoroughfares became leafier, the houses larger, gated, many surrounded by high walls.
“When I was a teenager, I used to ride my bicycle around here,” my father volunteered. “The Swabian kids would say, ‘Hey, you dirty little Jew.’” She lifted a hand from the wheel and swatted at the memory, brushing away an annoying gnat. “Yaaas but,” she answered, as if in dialogue with herself, “that was just a stupid thing.”
“It doesn’t sound—” I began.
“I look to the future, never the past,” my father said. A fitting maxim, I thought, for the captain of a vehicle without a rear window.
Growing up, I’d heard almost nothing about the paternal side of my family. My father rarely spoke of his parents, and never to them. I learned my paternal grandfather’s first name in 1967, when a letter arrived from Tel Aviv, informing us of his death. My mother recalled aerogrammes with an Israeli postmark arriving in the early years of their marriage, addressed to István. They were from my father’s mother. My mother couldn’t read them—they were in Hungarian—and my father wouldn’t. My mother wrote back a few times in English, bland little notes about life as an American housewife: “Between taking care of Susan, cooking, and housekeeping, I’m very busy at home … Steven works a lot, plus many evenings doing ‘overtime.’” An excuse for his silence? By the early ’60s, the aerogrammes had stopped.
I knew a few fundamentals. I knew my father’s birth name: István Friedman, or rather, Friedman István; Hungarians put the surname first. He’d adopted Faludi after World War II (“a good authentic Hungarian name,” my father had explained to me), then Steven—or Steve, as he preferred—after he’d moved to the United States in 1953. I knew he was born and raised Jewish in Budapest. I knew he was a teenager during the Nazi occupation. But in all the years we lived under the same roof, and no matter how many times I asked and wheedled and sometimes pleaded for details, he spoke of only a few instances from wartime Hungary. They were more snapshots than stories, visual shrapnel that rattled around in my childish imagination, devoid of narrative.
In one, it is winter and dead bodies litter the street. My father sees the frozen carcass of a horse in a gutter and hacks off pieces to eat. In another, my father is on a boulevard in Pest when a man in uniform orders him into the Grand Hotel Royal. Jews are being shot in the basement. My father survives by hiding in the stairwell. In the third, my father “saves” his parents. How? I’d ask, hungry for details, for once inviting a filibuster. Shrug. “Waaall. I had an armband.” And? “And … I saaaved them.”
As the camper climbed the switchbacks, I gazed out at the terra-cotta rooftops of the hidden estates, trying to divine the outlines of my father’s youth. As a child and until the war broke out, he’d spent every summer in these hills. The Friedmans’ primary address was on the other side of the Danube, in a capacious flat in one of the two large residential buildings my grandfather owned in fashionable districts of Pest. My father referred to the family quarters at Ráday utca 9 as “the royal apartment.” But every May of my father’s childhood, the Friedmans would decamp, along with their maid and cook, to my grandfather’s other property in the hills, the family villa. There, an only child called Pista—diminutive for István—would play on the sloping lawn with its orchards and outbuildings (including a cottage for the resident gardener), paddle in the sunken swimming pool, and, the year he contracted rheumatic fever, lie on a chaise longue in the sun, tended by a retinue of hired help. As we ascended into the hills of Buda I thought, here I am in the city that was the forge of my father’s youth, the anvil on which his character was struck. Now it was the stage set of her prodigal return. This proximity gave me a strange sensation. All