Nights followed where I cried myself to sleep. In the mornings I awoke from strange dreams with wet undergarments. My soul had been submerged into something dark and mysterious. Before, I had always slept in the center of the big bed between my mommy and my daddy. Now only daddy lay beside me. I missed mommy so much. Sometimes I started crying and I couldn’t stop. I hid in the pantry, or out in the garden. I hid anywhere I could find and I cried myself into a frenzy, until I started hiccupping, until I saw double. My sister, Manci, she called me a one-eyed monster, and that made me cry even more. When my crying stopped, then I only yearned for more tears. Tears now were my only comfort.
For days after they took my mommy away I sat on a stool in front of our house and I stared down that long street. Next door there lived a little girl about my height with long ponytails. She sat beside me, both of us staring with vacant eyes down that long and empty street.
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My father received his first letter from his cousin, Emma, barely three months after my return from Europe. Emma wrote to my father that she had received a phone call from Erzsébet almost as soon as I’d left her house. When Erzsébet said that her uncle’s son had just arrived on her doorstep from Canada, Emma could not believe her ears. For almost sixty years she had believed my father dead. The communist police had searched for him, she wrote in an early letter, but he had vanished. He wrote back, explaining that he had crossed the border illegally into Czechoslovakia. He knew that he would never return to his native country; he would need to cut all ties.
My father and Emma began exchanging letters. Sometimes they talked on the phone, although my father said he preferred letters to phone calls.
Emma, my father told me, was “the keeper of family secrets.” But “between her fits of tears, and talking a mile a minute in Hungarian, I can’t keep up with her,” he said. “After all these years of not knowing anything about my past, I’m overwhelmed.”
He had many questions for Emma, and she tried her best to answer them all. How many siblings did his mother have? Where were his uncles and aunts all born, and where did they die? Did everyone know about him, that he was “a bastard”? Who was his father? And how did his mother die?
This last inquiry of my father’s—about how his “mother died”— flattened me. I could not conceive of what it must have been like for my father to never know, or to think he knew but only because he’d imagined a story to fill in the gaps, how his mother’s life had ended. The idea that she had “died in the bombings” had become a safe bet, even though it was all conjecture because he had never even lived with his birth mother, certainly not at the end of her life, and I’d heard this all before, many times. It was one of the only things about my father’s past that I had heard. As a child, whenever I’d ask my mother to tell me anything about my father, or his parents, she’d say, “His mother died in the bombings.”
He asked Emma if she could please try to locate his birth certifi-cate. “Any evidence that I exist,” he told her in one of his many letters. Emma, already past seventy years old, traveled by tram and metro throughout Budapest, visited churches, St. Stephen’s Basilica, the hospitals, and religious archives. She asked questions and reported back to my father on what she’d found. I asked him if he could tell me what she found, but he said, “It’s personal.” In these moments of secrecy, still withholding himself from me, all I saw in him was more fear.
Meanwhile, for nearly three years I had been waiting for news from the Hungarian Embassy about my application for citizenship— an application, the embassy staff had politely, but assuredly, emailed me on numerous occasions, that was “a long shot,” considering the lack of original documentation verifying my father’s Hungarian birthplace, as well as his own father’s identity.
On the same day in late August 2005, as if both roads to our independent quests had intersected, Emma phoned my father with the news that she had located proof of his nationality in the church archives in Budapest, as the embassy staff emailed me with the news that my passport had arrived from Hungary; I had been accepted as a Hungarian citizen. As it turned out, officials in Budapest had been able to verify my father’s birth themselves, and, consequently, his own citizenship had also been granted back to him. My father was once again a citizen of his home country. He had been repatriated.
Two days later, after receiving both documents in a couriered package, I stood in my father’s living room and handed him his proof of citizenship and newly licensed Hungarian birth certificate. No pomp and circumstance. My mother watched nearby.
“I don’t understand,” he said, now holding the document. “What is this?”
“Your Hungarian citizenship.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re a citizen of Hungary again.”
He stared down at the document. “That’s not possible.”
“I told you…before I could get my own citizenship, the Hungarian government needed to grant yours back to you first. Mine was based on yours. So there it is. You have your citizenship again.”
He stared down at the document, silent.
My mother later told me that he kept it stashed in a drawer by his bedside, next to a rosary, purchased with my mother at Guadalupe, and a picture of the Virgin Mary.
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I continued writing my memoir before my office job early each morning and well into every evening. Guided mostly by notes I had taken throughout the therapy, my journals in which I’d transcribed specific conversations from the Styx and with Alfonzo, voluminous documentation left over from the College complaint and lawsuit—including Alfonzo’s 500-page rejoinder—as well as recorded primals, I was able to map out the sequence of events from when I met Alfonzo, through the therapy, out the other end, and headstrong into a lawsuit. I wrote to make real what at times still seemed unreal.
I also researched the word “Styx.” In all my years at the house, no one had so much as mentioned why they’d chosen to spell it this way. A simple search revealed that the word, “Styx,” had originated as stugein, meaning, “to hate.” In Greek mythology, the Styx, or “the river of hate,” separated the world of the living from that of the dead.
Explaining it all to Angelo, whom I’d been dating now for more than six months, was something else entirely. I gave him a copy of an essay that I’d been writing and told him to read it. He did, but then complained that “this is interesting, but it takes so much of your time.” Angelo began to experience my writing as direct competition for his attention and affection.
Late one night before bed as the two of us were talking in my apartment, my laptop open, journals and papers spread across my living room floor, he picked up my Walkman, which contained a recording of one of my primal sessions. Horrified, I told him to hand me the Walkman.
“That’s a taped recording from a therapy session,” I said. “Please give it back.”
“I want to listen for myself,” he said.
“It’s private.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” he said.
He put on the headphones.
“Don’t turn that on,” I said, my heart now racing, palms sweating.
He placed his finger on the play button and smiled.
We were sitting across from each other in my living room, and the thought that at any moment he might hear my recorded primals, a whiff of bedlam, ripped me open and left me feeling violated. I lunged for the Walkman, grabbed it out of his hands.
“Get the fuck out of here,” I screamed.
“Geez…I was only joking,” he said.
Nothing about my reaction made sense to him.
Days later he presented me with an ultimatum. “I don’t understand why you can’t just let go all of all that and move on with your life, instead of constantly reliving your past.”
I’d heard these kinds of comments from him before: “Move on with your life,” he’d say, or “Let go of the past,” or “Get over it”— all comments I’d learned to understand
meant something like: “I’m tired of listening to you talk about this subject.” Or maybe even: “What you’re talking about makes me uncomfortable, so will you please just stop?”
“I’m not reliving my past,” I said. “I’m trying to make a difference for the future.”
“I still think you need to let it go. You spend way too much time writing. You have to choose between me and your writing…”
“Excuse me?”
“You can’t have it both ways.”
I broke up with him the next week. I chose.
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I didn’t mention the subject of my book with my family either, since I’d learned to skirt issues that would only lead to more conflict. Despite whatever reconciliation my parents and I had achieved, topics around my “gay self” were still taboo. Recently, my mother had even handed me a letter she’d written to a local newspaper and asked me to give her my “thoughts.” She had been writing letters to newspapers and politicians for years. The first line of her letter had read: I am writing in firm opposition to the recent legalization of same sex marriage in Canada.
I had to broach the subject of my book with my mother eventually, though, as I knew that certain details from her life—and, to a lesser degree, my father’s—needed to be included in my book’s trajectory. My years in the therapy would not carry the full weight of their experience—to me personally, definitely not within the confines of a book—out of the context of my family history. I had changed the name of virtually everyone in my book, except my own, but my mother was my mother.
The entire situation troubled me, ethically and morally. Baring my own soul was difficult enough; what right did I have to divulge any of her own “secrets”? My mother, I knew, would never grant me “permission” to write about the conversation when she told me she’d been raped in the camp, that much I knew. I couldn’t even mention that conversation again to her, to anyone. I searched out books about the ethics of real-life writing, but found little that could help me navigate the sticky issue of how to write about one’s own life when it intersected—as it almost always does—with another’s, particularly when that other person is one’s mother who has a history of trauma and sexual abuse.
Two books, however, did help. In The Secret Life of Families: Truth-Telling, Privacy, and Reconciliation in a Tell-All Society, author Evan Imber-Black, Ph.D., helped me distinguish secrecy from privacy when she wrote that, “Toxic and dangerous secrets most often make us feel shame, while truly private matters do not. Hiding and concealment are central to secret-keeping, but not to privacy.” There was no revenge to my act of writing. I simply wanted to write the truth, maybe even to discover the truth through the act of writing. Finally, I read Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, in which she stated, “Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.” Writing, for me, brought an order of truth to the chaos of lies and deceit.
After months of anguishing, finally I approached my mother when we were alone in the kitchen after one of our Sunday brunches. At the very least, I felt I owed her a request to write about her years in the camps.
“You know I’ve been writing a book,” I said.
My mother looked at me. “About?”
“The therapy. My lawsuit against the doctor.”
She looked away, busied herself at the sink, separating plastics from recycling.
“I wanted to ask…I mean…I was hoping you would give me…well, your permission. I wanted to be able to write about some of your own experiences in the camps as well, juxtaposed against my own story.”
“Why would you want to do that?” She turned back to face me.
“I’m your son. Your life has affected me. Is that okay?”
Again, she turned away, silent. I waited.
“Yes, that’s fine,” she said.
No other words, and no mention of specifics. What exactly she was consenting to was unclear, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask. Bringing up her rape, specifically, felt out of the question, as I still was not permitted to talk openly about my own sexuality around her. Our fights from years ago were buried deep below the surface, land mines, and I could not risk resurrecting more estrangement.
But I also couldn’t stop writing. My essay “Surviving the Cult,” an almost academic account of my years in the therapy and the lawsuit, was published in the UK-based magazine Gay Times in January 2006.
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My parents and I added midweek dinners to our weekly brunches. Not since childhood had I prayed with them—doing so would have felt like submission. But when they made the sign of the cross before each meal, thanking God for all their blessings, the food and their children’s health, I bowed my head out of the same sense of gratitude. Their unyielding faith in God, whether shared by me or not, comforted. After years of estrangement, our time together settled my heart. What I believed held less importance than my own unyielding love for them. I wouldn’t change, and neither would they.
We toasted each other’s health with Jägermeister, ate meals that I spent hours preparing—schnitzel with pickled cabbage, roasted potatoes with bacon and Hungarian cucumber salad with sour cream and dill, tortes for dessert, black coffee and pálinka—all the while veering into any number of hot topics: abortion, which they wholeheartedly opposed even while I defended a woman’s right to choose; capital punishment, which all three of us denounced; the sexual-abuse scandal throughout the Catholic church, which they still refused to believe could have occurred; even Hitler, who my mother mentioned often and could not, perhaps because of their shared nationality, bring herself to condemn. In this and any other issue related to my mother’s years in the camp, which she spoke of more and more often, my father and I typically fell silent. Nobody could argue with her when it came to any subject related to her three years in a concentration camp.
At the end of every night when I put on my coat to leave and return to my downtown apartment, I said a word or two of Hungarian to my parents. “Viszontlátásra, Apu és Anyu…Szeretlek.”
To which my father always responded, “Viszontlátásra, Péter. Szeretlek.” (“Goodbye Peter, I love you.”)
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My father continued asking me computer questions—how to make bulleted lists and tables, borders, and colored fonts. He wrote love poetry for my mother using elaborate fonts, affixing pictures of hearts and angels that he’d found through “Clip Art.” Google became his new goldmine as he searched for anything he could find about all the towns and villages where he’d lived as a child.
“I want to show you a picture of one of the houses where I lived as a young boy,” he said to me one afternoon during a visit after work.
“What do you mean?”
“I found it on Google. I printed it to show you. It’s still just as I remember it.”
“You found a picture online of a house you lived in as a child?”
“Well, of course.”
“What do you mean ‘of course’?”
“Everything is in Google,” he told me. “Don’t you know?”
To his amazement, he learned that he could now email all his letters to Emma through her son—my father’s nephew, István. He spent weeks composing each letter in Hungarian, painstakingly using all the features available in Word for accents. Once completed, I helped him copy and paste the letter into an email.
“You’re a magician,” he’d say each and every time I clicked “send,” and the electronic swoosh told us his words were whizzing across the hemisphere to Budapest.
“Not really. This is pretty basic stuff.”
“Well, from where I’m sitting, you are a kind and gentle sir, a wizard on the keyboard.”
Kindness expressed to my father was kindness returned, and my heart swelled.
Emma began including old black-and-white photographs from my
father’s “missing years in Hungary” in her letters. The single bed in his basement office—his “cave,” as he now called it—was soon blanketed in a patchwork of foreign faces, ranging from the 1950s to the 1980s.
“I want to show you something,” he said to me in his office one Sunday. He handed me a grainy photograph of an elderly couple standing in the middle of a field, wheat billowing in the air behind them. “These are my grandparents, my mother’s parents. They lived in Pocsaj, a small Hungarian village. I lived with them for a short time after the death of my mother.”
“You did?”
“István and Sofi. Stephen and Sophie. I smoked a pipe for years because my grandfather smoked a pipe. The smell reminded me of how much I loved him.”
“What was he like, your grandfather?”
“Very kind, but quiet. When he talked, I listened. That was the way. He taught me a lot. Here, follow me…”
I followed my father up the stairs to the den, next to the kitchen. From behind the upright piano he pulled out a long teacher’s stick, and then he pointed it up at a large framed map of “The Kingdom of Hungary,” pre–World War I, hanging on the wall.
“This is the Hungary I love,” he said. “Before it was chopped up and parceled away. You know that I was born in Budapest.” He pointed to the capital near the center of the map. “But I grew up mostly in the surrounding countryside, in Pocsaj”—he pointed to the eastern area of Hungary, close to Debrecen—“where I lived with my grandparents, in Hajdú-Bihar County.”
“You know,” I said, glancing down at the picture of his grandparents, “if you like, we could scan some of your photos and include them at the end of your book.”
“You can do that? But…how is that possible?”
“Your printer has a scan feature. It’s simple.”
Over the coming days I showed him how to scan and paste photographs into his Word document. When he disagreed with the order in which I pasted the photographs, I showed him how to arrange them into whatever order he preferred.
The Inheritance of Shame Page 33