In the Darkroom

by Susan Faludi

  She pulled out her cell phone and handed it to me. “See?” She had taken a photo of her ID photo with her phone. “Just in case.”

  “Nice,” I said.

  My father looked over my shoulder. “Awful,” she said. “I had mine taken by a professional.”

  A racket of stiletto heels on flagstones announced the arrival of Jazmin. The shoes were silver and matched the polish on her paste-on nails. Jazmin seemed to have adopted the perky persona of an aerobics instructor. She had buff arms. Her bubble-gum pink, off-one-shoulder, faux-torn T-shirt announced, in silver-glitter letters, “Gym Girl!” She was escorted by an equally toned young man in a muscle shirt and gym shorts. “This is my husband,” she announced to the other guests. They weren’t technically married, but she preferred to describe him that way. Jazmin drew me aside to hear the story of her transformation, enlisting Tatianna as translator.

  “I’m very special in this respect,” she said, “because for two months, I went into hiding from the whole world. And in this period, I changed myself, all my wardrobes changed, I had my breasts done, I had my FFS”—facial feminization surgery—“I had silicone injections on my cheeks and my forehead, and I had my eyebrows tattooed.” The finale occurred in a sex reassignment surgical clinic in Serbia. The operation cost 16,000 euros. “When I woke up, my husband was on his knees by my bed. Because he knew. Now I was all woman. This is the meaning of being.”

  “Of what?”

  “Being. Of my being. … It makes me very happy, this feeling that I only have to snap my fingers and men are at my feet.”

  I asked if she and her husband had been together long.

  “Ten years,” she said. “But we never used my penis. We made love another way. My penis was the worst part of my body. I never used it.”

  Tatianna rolled her eyes. “That’s the difference between her and me,” Tatianna said to me in English. “I used my tool. And I’m not ashamed to say it.”

  Jazmin said her younger brother had stopped speaking to her since the operation and had forbidden her to come near his children. “He’s very Catholic. I told him, ‘If God wasn’t willing, then it wouldn’t have happened.’ ” He was unconvinced. “I changed,” Jazmin said, “but I can’t make people change.”

  “My daughter likes me now,” my father put in. “She comes to see me.”

  Jazmin said her husband’s family didn’t know. “We never told them,” she said. He simply presented her one day as the “new” woman in his life. “His parents knew me since I was a boy. But as a woman, they didn’t recognize me.” Just to be on the safe side, she was introduced to his parents “as the sister of a boy they once knew.” Which seemed to work. “They said, ‘Oh yes, we see the resemblance.’ ” Still, there was a tense moment when her husband’s parents asked to see Jazmin’s baby pictures.

  “What did you do?”

  Jazmin pulled out her cell phone and called up the picture she had showed them—of herself when she was two years old, naked, and—thanks to Photoshop—sans penis.

  Presenting her new self to the staff at the small business she owned required less finesse. Right before the operation, Jazmin had learned that somebody was stealing money from the till. The thievery presented a well-timed opportunity for a fresh start. Everyone was fired. Post-op, she hired a new crew.

  “I’m very proud at how these girls take me as a role model,” Jazmin said of her female employees. “They try to imitate me—the hair, nails, everything. As a female, I’m representing womanhood.”

  Soon, she added, she would be representing the ultimate in femininity. “I am going to have a baby,” she announced to the guests. “The baby will be God’s son.”

  “Oh, not God’s, I hope,” Tatianna muttered.

  “I’m looking for a surrogate,” Jazmin continued. “It will be a surrogate mother with my husband’s sperm. It’s going to cost three to five million forints, but I have another apartment that I’m going to sell.”

  And then?

  “And then, it will be a complete woman’s life,” she said. “Before I was a transsexual. Now I’m a woman.”

  My father brought in the cake, decked with candles. As she cut slices of the “Welcome to Hungary” Sacher torte for everyone, she recalled how she had gotten a deliveryman the previous winter to haul her giant Christmas tree all the way into the house. “It’s great being a woman,” my father said. “I look helpless, and everyone helps me. It’s a racket. Women get away with murder!”

  Lorelei, who’d arrived at the party two hours late in a wraparound dress and a choker made of large wooden beads (to hide his Adam’s apple), confided that he almost hadn’t come. “As soon as I left my apartment, my heartbeat went up,” Lorelei said. He feared being seen in a dress. “When it seemed very quiet, I started down.” As he entered the lobby, the building’s front door swung open and the man who walked in was one of Lorelei’s former superior officers. He glanced in Lorelei’s direction as he passed, and nodded.

  “And he said, ‘Kezét csókolom.’ ” I kiss your hand.

  “He didn’t recognize you?” I asked.

  Lorelei shook his head. “It made me very happy when he csókolom-ed me.” Lorelei had only recently dared to appear in women’s clothing. “March 6, 2005,” he said, his first attempt. He had ventured out of his apartment and descended just one flight before “I was trembling so hard I felt I would have to stop.” It took him another nine months to make it to the street. Since he had retired from the police, Lorelei had been working as a security guard. At his job, he wore a man’s uniform and a badge with his male name. No one knew his other identity. He preferred to keep it that way.

  Hardly surprising, given the political climate. As one of the feminist professors at the table noted, the times were “very very bad for LGBT people.” The conservative Fidesz Party and its far-right sidekick, Jobbik, were shooting up in the polls. “Look what happened at the gay pride parade last year,” said Judit Takács. Neo-Nazis and skinheads had set upon the marchers. There’d been injuries. “It could be even worse this year,” she said. “I’m very worried.”

  “They need to clean up the parade,” my father interjected. “It looks bad with so many raunchy-looking people on the march. It should be normal people, not irritants and clowns. We have no right to irritate other people. It doesn’t show a good side of minorities. …”

  “Stefi!—” I tried to interrupt.

  “You have to do it in a nice way, with a smile,” she kept on. “I tell it in a way that they view me as just like them. Otherwise, they are going to go behind your backs and say, ‘Who the hell are these people!’ It’s like what they say about the Orthodox Jews in their awful getup. People look at them and say, ‘Who the hell knows what they do? Maybe they are killing virgin Christians!’ ”

  I glanced over at Lorelei, he of the Mein Kampf collection. I wondered what he was thinking. And also, Tatianna. As we were setting the table earlier, Tatianna had told me how she’d found my father through the Trans X club in Vienna. “So I got a phone call from this Stefánie Faludi, and we start talking about this and that, and your father tells me, ‘You know, my last name is not really Faludi. It’s Friedman.’ And I said, ‘That’s a good thing. Because I’m that, too.’ ” Meaning, Jewish.

  “Oh, yes!” my father had replied, Tatianna’s remark jogging a memory. “It’s like what we’d say during the war, when one Jew met another: ‘Én vagyok egy zenész is.’ ” I am a musician, too.

  Tatianna said she hadn’t even known she was a “musician” until she turned twelve. Her parents had converted to Protestantism in the 1930s. It didn’t protect them. Tatianna’s father was sent to forced labor and then, in December 1944, five months after Tatianna’s birth, to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In the cattle car on the long, terrible ride there, Tatianna’s father slipped a postcard between the slats. Miraculously, someone found it lying by the tracks and, even more miraculously, mailed it.

  The letter was addressed to his onl
y child, who would later commit it to memory. Tatianna recited it for me now:

  To my dear son,

  I had to go on a trip. I don’t know how long it will take, but I will remember you always.

  Your papa

  In the last winter of the war, Tatianna’s mother had her infant son baptized in a Roman Catholic church, and the two of them moved in with a cousin, a young woman. The building manager’s son had a crush on the girl and after she spurned him, he denounced her to an Arrow Cross officer, who pulled out a gun and “killed her right on the spot.”

  I asked Tatianna how she felt about being back in Hungary. I was remembering the EU-inspired Equal Treatment Act with its landmark protection of “gender identity”—and also the reactions against it. On the floor of the Hungarian Parliament, representatives called the inclusion of that category “a scandalous surprise” and argued that it didn’t belong in an antidiscrimination bill because transsexuality was “a birth defect” and “an illness.” Conservative MP Sándor Lezsák claimed that guaranteeing equality for the transgendered would require extending the same legal protection to “necrophiliac pathologists or pedophile teachers,” people whose “sexual interest turns in the direction of animals,” and “all aberrations seen in horror movies.” The public view was much the same: opinion polls the year the Equal Treatment Act was being debated reported that 60 percent of the respondents regarded any deviation from the heterosexual norm as either a “sin,” a “crime,” an “illness,” or “deviant.” Until 2002, the criminal code defined homosexuality as a “perversion against nature.”

  “How do I feel about being in Hungary?” Tatianna repeated my question. Her response had nothing to do with gender. Her fingers floated reflexively to her throat, reaching for something that wasn’t there. “I usually wear a Star of David,” she explained. “Here, I don’t.”

  ————

  One evening some weeks after the party, my father and I took the bus up the hairpin switchbacks overlooking the Danube past the ancient fortifications of Castle Hill. The route circumnavigated the bulwarks of the Royal Palace and the ceremonial parade ground presided over by the giant bronze Turul. After the bus crested the hill, we disembarked. We made our way in the gathering dusk past a stretch of marble and graystone manses, once palaces for nobles, now office space for various state and private institutions.

  The marble foyer we entered was doused in shadow. A few paces up the ramp, a square of fluorescent light spilled from a Plexiglas window. My father knocked on the partition, and a man in uniform and a plastic ID badge hurried out to greet us. The security guard, Lorelei.

  “Szervusz, Stefi! Szervusz, Susaaan!” Hello, Stefi! Hello, Susan!

  Talking a rapid-fire Hungarian, Lorelei ushered us into his miniature kingdom, a tiny cubicle lined to the ceiling with surveillance monitors. A slide show of darkened office rooms and corridors and entryways played on the screens. On a desk were several computer consoles and two TV sets. The televisions were both playing, one tuned to the Food Channel, where two chefs with heavily moussed hair were whipping up a soufflé, the other to Blue Light, a police reality show. Its officers were mid-battle with rioting soccer fans.

  “Lorelei says we’re just in time,” my father told me. “The chimes are about to play.” We filed out to a courtyard behind the building to hear the evening bells of the Matthias Church.

  “In the fifteenth century,” my father said, translating Lorelei’s recitation, “the pope ordered the ringing of the bells every day all over Europe to pray for victory in the Battle of Belgrade,” the battle against the Turks to defend what was then a Hungarian border fort. We stood under a row of ornamental trees on the darkening plaza, listening to the tolling. A sudden wind rattled the leaves.

  Lorelei held forth for another minute.

  “During the Horthy regime,” my father relayed, pointing to the indistinct outlines of a building in the distance, “that was the Ministry of the Interior.” The ministry that had planned and directed the destruction of the nation’s Jews.

  “And that building,” my father continued, gesturing farther, “was Gestapo headquarters.” She paused. “Waaall,” she appended, “one of them.”

  In the gloaming, I couldn’t read her expression.

  Overhead, the clouds were turning ominous. Lorelei pointed to a black thunderhead barreling our way. We barely made it inside before the skies let loose.

  On the surveillance screens in the dry cocoon of Lorelei’s security booth, we watched the rain lash the building’s entryways. On the Food Channel, the chefs squirted icing on a seven-layer cake, and the Blue Light police turned hoses on the soccer hooligans, who were tearing out rows of stadium seats. The building’s security cameras captured the spidery shape of an occasional late-night bureaucrat, scuttling across the monitors.

  Lorelei told my father that he’d gone to a dinner-and-dance party at Stone Soup with a few other trans people, but he hadn’t liked the location and wouldn’t go again.

  “On Kazinczy Street,” my father told me. Stone Soup was a restaurant in the old Jewish quarter.

  Lorelei plunged into a lengthy tale.

  “Lorelei says the food was no good there,” my father summarized. “Lorelei says they ordered Hungarian pálinka, and the waiter said, ‘There are two kinds here—there is the traditional Hungarian pálinka and there is the one authorized by the Jewish Community—and which one do you want to drink?’ And they all said, ‘Not the Jewish pálinka!’ ”

  Another long anecdote followed, of which my father translated only its conclusion: “So anyway, they had a round of beers and then they all saluted Germany.”

  Lorelei reached for his cell phone and held it up to show me a picture of himself, in a platinum blond wig.

  My father said: “Lorelei says, ‘You must be shocked to see this aged man, instead of the elegant girl you met at the brunch.’ ”

  I asked how he’d settled on the name Lorelei.

  “He says he wanted a name that keeps distance,” my father translated.

  “From what?”

  “From bad connotations. In his opinion, Lorelei is a name that gives some dignity, a delicate, clean-living person. Not some floozy type. And he says, when he dresses up, he dresses up properly. To project the image of a true lady. So the name should also be that. Waaall, sure. Stefánie is also a name of such a lady.”

  Lorelei turned to one of the several computers and called up a website that listed names for baby girls. Sophia, Emma, Isabella, Emily, Abigail …

  “He says he sat here at night for many weeks, searching this site,” my father said. “There are thousands of names, and he selected many different ones before he decided on Lorelei.”

  Elizabeth, Charlotte, Audrey, Natalie, Zoe, Victoria, Lily …

  I pictured Lorelei hunched over the screen here, night after night, scrolling through the endless list with its cartoon images of newborns in pink ribbons and mommies in baby on board T-shirts. Here we were in the chamber from which everything was monitored and recorded, where no one could arrive or leave, exit an elevator or take a cigarette break without it registering on Lorelei’s security apparatus. No one escaped. And at the heart of all this surveillance was this man in the booth, whose “true” identity no one knew.

  Lorelei rolled his swivel chair to a cluttered desk and dug out from under some papers an instruction manual, which he handed to my father.

  “Ahhh!” my father said.

  They chattered away for a few minutes in Hungarian.

  “You see?” my father said, handing it to me. “These are the directions to the video game that I loaned Lorelei.”

  The manual was titled Jane’s Israeli Air Force.

  “It’s one of my flight simulator games,” my father said, and I caught a glint in her eye: it was a gift calculated to mess with Lorelei’s Luftwaffe allegiances. “You play an Israeli Air Force pilot who shoots at the enemies of the Jewish State,” my father said. And you have to choose “a Jewish n
ame.”

  “How did it go?” I asked.

  “Waaall, I do it very well,” my father said. “I’ve had a lot of practice. But Lorelei says it was too hard. He kept crashing the plane. He got shot down, and he didn’t even know what hit him.”

  Way to go, Stefi, I thought.

  Close to ten, the rain let up. I suggested this might be a good time to leave. We said our farewells and groped our way down the long shadowy corridor to the exit. I imagined Lorelei, back in the booth, watching us on one of his many monitors.

  14

  Some Kind of Psychic Disturbance

  A year before the end of World War II in Europe, the theory of an essential identity that fueled the final solution turned its lethal attention to the Jews of Hungary. That is, anyone “to be regarded as Jewish, if he or she, or at least one of the parents, or at least two of the grandparents were members of the Israelite denomination before the coming into force of the present Law.” The “present Law” was the second of the three Jewish Laws passed between 1938 and 1941, a measure that overnight reclassified nearly one hundred thousand Christian converts as members of the Jewish “race.”

  Beginning on May 15, 1944, an average of 12,000 Jews a day were rounded up in the countryside by Hungarian gendarmes and herded into cattle cars. Within eight weeks, 147 trains delivered 437,402 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. In anticipation, the concentration camp’s crematoria had been refurbished, furnaces relined, chimneys reinforced with iron rings, and the slave laborers assigned to the special unit servicing the gas chambers quadrupled. Even so, the ovens couldn’t handle the immense numbers; bodies were piled in vast open pits and burned, a method that allowed for what the camp commandant called the “disposal” of as many as 9,000 corpses a day. One of every three people murdered in Auschwitz was a Hungarian Jew. The Hungarian Holocaust, its leading historian, Randolph L. Braham, concluded, was “the most concentrated and brutal ghettoization and deportation process of the Nazi’s Final Solution program.” Hungary’s largest cemetery, the saying goes, is a field of grass in Poland.