Ten minutes before the picture, the air had grown so thick with humidity that my grandfather, his lungs worn and clogged, had to elevate his arms to get enough oxygen.
Four hundred and forty-three years before the photo was taken, Suleiman seized the city of Buda without firing a single shot. There are those who would pinpoint this moment as the beginning of the end of Hungarian autonomy — a trajectory that continued through entanglement in a pointless world war, a 1920 treaty that carved off 70 percent of the country’s land, and obeisance to increasingly dangerous German demands. But many would argue that the moment the country crossed from mere capitulation into actual complicity, the moment Hungary’s moral Rubicon was crossed, was with the writing and passing of its own Jewish laws in 1938, 1939, and 1941.
Two minutes before the photo was taken, I had unwrapped Kyle Davidoff’s present, a black plastic ball with a thick white string protruding, cartoon-style. “It’s a real bomb,” he said. “Not a toy. It’ll blow up in about, like, two minutes.” So we put it on the table and waited.
Twenty-five years later, a man in the audience will raise his hand and ask why all my stories are about guilt. I will say, “I hadn’t realized they were.”
Less than a second earlier, my sister had bounced up, impossibly high, from the neighbor’s trampoline, one backyard and a steep hill behind ours. Her arms stretched east, and her feet pointed west. She would belly-flop, but in the picture, it looks for all the world like she’s flying and won’t ever come down.
Seven years after the photograph, another call from Hawaii, my grandfather attempting his old joke: “Which happened first for you?” he almost shouted into the phone. “The sunrise or the sunset? It is very important that I know!” He sounded strangled.
Forty-five years before the photo, the Second Jewish Law, significantly harsher than the first, was introduced to the Hungarian legislative assembly. The law was penned, revised, introduced, and argued for by the man born Makkai János in Transylvania in 1905, the man who died John D. Makkay in Waianae, Hawaii, in 1994. There were several practical motivations, if one can use the word, having to do with intense German pressure, with the promise of regaining lands lost in the Treaty of Trianon, with the country’s overcrowding by a wave of Jewish refugees from Germany and Romania. But then there are also his words, entered in the public record: “Jews, wherever they are present, regularly bring forth anti-Semitism out of themselves.” Long after the bloodstains of the ensuing years have faded, those words are indelible.
Six years, forty-two weeks, and five days before the photo, I settled suspended in the amniotic pool. I would spend an extra half month there, breathing liquid and floating.
I have been assured, for what it’s worth, that he felt remorse. What that remorse entailed, how deeply it was felt, and whether his anti-Nazi stance represented any change of heart regarding the Jews or was simply a further expression of racial superiority, this time against the usurping Germans, I am unable to work out. And even if I could, the question would remain: Is chronology character?
In two seconds, my sister would hit the trampoline screaming. My father’s head would turn at the sound.
In the grips of dementia, he would call again. 1993. Little left to his eroding mind but quotation. “The time is out of joint. Oh, hateful — The time is out of joint. And how goes the rest? The time is out of joint. What country, friends, is this?”
In 1940, after his first visit to the nation that would one day be his home, my grandfather wrote that the anti-Semitic movement could never truly gain hold in America because of the percentage of citizens who held foreign birth certificates, and whose ethnicity could therefore not be confirmed. It was a land of anonymity.
Ten years after the picture was taken, my grandfather died in a Honolulu hospital, following six years lost in a sea of Alzheimer’s that erased the recent past, obliterated the entire notion of future, but left intact the events of half a century ago. Toward the end, he refused food. His beard grew to his knees.
Between 1941 and 1944, over half a million Hungarian Jews died at the hands of their countrymen and the Germans. Many, before the deportations even started, died from a thousand less infamous killers — those diseases particular to the hungry and cold and poor, to those with no way to earn a living.
Sixty-five years before the photo, twenty-three years before the prison cell, twenty years before the penning of the law, János followed a beautiful girl up a tree and toward the little wooden platform there. They climbed forever, weightless, into the sunlight. She was his cousin, with a wit that put his to shame. She would be his first wife, the mother of his only child. I cling to her life like a raft.
What will strike me most, twenty-seven years later, staring at this thing, is its profound and static silence. Rectangles of photographic paper are always silent, but this one particularly so. Eight children still and focused, mouths closed in tight lines. My father and grandfather looking up, reaching up, into the muting humidity. My sister stretched along the horizon, my mother presumably silent behind the lens.
After the war, in the Buda Hills, a group of escaped Nazi prisoners put their one Russian speaker at the front of the line. When they were stopped at the pass, he explained in flawless Russian that he was a Soviet soldier transporting these German prisoners. The real Russians asked him to count back from one hundred. His foreign tongue, so capable counting forward, was tripped up in reverse. The men were executed.
A week later, I would find the bomb in the tree house. It would live in the corner with the pine needles another two years, till the sun bleached it silver. When I was feeling brave, I’d nudge it with the toe of my sneaker. I was never entirely convinced that it wouldn’t, one day, explode.
THE MUSEUM OF THE DEARLY DEPARTED
There had been a leak.
Deep in the basement and then through the walls and floors of the building, gas had poured, scentless, at two a.m. After the fire trucks and news trucks and gawkers had dispersed, after one body had been sirened away and eleven more secreted out under sheets, the building sat empty for a week. The only survivor died in the hospital, never having woken. All twelve of them, that meant, died in their sleep. There had been no calls to 911, no bodies sprawled halfway to the door — just the mailman’s cry for help the next morning after three poisonous minutes at the lobby mailboxes. Despite the earnest reporters’ enunciation of “deadliest” and “perfect storm,” the public was not as horrified as it pretended. “That’s really the way to go,” people murmured to their TVs.
On the eighth day, the hottest of July, the old Hungarian couple returned from Cleveland and stood staring at the yellow tape, suitcases by their sides, taxi waiting to be paid. They hadn’t heard.
In seven law offices across Chicago, seven apartments passed to the survivors of the deceased. One of those beneficiaries, Melanie Honing, was a wiry little woman who had in fact never met the occupant of apartment D. Hers was a deeply awkward conversation with the lawyer. Early in their meeting she picked his stapler off his desk and held it in her lap, opening and closing the top. He didn’t stop her. Apartment D had been co-owned by Vanessa Dillard, who’d lived there the past twelve years, and Michael Salvatore, the man who’d been found in her bed beside her. He was the beneficiary of her will, as well as the disaster’s sole survivor, for all of an hour. Whether there’d truly been hope of resuscitation or if the paramedics had just fixated on their one chance to avoid total failure, they defibrillated him all the way to the hospital. Because of that later time of death, the apartment and its contents had passed to Michael. Michael Salvatore’s will in turn left everything to Melanie, the woman he was to have married nine weeks after the leak.