by Alan Lelchuk
Gellerman set down his laptop and began printing out the scene.
Was this good history, or good fiction? Manny wondered. (Or bad history, and bad fiction?) There was enough evidence, for sure, to draw the scene this way—Söderblom’s indifference, cowardice, hypocrisy, maybe even some furtive political ambition. We do know that Söderblom came back from his meetings with both Abramov and Stalin and proclaimed that the Soviets knew nothing of the whereabouts of Raoul. The ambassador accepted this as fact, and said that Wallenberg was probably lost or dead. (Killed in an auto accident, he opined, at some point.) Why did he go along so easily with the Soviet feigned ignorance? Did he imagine Raoul as a part-Jew whose family conversion meant little, and quietly resent that? Did he resent that Raoul was saving Jews, and this was beyond his job description for a Swedish diplomat? After all, anti-Semitism among Swedish Lutherans, furtive or open, was not a new revelation. The chief fact was that Söderblom was totally ineffective, maybe intentionally so; and he went on to reject outright all American offers for help.
As for the brothers, Marcus and Jacob, was their passivity a matter of family greed, or fear? Was their neglect intentional—saving their own Enskilda necks, if Raoul were free to tell all he knew about their Nazi connections?
It came as no surprise that the Söderblom meeting with Stalin on June 15, 1946, produced no results. The meeting was infamous for its supine acquiescence, a missed opportunity. So Manny’s scene, to be sure—as he analyzed it—actually set the stage for the real meeting.
The historian knew he had enough evidence, circumstantial and otherwise, to support the above creative scene. So fiction here could dramatize a piece of obscure history, complete the dotted lines, fill in a missing scene, and help to make clear what had been clouded, camouflaged. Those were not the best days in Swedish diplomatic history, and Söderblom was a prime exemplar of those black days (as the Swedes acknowledged, years later).
He closed his laptop, bid good-bye to the Indian statue, and went out onto the green to meet Jack, his real Indian (or Native American).
Jack was looking good, in a bright sport shirt and shorts, his dark face and jet black hair in sharp contrast to his clothes. “Hey, how goes it, Prof?”
“Not too bad. And yourself?”
“Good, man, good. I’m headed home for a month. Gonna see the family!”
“Sounds good. Hey, let’s walk down around the pond, and we can have our sandwiches sitting on the golf course.”
Jack smiled. “Why not?
Jack had a fine easy gait, and they began walking across the green and down behind the library and onto Rope Ferry Road. Students strolled or bicycled past, most white-wired to their iPods, others talking on cell phones.
“So, has the term gone well?”
“Yeah, pretty well. And guess what? I’ve begun a long essay on Samson Occom, at last!”
“Hey, bravo! But what about Crazy Horse?”
“Oh, yeah, that’s going along, but remember, that’s gonna be my thesis.”
Manny gestured. “So what’s your angle on Occom? You know there’s been a lot of stuff written on him.”
“Yeah, I knew you’d put on me something like that—well, he was a ‘wild Injun’ right there in the midst of those white Christian gentlemen! Isn’t that enough of an angle?” A restrained smile. “And beating them at their own game—learning. The art of learning. He did that better than all of them!”
“Yeah, I think I did know something of that.”
“Man, that cat knew Hebrew and Latin! Could read and write it, taught those langusges here at the college, can you believe it?”
“I am impressed.”
“He was kinda like your Wallenberg,” Jack said, with a gleaming smile, “an odd man out.”
Gellerman looked over at his young friend. “You’re getting to be a bit dangerous, know that?”
Jack nodded in delight and walked on. They passed the oval pond on the left—“That’s what Samson got for his troubles, a pond named after him!”— strolled up the narrow sidewalk past the hefty houses, and turned left, passing the golf clubhouse on the right. They walked down the small hill, and found a hillock of green to sit on.
“This looks good. We can see a hole or two.”
“Boy, what we would do with this green! Where we live it’s brown most of the year—well, brown all the year!” He hit Gellerman’s arm good-naturedly. “Just throw some seeds down here, come back in a month, and you have plants growing, grass growing!”
“Eat your sandwich. And remember, I’ve visited you out there.”
“Recruiting me, I remember. But you didn’t bring any New England rain!”
“You forgot to e-mail me.”
They ate, observing some golfers lining up a shot, while swallows dived.
“The thing is, Occom reminded me a little of your Wallenberg, the way he always seemed a little finer than others, more Christian than the Christians!”
“Or maybe more essentially Christian, even though he was a Native!”
Jack nodded and laughed.
“That’s a good analogy, Jack. An unusual pair, to be sure. Except my Raoul never learned Hebrew. At least that I knew of!”
“Well, there’s always more to learn.”
“True enough. Hey, look at the arc on that shot. A beauty, huh?”
“Now, this,” observed Jack, moving his palm out, “is what I call the real graduate school life, right? Taking our lunch here and watching the golfers play a round. Who would want to do anything else?”
“Not anyone sensible, of course.” He brushed off an insect. “Remember, last time we had to canoe for our lunch, so I tried to make it easier this time.”
They ate, and breathed in the soft air, the aroma of freshly cut grass. Manny said, “Hard to believe a little white ball could torment so many.”
Jack laughed. “So, are you going ahead with the book, or what?”
“Yeah, maybe so, if I ever get the time, the space.”
They ate, listened, watched, swatted away bugs.
“Hey, I have an idea for you, Prof. Why don’t you trek out to Hopi and write the book there? Really. I can get you a private space in a pottery studio, pretty spare, but it’s quiet; my aunt makes pottery and dolls in one room, and you’d have the other. What d’ya think? And if you need inspiration, there is the grand mountain right in front of you. You’d write it there, believe me!”
Manny looked over at his friend, his dark eyes brimming with his new idea, and he squeezed his arm. “Maybe you’re onto something.”
“I know I am. And for breaks, we can play hoops. You’re a shooter, right?”
“Centuries ago, I had a set shot.” Manny smiled. “But, it’s a thought.”
“Think it over, Professor, really. It’ll be great fun to have you out there! You’d probably get more work done in a Hopi month than in three months here! Away from papers, meetings, students—yeah, it’s perfect!”
Manny pondered the surprise notion, recalling the unique aura of that small rectangle of arid land squeezed within the huge Navajo territory.
“Sir, if you finish up RW on our turf, you can become an honorary Hopi!”
“Oh, I think it’d be truer if you made Wallenberg an honorary Hopi.”
“Hey, that’s a thought. I’ll talk to our chief.”
“Too bad we didn’t think of this before our chief, President Reagan, made him an honorary American, back in ’81. Hopi citizen first, American second.”
CHAPTER 14
A few days later Manny flew down to New York, was picked up at LaGuardia by a private town car, brought to his hotel (Affinia, across the street from Madison Square Garden), and, after showering and getting settled, was met in the lobby by a young woman, Cary, an assistant producer whom he had spoken with earlier. She had a cab waiting, which whisked them downtown to a private apartment in Tribeka, and inside that plush place, he met the director, whom he had talked with at length on the telephone, several times,
before he had been invited down to do an interview for the HBO documentary.
“Good to meet you in person, Professor,” said Bobby Jenkins, a tall young African American who was making a documentary on the Brooklyn Dodgers on the fiftieth anniversary of their departure from Brooklyn for Los Angeles. “I enjoyed our long phone calls very much. Look, we’re still setting up here with the lighting and the sound crews, so if you don’t mind waiting a bit, over in that room, we will let you know when to come in. It won’t be too long. Meanwhile, either Cary or Joy can get you a coffee or cold drink, or whatever you want.”
Manny walked into the adjoining room, darkened by the drawn drapes, sat on a cozy couch, and asked for a ginger ale. From the deep countryside and the birds singing in the morning to this hip apartment with the hustling crews and video cameras in a few hours was a leap of faith, not just a leap of geography.
Sitting there, in the shadowy darkness, he recalled his childhood of watching Jackie play, in his first year with the Dodgers, in 1947, and tried to pinpoint specifics. (That’s why he had been asked down here, after all.) Ginger ale was brought, and he returned to boyhood … to the friendship with Burt, his boyhood hero who was shot down over Germany in his B-17 and put in a POW camp; he escaped and finally made it home, wounded badly. A series of surgeries ensued, and because of his US Air Force uniform and Purple Heart, he was let in free, along with his eight-year-old buddy, little Manny, and waved down to the box seats behind first base, where Jackie played that first year … Memories of Robinson flooded him now, clear and vivid, taking a big lead off of third base, daring the pitcher provocatively … Manny could hear the Philly and Cardinal curses and slurs slung out to Jackie, at bat or in the field …
A charmed boyhood, in old cozy Brooklyn … He knew well that whatever happened inside the shooting room, it would be a far cry from what he had seen or felt, or could articulate, on camera. Further, he understood well that if he talked for three hours, he might make three minutes on the screen, but that was fine with him. He had other things in his mind, and at stake.
Sitting there, in the shaded room, he wondered at what age did one sense a serious turning of direction, a sudden change of intention (and maybe fortune and momentum too)—certainly not before forty-five, maybe fifty-five, or was it sixty-five these days? Different from Dante-esque views of a midlife turning point. Well, Manny was feeling right now on this edge, like trying as a boy to balance yourself on a thin rail and walking across it … Yes, something was stirring in his being …
The shooting was a mechanical ordeal. The vertical sheets of extra lighting were too bright and hot upon him, stunning his vulnerable eyes; the crew said they couldn’t shift the angle, because of the video picture. Next, the camera people said the jacket or tie didn’t show well, so they changed both for him, which irritated Manny; he didn’t feel like himself sitting and talking in another’s clothes. He chided himself: those were foolish details; forget them. So he went ahead with the two and half hour interview, answering question after question, feeling awkward; and as it proceeded, he continued to admonish himself not to worry about the details, just talk about being a boy and seeing Jackie play, and meeting him outside a few times, getting his autograph, hearing his gravelly voice up close, and seeing his dark probing eyes. (Manny kept quiet about the analogy he later drew with Dickens’s Magwitch, the convict, confronting the boy Pip, terrifying him, only to turn out later on to be his secret benefactor …) The questions droned on—the questioner amiable—and Manny spoke dutifully, dully, while being reminded to sit upright in his seat … and he grew sorry he had agreed to do the whole fucking thing. How boring and brittle was this artificial, staged talking.
But something of interest did happen during the ordeal. He found himself thinking back to Raoul being interrogated for hours, maybe for days, from 1945 to 1947, under a bright bulb or blinding light; and he had a sense of the pressure, the relentless pressure. To the camera he was saying what an outsider Jackie was, an outsider/insider—a black outsider to society and to white baseball, but an insider in baseball, a brilliant base-stealing outlaw in the game itself. Privately, he was transferring the outlaw image to RW in his relation to proper Swedish society and his proper family—to the neutral Swedes, the conservative Lutherans, the rich self-protective family. Raoul had come from all that, but he had broken away and chosen a tougher, more difficult, path. (He had his grandfather’s counsel, as Jackie had Mr. Rickey’s.) A choice that left him alone, unprotected, betrayed.
At the end of the interview, when the director and producer asked him how it felt, Manny replied, “Oh, it was of interest … made me think.”
“Well, we thought you did really well—though we didn’t get that reference to a Mr. Wallenberg?—and of course we don’t know how much of the whole thing will get in.”
Manny, surprised, said, of course he understood, and it didn’t really matter. He didn’t add that what did matter was his private offscreen reflection on the association between his boyhood game-hero and his adult life-hero …
He kept these revelations private, in the huge black Denali SUV that sped him back to LaGuardia, and in the little propeller airplane that lifted him up to Lebanon, New Hampshire, and in the days following …
A week later he drove back up to Sweden, Maine, for another of his son’s concerts; a trip that went across New Hampshire and into the same vast reaches of rural Maine, decorated occasionally with tacky towns and roadside motels, and suddenly opening out to great expanses of green countryside, where the sky was large and the mountains loomed, and you felt a touch of Montana … His son’s trio played Debussy, in a small rough-hewed cabin, for a dozen parents. The music was riveting; the boy played with his firm intonation and usual panache. Afterward, a parent whispered, “Was that your son on the cello? The other two were good, but he was something else.”
Manny soon was taking his “something else” for another special dinner in Bridgeton, and he felt his vulnerable soul salved by the music, the boy.
He asked Josh, over his surf and turf, how he liked chamber music.
“Oh, it’s great, Dad, but my favorite is still orchestral. I love a big orchestra and the music written for it.” He chewed fast, eating with gusto. “I can’t wait for GYBSO camp to start! Hey, Dad, this is really good; you should try some!” He looked up and casually added, “And, oh yeah, I wrote another section of my Wallenberg Suite.”
“Wow,” Manny exclaimed, caressing the boy’s cheek. “I’m really getting rewarded on this visit! Debussy and Wallenberg.”
An hour later, in the cabin studio, he listened to the additional several minutes of the composition, a melody of sorrowful sounds and strong vibrato. “You’ve really been working!” he told the boy, who beamed.
The question remained whether Wallenberg lived on beyond 1947, in another prison like Vladimir, or else in some Gulag site, like a camp in Perm or Vörkuta, or even a psychiatric hospital. There were hundreds of “sightings” of RW out there, post-1947, the date of his official death (a “myocardial infarct on July 17, 1947,” declared the Soviets), by Russian, German, Hungarian, Polish political prisoners. Either it was RW or someone who appeared very similar, some elderly ill Scandanavian, who had been in a camp or hospital for many years. Could it have been possible? Sure, possible. The case remained open for years, with many unanswered questions and many places cited by a variety of apparent witnesses. For example, he knew—from the work of the historian S. Berger of the Swedish-Russian Working Group—that an elderly Swede was witnessed in 1960, in solitary confinement in Korpus 2 of Vladimir Prison, by two former employees, Varvara Ivanovna Larina and Aleksandr Timofeiyevich Kukin; and in 1970, by Josyp Terelya, a former prisoner, also in Korpus 2 of Vladimir. Moreover, if Raoul was alive after 1947, he would most likely have become a secret prisoner in isolation, and such prisoners were assigned either a false identity or a number. Convicted prisoners 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20 were sentenced by Special Tribunal (OSO) between the spring of 1947
and May 1948. In what isolation prisons were they placed after their departure from Moscow, and who were they?
At home, Manny conjectured a scene of the once-young, dark-haired Raoul now a much older man, maybe a emaciated gray-haired prisoner, worn down, wearied, and ill. (Or was it tuberculosis, with that cough?) Gellerman imagined him as observed by one of the apparent witnesses, a guard/attendant:
He sat in a chair, a blanket over his legs, a white scraggly beard covering up a good part of his face. I brought him his dinner daily, a piece of bread dipped in a soup gruel, on occasion a piece of dog meat, and watched him work his jaw excessively. His one true pleasure came from the dry Swedish bread, “Knäckebröd,” which I smuggled to him, once a month, courtesy of bribery and a secret benefactor. This reminded him of home and his Stockholm youth, he explained, in the basic Russian he had learned through the years. In the spring, when it was often chilly, he would sit either in the sun with my help or, if it was gray as usual, near the one stove in the large dormitory room, where ten other prisoners lived. They didn’t bother him much, and every few years a political prisoner came who talked with him, in German. His speech gradually became slurred, and he coughed regularly.
On rare occasions he had a visitor, an agent from Moscow, who asked how he was doing, and whether he wished to confess anything; whether he wanted to change his mind and offer any information about the long-ago past, so that he might spend his last remaining years—or months?—with his friends or family back in Sweden. These agents, either from the KGB or SMERSH (counterintelligence), always informed him, I would hear, that nobody on the outside had asked for him, not yet. Not after all these thirty-odd years. But maybe soon? When the agents visited, it was often in pairs; one would press him to talk—after all, he was an old man now and it didn’t matter—and the other would say something new about Stockholm, where he had just visited. (Of course, he was lying, and everyone knew it.) The first agent would ask him about his contacts with the rich Jews of Budapest, or about his special work for the American OSS. Though it was many decades later, they still did their onerous work, still pressed the old man. They came around maybe twice a year or so.
