Searching for Wallenberg

by Alan Lelchuk

  “Did you eat yet?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t need much, thank you.”

  A waiter came by; she ordered a Greek salad with wine and sat quietly.

  Mother said, “Good news, we are proceeding to work immediately. Professor Gellerman has agreed!”

  Manny barely nodded. He heard some Brits at a nearby table digging into Bush and Blair.

  “I have a very strong feeling, Dorottya, about our new partnership. At last I have found a true champion to serve Father, and his memory.”

  Dora looked over at Manny, her brown eyes fixing him, waiting.

  Manny massaged his beard. “Your mother is optimistic. I hope she is correct.”

  Dora half smiled. “And you?”

  “Me? I am always pessimistic, but I am also always foolish. So, anything is possible!”

  A moment of puzzling silence, the ladies absorbing that; then Zsuzsa laughed, and her daughter smiled. “You see,” proclaimed Mother, clapping her hands, “he is a gentleman of possibilities. What more can we ask for?”

  “Yes, a Professor of Possibility,” Dora observed, wittily. “That is a good role.”

  She stared at him, with those shining—demanding?—brown eyes, to see how he was taking her playful mocking. Satisfied, she said in a low voice, “‘Anything is possible.’ I like that; it is very philosophical.”

  “Credit to Dostoyevsky, though the new phrasing is mine,” Manny explained, breathing in her musk fragrance and pink cheeks, and wondering if indeed the phrase had pertinence here.

  The next day, before meeting Zsuzsanna to go to the copy shop, he called the Budapest historian whom he had consulted with in the past, and luckily found him in.

  In Borhi’s fourth-floor Buda apartment in the third district, Manny proceeded to narrate further—more than he already had told him in the past, via some e-mails—about the madwoman (and/or charlatan or medium), and her wild claims, and her cache of so-called authentic letters, documents, etc.

  Lazslo shook his head and said, “Oh, I doubt most of it, as I have told you; but you know, so much of Wallenberg in Budapest and in Moscow is obscure, mysterious, unknown, and even invented, that we can’t be sure that her tale is entirely fictitious.” He shrugged. “I myself have heard many apocryphal stories about him, in relation to the Nazis, the OSS, the Russians, and also his personal relationships of all sorts, so that without hard empirical evidence, we can’t prove or disprove such claims. Of course, if we could check some of the papers you speak of, yes, that would help. But if she won’t give them up for a day or two, how would you accomplish this?”

  “Well, I’ve tried, but thus far, no success.”

  He got up, went to his desk, found a name in an address book, and wrote it down on a piece of paper. “Here is a bona fide handwriting analyst, who specializes in old documents and manuscripts. Use my name. I have used him in the past a few times; see if he is still around and what he may require to check the papers. Yes, I believe it will be the originals, for many reasons.”

  Gellerman thanked him, took the address and phone number, and told him he would keep him informed.

  Borhi nodded, and added, “Let me know if anything turns up. All leads should be followed, as you are doing. And really, who knows?” He raised his eyebrows. “Remember, nobody really knows anything about this case, after all these decades, so anything you can come up with will be of great interest.”

  As Manny departed and entered the small old-fashioned steel elevator, he thought with surprise about how open Borhi was to the possibility of discovering some pay dirt. However, in the elevator cage, as it dropped down, he felt more like a prisoner of the situation than a free man pursuing history.

  The next day, Wednesday, at a copy shop, they proceeded to make copies of twelve documents, and as they waited in the tiny shop, Manny realized the folly of this; just as Borhi had cautioned, no serious handwriting analyst could work from mere copies and declare a verdict with any certitude. That was foolish. It came to him that he would have to resort to stealth work, if he wanted to get anywhere …

  Later, in the apartment, he searched through the Tribune for the baseball scores, saw the Red Sox holding up in the dog days of August, and sat down at the large table in the parlor. He shuffled through a pile of papers, then took out a notebook and a pen. He called Zsuzsa in and said, “So, shall we begin? Let me ask you some questions, concerning these letters and other documents, and you can answer as best as your memory serves you …”

  She smiled, sitting with her hands folded like a prim schoolgirl. “First, I ask you a question, a basic question: You have faith in me, I assume? Or hope?”

  Caught off guard, he said, “Well, yes.”

  “And you are going to check on my papers for reasons of your profession, yes?”

  “Yes.” He paused. “Naturally.”

  She nodded, and said, “All right, I understand. But for me, faith is everything, for it means trust, with the body, and the heart, as well as the brain, and that faith is the only path to truth, the deeper truth of seeing things that others cannot see.”

  He put down his pen, considered her words of prudent self-protection, and sensed that the medium was talking.

  “Yes, I suppose what others cannot see, or find; that’s what we are searching for.”

  The teacher nodded to the pupil and said, “I know your suspiciousness; I have felt it, and hope it is only your immediate reflex, not your deeper belief. Perhaps I can ‘convert’ you?” She smiled. “May I read these few thoughts to you, from one of your own?” She reached over, took out a small pad, and read: “I am quite willing to believe that a new truth may be supernaturally revealed to a subject when he really asks. But I am sure that in many cases of conversion it is less a new truth than a new power gained over life by a truth always known.” She looked up, luminous, having used one of Manny’s books to support her view, and perhaps pedagogy. “Your William James wrote those words. A wise man, don’t you think?”

  If Manny Gellerman ever doubted it, he understood well now that this was one formidable lady, and maybe foe, and that he must not underestimate her. “Yes, a wise man,” he repeated her words, but his mind was elsewhere, trying to catch up with his own plans, and the future.

  “May I say,” he said, “that I didn’t realize that you did such quick homework or read so widely?”

  At first she observed him sternly, but then she softened, and she laughed. “Oh, not so widely; there is always too little time for reading. But it is my greatest pleasure, apart from remembering and honoring father.”

  He took a bite from a sweet roll that she had brought, with coffee, and began his questioning of her, wondering, just wondering, if she had managed to feel or intuit his inclination or plan to “borrow” some of her original papers for authenticating.

  CHAPTER 17

  Driving up on Route 93 from the Boston airport, he had plenty of time to think, rethink, reflect. Above Hookset and before Concord, he crossed over to Route 89 going north, where the cars were few and far between, there were no billboards, and it was practically pitch black, with no highway lamps. He had made this drive hundreds, maybe thousands, of times in his thirty years living up here in the North Country. He drove in a kind of velvety fog, charcoal-smooth and easy, listening to music or encased in his own thoughts. Occasionally, when another car came up from behind, Manny felt it as an intrusion upon his private road, his quiet metaphysical hour.

  That his life had been interrupted, or intruded upon, by Wallenberg, was clear enough. For over a year, maybe a year and a half, Raoul, and what had happened to him and why, had come to possess him, almost as much as it possessed the woman he had just left who claimed to be his daughter. While he had seen the mystery, or mysteries, to begin with, and felt he had solved certain of them, others had merely deepened. And as they had deepened they had ripened, it may be said (to himself), to the point where they had taken hold of him, emotionally, so that he now felt very close to that betr
ayed tragic figure. Oddly enough, he had been right in his early speculations that Raoul was a mix of Jackie (Robinson) and Bartleby (the scrivener): part outlaw, part stranger; two outsiders—like Bartleby, a man of principle, betrayed, abandoned, and left forlorn; like Jackie, proving himself with his great skills (physical), and taking on an extra burden (race). Strange indeed, Gellerman thought, that both these native figures described best how he viewed Raoul, from the inside, emotionally.

  Was he going crazy? Perhaps.

  He drove, in the clear black night, comforted by the routine radio broadcast of the baseball game, just like childhood evenings …

  What did “crazy” mean in this present context? Willing to go all out in the face of obstacles, stop signs and detours, in pursuit of his final goal? (Was that Prince of Denmark crazy, seeing and listening to his ghost father and acting as though he were real?) And yet, what was the final goal? Recovering what had happened to Raoul? Recovering—or discovering—who he was? Discovering the culprits responsible for his languishing in prison? Hadn’t he answered these questions for himself and concluded that there were criminals besides the Soviets? … Yet, if he had his own partial answers, did he wish to reveal them to the world? For example, did he wish to reveal that Raoul was probably gay, and maybe even out of the closet in Budapest? Would the world, and RW’s legion of supporters and votaries, really need or want to hear that, when the basic issues were political, ethical? … Shouldn’t he seek to protect Raoul—no matter what the ghost had said to him—and honor the secrecy of his private life?

  Now, what about the madwoman/medium of Budapest? (And why did Manny persist in calling her “mad,” when she actually seemed, thus far, quite the opposite?) Where and how did she fit in, with her faith and obsession? If—a very large if—she had been telling some truth, or a bit of the truth, and Raoul had had a liaison with her mother, was that to be revealed too? Well, she seemed to be writing about just this. For what and whose purposes? …

  (Did RW also have a liaison elsewhere? With another woman, or a man? …)

  What more could Manny do? Had he not served Wallenberg sufficiently already with his approximately eighteen months of increasing devotion?

  He drove, questions swirling, passing through the blackness like a submarine slipping through dark waters stealthily, every now and then catching sight of red tailgate lights up ahead …

  The Red Sox put on a rally in the ninth, but lost, and the announcers were putting the best face on it. The Yankees were charging hard to the top. Why not stick to the pennant races, the football season, the academic world, the easy native obsessions with movies, political correctness, celebrities, and the dinner talk about real estate values and Bush bashing?

  Work to be done: the small matter of the ongoing witnesses who kept turning up, saying they had spotted RW in some Gulag prison or hospital.

  The handling of Zsuzsanna’s memoir.

  And how about handling Manny? Working on his own book or article? Maybe his Shadow Narrative, or fictional metahistory? His long-term investigation and questions would continue to the end, whereever that end might lead—Budapest, Moscow, Stockholm? …

  Driving on the fast lane was easiest here, on the four-lane highway, with hardly a car in sight, going or coming; occasionally a New York or Connecticut car headed up this way, at sixty-five miles an hour or so, and Manny would cruise by at eighty, his Saab knowing the way by heart and routine. Route 89 North at night was smooth, safe, spacious, an empty road on which to roam and reflect, to consider one’s life and decisions, and if he drove straight up to Montreal, he’d figure out all his directions and future destinations.

  Raoul was there with him; he sensed his past and his presence, a history alive, a mystery unsolved. Now it began to drizzle, and Manny thought he saw R’s sober reflection in the windshield, challenging him, as the wipers shifted slowly back and forth, back and forth.

  The policeman who stopped him was an older fellow, wearing summer blues; he checked out Manny’s driver’s license and registration. “You’re lucky tonight. I’m only going to issue you a warning, but no more eighty-five and ninety, no matter what time of night. And even if no one is on the road, sir.”

  Manny, a bit dazed, was grateful for the warning—was it a symbolic warning as well?—and curtailed his speed for the next hour until he hit home.

  The next day he felt fired up, and, after breakfast, went to work drafting a small essay:

  In recent years, there’s been a small cadre of political and polemical critics who have tried hard to make Raoul out to be a dirty spy for the Americans, giving the Soviets a good reason to be very interested in him. RW supposedly worked not merely for the OSS, but also for a super secret group, known only to the top people around FDR, called “The Pond.” These pundits argue the case that Raoul was in touch with the British secret service as well, and may have been involved with an arrangement whereby the Brits would join the Hungarians in going against the Soviets, once the war was over. (It should be noted that a close aid of RW, Captain Elek Kelecsenyi, supposedly had ties to KGB agents and probably reported on Raoul.) In addition, runs the argument, Raoul was able to secure the release of so many Jews precisely because he was in cahoots with the Nazi high command in Budapest. Thus the Soviets were most keen on detaining and questioning him about the various agents he might have known, plus the many rich Jewish friends and clients that he worked for. Consequently, the idea of Raoul acting out of pure intentions was naïve and wrong.

  It is worth noting that the leader of the group seeking to erode Raoul’s perceived integrity is himself a Soviet émigré, who, while living comfortably in New York, is a conspiracy theorist in his heart and mind. This middle-aged fellow, whom I met in Moscow and whose excessive, relentless essay on the subject is both ideological and tendentious, has made the case that in fact Raoul was hardly a hero, but rather a Swedish playboy more concerned about his personal dandy pleasures than the ordeal of the Jews. If so, Raoul was one playboy who did rather well for the Jews, and we needed more of them!

  Why was this effort to degrade Raoul made? And why has this group attacked RW so vengefully, when, to be sure, there was little evidence to back up their assertions, and furthermore, no witnesses to corroborate them? These are perhaps more interesting questions. And why would this push come from an ex-Soviet and a few drive-by American journalists and cheap ex-spies? Was it only the smell of the bucks?

  But for a moment, let’s say that RW was a spy, working for the Allies while working to save the Jews of Budapest. Considering the context, was this so bad? Look at what the Soviets did to local resistance fighters like Károly Schandl, Lázslo Pap, Louis Klement, who were sent to Vladimir Prison for years! Or Count István Bethlen, who was murdered by Soviet hands in October 1946. Or other Hungarian associates of RW, like Szabö, Szalai, Alapi, who were hunted down by the Soviets and forced to serve long prison terms. Not to forget the strong anti-Semitism of the Soviet troops and leaders. Was it so wrong to work against that huge monstrous machine?

  Moreover, the Soviets themselves in all probability did not know whom they had gotten when they captured RW. Although the early facts of his capture are rather nebulous, it’s clear that RW himself didn’t fully know if he was being taken by the Soviet officials from Debrecen to Moscow as “a guest or a prisoner.” There, he was taken to Lybianka Prison, though it still remained unclear if they knew who he was; for it was a few weeks later that Abramov of SMERSH, the counterspy unit, entered the situation to say that he, and not Beria, would run the case. In June and July 1945, in Russia and Hungary, chaos and confusion reigned, with missing souls, dead souls, unknown and undeclared souls, so that knowing who was who was itself a conundrum. With larger national problems of economics and politics on the horizon, and the Cold War already begun, the capture of a single unknown Swede was probably of little importance for the Soviets.

  We return to our initial question: Why has the recent squad of political assassins gone after RW and his rep
utation? Is it because the Soviet sensibility was shaped by a Stalinest thug regime and anti-Communist mindset, which was then enveloped by the new Cold War temperament, wherein conspiracy was in the air everywhere? And within this atmosphere, allies and enemies were practically all the same, all implicated, switching sides periodically, in a No Exit laboratory of liars and betrayers and double agents; and therefore, the idea of a single-minded soul, driven by idealism and a passion for justice and natural sympathy, was not only incongruous but incomprehensible and anathema. The basic principle was simple: everyone in the USSR and East Europe—and the Americans too—in the late forties/early fifties had dirty hands. And now, looking back, the battle-scarred survivors of the Soviet paranoia machine and the Cold War, including those who had been agents themselves of the KGB and other secret agencies, made themselves over into shrewd experts and judges on who was dirty, who was a spy, who was a traitor and double agent; and it turned out, in their absolutist judgment, that ninety-nine percent all of the players were dirty, whether they knew it or not. Conspiracy, spying, betrayal, dark intentions coursed in the blood of this posse of self-appointed vigilantes. Wherever they could, the posse would pursue any renegade or maverick who had not only avoided criminal acts but who had come across as honorable or decent. For one honorable man to exist in that vast sea of crooks, commies, cowards, trimmers, and assassins was as dangerous as the idea of justice itself; and he had to be hunted down and, if dead, his reputation blackened, for if there were no honorable men, then honor itself was out of the question.

  Manny stopped for a lunch, grabbed some cottage cheese, nuts, and yogurt, and returned for revision. When he looked up it was twilight. On the horizon lay lines of blue and mauve with cirrus clouds forming amoeba shapes. He felt unsettled, fatigued, as though he had just been digging in smelly muck and mire. Though he had written about the Cold War, he was always amazed at how long it had persisted; and now this new angle, tarnishing the good guys. Had he tried too hard to protect Raoul? No, not at all.