Searching for Wallenberg

by Alan Lelchuk

  Left alone, he sat in the wooden armchair—a crude version of a Morris chair, with wide arms—the upholstery torn, the wood splintered—and picked up his files of Lady Z.’s papers and his own notes. The room’s walls had small symbols painted on them: a curlicue, captioned, “oraibi”; another of a hand and a sideways S, “Chaco Canyon,” and one of an angled seesaw with circles at the ends, and a narrow snake-like creature shimmering up alongside. Manny would have to ask Jack what these little designs meant and who had done them? The space itself was a spare rectangle, shabby but decent, a few pieces of furniture, including a bookcase with books. Resisting those, he sat back and realized it could be easier to focus here than in NH, without routines or college responsibilities, friends or students; maybe a serendipitous weekend after all?

  He started looking through the notes and realized how much he missed his radios, to surround his boring background. He got up, quietly knocked on the door, and, excusing himself for interrupting Euella, asked if a radio on low would bother her. She shook her head.

  “Do you happen to have one around?”

  She nodded, called out to her daughter, and asked her to bring in the little portable radio. The girl, on the sullen side, went and did her small task.

  Back in his space, he turned on the old Emerson, searched the dials, found only pop and country music on AM and FM, and settled on the latter. A case for Sirius Satellite Radio, or at least a CD music box. Well, if he returned some time and stayed on, he would bring one with him. Just like crazy Manny—he told himself—to skip Europe, skip the Caribbean, and return to this desolate, haunted land …

  So, with Sugarland singing, he started reading his madwoman’s pages …

  He was about twenty minutes into reading, or rereading, the materials when he opened his laptop to check contacts—Jack had told him of the new Wi-Fi connection for the store out front—and he found two new messages of interest, one from his Washington, DC, historian friend. She wrote to alert him that a Russian historian, Arkady V., was claiming, in an essay or book, that the KGB interrogator Daniel P. was perhaps present at the death of Wallenberg. Was this true? she asked. Manny, amazed, didn’t really know, but wasn’t sure he believed it. He wrote back and asked her to let him know when “something tangible” turned up. Yet her note, and the claim, brought back to him the last scene he had created, Daniel P.’s late good-bye to Raoul, and he realized how ironic that would have been, if the Russian historian’s claim had real evidence behind it. Manny would have to wait and see, and check it out … But imagine if Daniel had been there, witnessing it …

  He pondered the new gambit put out there, and it revealed to him the full power of the new Internet world: here, on a southwestern mesa on a remote reservation, one didn’t need a real library for research and information, a necessity in the old days; one could sit here and do work through the virtual world. Especially if one knew what one was searching for. (Just now, for example, he googled KGB and found a brand new site created by the Lithuanians! A handsome site, too, presenting the whole KGB structure in East Europe beginning in the 1940s.). This new world might have surprised Aldous Huxley too.

  Here, in the shabby partitioned studio, he felt okay, semi-real, up to par; cut off and not cut off from modern civilization; alone, and yet surrounded by these ancient pre-Western Americans; engulfed by the curious little symbolic drawings on the walls, and protected in the background by one special friend who provided the local hospitality. Things could be worse, far worse.

  The second message came from somewhere in Finland: “My understanding, Professor, from your website, is that you hunt for the whereabouts of Mr. Raoul Wallenberg. Let me tell you I was in a cell with him, in Lefortovo Prison, cell 151, after Willi Roedl left. Then he was sent to the Gulag, somewhere in the Urals. Maybe you find someone who was there with him? Keep me on your list, please.”

  On my list? My website? Manny was baffled, shocked; and, of course, he understood. Yes, naturally, Lady Z. had “creatively” set it up, helping him out.

  Later, in Jack’s pickup, he sat in the shotgun seat, and bumped along the rutted dirt road as his student drove up these narrow winding roads, taking them high up to Old Oraibi on Third Mesa. Slowing down as they headed into the village of a dozen at the far edge of the mesa, Jack pointed to a handwritten sign and grinned. It read: “This village is offlimits to whites because you have broken our rules. You are no longer welcome here.” Jack tapped him playfully on the shoulder. “Take it easy, I’ll get you through,” he kidded, or half kidded. “You’re with me now.”

  “Hey, thanks, but you know, I like to go where I am not invited, been doing that all my life.”

  Jack smiled. “We’ll pay a brief visit to some relatives of mine.”

  Presently, they were driving on the dirt road of the small village, sitting on the precipice of the mesa. This stark countryside was different from any that Manny had ever seen.

  But his mind was drifting to the wiry KGB interrogator and his prisoner, what had happened, and how Manny had imagined it.

  “Why create a village in so extreme a neighborhood?” Jack answered his own question. “Because the Spanish conquistadors, when they came, couldn’t conquer them—too steep to get up here from the other side of those cliffs.”

  During the visit with Jack’s elderly relatives in a small adobe house, in the small spare kitchen with the photo of Barry Goldwater on the wall, Manny was wondering about that last meeting between Daniel P. and Raoul. At the end of the visit, the relatives gave him a book written by their uncle, Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian. He thanked them and accepted the paperback.

  The old man held up his hand. “I’m too old now to read small print. But you read that and tell me or Jack what you think, whether it’s understandable to someone outside of the tribe.”

  For Manny this was like an old Jew giving “The Rise of David Levinsky” to a foreign Gentile to read. “I’ll do that.”

  They drove back down, more slowly, and Manny soaked up the bizarre mountaintop landscape and isolated clumps of small houses, and tried to think of what sort of architectural sketches Raoul might have drawn for his Michigan professor. What a strange country this was, Manny thought, right here on the other, far side of America.

  They had dinner at Jack’s house; he chatted politely with the kids and quiet wife, and, when it got late-ish, about nine, Jack surprised him by taking him down to the Hopi Cultural Center, where he had secured a room for him at the hotel.

  A small, cozy, clean room. “It’s quiet, you’ll get a good night’s rest here.”

  “Hey, I could have slept in the studio, on the cot.”

  “Nah, this is more ‘civilized.’” Jack beamed. “The studio is for working on your book. And here’s your bag.”

  “You’ve thought of everything.”

  “Almost.”

  He faced Jack, nodded, thanked him, and added, “I’m here to take you back to school, you realize.”

  “Yeah, my very own bounty hunter. Gellerman for DeNiro.”

  “Never thought of it that way, but why not?”

  Jack nodded. “You get some good sleep now.”

  “And you think of what you have to do.”

  “It may take a while. You may have to stay longer than the weekend.”

  “Well, I’ve brought my work.”

  “That’s the spirit. But you gotta finish up your project; we’re all waiting.” Jack punched Manny’s shoulder playfully. “Maybe especially Raoul?”

  When he closed the door, Manny washed up, sat on the bed, and replayed the day, the Jack advice. He took out the gift book and read in different sections. An interesting Hopi life, especially from an anthropological point of view, with unusual aspects of daily life, like the roles of man and woman … Certainly it would upset some current fashionable positions. How would the contemporary moralists handle it: Native American ways versus current political correctness?

  Manny had an impulse to open his laptop,
but it was over at the studio. Could he walk there and find it in the dark night? He knew it was up the road a bit; he had a flashlight, and it wasn’t exactly downtown Detroit; coyotes weren’t going to mug him. Wearing a light windbreaker, he walked outside into the soft cool air, a pleasant wave. The walk from the driveway to the road was brief. A full moon was up, and though it went in and out of the clouds, it lit his way well enough, with the flashlight doing the rest. There were no cars, only the sounds of the whispering wind and stray calls in the night. Periodically, when the clouds allowed, he saw the blinking stars, and he tried to identify the constellations, sighting the Big Dipper and the North Star, and even finding Cassiopeia. Seeing the W-shape from a different angle out here, he strained his neck around to catch the full W. Those billions of stars, those sparkling shapes and designs, reassured him. His sneakers crunched on the gravelly path. If he kept up his pace, he figured it couldn’t be more than fifteen minutes, and if he felt lost, he’d turn around.

  He hadn’t been alone this way, in nature, in the moonlit darkness, since he was a seventeen-year-old boy sailing on Norwegian ships and, as a “dekksgut,” serving on the graveyard shift as the lookout. Standing on the bow from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m., facing the rolling Atlantic, he’d stand for an hour with the blue-black sea crashing beneath him and the black night above, waiting and watching to sight the first lights of any ship headed toward them. If he saw one, he’d clang the loud metal bell, one, two, or three times, depending on the approaching ship’s direction, to alert his partner three stages above in the pilot’s cabin on the bridge, so he could turn the ship ten degrees starboard. Back in his seventeen-year-old sea-youth, he had experienced an early sense of the solitariness of man in the world, a perception of the physical beauty of the natural world. Now, near fifty years later, in the September night walking out on this high destert plateau, he felt a return of those youthful emotions and perceptions, the same sense of solitude and stark beauty.

  When the moon passed behind the clouds, he thought it best to keep the flashlight on, and his silver metal whistle in his other hand. You never knew when a coyote would become a pack, or turn into a wolf, he figured, walking on. In the bracing night air, before the stars, Manny felt somehow on the right track in his long search for Raoul. He wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but whatever its destination or meaning, he felt it as a journey worth continuing, worth interpreting.

  Lo and behold, after twenty minutes or so he came upon the studio building and was gratified—as though he had undertaken a vast adventure, not a mile walk in the empty night. When he tried the back door, on his side of the studio, he found it open still, a bit of luck. Though he hated to turn on the light, he had to, to find the wired laptop. He sat down, opened it up, waited for the dialup, and read first a few messages.

  Another message from a foreign destination, Pecs, Hungary.

  I believe I stay for a period with Mr. Wallenberg in a Soviet psychiatric hospital in north of Russia. Near Vörkuta. He was great much older, and rumored they were examining experiments on him. He was weak, and sick. To me he always a gentleman. We play chess once, I recall. If you need further my help, I here for you to speak with.

  Ferencz Patyi

  Gellerman wondered, How long will this go on? Or is this just the beginning? Now, armed with a new public website, was he open territory for all the new (old) witnesses, those pursuing wish fulfillment, with selective memory, with dementia? Get ready, my friend, they are coming at you, full steam ahead!

  Another message, from the department secretary, asked how many students he was ready to admit into his fall term’s seminar, History and the Novel? More than fifteen, or not? It was getting crowded.

  Suddenly Manny felt the pressure in his chest of having to teach in three weeks or so … He was not in a mood for that.

  A third message came from his infamous lady in Budapest: “Prof. Gellerman, where are you? I have not heard from you in several weeks. Write and tell me how things are—. How deep have you progressed with my papers? Have you started the formal writing yet?”

  Yes, she had a point; well, he’d drop her a note tomorrow.

  When he turned around, there was the familiar gentleman sitting in the upholstered chair, wearing an open-necked shirt and jacket, hat in his lap. The face was sober, narrow, familiar.

  Startled, Manny said, “You? What are you doing here?”

  “The better question is, what are you doing here?” the fellow paused and turned his hat. “Haven’t you had enough?”

  Manny shook his head slowly, bewildered.

  “You have pursued this diligently, with intelligence and with dedication, but isn’t it time to give it up now? And get back to living your own life?”

  Manny didn’t know what to say. “I don’t know …”

  “Well, I do. You have taken this as far as you can. Look, here you are, at a lonely edge of the world, far from Moscow, Budapest, Stockholm archives, still searching … As your friends would counsel, enough is enough. You have been … tried and true in this pursuit.”

  Gellerman smiled at the use of the idiom. “Is that what you came here for, to tell me to give it all up?”

  The fellow fiddled with his hat and leaned forward. “Would you propose a different reason?”

  Manny said, “Maybe to answer some questions, or to reveal some truths?”

  The stoic gentleman studied the wall with the Hopi designs, drawings, shapes. “They were very inventive, weren’t they? In symbolic nonwhite ways. My professor in Ann Arbor, Dr. Slusser, suggested that I travel here, spend some time with Hopi and Zuni, and observe Southwest architecture, the materials, like burnt adobe, and the manners. So I always wanted to visit and observe, and while in Arizona visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West. Later on, I even made a few preliminary sketches for a desert project—just right for a Swede,” he said dryly.

  Manny admired the allusion to the old professor and his own aspiration.

  “But you,” the visitor narrowly smiled, “You seem to know the territory and to value it highly.” He reflected. “Maybe I should have come down this way, and designed a place to return to, after my Budapest duties? … In any case, Emmanuel, you have been nothing less than valiant, as I said, but it is probably time to leave it go.”

  “And let history take its course?”

  The gentleman smiled ruefully.

  “May I ask you,” Manny gambited, “did you have a family in Budapest?”

  The Swede stared. “Do you think I have arrived here to answer such … esoteric questions?” he shook his head. “My mission is simply to relieve you of yours. Of pursuing the odd case. What happened to me, happened. It is not a handsome story. For it to end—without resolution, without answers—that is a suitable ending, I would think.”

  “Ironically, you speak as if I am a burden upon you, rather than the other way round.”

  A generous smile. “You have a clever way of putting matters. But there is no need anymore. The facts speak for themselves, the absences and mysteries speak also. So, what else is left? … Interpretations? They will go on and on. And will resolve little.”

  “But supposing they blacken you, tarnish what you did? Who you are?”

  “Oh,” he said, adjusting the band of the hat, “that is the nature of things, don’t you think, when it comes to human beings? And maybe historians?” He laughed a little. “Besides I can bear all that, I assure you.”

  “Well, maybe I can’t.”

  They faced each other, in the small spare studio, and Manny felt the oddness of that new request. What was he to do now? …

  “I will take into consideration what you are asking of me and try somehow to find a response.”

  “Good.”

  The gentleman stood up, lifting his obscure backpack, and Manny joined him.

  Manny said, “Too bad you don’t have your old Studebaker outside, huh?”

  This warmed Raoul, who nodded in agreement. “Absolutely. Along with Vilmos to drive
us, perhaps.”

  Manny turned away for a second, hearing the beeping on his laptop of a new message, and when he turned back, RW was gone, vanished, just like that. Manny opened the door and peered out into the darkness, adjusting his eyes, staring, searching for a clue, but there was no sign of him. Manny stood there, transfixed, hearing the wind and the eerie calls from the mountains. Jackals?

  He began to walk back, but now the treeless landscape, dark shapes, and eerie cries were much less scary than on the adventurous trek out. As for the little occurrence inside, why and how did the stranger know he was there? … Who had summoned him here? No matter now. Manny knew he had many things to consider, so he’d get up early and attend to them—simple and complicated things.

  Back inside the hotel room, he was conscious of the sharp differences between the bewitching studio and the cozy familiar room. Here he could remember clearly why he came in the first place, to retrieve his AWOL student, and bring him back for his schoolwork and degree. To that simple task he’d devote himself more fully in the next day or two …

  As for the deeper journey, he couldn’t let that go; it had hooked him, he knew. (Was Mr. Wallenberg worried that he was getting closer to the—or a—truth?)

  CHAPTER 20

  Back in the classroom two weeks later, he felt on home ground again, like someone sitting back in his favorite automobile or in his position on the field. Here with his fifteen students ready to become educated, a few even devoted, he handed out his reading list and outlined the course:

  “So we are going to study the intersection of history and literature, and where and how history is best served through the lens of literary works. In no particular order, we’ll read Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, a work of literary journalism about the Spanish Civil War. Another classic, Man’s Fate by André Malraux, is a fictional portrait of the Chinese Communist Revolution. Closer to home, we’ll read The Book of Daniel by E. L. Doctorow, a novel about the Cold War in America and the Rosenbergs. While there are many good books about World War II, I’ve chosen two first-class novels, History: A Novel by the Italian writer Elsa Morante, and Life and Fate by the Russian Vassily Grossman; the former is well known, the latter, obscure. For a work imagining political revolution in South America, let’s do Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo. And for a modern view of that history, Gabriel Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Later, if we have the time, we’ll try Rebellion in the Backlands, by da Cunha, a Brazilian journalist who wrote what I think is the greatest South American novel.”