Searching for Wallenberg

by Alan Lelchuk

  “Or,” suggested Jake, “The Swede!”

  “God, no, let’s be inventive,” said Hermansky “Let’s see …”

  “I have it!” said Phil Roberts, “We’ve known you for nearly a year now, and no one knows anything about you, so, you are hereby annointed Mystery Man.”

  The sardine-squeezed gang of six cheered!

  Raoul, uncomfortable, found himself saying, “Is that really a nickname?”

  “Well, it will do till a better one comes along!”

  Raoul relented, smiled, and allowed the joking to proceed. As the Plymouth careened along through the leafy streets of the charming college town, Raoul thought how surprising these colleagues were, all this good-natured kidding masking their true talent and intelligence. And maybe Hermansky was right; maybe he was the Mystery Man—to himself as well. Well, for now, he’d have his beer with the fellows, and then, later, sit in the library and work on a serious sketch for his bold thesis inspiration.

  Phil Roberts meanwhile continued to hold him by the arm, and Raoul wondered about the friendships of these Americans—how loose they were, how loose and easy, so very different from his own more formal Stockholm culture.

  Phil turned and smiled broadly, sitting in his lap, saying, “You see, Mystery Man, you can rest easy with us, your secrets will always be safe with us.”

  Gellerman pulled himself back up from the scene and reread it. Did it catch the youthful but complex spirit of Raoul—his appealing quest for learning and understanding in the New World, but also his uncertainty? While the little portrait captured certain traits, like shyness, propriety, collegiality, did it reach deeper into his personality? Maybe there, at the end, with Phil so close? When Raoul wrote to his grandfather that America was changing him, did that include a freeing of his inner self and desires, which were taboo in Stockholm? Or was Manny reaching out too far? Perhaps. But for now, he let it be. The Wallenberg with whom he had recently chatted on the Hopi Res deserved a replay of his spirited youth, his comic spirit, and his rebel’s stance, but also his complex character. If he imagined a scene based on his interview with Olaf Selling, would more emerge?

  An elderly couple stopped and asked Manny for a direction on the campus. Manny took them outside the inn and pointed out the small redbrick Hood Museum, down the street a few hundred yards. The gentleman thanked him and turned away. But as he did, Manny realized the man reminded him of someone: Daniel Pagliansky in Moscow, with the thin wisps of hair flying, the small wiry frame, the lively brown eyes. And right there Manny stopped, suspended briefly, for he suddenly felt he understood something, or rather, understood that he had failed to see something. How naïve, of course!

  He returned inside to his obscure corner, opened the laptop, and composed:

  Late July 1947; Lybianka Prison, Moscow

  Raoul was led into a Medical Lab 272 by two guards and set down on a metal armchair. The square room was lit by several unshaded bulbs and a standing lamp, and it contained two large glass medical cabinets, an examination table, a wash basin, several chairs. Presently, a bespectacled doctor wearing a white medical coat walked in, nodded, and examined a file at the green file cabinet. Two minutes later the doctor was followed in by two KGB agents, wearing full uniform, including large military hats. Raoul at first barely recognized his interrogator friend, since he looked so different, dressed formally in his military uniform of olive and red.

  Raoul looked at him, and Daniel looked back, and nodded very slowly. No words were exchanged.

  The doctor read through his file, turned to the two agents, and had them sit down on two chairs by the far white wall.

  He gestured for Raoul to move up to the examination table and remove his shoes. Raoul got up, removed his shoes, and sat at the front edge of the narrow table covered with a sheet.

  The room smelled of sulphuric acid and other chemicals.

  Raoul said, “Daniel. Good to see you came, to say a real good-bye to me.”

  Daniel took off his large officer’s hat and nodded.

  The doctor motioned to the prison guards, who came alongside Raoul, each on a side, and each gripped an arm. The doctor returned from the medicine cabinet with an ammo box container of bandages, small vials, and an injection needle.

  “Do you wish to say anything?” he asked Raoul.

  Raoul shook his head slowly but firmly.

  “We have your confession sheet for you; would you like to sign it?”

  Raoul shook his head.

  “No matter, we will sign it for you. An enemy of the state doesn’t have to sign for himself.” The doctor walked close to Raoul, nodded to the tall guard, who gripped the right arm. Carefully he filled the needle with a grayish liquid.

  Daniel and his associate agent stood up, holding their hats.

  Suddenly, in a small but distinct voice, Raoul spoke: “Daniel, wouldn’t you like to do the honor?”

  The doctor looked strangely at Raoul and then over to Daniel, who stood small and stoic; no one was very amused.

  Returning to the business at hand, the doctor searched for a prominent vein, found one, and injected the needle. The doctor waited, along with the guards, for maybe twenty seconds, with Raoul looking straight ahead, before he lost consciousness; at the doctor’s nod, the guards laid him down on the narrow bed. The doctor leaned over, opened his eyelids, and checked his pulse.

  Turning to the KGB agents, he said, “Which one of you will sign the death certificate?”

  Daniel and his associate looked at each other, hesitated, before Daniel came forward and scribbled his name.

  The doctor, adjusting his spectacles, proceeded to sign his name. He said, “Sign again here.”

  Daniel signed a second sheet.

  The two guards rolled in a gurney, lifted the body onto it, and waited for one of the certificates to be attached to the gurney. The doctor put the second sheet into the file.

  “Case number 4581 is now officially closed, comrades.”

  The two agents put their hats on, nodded, and filed out, while the doctor stayed. He began cleaning up, tossing out the empty vial, cleaning the needle, and washing his hands. He organized his medicine cabinet and locked it. He put the certificate into the manilla folder, wrote something on it, and set the folder in the iron basket on top of the cabinet.

  Finally, looking about, satisfied, he closed the lights, stepped to the door, and exited.

  Manny felt depleted, melancholic. He sat in the wing chair in the formal lounge, entranced, while well-dressed guests and students paraded through, chatting. His throat was dry. Had the scene really happened? Here, now, the scene of Last Betrayal seemed right, in keeping with Soviet ways and KGB tactics. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Because, he figured, he had been thinking like an American scholar, not like a Soviet comrade. He tried to console himself with the thought that this scene was imaginary only, right? No hard evidence for it! … Still, he felt awful.

  “Thank you,” said the elderly man, suddenly reappearing with his wife, “but the Hood Museum is closing now. We will try tomorrow.”

  Manny, taken from his depths, looked up, and for a moment swore he saw Daniel right there—the bony structure, the wispy white hair, the alert eyes.

  Manny nodded, “Oh, I see. Well, yes, try tomorrow.”

  Who had sent the fellow? This montage of lives, which Manny had experienced before, proved a revelation. The accidental meeting was a sign, yes. His imagined character of a minute ago was revealing to him the real one whom he had visited in Moscow. A historian’s irony? Or history’s irony? … The cycle was now complete: RW was abandoned by family, state, and friendly interrogator. Manny saw now how in his earlier scenes he had been a naïve romantic. But now, he felt more the realist … For now he understood—it made perfect sense—why the real Daniel P. had never told his son or wife, or spoken to anyone else, even when it could have benefitted him, anything concerning RW and his dealings with him. Nor did he acknowledge anything to the KGB when they intervie
wed him in 1991 and offered him complete immunity. Silence became his signature, for family, state, and history. To be a KGB operative was one thing—involving institutional perfidy—but to be a personal betrayer on top of that, added a new layer of evil.

  Standing up, Manny heard in his mind the last sounds of his son’s finale, those harsh dissonant melodies that Shostakovich had dedicated to Rostropovich, to be played at the composer’s funeral.

  CHAPTER 21

  The apparent “downfall” of Manny didn’t occur for another few weeks, in October, when the leaves were falling, the colors were changing, football had begun, and the baseball playoffs were heating up. But there was little time to enjoy the foliage and sporting fun for Manny. It happened this way. In Budapest the Medium lady couldn’t—or wouldn’t—restrain herself and take a chance on missing out on her several minutes of fame and glory. So she managed to leak a story to a Hungarian journalist about her so-called identity, and which “famous professor” was editing her papers in America. The rest happened fast, furious, and was not so pretty. Newspaper services from around the world picked up the story, printed first in the Budapest magazine HVG, and it spread like rumor-wildfire to all sorts of media, starting with the likes of the International Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, and going on to Dygens Nyheter and the Huffington Post. Was YouTube next? Manny was phoned, faxed, beeped, wired, e-mailed, texted, confronted. How were the lady’s papers proceeding? When would the memoir be finished? Who was the publisher? (Several New York publishers, plus Yale and Chicago, had expressed immediate interest.) Conveniently, a few inquired whether her revelations were accurate.

  When CNN and the BBC called and asked for interviews, and Tom Lantos and the Swedish-Russian Working Group chipped in to ask for and demand answers, what was he to say?

  In the next few weeks, there were surprise meetings, journalists, lawyers, interviewers, a detective, scholars, lawyers. His life quickly became a circus; he was followed around by a new group every day on the quiet Ivy League campus. One day he was ambushed inside his classroom by that journalist from Uppsala, who now, with her camera/sound man, sought to film him in class, as part of the process of making a documentary about him; the fifteen graduate students grew very excited, and Manny, very nervous; naturally, he turned them away, to the dismay of the students.

  Manny understood, of course, that he was about to be blown out of the water any day, by the clever Budapest lady, so he had one of two choices: expose her himself, or let her make a mockery of herself, and shrewdly try to remove himself from her and the field of combat by seeking to create distance from her.

  In the meantime, daughter Dora showed up on his doorstep, after her New York conference, coming up to see the real New England in the fall and to be hosted by Manny. Good timing? Or good scheming? (“Mom hopes to follow me here one day, if you give her an invitation.” The petite young woman smiled, after setting down her small valise inside the kitchen of his large farmhouse.)

  When the chair of his department called him in, Manny imagined the worst: direct questions about the authenticity of the papers and the date of publication of the memoir.

  “You’ve given us more publicity than our department has ever had,” he laughed robustly. “This will help us, within the university, for raising our profile and for getting us more funding.”

  Manny nodded.

  “What sort of woman is this? How’d you come upon her in the first place?”

  “Actually, my student Angela first mentioned her to me,” Manny said. He explained the evolution from the thesis and described the lady, “She’s unusual, let’s say that. Rather bohemian in her thinking, her ways.”

  “I would imagine so, after that life! Well, you’ve done a great job!” He leaned forward and said, in a lower voice, “There are several alumni groups that really would like to hear about all this. Can I get you to address them?”

  What could Manny say, now, before any exposure explosion, but “Sure.”

  “Great, I’ll set it up and let you know. This is very productive for the department, puts us on another level of importance.” He lowered his voice for delivering crucial verdicts: “This is important for you too, Manny. I was worrying about you … This brings you back up, just what you need for a comeback!”

  Later, at home in the countryside, he set out two wine glasses for Dora and himself, and sat in the living room, waiting. The giant avocado plant needed serious tending and pruning, its branches reaching up to the ceiling and out wildly into the room. The twenty-five-year-old plant was holding its own, though looking strange, its branches lunging every which way.

  “Hello,” she said, entering, wearing a white blouse and flowered skirt. “I really like your house.”

  “Here, this is for you.” He stood and gave her a glass of white wine.

  “Thank you. And here, this is for you, from Mother.”

  She handed him a small package, tied with a ribbon, and sat down.

  He opened the simple wrapping to find a small cardboard box. He opened it and took out a note and a worn leather pouch, three inches by four, heavy with a weight inside, and tiny eroded writing on it. The note read: “Please accept this gift from me and my father, a present given him by a Jewish survivor in Budapest. My father used it as a paperweight on his desk and was very fond of it. I hope you will be too.” It was signed, “Your friend, Zsuzsanna.”

  He lifted the little (terra-cotta?) paperweight, feeling it, and passed it to Dora, sitting alongside.

  She lifted it, raising her eyebrows mischevously, and said, “You are becoming like one of the family!”

  He looked at her. “Is that good or bad?”

  She sipped her wine. “Good, I hope!”

  He drank his wine, observing the surprise present, and the young woman, suddenly here, with her beautiful face, in his living room. What did it mean? What was he supposed to do with her? … Was she a plant from the mother?

  “How long are you here for?”

  “Oh, just a few days.” She smiled. “I won’t be a bother to you, I promise. Mom said I should pay a visit and see the leaves.”

  Was this young Hungarian beauty really a family link to the great ghost of a man he had been pursuing these past few years?

  “Yes, the leaves,” he repeated. “Maybe we can climb Mount Cardigan this weekend, so you can get a wide view of their colors turning.”

  She nodded, her brown eyes fixing him.

  Manny had many questions to put to her, but not now; and he wasn’t sure that she could answer them. He stood up and went to the avocado plant, seeing that a few dead leaves had fallen, and retrieved them. “I suppose you want to know how your mom’s papers are coming along?”

  She shook her head. “No. That is between you and her.”

  “Yes, that is true. Well, we should consider dinner, shouldn’t we?”

  In the ensuing few days, Manny felt the young woman’s presence and tried to imagine her mother really being the daughter of Wallenberg, rather than the obsessive RW-cult fanatic he believed her to be. Did it really matter, however? he wondered, climbing the 3,200-foot mountain with his young guest. Wasn’t Zsuzsa’s long obsession enough, deserving enough in itself? As he glanced at the trim Budapest daughter, with her backpack and hiking shoes, take the steady ascent like a small mountain goat while he climbed like an old goat, he tried to ponder what it all meant, what the real fallout would be, and when? … They were ascending now above the tree line, onto a stretch of granite ledge and big boulders. From here they could view the top of the mountain and the forest ranger lookout hut, jutting out high on its wooden stilts. Windy here; he took out his light windbreaker from his pack. The energetic young woman eyed him every so often, nodded or half smiled, didn’t speak much, and looked easy, comfortable.

  At the top they had a 360-degree view of the topography below, mostly forest with some open fields and dark-blue lakes and little white houses dotting the woodsy landscape. If you peered c
losely, you spotted the periodic clusters of the small villages, and even, if you looked through the binoculars, you could sight selected places, like his house and land or the college library steeple. Dora paid the expected compliments—“almost like Machu Picchu, where I climbed once.” There was sweat on her pink flushed face. Radiant herself, she appreciated the visual beauty, and stealthily he sought any resemblance to RW … Why couldn’t he simply accept the situation as young Dora apparently did? If it happened that she was Raoul’s secret granddaughter, it happened, and if not, not. (Could he ever ask her to take a DNA test? But without Raoul’s corpse, how could they confirm a match?) She seemed easy about accepting such ambiguity. Why not Manny?

  They drank their bottled waters, viewed the spacious vista. “I like your New England,” she acknowledged, and he responded, “I like your Budapest.” A pair of hikers came by and said hello. On top of the mountain, closer to the clouds, he sensed a curious responsibility for this young person. For her not being damaged by the mother’s delusions and derangement. Or his folly? Naturally, he kept this feeling to himself, and pointed out the few sights he knew: the beginning hills of the White Mountains, like Smarts, and the great stony Whites, with the ‘baddest’ weather in New England.” Pointing, he explained, “Right there on top of that one, Mount Washington, the wind regularly blows at fifty or sixty miles an hour in winter. A foolish hiker gets lost there every winter.” She nodded, her small chin forward, and asked defiantly, “Are you going to test me?” He retorted, “Absolutely. As soon as we get back.” Actually, he thought he should test her, but not about mountains.

  When they did get home in two hours, he found in his e-mail box another witness sighting, this from a Russian immigrant residing in Rehovot, Israel, a retired physicist who claimed he had seen the “old sick diplomat” at a Gulag camp near the Urals, and would be happy to talk with Professor Gellerman. Manny jotted down the name and a phone number. After a shower, he met up with Dora in the kitchen, and they planned a dinner. “I cook; it’s my turn,” she said. The dinner was good too, a roast chicken in a pan with carrots, potatoes, and onions; and the talk concerned her work in children’s therapy. He kept waiting for the questions to come about her mother’s “manuscript,” but they never did. A smart and discreet young woman.