Searching for Wallenberg

by Alan Lelchuk

  The next day in class, he spoke to the students about their progress thus far in the mother’s memoir papers. He mentioned to them again the Sacco and Venzetti source book of primary source materials, Commonwealth v. Sacco and Vanzetti, which included trial transcripts, newspaper articles, letters to the editors of the time, a repercussion section. So now he asked the class if they would like to work on that Wallenberg source book. “Using perhaps as a basis the Hungarian lady’s letters, notes, newspaper clippings, and photographs. What do you think?”

  Kevin said, “That’s cool, really cool, sir. Do you think we might be able to publish it?” A growing buzz and affirmation ensued.

  “Why not? It would make a very useful source book, especially with so many still unanswered questions, and we could also include some of the research findings of the Swedish-Russian Working Group, plus some of Raoul’s own Budapest reports and letters. Those should be in there too.”

  The class sounded its approval.

  “Let’s do some homework, round up a few other source books to go along with the Sacco and Venzetti model,” he advised, as the students tapped keys on their laptops. “There’s that one about the Rosenbergs that I mentioned.”

  Manny sensed that he was now paying the healthiest homage to Raoul, keeping him alive in the classroom, in the young minds; and in his own life of research. Raoul needed to be remembered; the memory of his deeds, and his abandonment, needed to be put up there, on the big American, maybe European, radar screen. (Even if this were to be a sanitized Raoul, for new-era political purposes.) Yes, there would be more beeps and signaling on his website from the “witnesses” around the world and, who knows, one might come through—like the physicist?—with new words of authentic memory and suggestive illumination.

  Jesse raised her hand, “If we do a good enough job, maybe we could send a copy over to Moscow and see what the current Russians think or want to do.”

  “There’s an idea,” Manny took up, only half humorously. “We send Putin a Wallenberg source book as a gift, marking off a section of blank pages for him to fill in a missing file.”

  The class went on and deliberated, and then returned to the work coming up, the Doctorow novel, and some of the original sources from that era.

  After class, he went to the office to pick up a few items, and the cordial secretary handed him a Registered Letter from Sweden. (“I signed for it, sir.”) Heart beating. Manny opened it and found a formal letter from Danowsky and Partners, Attorneys at Law in Stockholm, stating that, on behalf of the Wallenberg family, a legal suit was being filed in the Swedish courts for “unproven and perfidious allegations staining the name of their late family member Raoul Wallenberg, concerning an illegitimate Hungarian family and living daughter in Budapest.” Manny nodded to the wondering secretary, signaling all was fine, and wandered out and across the campus green. In the autumn twilight, he walked over to the inn, entered the restaurant, and at the bar ordered a scotch. If the Enskilda Wallenbergs were excited by the “news” of a possible family in Budapest, what would happen when and if his projected book was published, with its imagined charged scenes and conclusions about the brothers? (Not to mention a memoir by Lady Z.) That might incite, not merely excite, the Wallenberg boys even more!

  He made a mental note to call up his legal buddy in New York, smart and able Marty Goldmark, who was as passionate about legal combat as he was about the First Amendment. He’d have great fun arguing in a Stockholm courtroom, and winning—and wouldn’t he? The tough Jewish bulldog going after the cool Swedes!

  “So you’ve really hit the news, huh?” asked his worldly colleague, Tom Jameson, sidling into a barstool. “Your ship has come in, at long last. Here, I’m buying this next one!” and he called over the bartender. “Will you even be talking to deck boys like us, who are here to swab the decks and clean the latrines? I doubt it. Out there in the big world, the stakes are different, and the players too. And you’re a player now!”

  Manny was quietly astonished at what Tom was saying. “Oh, I don’t think I’ll be making many changes just yet.”

  “Yes, that’s the spirit, saying the right words! Do remember those words for just a few seconds, when the CNN makeup crew is applying the finishing touches for your appearance, okay?”

  Manny smiled and nodded, and went on to the second drink. He barely heard the ribbing and sniping of the next half hour by his cynical pal.

  “Kidding aside, my new Frederick Turner, you might be making real history out of all this, right?”

  Manny smiled, absorbing the humor, and reflected on that phrase. Maybe the fellow was onto something more than what he was saying?

  Later, at the house, while Dora was making her farewell dinner for them—she was leaving in the morning—he remembered the “making history” phrase, and recalled a line from the great Thomas Macaulay. In his study he searched his notebook and found it, never having understood it until now: “History, at least in its state of ideal perfection, is a compound of poetry and philosophy” (from Hallam’s History, 1828). Manny would add to that compound the qualities of imagination and fiction. He’d try to make his history filled with that extra-rich compound.

  Over a dinner of veal paprika, they listened to Sarah Vaughan, drank a pinot noir, and chatted about autumn here. Dora looked sparkling in her own handmade knitted vest and blouse.

  “So you might tell Mom that my graduate class is now studying her papers along with me, and they may indeed create a new and fantastic source book.”

  She took small forkfuls of food, and eyed him. “You should report to Mom directly, I think. How do you like the veal? Too strong?”

  “Tasty!” he said. “And how do you like New Hampshire? A bit dull, yes?”

  “Oh, I can get used to dull places like this—mountains, lakes, a small university and museum nearby.”

  “Not quite the new-world America that Europeans hear about.”

  She twirled a bite. “I like the way you live, actually. Maybe I’ll even return, if I am invited back.”

  A pause of surprise. “It’s a date,” Manny offered, and then, reflecting, put out a pawn gambit: “Maybe next time we can drive out to Ann Arbor and see where your grandfather went to graduate school.”

  She ate slowly, chewing each bite carefully. She eyed him with her small brown eyes, considering how to judge those words.

  “Where is Ann Arbor?”

  “In Michigan.”

  She nodded. Ate. Eyed him. Smiled slowly. “Next time I think I will make it a little spicier.”

  “And see how much I can take, right?”

  She laughed. And mocked him. “Right.”

  Later he wondered about her real view of things—her mother and her obsession, her own beliefs and understanding, Manny and his interaction with her mother, and even Manny and herself. In the night shadows of his bedroom, he conjectured how extraordinary it might be if indeed Raoul’s real granddaughter was sleeping a few rooms away! He got out of bed, searched for the anthology on the shelf, and turned to the poems of Emily Dickenson. He found the one: “Much madness is divinest sense / To a discerning eye …” The principle was beautiful, but what about the reality? Did he have—and could he hold onto, in the light of day—such a “discerning eye”? Was it possible, just there, a few rooms over? …

  The next morning, at breakfast, he had a four-and-a-half-minute boiled egg, bagel, and coffee, and made for Dora her buttered toast and tea.

  “Please take some of this homemade jam, made by my ex-student,” he said, handing over the raspberry preserve, and adding, almost casually, “and please tell me how your mother became so knowledgeable about Jewish things, biblical references, etc.”

  She nibbled at her toast, raised her brown eyes to face him squarely, sipped her tea, contemplating the question and the questioner. For nearly a minute she examined both and finally said, “Well, I will tell you something, because I believe that you are sincerely trying to help her. Mother was a Catholic growing up, l
ike many Hungarian Jews during the war who were in hiding from the Nazis and Arrow Cross. She never knew that she was Jewish, I believe. Only later, in the late sixties I think, did she convert to Judaism, after she heard a visiting rabbi who came to the Great Synagogue from Israel, who tried to call back those who had been raised Catholic for purposes of survival. When she did return, she threw herself into study, working for two years with a learned rabbi, studying and reading everything she could.” She paused, observed his reaction, took another bite of her toast. “That’s what I know.” Pause. “Yes, this jam is very good.”

  Scooping egg from the shell, he eyed her. “Did Mom tell you to tell me what you just said?”

  Her lips and face tightened. “Do you mean am I her messenger? No. She never gives me instructions, on anything.” She looked at him sternly. “Is that why you think I came up here to visit you?”

  He had hurt and offended her, and he shook his head. “My question was no more than what it was: a question, not an accusation. Please understand that.”

  After a moment, her face relented, and she nodded slowly.

  “But that does explain her rather full knowledge of the subject.”

  She stared at him, then her wristwatch.

  “Yes, we better get going; the airport is about an hour and a half away.”

  The drive down was uneventful, a return to easy cordiality. He kept his thoughts and questions to himself, like why had she in fact come up, and what more did she know that she had not yet told him. Instead, he drank in her youthful beauty. At the airport, he gave her a proper hug and warm kiss on both cheeks, and she returned them, looking up at him. The connection was real, but ambiguous, and they both left it at that. When he said he’d e-mail her, she said, “I’d like that.” She added, with a smile, “And more of that jam.”

  He returned to the college, and felt better, safer, on home turf. Here he could think rationally, address the wild issues and challenges as they came blowing his way, assess his gains and losses, and take the measure of where he stood. He read his pact with himself this way: if he had become part of the obsession, a misfit piece rather than a solver of the puzzle, so be it. His Wallenberg mission was now set on higher, riskier ground, and if that meant he was a man possessed, a man of “much madness,” so be it. Even here, walking on the sparkling oval green framed by the white steepled library at one end and the red-bricked inn at the other, ambling amidst this Ivy college order and sanity while feeling “secretly possessed,” this was fine. This was a state of mind, a spiritual feeling, that he was content to live with, like a religious devotee, no matter the challenges, tests, pressures, sure to come. (And if little Dora returned for more jam, did that also mean more secrets to be revealed?)

  He found himself wandering over to the library, and then, before going upstairs to work, walked down to the basement. There, he was immediately enfulfed by Orozco’s giant murals, with their stylized figures (and colors) marching through the long history of Mexico, from the Aztecs to the Revolution. These daunting murals were painted on the high walls of the near-empty reading room. Students hardly studied here anymore, once the new library addition opened with its bright fluorescence and computer-oriented space. Slowly Manny walked around, as though parading at the grand Bolshoi Theater ballroom at intermission, following along the historical depictions (Departure of Quetzalcoatl, Gods of the Modern World), taken aback once again by the violent imagination, the crazed stylized figures, the waves of flaring reds and blacks, the anti-Christ and anticapitalist images. Here, underground, existed a different world from the one above in the library or on campus—a space of deeper truths, darker confrontations. (Like RW’s life?) This special underground world had been created in the 1930s by the talented Communist painter—his politics outraged the college administration and the townpeople of the time—and here it remained, a mostly-empty library room mural, visited primarily by tourists, foreigners, art specialists.

  Manny, as he strolled, felt the strangeness, the incongruity, within himself: this absorption of a radical view and defiant sense of reality. Fondly he recalled again his graduate days in Madison with that gutsy professorial gang of Curti, Mossi, Williams, Hazeltine, Goldberg; and their pursuit of the dark truths behind the carefully prepared façade of American history. Were Manny a painter, he’d be tempted to try a mural of Wallenberg and the events of his life, from Stockholm youth to Ann Arbor architecture school, Budapest safe houses to Lybianka imprisonment, to possible Gulag camps. A narrative of defiance, risk taking, cool heroics, persistence, betrayal, and secret private life. Despite family, despite state, despite religious tradition, despite establishment morality, it would depict a fight for personal freedom of his own soul—and body? But how would you paint that? … Switching back to the current mural, Manny realized he felt at home down here, in this underground of fiery vision and fierce truth.

  A librarian called out from the reserve books desk, “Professor Gellerman, did you want to reserve any books for your class this term?”

  Manny stopped in his reverie, looked over. “Thanks, John, I’m all set.”

  Yes, he thought, switching tracks, he did have a mural to paint, but it was called a history, a history to write—and to account for. In the land of Winnebagos and Catalinas, pop songs and formulaic films, iPods and feelgood pills, academic piety and national venality, Manny would keep the Wallenberg memory and man alive and well, in some small corner, through his bit of hard spade work.

  Standing at the doorway, taking in one last view of the mural, the professor was now suddenly accompanied by a familiar figure framed in a dark suit, fedora hat.

  The gentleman shook his head slightly and stared, a stare of disbelief and sobriety, skepticism and forlornness. The look read, “Still at it, here too?”

  Manny did a double take, but nodded, appreciating the solitary, if begrudging, support.

  Outside, presently, the air had turned seasonally cooler, and it washed over him refreshingly as he walked up the little hill toward his office. He had a class to prepare and much private work to do.

  “Keep the Aspidistra flying” Manny told himself, repeating, for no reason, George Orwell’s sign-off call at the end of his essays to buck up his fellow citizens in London who were enduring the Nazi blitz bombing. Well, maybe Manny could find some native flower of signature cheer for his own good spirits, when and if the legal and critical attacks started coming.

  But for now, he felt okay; he accepted it all—the figures in his imagination, the delusions of the medium, the calls of the remote witnesses, the antics of the critics and lawyers ready to pounce. He embraced the present day of autumnal glory and the sunny innocence of the passing students. Yes, come one, come all, he thought, so long as the Swedish gentleman, his private sidekick from history, stayed around, alongside, checking in peridocially to chide and caution. With that secret sharer in his life now, for all seasons, Gellerman felt ready, a new self in the making, a revised history waiting to be written.

  CHAPTER 22

  Manny sat stiffly in the wooden armchair on the high platform in the Stockholm Tingsrätt District Court. Even though it was just passed 11 a.m. and he had only been sitting here forty-five minutes, he began to perspire. The questions were the same ones asked yesterday, and just as relentless. He could feel the sweat twirl around his shirt collar, and he didn’t know how long he could go on with this steady Swedish torture. And this was only a preliminary hearing, for cause for a full trial! Every now and then he’d nod to his defense attorney; but when the taciturn fellow tried to help him by raising an objection, the judge always seemed to rule against him.

  The Armani-suited interrogator, a lawyer from the firm of Danowsky and Partners, persisted, in good English, with the same repeated queries:

  “Where have you first found the lady and family in question?”

  “Did you check out thoroughly their credibility? How so?”

  “Does the professor have documentation that could prove her claims? Or your o
wn claims, in your defamatory essay and public statements?”

  “Professor Gellerman, why hasn’t this Budapest lady shown up at this preliminary hearing, if she has nothing to hide, and why haven’t you, Professor, insisted that she be present now?”

  “Please tell the court, are you able now to verify her cache of letters from her supposed father, which the Hungarian lady has claimed to be ‘authentic, and held in her possession for years?’”

  “Why did you deliberately choose to follow up your oral presentation at the University of Uppsala in the spring with your winter essay in American Scholar on the subject, If you are still not sure of documentation and substantiation?”

  “Does the professor have some personal secret agenda for wanting to defame the Wallenberg family, its noble history, its present family members, and its high professional name? Please think carefully before you answer.”

  As Manny listened to these questions over and over, he loosened his collar (furtively) and sought to answer as best he could, repeating his own standard statements, which were rather weak generalizations:

  “The lady in question, Mrs. Zsuzsanna Wallenberg, was invited by me to come here, but she adamantly refused, declaring such legal battles and defenses have nothing to do with her and her family. In fact, she says that they are a Swedish attack on her integrity and honor.

  Well, as I’ve said before, more than a few times, I have been in the midst of trying to authenticate both the woman’s words and also the value of her private collection of letters and memorablia … I have had to check this out carefully, with several experts, including international ones, all of which takes time, much time.

  Look, my article in American Scholar was as much about the nature of historiography, the writing of history, as it was about the Wallenberg case in itself. I could easily have published something for a much wider audience, something in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times Magazine, if I had wanted easy fame and money from my project here.