Searching for Wallenberg (2 page)

As the great English historian Thomas B. Macaulay wrote, in 1828, “History, at least in its state of ideal perfection, is a compound of poetry and philosophy.” I would assume he meant here the realm of fiction, as we know it. I concur.

The university was like a national park, with protected land, preserved forests, a clean river, and, in place of RVs, redbrick and white clapboard buildings with pampered undergraduates instead of wild animals. Indeed, periodic safaris of new recruits and innocent parents were ushered through, persuaded to look agog at the newest sports fields or the high-tech library and science buildings. Important new buildings, not faculty, were on exhibition.

Gellerman surveyed the park from his third-floor office overlooking the Dartmouth Green, waiting for his grad student Angela to show up to report on her progress since her winter trip to Budapest. During the months since she began the project, Manny had done much reading up on her—or
his?
—new subject. He’d read three or four books, multiple articles, a slew of online information, and he had found it more and more intriguing. And bewildering. Was her thesis and his newfound interest setting up a new serious project for Gellerman?

He got up and went to the bookshelf, and pulled down his previous two books. The first,
Turning-Point
, concerned the dropping of the A-bomb. He had come down strongly on the side of the revisionist historians, such as Sherwin and Alperoff, who had argued that there was no pressing need to have dropped those bombs on civilian centers, and that the motives had much to do with displaying political and military power to the Russians. The second, on Vietnam,
The Spoils of Defeat
, was an examination of the dire consequences of ideological fervor, showing how Cold War policies had cost America thousands of unnecessary deaths and misguided policies. He looked again at the date of
Spoils
and winced, realizing that it came out over twenty years ago! Now, in his mid-sixties, Manny felt somewhat deflated. He set the two books down on his cluttered desk, and reflected that his Fulbright trip to Budapest and Prague, several years back, had been an attempt to start up the engines for a new work on the fall of Communism in those parts and the vacuum of American policy. However, he had not written much, and had lost his initial thrust. But now, this Raoul W. had beckoned … a thin gleam on the horizon …

He heard the knock on the door, and there was Angela, in winter regalia: yellow down jacket, ski ticket hanging off the zipper, and blue sweater brightened by a smart scarf. “Hey Professor G.!” She sat down, fiddling with her attaché.

“Hi, Angie, how was your trip? Some progress on the thesis?” He added, “And did you get some skiing in?”

“Both,” she beamed, and took a sheaf of papers out of her Lands’ End case. “I think I hit it rich, sir! Really! Like you may not believe it, Professor.”

He accepted the sheaf of forty-odd pages, and quietly observed this bright angel of a young student. Some of the best future researchers of our land would be these athletic Ivy League detectives, who left their skis temporarily for the archives, made major discoveries, and returned to the slopes.

“I’m listening, Angela. What won’t I believe?”

“Well, Professor, I followed your ‘rumor’ lead, and I think I uncovered Hungarian members of his family, alive still, in Budapest. Can you believe it?”

Manny came around to the front of the desk and sat on it. “Go on, I’m all ears.”

“Well, it turns out that Mr. Wallenberg was very connected to a Budapest woman, and maybe even married her, and had a child with her as well. And that child, now in her fifties or so, and her daughter are, like, alive and well in Budapest! I met and talked with them, briefly, and totally believe their story!”

Manny suppressed a large grin, and gave instead a small smile. “On what evidence are you basing your ‘belief’? What records do you have in hand, or was it just the woman’s words?”

“Yes, sir, the woman’s words! And a promised journal!” Her face gleamed with triumph. “I tried to search for records in the city office, but that was inconclusive, in part because I have no Hungarian.”

Manny nodded in appreciation of her attempted search. Would it have been that difficult to dig up a Hungarian translator? he wondered privately.

“So she talked freely with you?”

“Well, once she saw that I was serious, and doing my research for scholarly work, yes, she talked a bit.”

Manny nodded. “Where did you ski?”

“In the Swiss Alps, on the way back. Nothing like it, ’cause the days are so mild and the snow so wonderful!”

Manny took the sheaf of papers and said he would read it, very soon.

“You should meet her yourself, Professor G. I gave her your name and your e-mail as well, which she had asked for, for corroboration. But I guess she was too shy to write you.”

“I guess so.”

“But she did check out the Dartmouth website, I know. So maybe that was enough for her, huh?”

“Could be.” He paused. “So, if Wallenberg fathered this child, when did it happen? And how much did he see her, before he got caught by the Soviets?”

She sipped from her water bottle. “Good question. Not much, not much at all. But then, as I understand it—and this part was a bit cloudy—she was sneaked in somehow to Lybianka once, and he was sneaked in for a visit to see her and their child, in Budapest. A bribed few visits, of course, and highly controlled.”

Gellerman scratched at his trim beard, smiled, and turned back to his seat.

“Highly unusual, what you describe, Angela. Almost, if not altogether, impossible. The Soviet Union was a closed, very closed society.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s why I didn’t go all over that too much in my thesis. But for sure, you should chat with her yourself—I mean, to corroborate my research.”

“And … instinct?”

“Yeah, sure. My instinct.” She jumped up. “I
really
look forward to hearing what you think of it. But it’s still a rough draft sort of, please remember.”

Manny nodded. “I will remember, thanks.”

The student left and, true to form, Manny removed his shoes, kicked his legs up onto the desk, and settled into his favorite reading-and-thinking cockpit. What a crazy, unbelievable tale! Well, he hoped she had a sense of humor. After all, much of what occurred in Communist society was so bizarre, so outlandish, that only big grim jokes could get at it. That’s why Milan Kundera’s and George Conrad’s early fiction, the Czech films of the sixties, Bulgakov’s
The Master and Margarita
, were so richly revelatory. Not to mention Solzhenitsyn’s
The First Circle
or
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
All those novelists filled out history—and documented it?—better than the historians …

A few hours later, when he had finished the quick reading and checked his e-mails, there appeared, almost on cue, a missive from a stranger in Budapest. Only it wasn’t from the expected party, but from a professor:

How very interesting, thought Manny, and answered:

Just as he was about to hit the send button, Gellerman added: “I would be happy to visit ZFW myself sometime, in Budapest, if she welcomes me.”

Gellerman sent the message on, but wondered, Was this his entry into History, or rather, and more probable, his entry into a private Fantasyland?

Teaching his seminar the next Tuesday, from 4 to 7 p.m., Manny felt at home, relaxed, purposeful, as he greeted his fourteen students seated around a long oval table in the modern Rockefeller building. His seminar was History through Literature, and he had already taught such novels as
History
by Elsa Morante,
Man’s Fate
by André Malraux,
The Joke
by Milan Kundera,
Life and Fate
by Vasily Grossman,
The Secret Agent
by Joseph Conrad, and presently was doing
The Book of Daniel
by E. L. Doctorow. At home in the classroom, Manny always reminded himself of how the university existed right here, in this quiet room, with the students, the professor, and the text, far away from administrators, bureaucrats, new buildings, sporting fields, and public relations propaganda. Here, in this sacred sanctuary, each book presented a different problem about how history had entered fiction and, conversely, how fiction had shaped the history. The course was a new one for Gellerman, and he felt energized.

Teaching these seminars was always a question of knowing the text well, the historical context just as well, and presenting the right questions to be discussed. “So tell me,” he began, “why does Doctorow choose to tell the story from the point of view of the son, Danny Isaacson? And does he make the son like the real-life Rosenberg boy? And if not, why not?” He paused. “Furthermore, how is history brought into the narrative? Through the characters, or otherwise? And is the writer redressing history, so to speak—at least history as it has been written by the historians? Does the fiction writer have such a right? You can answer any of those questions.”

Matt Cheney, a thin fellow from Maine, spoke up first, “Well, Danny is not at all a saintly type. Quite the opposite. In fact he’s portrayed at times as nasty and selfish, even brutal to his own wife. Clearly Doctorow doesn’t paint the picture of a perfect sort of radical kid.”

Carolyn Johnson, a smart, heavyset young woman from a poor black Roxbury background, opined, in her clear slow voice, “Well, history also comes in through those small essays that Danny enters into the narrative, like minilectures, you know like when he tells us about Stimson, the secretary of state, thinking maybe we should tell the Russians our secrets about the A-bomb, so we and they would have parity and trust each other, and maybe avoid the whole Cold War. And then he’s shoved aside. Or when …”

These kids were good, Manny knew, when you gave them the opportunity, and when you trained them to think. They even taught him on occasion, if he listened closely to their semi-articulated views and cut through those to their true thoughts.

“Yeah, but I think he went too far and got it wrong,” said Paul Olsen, a short-haired conservative who doubted all his peers’ ideas. “They were guilty as hell, like the recent histories show, and the writer is merely trying to justify his own leftist interpretation.”

“Well, actually, the recent histories show that Ethel was not guilty, just Julius,” Gellerman corrected, “but perhaps the more important question is, Does the writer not have the right to put in his own interpretation? Especially if the particular case is not clear at all, but filled with an assortment of prejudices, mysteries, and inventions posing as facts?”

“Sure, here in a novel he can interpret as much as he wants,” suggested Paul. “But if he were writing a real history—”

“What do you mean, a ‘real’ history?” said Matt. “Don’t historians make their own interpretations as well? Is that what you mean by ‘real’ history?”

“And of course it’s based on what they take to be ‘the facts,’” said Caroline. “And maybe
their
facts?”

Country girl Jodie Reyes offered, “Maybe we should read some of the histories as fiction then? And some of the fictions as history?”

“Well, why not?” answered Matt. “We’ve had some good examples this term, haven’t we?”

“Especially if people who have mostly written the histories have been those elites at the top?” Mike Reynolds put in. “Wasn’t that what E. P. Thompson said, in his
Making of the English Working Class
, at the beginning of the term?”

“Well,” Manny refereed, “let’s look at what were the so-called facts in the trial itself. Take out the source book, and let’s check out those documents.”

As the class opened up their source books—which Manny had created for them, in the form of a thick scrapbook, with other documents for other cases, such as the Sacco-Venzetti letters and papers, English anarchist documents, and recent KGB file openings—he decided perhaps to make one for his own Wallenberg case. Weren’t there as many prejudices and mysteries there as with these legendary cases?