Searching for Wallenberg (24 page)
Read Searching for Wallenberg Online
Authors: Alan Lelchuk
“Lots of ‘uns,’” noted Dora dryly.
Gellerman smiled.
“And tell me this, Professor,” asked the sharp daughter, “are we also part of the ‘unaccountable’ facts?”
Just then the mother came in, rubbing her hands with lotion, he saw, and she took a seat across from them, in another chair.
“So you have been having a good chat? Have I interrupted?” Her look was eager, greedy even.
Dora shook her head, and Gellerman followed, adding, “I have been getting quietly tested.”
Zsuzsanna laughed, “Have you passed?”
“You will have to ask the teacher.”
Dora made a face. She helped serve the dessert, fresh fruit in small dishes, to both her mother and Manny. And then she said quietly that she had to depart; she had an appointment. Her mother was surprised, but then half giggled, hugged the girl, and said to Manny, as he stood up too, that she certainly hoped he was going to stay on; it was still very early. More of a declaration than an inquiry.
He avoided hugging little Dora, who without her heels would have been under five feet. She moved off into the foyer, for her coat and the door.
“I think she is rather special,” Manny offered, “full of a quiet poise, and … intuition.”
The mother clapped. “Yes, you have hit it on the head. Sometimes she knows things way before I can understand them.”
Oh, and what had she intuited about me? he wanted to ask, when Zsuzsa beckoned him toward the large oak desk.
“Come, I will read to you a letter her grandfather, my father, wrote to me, which will be of interest perhaps.”
At the desk she pulled open the second drawer on the right side, took out a green folder with a sheaf of letters, and, setting him down in a straight-backed chair, put on her reading glasses and searched through the letters. She proceeded to read in English:
My Dear Daughter
,
Although you are only a little child now, and do not understand all of my words, I want to tell you that your father loves you very much, that you are and will be a special girl, and that, along with common sense and a good heart, you must always rely on your intuition. This will tell you what to do in different and difficult situations, when you are at a loss for logic or past history. You must decide swiftly, about a person, a situation, a friend or enemy, and the best you can do is to allow your intuition to have its say, and to follow its way. This has always worked for me, whether in a difficult situation in Chicago, or in Haifa, or in Budapest. So once you learn the meaning of the word, and learn to listen to or consult your intuition, see if it works for you, as it has for me. I know that you will have a powerful one.
She looked up at Manny, her face blissful as if she had just been spoken to by God.
All he could do was to nod, and stay silent, and listen to the sounds of the grandfather clock ticking, and the cars going by.
“Would you mind if I looked at the letter?”
She gave him a look as though he were a thief, about to steal something from her!
And then she handed over the page.
Manny stared at the legible handwriting, felt the thin quality of the paper, looked up at her, with the green folder beside her on the desk. “But this is in English?”
“Of course, why not? He never learned Hungarian to write it well, as he did with German. You knew that he wrote to Grandfather Gustaf in English as well as Swedish, didn’t you? Besides, he wanted me to know English, the language of the future, he believed. He was right, wasn’t he?”
“And those are all in English?”
She smiled, took the green folder into her arms like holding a child, shook her head. “Some are in English, some in German, but what difference? They are all magical.” She rocked with it in her arms, his “inspired” lady.
He was bemused by her maternal pose, thought it best to say little of his avid interest in those letters, and said it was getting late; perhaps he should go now.
“No, no, please, you must stay on for a while anyway. Here, sit, and while I bathe, I will give you another letter to read.” She giggled, “I must take my therapy bath, always at 10:30; so you will excuse me for a while?” A glance of girlish glory on her oval face.
What was she up to now? And this tempting offer?
She set him down, by his shoulders, and rummaged in her letters, selected one, and handed it to him, slowly letting go of it. What variation of cat and mouse was she playing? Smiling, she went to her disc player, made a selection, put it on, and took her leave. In a moment the jazzy rhythms of
Rhapsody in Blue
by Gershwin came on, for Manny’s lullaby.
He sat, baffled, like a buffalo longing for the range, struck with a Valium dart.
The letter from Raoul was addressed to his wife:
Dearest Klara,
By now you will have received the papers documenting my arrangements with Kurt Becher, the German administrator, with whom I have had successful dealings. If anything were to happen to me, he will be able to provide for you. Though he is a Nazi, and a special representative for Himmler, I have found him to be reliable in past situations. He used to work with my cousins in Stockholm in banking, because of his own connections with German banks. And in Budapest on several occasions he has helped me stop a deportation of Jews by the Arrow Cross, and on two occasions he also aided me in preventing Eichmann from performing his own deportations. He has known of our family’s existence, and has never betrayed the trust here. Naturally, there are strong reasons for his remaining true to his word while I am away, both financial and political. He understands that I will support him with the Americans, if they should capture him and try him for war crimes. He also understands that there are payments awaiting him in Geneva, once certain conditions are met. Now you should take my arrangement papers with Becher, composed in German, and send them along with Per Anger in a sealed envelope—or with Lars Berg—when they return to Sweden. They are both reliable, and they will have instructions of where to keep the envelopes in a safety deposit box. In fact they will be put into the same safe bank—not Enskilda—that our own papers are kept, should anything happen to me. They will provide insurance for you, as well as other papers for future safety.
Some will protest my connection and arrangements with a Nazi like Becher. But in this era, this confusing day and terrible age, you must sleep with strange bedfellows, a little like Ishmael when he finds himself in bed with a very strange, tattooed Indian gentleman, Queequeg, in my favorite American novel
, Moby Dick.
Thus I have had to deal with Becher and other unsavory sorts, even an occasional SS man, for me to get my work done effectively. Exquisite moral distinctions I must disregard for now, when I have a larger moral focus, namely, the saving of the Hungarian Jews. Toward that end, I have sacrificed many of my own moral niceties, and still feel clean. Early on, in Stockholm, before even departing for Budapest, Olson, the American chief of the OSS, a good man, warned me that I was not entering an academic school room or philosophy class, but a dangerous situation where Jewish lives were at stake, and whoever could help in that mission was worth dealing with.
Whoever.
There is no doubt that I shall be blamed for such dealings, now, and maybe later in short-term history, but I will not feel my hands dirty or my conscience guilty. I take some solace in this position, and I want you to know this.
Please take care of our little prize, and yourself, until I see you again.
Yours faithfully, R.
Manny sat there, stunned, staring at the handwriting, and trying to make sense of all this. If he could perhaps make a copy of this letter and match up the handwriting with samples in the RW archive …
Gershwin played on, scenting the room with those American bluesy rhythms, and Manny wished he were back there, in his native land, walking past the green, watching the kids toss their Frisbees and the headbanded joggers with attached iPods looking like playful aliens, and be enfolded again within the easy zone of native playland. But instead he was sitting here, interned, in a stuffy apartment, suffocating in history. And his warden was a few rooms away, taking her bath! How ludicrous could this get! And who was she? And how’d she acquire or invent these letters? …
His heart palpitated, as he contemplated the possibility that these letters were authentic … Absurd! Probably some shrewd amateur imitations. Still, a copy for handwriting analysis would be very helpful indeed.
Switching up from this eerie situation, his mind wandered back to home turf … Playing baseball as a high school boy in Prospect Park, and hitting line drives in the parade grounds … in Madison, playing a shallow center field for the history department graduate team, in softball, and challenging the batters to hit straightaway over his head … in Hanover, playing tennis against his regular partner and figuring out how to hit the high lob to his backhand … These sporting memories calmed him, drawing him back to the familiar … Suddenly crossing his memory was Jackie Robinson, taking his provocative lead off third base, daring the pitcher to throw over, waiting to dart for home …
“So, I see, you have finished your homework?” she teased him, in her white faded bathrobe, looking like Garbo half sprawled on her thick divan. “What do you think?”
Gellerman shook his head. “How was your bath?”
“Ah, wonderful, always, though I stayed a shorter duration so you wouldn’t be alone.” She brushed her hair vigorously.
“Tell me, do you have that other letter, the arrangements with that Becher?”
“Of course, but that is in German, and I wasn’t sure how well you knew German. Do you?”
“Not really. But I would like to see it anyway.”
She laughed, her teeth gleaming. “I am sure you would. And I will show it to you, not just now perhaps. But I am glad you have found this one of interest. Now, join me with a little cognac I hope?”
Reluctantly—as he wanted to leave—he permitted this offering, and she poured two shots in cognac glasses.
“
L’chaim!
” she toasted. “To our future union.”
He nodded, sipped, and wondered which union she had in mind?
“I have much to share with you,” she offered, rubbing her white cheeks with a lotion, “the more I trust you, your sincerity.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Not merely letters, but a Moscow diary, and thoughts, memories, feelings. Maybe some secrets …”
He drained the remaining cognac. Best to hear her rich nonsense with this rich liquor flowing through him and Gershwin serenading.
“You have read some Kabbalah?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“That’s a pity, really. There is much wisdom there. I study it.”
“I see.”
“You would do well to read some Zohar. And other texts of Rabbis Hayyim Vital or Dov Baer, or the visions by Ba’al Shem Tov. They are magical.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“I understand, a rationalist and a skeptic, all the way through. Why not? You are a historian.” She smiled, sympathetically. “But I must tell you that my father was comforted very much by reading some of these materials in Lybianka. You know that the usual name for the Kabbalah is in fact
hommah nistarah
, or ‘the hidden science.’ So it is not altogether fuzzy and foolish thinking, you realize.”
He nodded, again not understanding. He blurted out, “But how in the world did your father get a hold of a Zohar sitting in a Lybianka cell?”
She smiled, put lotion on her cheeks, carefully. “Do you think we were not able to reach him there? Do you think that we left him alone, the way everyone else did? No, my dear professor, it was not like that. We did what we had to do to keep hope alive in him and to nourish him through the hard times. The concrete walls of Stalinism could not keep his loved ones from reaching him, loving him.”
He waited patiently, and then stood to go. “I think it’s time, you know; it is rather late, and—”
“I won’t hear of it. Don’t be silly. The bed is already made up for you. You can check on it. It is actually in my father’s study.”
This news jolted Manny, just as she had planned, the perfect bait.
He took it and moved into the study, where the single bed was turned down, fresh sheets crisp, hospital corners. Astonishing, this carefully prepared plan, or trap. He used the adjoining half bathroom to do his ablutions, aided by the fresh toothbrush sitting on the washbasin. He slipped on the bathrobe, folded neatly for him, returned to the small room, and got into the bed. A small bedside lamp was lit, and he looked around, like a mouse carefully assessing its chances for escape. Except he felt more like a cat, an alley cat that had been taken in from the streets and was being converted into a house pet. He scratched at his narrow beard.
He lay there listening to the whispering sounds of the streets, and a clock ticking on the desk. And waited. Was he supposed to get up and investigate? … He lay there, making out the framed photographs on the walls, the desk. He wondered, What if? What if the whole thing, this crazy fairytale, had an element or two of truth in it? Just one, or two? Like the mother had in fact known Raoul, through the parents who were saved by him? Or Raoul had kept up a friendship, even perhaps a correspondence, with the family? Maybe Zsuzsa had indeed recovered a letter or two? Any of that would be interesting enough, without all the other facts and details. Much could be mined from a single vein. As for the rest, well, let her have her embellishments, her strong fantasy; what was wrong with that?
The sound of someone walking about, lightly. He stiffened, wondering what to do if the lady appeared at the door, with that beckoning look? … He lay there, perfectly still, sorry he hadn’t turned out the lamp.
But the footsteps passed on by, through the adjoining living room, and no one appeared … Maybe it was the ghost of Raoul walking about? Could be, he mused in his drowsy state. Maybe this was the residence where the ghost lived part-time? And walked about in the night, like in a Poe tale? …
