Searching for Wallenberg (36 page)

Daniel nodded and jotted down the new requests, as he had jotted them down for months and passed them along, with few results.

Now he reached down into his small leather briefcase and brought out a folder and a small mirror. “Raoul, I want to show you something. Do you recognize this man?” He held up a few photographs. And waited, while Wallenberg gazed. “And here, please, look at yourself.” He held up the small mirror. “You see, my friend, what has happened, don’t you? The wrinkles, the coloring … what this place has done to you? Here is all the evidence you need to convince yourself about what is happening!”

Raoul said, “I am sure you too have aged in two years, don’t you think?”

“Touché,” said the interrogator. “But there is a difference, between what Time has done to us, and what Lybianka has done to you. Listen, man, you need hope, real hope, and you haven’t got much left! And I am worried!” He stood up, a wiry little fox of a man, and marched back and forth, before taking his seat again. “Anything, give me anything—a few names, a Swiss bank account, a basement or attic where the Jews have hidden some artworks? …”

Gesturing permission, Raoul stood up and walked to the wall, about a dozen feet away. Oddly, he stood there, arms folded, against the cement blocks.

“For god sakes, man, turn around! Don’t allow yourself any self-pity—not now, it’s too late for that.”

Slowly, against his will, a wounded creature in a drab gray uniform, he turned back toward the room, toward his interrogator, and said, “You know, a fresh cucumber would be a bit of heaven. If you can manage just that.”

Daniel sat back in his chair. “I will do my best, Wallenberg. And I will try to get Kaminski not to cross-examine you today; I see you are quite wearied, and maybe some rest will settle you somewhat.”

Raoul walked back to the table and sat back down. “I have never asked you this, Daniel, and you don’t have to answer me if you don’t wish.”

The little interrogator looked at him, baffled.

“You are Jewish, aren’t you?”

Daniel looked at him in quiet amazement. “Jewish?” He shook his head. “Wallenberg, religion doesn’t count in the life of comrades. We are Soviet communists, without any religion.”

“I know that view. But your parents gave birth to you as a Jewish boy, didn’t they? Your mother and/or father were Jewish, weren’t they?”

“Why would you ask such a question?”

Raoul stared at him, at this clever little man with whom he had been dealing and negotiating for the past few years, and who had exhibited, today, an apparent true concern for his life. Raoul understood the pain of these people, the pain and the wound, even of these proud comrades, who believed they lived by secular faith while living with deliberate and cultivated amnesia. He had seen and known many of them in Budapest, and he understood.

“Oh, I was just wondering. Please, don’t forget the fresh cucumber, yes?”

Daniel P., at first furious, took a few breaths, relaxed his face, and responded, “Yes, I shall try.

Manny leaned back, rather exhausted, and reflected over where he had gone in the little scene? … Why had he pursued this last direction, for example? … Would Raoul have played that card? For what purpose? … Because Daniel had shown some compassion? (Or was it, to shift to the real, because of Manny’s own live interview with the aged Daniel P.? …) It was curious how, in trying to discover a possible truth, the “imagined” had taken the historian to unexpected territory. Would the interrogator really have “warned” his prisoner that if he didn’t speak up soon, say something of relevance, that his end was near? (Actually, Raoul was probably murdered a month later, in July 1947, probably by lethal injection, after Stalin, in June, had ruled out assassination by shooting.) And did it have a kernel of truthfulness that the two had become, like caged creatures set together for a long while, crossover intimates? Where one felt the emotions of the other as much as those of one’s own self, so that at moments the two selves were like one, or were like blood brothers? … Was this in part why the real Daniel P.—whom he had luckily interviewed in Moscow—never again admitted a word, not to KGB or to family, in the next fifty years, about what had gone on between them?

Where did he stand now? he wondered the next day, riding his bicycle along the river. The late sun glinted off the Connecticut, and he wore his shade visor over his helmet. A Martian with a beard he appeared. He rode the bicycle leisurely, a good pace for mulling things over. Clearly, just now he was in limbo, waiting to hear from the writing analyst, waiting to figure out what his next step should be. But was there another step? Or were all the steps used up now? What did he have in mind, if the word came through as expected and he cut himself free once and for all from Lady Z. of Budapest? What could he do for RW then—call out to him from across the great boundary as the medium did? Join her in the calling?

The river ran smooth and bending, some angles as smooth as glass. Maybe he should have gone out for a canoe trip with Jack. But Jack was still back in Arizona until the fall term in September. He’d have to write him and see how he was doing. And make sure that he got back here to finish up his degree.

Had Manny been right in his interpretations, personal and professional, for Raoul? Of course, he might wander the globe and search out more witnesses who claimed to have seen an elderly sick Swede in later years. It would be a long wandering, with more bizarre tales, half true perhaps, half made up. And more books would appear, speculations disguised as semi-facts, semi-fictions called biographies. (All future biographies, he projected, would have more pages for apparently new information, but would remain essentially repeats of the past, a life with the mysteries intact.)

As far as Zsuzsanna and her helpers were concerned, they had done brilliant and even heroic work—created a large oeuvre, which, even if a fraud, was fantastic in its construction. Like some giant Lego creation, done by a genius eight-year-old. Little wonder that she was unique: she had built a house of cards upon a foundation of faith. So much
stuff
she had collected, to match her storeroom of faith and obsession. She had
imagined
an entire life story, fabricated a detailed biography, out of her obsession with Raoul. Methodically, she had filled in the openings, gaps, holes, with manufactured letters, photos, documents, memories. An impressive, audacious accomplishment.

What next? He pedaled upward, in the twilight, toward Lyme Road. Suddenly, he pulled up short, as there stood in the road a huge animal, and as he crept closer, really slowly, he saw that it was a moose, staring at him with big liquid eyes. Manny stopped fifteen or twenty feet away and looked at the huge odd creature with the fantastic wide antlers and long face and drooping neck. The mysterious creature observed him carefully. Manny stood by his bicycle, waiting quietly—a standoff, scary, thrilling. Here in the fading light on the small country road, there was mystery, bewilderment. On both sides? Manny waited, and the moose, satisfied there was no threat, walked on spindly legs across the road and back up into the thick woods … Manny, still stunned, sat down on the grassy bank. What an odd minute or two. Beauty and mystery, suddenly appearing in the midst of an ordinary summer day …

Was the meeting a sign? Signaling what? … An ESP from the Budapest medium? Or from someone farther out? … A moose sighting was a rare event, especially up close, and he had to take it for what it was. Presently, he was pedaling back toward his car, on clear Route 10. But the experience stayed, the moment of connection between himself and the strange animal a resonant moment.

He sought to refocus his thoughts on RW and the current limbo …

In the coffee shop, his historian colleague, Tom, commented, “Whatever it is, it is. But I’m afraid I see a lose-lose situation for you in this. If your expert rules that the material is a fraud, then you will have to back out, gracefully, and will have wasted your time altogether. Too bad, eh? Now, if he were to say that there is a possibility that some of this stuff may be authentic, what do you do? Spend the rest of your years trying to help her write this thing? Or do you try to write your own book, based on her materials? This may not be legal, or moral. So, you are about to be in a bind.” He smiled, like a player who had just checkmated his opponent.

Manny considered this. “I don’t know,” he responded, “my interest is in the man himself, what happened to him, and why. No matter how this particular situation unfolds, that will remain my aim.”

The smile was wiped away. “You might recall, you do have a career to think of. And you’ve spent a good long time on this. Charity work and philanthropy are one thing, but your discipline is another.”

Manny nodded. “Thanks for the reminder. You do make a point.”

The colleague leaned back in the straight chair. “If I can help hold up the limb you are out on, let me know.”

Manny half smiled, “I will remember to.”

From the
Wall Street Journal
reporter came an e-mail, asking if he had news about RW, perhaps from a Hungarian source. And did he in fact uncover and interview in Moscow the original KGB interrogator of 1947? Was there a book in the making, Professor, with all this news? Did he care to share it with the reporter? Amazed and anxious, Manny wrote back and said he had no news, and would let the reporter know if anything were to emerge. And he wondered, How in the world? …

The report came back in the first week of September from the Boston analyst. Mr. Blaylock wrote:

The good thing about the once-over was that the bill was only $350. It also gave him some more time to explore.

So much for being a good boy and not stealing the original pages from Zsuzsanna’s collection—it never paid to be “a good boy” in those situations, did it?—though without the Wallenberg originals from the several museums and the family archive, they wouldn’t have done much good.

So, he was back to square one. In a never-ending limbo, it seemed …

The Swedish-Russian Working Group was begun in 1991 and continued until 2001, when it ceased; its mission had been to find out what happened to Wallenberg, and it was composed of historians, diplomats, and other interested professionals from Sweden, America, and Russia. (Previously, from 1989 to 1991, there had existed the International Commission on the Fate of RW, led by Guy von Dardel, his step-brother.) The Working Group did research, conducted interviews, met with Soviet and Swedish officials—and came up with very little in their decade of existence. They put out several long papers detailing Soviet lies and deceit, Swedish tepidness and cowardice, family passivity, ephemeral witness sightings, but nothing of substance that was new about Raoul. No hard evidence of how he was caught or died, or if he had lived on; no discovery of the “lost” Wallenberg file in Lybianka; no serious diplomatic revelations. The Working Group continued to encounter Russian stonewalling of the issue, and Swedish fear and callous temerity about pressing the case with the Russians. Altogether, the original history from the late 1940s and the recent history from the Working Group’s era had revealed embarrassing, even venal, activity by the Swedes, and the Russians’ brutal track record. In sixty years, there had been nothing new in solving the deep mysteries surrounding RW.

So he had good reason, Manny informed himself, to become a detective in pursuit of the case, and the real Raoul.

In 2000, Alexander Yakovlev, head of a Russian presidential commission that investigated the case, acknowledged that Wallenberg had been shot and killed. (He had not died of a heart attack, the previous Gromyko line.) Yakovlev said that an ex-KGB secret police chief, Vladimir Kryuchkov, had informed him in a private conversation that RW had been executed at the KGB Lybianka Prison in Moscow. (The only problem here, Manny knew, was that Stalin had issued an edict, in June 1947, forbidding any killing by shooting.) To close down that avenue of denial and stonewalling, another official, Andrei Artizov, offered, “Unfortunately, all materials relating to the case have been destroyed.” Very convenient. However, in all probability—according to Nikita Petrov, a KGB expert—the true Wallenberg file lay buried in the infamous basement of Lybianka, beyond the reach of historians, diplomats, politicians, and even most KGB/FSB officials.

Strangely, all of the above suggested to Manny the ending of
Bartleby the Scrivener
, in which the scrivener dies forlorn in the Tombs Prison of New York. The narrator, his old boss, “betrayed” the scrivener by abandoning him when he became an embarrassment. Yet Bartleby sought only to stay in his office with him. Later, when the narrator sees the dead scrivener at the Tombs and discovers that Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letters Office at Washington, the narrator regrets deeply his abandonment. Manny decided he was not going to imitate that conventional lawyer and abandon the Wallenberg he was getting to know, ghost or man. The novella ends, “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” Manny would substitute his own charge, “Ah, Wallenberg! Ah, humanity!” and stand by him, in whatever way that he could. But what did that mean? Or how might that play out? …