Searching for Wallenberg (39 page)

The stewardess asked him if he wished a drink, and he asked for a ginger ale. She proceeded to find one and pour it in a cup for him. Manny reread the note, once again surprised by her detour. Naturally, she knew he had just attended this conference, and probably what had occurred, but was slyly waiting for him to announce any news. In the meantime, a little
luftmenschen
learning. Face it, Manny, the Chessmaster from Budapest was two steps ahead of you, no matter how hard you tried to catch up. He wrote back:

There was also another e-mail from a
New York Times
reporter, asking about the recent news emanating from the conference. Manny didn’t answer that one. He set the empty cup on the corner of his tray, put on his eyeshade, and dozed off.

Back home at the college there was a stir, and he discovered that he had become a sort of mini-celebrity while he was away. A note on the Internet, a newsy revelation from the conference that used his name, had ignited the buzz. This was a whole new experience for Manny, who for fifteen or twenty years had been a marginal player. His boss, the amiable Irish dynamo, called him up, asked him to lunch, and insisted that he give a faculty talk on his powerful research. Even the dean of faculty dropped him a note. The chair of the former Swedish-Russian Working Group invited him to attend a special meeting, excited to hear of his discoveries (especially the Pagliansky meeting). And the Swedish Embassy in DC called and invited him down for a luncheon discussion. Meanwhile, the handwriting analyst called and asked if he had gotten any of the original papers yet for him to examine?

His head swirling, his thoughts revving, Manny was grateful to be diverted by the boy’s return from summer music camps and his needs for the new school year. Helping him, along with his mother, get prepared with fall items (new backpack, sneakers) grounded Manny for the week, and he was satisfied. “Dad, is it true, you’ve made a real discovery in the Wallenberg case?” What could Manny say, but “Maybe. It’s too early to tell.” The boy retorted, “Robby saw your name on Yahoo! Trending! That’s awesome!” The Internet would lift you, or doom you, or both.

He felt so ambivalent, so anxious, so unsure about what to do, how to act, that he didn’t—didn’t answer the expert, didn’t write the Budapest lady (asking for the originals), didn’t respond to the Working Group or Embassy. In a state of paralysis, he waited for a sign, a signal, to pull him free.

An e-mail arrived from Jack. “It’s best if I really do skip the next few quarters, Professor G., and shoot for the spring quarter. I hope you won’t be too disappointed. Don’t worry, sir, I’ll try really hard to make it back.”

No surprise for Manny, but it disconcerted him. He understood what it meant, and he could either leave it alone and let it run its course, or he could intervene, as in a drug intervention. Jack was good and smart; Manny felt a connection, and he didn’t want him to fall away into a lost wilderness.

He prepared for his talk, to be given in a circular hall in the Rockefeller social science building, holding maybe 150. The crucial thing was the strategy of the talk: what to tell, what to omit, whom to thank and pay homage to.

September distracted Manny with memories. It filled him with longings, or energized his old longings … for his sons when they were little: the older son who read R. L. Stevenson and Kipling at age six or seven and understood all the motives and plots, while beginning to write his own small artful stories; and the younger son who played his one-quarter-sized cello in the living room at age five; for his Russian father, who would speak tenderly in his native language to Manny at six, taught him chess, took him on Sundays uptown to the Fourteenth Street Stanley Theater in Manhattan to see Russian movies and eat dinner (homemade borscht with potato or sour cream and a well-done brisket of beef) on Second Avenue with other émigrés; for his sports-splashed youth, playing baseball in Lincoln Terrace Park, (pink Spaldeen) handball and softball at the PS 189 schoolyard, or ring-a-levio in his Brownsville/East Flatbush neighborhood, near the El at East 98th Street … And now, this curious longing for Raoul, the abandoned prisoner in Lybianka, or Gulag … Weird how Wallenberg had penetrated his consciousness so deeply …

The talk would be “safer” if written out as an essay and read aloud, where he could carefully edit the words and monitor the fault lines; but it would be easier and richer, though more dangerous, from notes … Which to choose? The dilemma was what to leave in, what to omit and stay away from entirely? … He sensed there would be a big crowd, larger than the usual narrow academic one because of the subject and his new renown.

Indeed, the crowd was overflowing, with standees on the sides and in the back. After a dramatic introduction by his flashy boss, he stepped behind the podium before the eager audience—judging from the ovation—and tried to speak neutrally, seeking to deflate the high expectations of the moment:

Manny took a drink of water and breathed deeply, trying to relax and focus on how he wanted to proceed, and what tracks to avoid … “First, let me lay out the mysteries of the man and his work that have arisen through the years; and second, offer a few clues on those mysteries; and third, suggest a few opinions if not outright conclusions …” As he spoke, from his notes on a Steno Book spiral pad, it was easy enough to cover the first: the uncertainty of the actual death of Raoul, the curious languishing for two years in the Soviet prisons, the apparent passivity of the Wallenberg family, and the incompetence and cowardice of the Swedish diplomatic core and government. (He mentioned the post-1947 witnesses who had cited seeing old man Raoul in various Gulag sites.) Next came the overview of the man himself: his background and training, including his three years at Ann Arbor, which seemed to astonish everyone. With dexterity, Manny described Wallenberg’s character: the fortitude, the humor, the early and ever-present rebelliousness against authority (as when, in his early officer training days, he stood up for justice), the ability to handle himself cooly in a jam (as he did during the holdup outside Chicago). Now, with about ten minutes left in the hour, Manny had to race through the modern history of the investigation, with few results from RW’s own Swedish family (step-father Fredrik von Dardel and half sister Nina Lagergren), the Swedish-Russian Working Group. Finally, the recent discovery of the
possible
Hungarian family of Raoul, now under his current research and probing. Yes, he figured, with the audience clapping, he had gotten through it, protecting Raoul, protecting himself.

The questions came, and the first several were easy enough; but then one came about this recent strange family. “Who were they? How did the professor come upon them?” Here he resorted to the historian’s shield of privacy and protection for the family. “Until I can firmly deduce the authenticity of the papers I have received and make a true judgment on them, I don’t think it is fair to reveal any details or sources. Of course, I have consulted with the family members and they concur with me on this.” There, he had used Madame Zsuzsa against herself, for once. The follow-up question pushed this logic farther. “Does this account for the fact, or impact upon it, that Mr. Wallenberg did not marry that we know of?”

“Yes, that is a very good question, and you have provided your own answer,” he responded. “It will indeed impact upon that question,
if
the papers prove to be authentic, and not mere … wish-fulfillment, perhaps.”

“In your estimation, Professor, was there any truth to the later witness sightings?”

“So far as I can tell, mistaken persons and wishful projections of one sort or another. Still no hard evidence.”

“And what about the charge that he was indeed working for the Americans, gathering names and data to use for the OSS against the Russians?”

“Again, no real evidence for that; Wallenberg had little truck with the Nazis or the Arrow Cross; he in fact despised them, but he needed them in his work to save Jews.”

“One last question, over there.”

“Was he a real hero in your mind?”

Manny considered his final answer. “Yes, but I would call him a tragic hero, one who didn’t start out trying to be a hero, but conditions thrust that role upon him; and then he was doomed, because of the confluence of circumstances, to an awful fate, a slow perishing in a Soviet prison.”

The crowd surrounded him, and he understood that while he had protected Raoul—no mention of his possible gay status—Zsuzsa had protected him, at the same time that she had propelled him to this higher level of authority and expertise. And soon, in return, wouldn’t he have to protect her, and her fantasy, for everyone’s sake? A thrilling, or chilling thought …

At the dinner at the inn afterward, he was pushed on several counts by colleagues, but Manny shook his head and offered a crafty smile, one of pretend power and deep knowledge, and asked for more red wine.

There was a letter from Zsuzsa in his e-mail box:

Was the woman clever, or was she way more than clever, as well as dangerous? You gave her a book gift, and she used it to challenge you! Who was helping her choose those passages? Was it little, sly, devilish Dora? The daughter was quiet and smart, and maybe, beneath her innocent surface, knew just what was going on.

Another e-mail came from the eminent Hungarian congressman in California:

Things were heating up for sure. Clearly now, there was more to the case than all those professionals and diplomats knew or imagined, only her name was Zsuzsanna.

Manny had to get away from all of it, and also he had a chore to take care of, so, in a week, he was on his way to Arizona. He he had answered both letters with polite and appropriate responses, promising reports soon on any and all progress. On the lengthy flight, with stops in Chicago and Phoenix, he was glad to have brought along the folder of papers projected as Lady Z.’s memoir. Waiting in airports seemed the perfect place for reading such stuff (or mush?).

Of course, it wasn’t mush, as much as musings, memories, magical history, millenial thinking, memorabilia. How strange! Not uninteresting either. With accounts of places in the countryside outside Budapest during the war, where Jewish families went to hide. Many letters, diary entries, newspaper clippings, letters from Raoul to the family and the daughter, and from the mother to diplomats, statesmen, the Wallenbergs. A mass of materials, assembled by a shrewd magician and probably assisted by a top-notch researcher, or team. Well, he’d sit on it and wait. No need to rush to judgment, especially one that could topple him back into obscurity, and probably comedy.

In Phoenix, Gellerman rented a car and drove up through Flagstaff, through Winslow, and on to Hopi land, a small rectangle set in the midst of the much larger territory of the Navajo reservation. He had been at the reservation once before, years ago; but once he stepped outside, he recalled immediately the simmering heat, the arid fields, the sense of desolation. (He recalled too several lines from RW’s Ann Arbor notebook, and his desire to see/study the region for its architecture.) He drove up to the Second Mesa, where he would meet Jack, after a call. At the modern Hopi Cultural Center, a surprising series of interconnected adobe buildings housing a hotel and a commercial store, he parked and walked inside. There was Jack, immediately coming up to greet him warmly.