Searching for Wallenberg (29 page)

A charmed boyhood, in old cozy Brooklyn … He knew well that whatever happened inside the shooting room, it would be a far cry from what he had seen or felt, or could articulate, on camera. Further, he understood well that if he talked for three hours, he
might
make three minutes on the screen, but that was fine with him. He had other things in his mind, and at stake.

Sitting there, in the shaded room, he wondered at what age did one sense a serious turning of direction, a sudden change of intention (and maybe fortune and momentum too)—certainly not before forty-five, maybe fifty-five, or was it sixty-five these days? Different from Dante-esque views of a midlife turning point. Well, Manny was feeling right now on this edge, like trying as a boy to balance yourself on a thin rail and walking across it … Yes, something was stirring in his being …

The shooting was a mechanical ordeal. The vertical sheets of extra lighting were too bright and hot upon him, stunning his vulnerable eyes; the crew said they couldn’t shift the angle, because of the video picture. Next, the camera people said the jacket or tie didn’t show well, so they changed both for him, which irritated Manny; he didn’t feel like himself sitting and talking in another’s clothes. He chided himself: those were foolish details; forget them. So he went ahead with the two and half hour interview, answering question after question, feeling awkward; and as it proceeded, he continued to admonish himself not to worry about the details, just talk about being a boy and seeing Jackie play, and meeting him outside a few times, getting his autograph, hearing his gravelly voice up close, and seeing his dark probing eyes. (Manny kept quiet about the analogy he later drew with Dickens’s Magwitch, the convict, confronting the boy Pip, terrifying him, only to turn out later on to be his secret benefactor …) The questions droned on—the questioner amiable—and Manny spoke dutifully, dully, while being reminded to sit upright in his seat … and he grew sorry he had agreed to do the whole fucking thing. How boring and brittle was this artificial, staged talking.

But something of interest did happen during the ordeal. He found himself thinking back to Raoul being interrogated for hours, maybe for days, from 1945 to 1947, under a bright bulb or blinding light; and he had a sense of the pressure, the relentless pressure. To the camera he was saying what an outsider Jackie was, an outsider/insider—a black outsider to society and to white baseball, but an insider in baseball, a brilliant base-stealing outlaw in the game itself. Privately, he was transferring the outlaw image to RW in his relation to proper Swedish society and his proper family—to the neutral Swedes, the conservative Lutherans, the rich self-protective family. Raoul had come from all that, but he had broken away and chosen a tougher, more difficult, path. (He had his grandfather’s counsel, as Jackie had Mr. Rickey’s.) A choice that left him alone, unprotected, betrayed.

At the end of the interview, when the director and producer asked him how it felt, Manny replied, “Oh, it was of interest … made me think.”

“Well, we thought you did really well—though we didn’t get that reference to a Mr. Wallenberg?—and of course we don’t know how much of the whole thing will get in.”

Manny, surprised, said, of course he understood, and it didn’t really matter. He didn’t add that what did matter was his private offscreen reflection on the association between his boyhood game-hero and his adult life-hero …

He kept these revelations private, in the huge black Denali SUV that sped him back to LaGuardia, and in the little propeller airplane that lifted him up to Lebanon, New Hampshire, and in the days following …

A week later he drove back up to Sweden, Maine, for another of his son’s concerts; a trip that went across New Hampshire and into the same vast reaches of rural Maine, decorated occasionally with tacky towns and roadside motels, and suddenly opening out to great expanses of green countryside, where the sky was large and the mountains loomed, and you felt a touch of Montana … His son’s trio played Debussy, in a small rough-hewed cabin, for a dozen parents. The music was riveting; the boy played with his firm intonation and usual panache. Afterward, a parent whispered, “Was that your son on the cello? The other two were good, but he was something else.”

Manny soon was taking his “something else” for another special dinner in Bridgeton, and he felt his vulnerable soul salved by the music, the boy.

He asked Josh, over his surf and turf, how he liked chamber music.

“Oh, it’s great, Dad, but my favorite is still orchestral. I love a big orchestra and the music written for it.” He chewed fast, eating with gusto. “I can’t wait for GYBSO camp to start! Hey, Dad, this is really good; you should try some!” He looked up and casually added, “And, oh yeah, I wrote another section of my Wallenberg Suite.”

“Wow,” Manny exclaimed, caressing the boy’s cheek. “I’m really getting rewarded on this visit! Debussy
and
Wallenberg.”

An hour later, in the cabin studio, he listened to the additional several minutes of the composition, a melody of sorrowful sounds and strong vibrato. “You’ve really been working!” he told the boy, who beamed.

The question remained whether Wallenberg lived on beyond 1947, in another prison like Vladimir, or else in some Gulag site, like a camp in Perm or Vörkuta, or even a psychiatric hospital. There were hundreds of “sightings” of RW out there, post-1947, the date of his official death (a “myocardial infarct on July 17, 1947,” declared the Soviets), by Russian, German, Hungarian, Polish political prisoners. Either it was RW or someone who appeared very similar, some elderly ill Scandanavian, who had been in a camp or hospital for many years. Could it have been possible? Sure, possible. The case remained open for years, with many unanswered questions and many places cited by a variety of apparent witnesses. For example, he knew—from the work of the historian S. Berger of the Swedish-Russian Working Group—that an elderly Swede was witnessed in 1960, in solitary confinement in Korpus 2 of Vladimir Prison, by two former employees, Varvara Ivanovna Larina and Aleksandr Timofeiyevich Kukin; and in 1970, by Josyp Terelya, a former prisoner, also in Korpus 2 of Vladimir. Moreover, if Raoul was alive after 1947, he would most likely have become a secret prisoner in isolation, and such prisoners were assigned either a false identity or a number. Convicted prisoners 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20 were sentenced by Special Tribunal (OSO) between the spring of 1947 and May 1948. In what isolation prisons were they placed after their departure from Moscow, and who were they?

At home, Manny conjectured a scene of the once-young, dark-haired Raoul now a much older man, maybe a emaciated gray-haired prisoner, worn down, wearied, and ill. (Or was it tuberculosis, with that cough?) Gellerman imagined him as observed by one of the apparent witnesses, a guard/attendant:

He sat in a chair, a blanket over his legs, a white scraggly beard covering up a good part of his face. I brought him his dinner daily, a piece of bread dipped in a soup gruel, on occasion a piece of dog meat, and watched him work his jaw excessively. His one true pleasure came from the dry Swedish bread, “Knäckebröd,” which I smuggled to him, once a month, courtesy of bribery and a secret benefactor. This reminded him of home and his Stockholm youth, he explained, in the basic Russian he had learned through the years. In the spring, when it was often chilly, he would sit either in the sun with my help or, if it was gray as usual, near the one stove in the large dormitory room, where ten other prisoners lived. They didn’t bother him much, and every few years a political prisoner came who talked with him, in German. His speech gradually became slurred, and he coughed regularly.

On rare occasions he had a visitor, an agent from Moscow, who asked how he was doing, and whether he wished to confess anything; whether he wanted to change his mind and offer any information about the long-ago past, so that he might spend his last remaining years—or months?—with his friends or family back in Sweden. These agents, either from the KGB or SMERSH (counterintelligence), always informed him, I would hear, that nobody on the outside had asked for him, not yet. Not after all these thirty-odd years. But maybe soon? When the agents visited, it was often in pairs; one would press him to talk—after all, he was an old man now and it didn’t matter—and the other would say something new about Stockholm, where he had just visited. (Of course, he was lying, and everyone knew it.) The first agent would ask him about his contacts with the rich Jews of Budapest, or about his special work for the American OSS. Though it was many decades later, they still did their onerous work, still pressed the old man. They came around maybe twice a year or so.

In response, he always shook his head steadily, said very little, but occasionally asked for a little medicine, some fresh meat or vegetables, and a real doctor. (He spoke in German, which one agent usually knew, and in his simple Russian.) They laughed and said, of course, help was on the way. They would be arriving quite soon, here in Perm, in the middle of nowhere, just another few months, hold on. From teasing they turned serious, “But if you tell us the truth about Budapest, and where you have kept hidden all those old paintings and Jew jewelry all these years, then a doctor can be found. And you will see Sweden again.”

Once he trusted me, he asked to see a Swedish newspaper, if I could bring one, and every few months I managed to, through a Moscow friend who asked a foreign office assistant. I would bring a newspaper, like
Dagens Nyheter
, and also some architecture magazines. (I recall an old
Arkitektur
, and
Forum
, which he pored over carefully.) Oh, yes, I remember something else he wished for, a photograph of the Stockholm city library, the “stadsbibliotek,” by the architect Asplund. (I wrote down these names.) Sometimes he would sit and draw sketches on rough sheets of paper for an addition to that oddly shaped building, a sort of top hat housing a circular library, his reading room in childhood, and asked me to save them for him. How strange! But I put them in an old burlap feed bag and set it in the small animal shelter. A mistake.

Many of the prisoners were beaten, almost by habit, by the more veteran guards, when they had little to do, but mostly he was left alone, a tottering sick old man. Once, however, early in maybe 1972, I did see a guard hitting him, for no reason or other, and I interceded, bribing the brute. His eyes were astonished, and he had a bloody mouth—nothing serious. I aided him. That’s when he started to believe in me. You see, he had been transferred from Vladimir Prison to this hellhole in the Urals, where there was no accountability whatsoever. Just the concrete blocks, the prisoners, the guards. Well, actually, for a few years he did have a friend in there, a general in the Soviet Army, a Ukranian from Khartov who had been a hero in the Great War, but who had spoken out afterward against the injustices of his superior; he was warned, but again protested about the Russian’s brutality and stupidity, so he was sentenced to six years in Perm. This General, Artunian, was civilized, and he and the old man hit it off, and for several years they were friendly, before the general was released.

But most of the time my Swedish old man was a man alone, forlorn in a foreign country and penal colony, gradually getting sicker, coughing, a thin bag of bones, until one day he didn’t awake in the morning. I think this was as late as 1981 or ’82, and that was the end of him. When they took him away, no one named him on the death certificate, of course; he was simply prisoner number 71392. That’s the way it went, you see—nameless in prison, nameless in death. I missed him. Truly. And when I went to find that burlap bag, it had feed in it; when I checked with the guard, he said he had tossed those papers into the incinerator; some fool had filled a good feed bag with that paper nonsense!

That’s what I remember; that’s what I told the investigating commission in 1991 that asked me to tell what I might have known about a Swedish prisoner in Perm. He was there, all right, I can swear to that.

Gellerman, exhausted, got up and wandered through the long house to the kitchen, to make himself a coffee. He felt as though he had been the pained witness, the narrating guard. He checked the plants and saw they needed water. He filled a small pitcher and watered three plants. (The twenty-five-year-old towering avocado, started by his ex-wife from a pit, was scraping the ceiling, but leaning over like a leafy Tower of Pisa.) When the coffee was ready, he took it back to his study and reread his scene. Manny thought it conveyed basic facts, based on what he knew about Perm and Wallenberg—if RW had survived beyond Lybianka and Vladimir. With those more than fifty witness “sightings,” the survival was a possibility, and Manny chose Perm because he had met, in Moscow, the son of the real Ukranian general from Khartov who had been imprisoned there for standing up to authority. If RW had survived the despair, the loneliness, the determination of the old RW—had he captured it adequately?—stood in contrast to the heinous moral delinquency of the W. family and the Stockholm government. What a state of rotten Swedish affairs! Who in innocent America could understand such moral and physical geography, such years of Soviet ruin and Swedish decay? …