Searching for Wallenberg (44 page)

Manny understood, of course, that he was about to be blown out of the water any day, by the clever Budapest lady, so he had one of two choices: expose her himself, or let her make a mockery of herself, and shrewdly try to remove himself from her and the field of combat by seeking to create distance from her.

In the meantime, daughter Dora showed up on his doorstep, after her New York conference, coming up to see the real New England in the fall and to be hosted by Manny. Good timing? Or good scheming? (“Mom hopes to follow me here one day, if you give her an invitation.” The petite young woman smiled, after setting down her small valise inside the kitchen of his large farmhouse.)

When the chair of his department called him in, Manny imagined the worst: direct questions about the authenticity of the papers and the date of publication of the memoir.

“You’ve given us more publicity than our department has ever had,” he laughed robustly. “This will help us, within the university, for raising our profile and for getting us more funding.”

Manny nodded.

“What sort of woman is this? How’d you come upon her in the first place?”

“Actually, my student Angela first mentioned her to me,” Manny said. He explained the evolution from the thesis and described the lady, “She’s unusual, let’s say that. Rather bohemian in her thinking, her ways.”

“I would imagine so, after that life! Well, you’ve done a great job!” He leaned forward and said, in a lower voice, “There are several alumni groups that really would like to hear about all this. Can I get you to address them?”

What could Manny say, now, before any exposure explosion, but “Sure.”

“Great, I’ll set it up and let you know. This is very productive for the department, puts us on another level of importance.” He lowered his voice for delivering crucial verdicts: “This is important for you too, Manny. I was worrying about you … This brings you back up, just what you need for a comeback!”

Later, at home in the countryside, he set out two wine glasses for Dora and himself, and sat in the living room, waiting. The giant avocado plant needed serious tending and pruning, its branches reaching up to the ceiling and out wildly into the room. The twenty-five-year-old plant was holding its own, though looking strange, its branches lunging every which way.

“Hello,” she said, entering, wearing a white blouse and flowered skirt. “I really like your house.”

“Here, this is for you.” He stood and gave her a glass of white wine.

“Thank you. And here, this is for you, from Mother.”

She handed him a small package, tied with a ribbon, and sat down.

He opened the simple wrapping to find a small cardboard box. He opened it and took out a note and a worn leather pouch, three inches by four, heavy with a weight inside, and tiny eroded writing on it. The note read: “Please accept this gift from me and my father, a present given him by a Jewish survivor in Budapest. My father used it as a paperweight on his desk and was very fond of it. I hope you will be too.” It was signed, “Your friend, Zsuzsanna.”

He lifted the little (terra-cotta?) paperweight, feeling it, and passed it to Dora, sitting alongside.

She lifted it, raising her eyebrows mischevously, and said, “You are becoming like one of the family!”

He looked at her. “Is that good or bad?”

She sipped her wine. “Good, I hope!”

He drank his wine, observing the surprise present, and the young woman, suddenly here, with her beautiful face, in his living room. What did it mean? What was he supposed to do with her? … Was she a plant from the mother?

“How long are you here for?”

“Oh, just a few days.” She smiled. “I won’t be a bother to you, I promise. Mom said I should pay a visit and see the leaves.”

Was this young Hungarian beauty really a family link to the great ghost of a man he had been pursuing these past few years?

“Yes, the leaves,” he repeated. “Maybe we can climb Mount Cardigan this weekend, so you can get a wide view of their colors turning.”

She nodded, her brown eyes fixing him.

Manny had many questions to put to her, but not now; and he wasn’t sure that she could answer them. He stood up and went to the avocado plant, seeing that a few dead leaves had fallen, and retrieved them. “I suppose you want to know how your mom’s papers are coming along?”

She shook her head. “No. That is between you and her.”

“Yes, that is true. Well,
we
should consider dinner, shouldn’t we?”

In the ensuing few days, Manny
felt
the young woman’s presence and tried to imagine her mother really being the daughter of Wallenberg, rather than the obsessive RW-cult fanatic he believed her to be. Did it really matter, however? he wondered, climbing the 3,200-foot mountain with his young guest. Wasn’t Zsuzsa’s long obsession enough, deserving enough in itself? As he glanced at the trim Budapest daughter, with her backpack and hiking shoes, take the steady ascent like a small mountain goat while he climbed like an old goat, he tried to ponder what it all meant, what the real fallout would be, and when? … They were ascending now above the tree line, onto a stretch of granite ledge and big boulders. From here they could view the top of the mountain and the forest ranger lookout hut, jutting out high on its wooden stilts. Windy here; he took out his light windbreaker from his pack. The energetic young woman eyed him every so often, nodded or half smiled, didn’t speak much, and looked easy, comfortable.

At the top they had a 360-degree view of the topography below, mostly forest with some open fields and dark-blue lakes and little white houses dotting the woodsy landscape. If you peered closely, you spotted the periodic clusters of the small villages, and even, if you looked through the binoculars, you could sight selected places, like his house and land or the college library steeple. Dora paid the expected compliments—“almost like Machu Picchu, where I climbed once.” There was sweat on her pink flushed face. Radiant herself, she appreciated the visual beauty, and stealthily he sought any resemblance to RW … Why couldn’t he simply accept the situation as young Dora apparently did? If it happened that she was Raoul’s secret granddaughter, it happened, and if not, not. (Could he ever ask her to take a DNA test? But without Raoul’s corpse, how could they confirm a match?) She seemed easy about accepting such ambiguity. Why not Manny?

They drank their bottled waters, viewed the spacious vista. “I like your New England,” she acknowledged, and he responded, “I like your Budapest.” A pair of hikers came by and said hello. On top of the mountain, closer to the clouds, he sensed a curious responsibility for this young person. For her not being damaged by the mother’s delusions and derangement. Or his folly? Naturally, he kept this feeling to himself, and pointed out the few sights he knew: the beginning hills of the White Mountains, like Smarts, and the great stony Whites, with the ‘baddest’ weather in New England.” Pointing, he explained, “Right there on top of that one, Mount Washington, the wind regularly blows at fifty or sixty miles an hour in winter. A foolish hiker gets lost there every winter.” She nodded, her small chin forward, and asked defiantly, “Are you going to test me?” He retorted, “Absolutely. As soon as we get back.” Actually, he thought he should test her, but not about mountains.

When they did get home in two hours, he found in his e-mail box another witness sighting, this from a Russian immigrant residing in Rehovot, Israel, a retired physicist who claimed he had seen the “old sick diplomat” at a Gulag camp near the Urals, and would be happy to talk with Professor Gellerman. Manny jotted down the name and a phone number. After a shower, he met up with Dora in the kitchen, and they planned a dinner. “I cook; it’s my turn,” she said. The dinner was good too, a roast chicken in a pan with carrots, potatoes, and onions; and the talk concerned her work in children’s therapy. He kept waiting for the questions to come about her mother’s “manuscript,” but they never did. A smart and discreet young woman.

The next day in class, he spoke to the students about their progress thus far in the mother’s memoir papers. He mentioned to them again the Sacco and Venzetti source book of primary source materials,
Commonwealth v. Sacco and Vanzetti
, which included trial transcripts, newspaper articles, letters to the editors of the time, a repercussion section. So now he asked the class if they would like to work on that Wallenberg source book. “Using perhaps as a basis the Hungarian lady’s letters, notes, newspaper clippings, and photographs. What do you think?”

Kevin said, “That’s cool, really cool, sir. Do you think we might be able to publish it?” A growing buzz and affirmation ensued.

“Why not? It would make a very useful source book, especially with so many still unanswered questions, and we could also include some of the research findings of the Swedish-Russian Working Group, plus some of Raoul’s own Budapest reports and letters. Those should be in there too.”

The class sounded its approval.

“Let’s do some homework, round up a few other source books to go along with the Sacco and Venzetti model,” he advised, as the students tapped keys on their laptops. “There’s that one about the Rosenbergs that I mentioned.”

Manny sensed that he was now paying the healthiest homage to Raoul, keeping him alive in the classroom, in the young minds; and in his own life of research. Raoul needed to be remembered; the memory of his deeds, and his abandonment, needed to be put up there, on the big American, maybe European, radar screen. (Even if this were to be a sanitized Raoul, for new-era political purposes.) Yes, there would be more beeps and signaling on his website from the “witnesses” around the world and, who knows, one might come through—like the physicist?—with new words of authentic memory and suggestive illumination.

Jesse raised her hand, “If we do a good enough job, maybe we could send a copy over to Moscow and see what the current Russians think or want to do.”

“There’s an idea,” Manny took up, only half humorously. “We send Putin a Wallenberg source book as a gift, marking off a section of blank pages for him to fill in a missing file.”

The class went on and deliberated, and then returned to the work coming up, the Doctorow novel, and some of the original sources from that era.

After class, he went to the office to pick up a few items, and the cordial secretary handed him a Registered Letter from Sweden. (“I signed for it, sir.”) Heart beating. Manny opened it and found a formal letter from Danowsky and Partners, Attorneys at Law in Stockholm, stating that, on behalf of the Wallenberg family, a legal suit was being filed in the Swedish courts for “unproven and perfidious allegations staining the name of their late family member Raoul Wallenberg, concerning an illegitimate Hungarian family and living daughter in Budapest.” Manny nodded to the wondering secretary, signaling all was fine, and wandered out and across the campus green. In the autumn twilight, he walked over to the inn, entered the restaurant, and at the bar ordered a scotch. If the Enskilda Wallenbergs were excited by the “news” of a possible family in Budapest, what would happen when and if his projected book was published, with its imagined charged scenes and conclusions about the brothers? (Not to mention a memoir by Lady Z.) That might
incite
, not merely
excite
, the Wallenberg boys even more!

He made a mental note to call up his legal buddy in New York, smart and able Marty Goldmark, who was as passionate about legal combat as he was about the First Amendment. He’d have great fun arguing in a Stockholm courtroom, and winning—and wouldn’t he? The tough Jewish bulldog going after the cool Swedes!

“So you’ve really hit the news, huh?” asked his worldly colleague, Tom Jameson, sidling into a barstool. “Your ship has come in, at long last. Here, I’m buying this next one!” and he called over the bartender. “Will you even be talking to deck boys like us, who are here to swab the decks and clean the latrines? I doubt it. Out there in the big world, the stakes are different, and the players too. And you’re a player now!”

Manny was quietly astonished at what Tom was saying. “Oh, I don’t think I’ll be making many changes just yet.”

“Yes, that’s the spirit, saying the right words! Do remember those words for just a few seconds, when the CNN makeup crew is applying the finishing touches for your appearance, okay?”

Manny smiled and nodded, and went on to the second drink. He barely heard the ribbing and sniping of the next half hour by his cynical pal.

“Kidding aside, my new Frederick Turner,
you might be making real history out of all this, right
?”

Manny smiled, absorbing the humor, and reflected on that phrase. Maybe the fellow was onto something more than what he was saying?

Later, at the house, while Dora was making her farewell dinner for them—she was leaving in the morning—he remembered the “making history” phrase, and recalled a line from the great Thomas Macaulay. In his study he searched his notebook and found it, never having understood it until now: “History, at least in its state of ideal perfection, is a compound of poetry and philosophy” (from
Hallam’s History
, 1828). Manny would add to that compound the qualities of imagination and fiction. He’d try to make his history filled with that extra-rich compound.

Over a dinner of veal paprika, they listened to Sarah Vaughan, drank a pinot noir, and chatted about autumn here. Dora looked sparkling in her own handmade knitted vest and blouse.

“So you might tell Mom that my graduate class is now studying her papers along with me, and they may indeed create a new and fantastic source book.”

She took small forkfuls of food, and eyed him. “You should report to Mom directly, I think. How do you like the veal? Too strong?”

“Tasty!” he said. “And how do you like New Hampshire? A bit dull, yes?”

“Oh, I can get used to dull places like this—mountains, lakes, a small university and museum nearby.”

“Not quite the new-world America that Europeans hear about.”

She twirled a bite. “I like the way you live, actually. Maybe I’ll even return,
if I am invited back.”