Searching for Wallenberg (45 page)

A pause of surprise. “It’s a date,” Manny offered, and then, reflecting, put out a pawn gambit: “Maybe next time we can drive out to Ann Arbor and see where your grandfather went to graduate school.”

She ate slowly, chewing each bite carefully. She eyed him with her small brown eyes, considering how to judge those words.

“Where is Ann Arbor?”

“In Michigan.”

She nodded. Ate. Eyed him. Smiled slowly. “Next time I think I will make it a little spicier.”

“And see how much I can take, right?”

She laughed. And mocked him. “
Right.
”

Later he wondered about her real view of things—her mother and her obsession, her own beliefs and understanding, Manny and his interaction with her mother, and even Manny and herself. In the night shadows of his bedroom, he conjectured how extraordinary it might be if indeed Raoul’s real granddaughter was sleeping a few rooms away! He got out of bed, searched for the anthology on the shelf, and turned to the poems of Emily Dickenson. He found the one: “Much madness is divinest sense / To a discerning eye …” The principle was beautiful, but what about the reality? Did he have—and could he hold onto, in the light of day—such a “discerning eye”? Was it possible, just there, a few rooms over? …

The next morning, at breakfast, he had a four-and-a-half-minute boiled egg, bagel, and coffee, and made for Dora her buttered toast and tea.

“Please take some of this homemade jam, made by my ex-student,” he said, handing over the raspberry preserve, and adding, almost casually, “and please tell me how your mother became so knowledgeable about Jewish things, biblical references, etc.”

She nibbled at her toast, raised her brown eyes to face him squarely, sipped her tea, contemplating the question and the questioner. For nearly a minute she examined both and finally said, “Well, I will tell you something, because I believe that you are sincerely trying to help her. Mother was a Catholic growing up, like many Hungarian Jews during the war who were in hiding from the Nazis and Arrow Cross. She never knew that she was Jewish, I believe. Only later, in the late sixties I think, did she convert to Judaism, after she heard a visiting rabbi who came to the Great Synagogue from Israel, who tried to call back those who had been raised Catholic for purposes of survival. When she did return, she threw herself into study, working for two years with a learned rabbi, studying and reading everything she could.” She paused, observed his reaction, took another bite of her toast. “That’s what I know.” Pause. “Yes, this jam is very good.”

Scooping egg from the shell, he eyed her. “Did Mom tell you to tell me what you just said?”

Her lips and face tightened. “Do you mean am I her messenger? No. She never gives me instructions,
on anything.”
She looked at him sternly. “Is that why you think I came up here to visit you?”

He had hurt and offended her, and he shook his head. “My question was no more than what it was: a question, not an accusation. Please understand that.”

After a moment, her face relented, and she nodded slowly.

“But that does explain her rather full knowledge of the subject.”

She stared at him, then her wristwatch.

“Yes, we better get going; the airport is about an hour and a half away.”

The drive down was uneventful, a return to easy cordiality. He kept his thoughts and questions to himself, like why had she in fact come up, and what more did she know that she had not yet told him. Instead, he drank in her youthful beauty. At the airport, he gave her a proper hug and warm kiss on both cheeks, and she returned them, looking up at him. The connection was real, but ambiguous, and they both left it at that. When he said he’d e-mail her, she said, “I’d like that.” She added, with a smile, “And more of that jam.”

He returned to the college, and felt better, safer, on home turf. Here he could think rationally, address the wild issues and challenges as they came blowing his way, assess his gains and losses, and take the measure of where he stood. He read his pact with himself this way: if he had become part of the obsession, a misfit piece rather than a solver of the puzzle, so be it. His Wallenberg mission was now set on higher, riskier ground, and if that meant he was a man possessed, a man of “much madness,” so be it. Even here, walking on the sparkling oval green framed by the white steepled library at one end and the red-bricked inn at the other, ambling amidst this Ivy college order and sanity while feeling “secretly possessed,” this was fine. This was a state of mind, a spiritual feeling, that he was content to live with, like a religious devotee, no matter the challenges, tests, pressures, sure to come. (
And if little Dora returned for more jam, did that also mean more secrets to be revealed?
)

He found himself wandering over to the library, and then, before going upstairs to work, walked down to the basement. There, he was immediately enfulfed by Orozco’s giant murals, with their stylized figures (and colors) marching through the long history of Mexico, from the Aztecs to the Revolution. These daunting murals were painted on the high walls of the near-empty reading room. Students hardly studied here anymore, once the new library addition opened with its bright fluorescence and computer-oriented space. Slowly Manny walked around, as though parading at the grand Bolshoi Theater ballroom at intermission, following along the historical depictions (
Departure of Quetzalcoatl, Gods of the Modern World
), taken aback once again by the violent imagination, the crazed stylized figures, the waves of flaring reds and blacks, the anti-Christ and anticapitalist images. Here, underground, existed a different world from the one above in the library or on campus—a space of deeper truths, darker confrontations. (Like RW’s life?) This special underground world had been created in the 1930s by the talented Communist painter—his politics outraged the college administration and the townpeople of the time—and here it remained, a mostly-empty library room mural, visited primarily by tourists, foreigners, art specialists.

Manny, as he strolled, felt the strangeness, the incongruity, within himself: this absorption of a radical view and defiant sense of reality. Fondly he recalled again his graduate days in Madison with that gutsy professorial gang of Curti, Mossi, Williams, Hazeltine, Goldberg; and their pursuit of the dark truths behind the carefully prepared façade of American history. Were Manny a painter, he’d be tempted to try a mural of Wallenberg and the events of his life, from Stockholm youth to Ann Arbor architecture school, Budapest safe houses to Lybianka imprisonment, to possible Gulag camps. A narrative of defiance, risk taking, cool heroics, persistence, betrayal, and secret private life. Despite family, despite state, despite religious tradition, despite establishment morality, it would depict a fight for personal freedom of his own soul—and body? But how would you paint that? … Switching back to the current mural, Manny realized he felt at home down here, in this underground of fiery vision and fierce truth.

A librarian called out from the reserve books desk, “Professor Gellerman, did you want to reserve any books for your class this term?”

Manny stopped in his reverie, looked over. “Thanks, John, I’m all set.”

Yes, he thought, switching tracks, he did have a mural to paint, but it was called a history, a history to write—and to account for. In the land of Winnebagos and Catalinas, pop songs and formulaic films, iPods and feelgood pills, academic piety and national venality, Manny would keep the Wallenberg memory and man alive and well, in some small corner, through his bit of hard spade work.

Standing at the doorway, taking in one last view of the mural, the professor was now suddenly accompanied by a familiar figure framed in a dark suit, fedora hat.

The gentleman shook his head slightly and stared, a stare of disbelief and sobriety, skepticism and forlornness. The look read, “Still at it, here too?”

Manny did a double take, but nodded, appreciating the solitary, if begrudging, support.

Outside, presently, the air had turned seasonally cooler, and it washed over him refreshingly as he walked up the little hill toward his office. He had a class to prepare and much private work to do.

“Keep the Aspidistra flying” Manny told himself, repeating, for no reason, George Orwell’s sign-off call at the end of his essays to buck up his fellow citizens in London who were enduring the Nazi blitz bombing. Well, maybe Manny could find some native flower of signature cheer for his own good spirits, when and if the legal and critical attacks started coming.

But for now, he felt okay; he accepted it all—the figures in his imagination, the delusions of the medium, the calls of the remote witnesses, the antics of the critics and lawyers ready to pounce. He embraced the present day of autumnal glory and the sunny innocence of the passing students. Yes, come one, come all, he thought, so long as the Swedish gentleman, his private sidekick from history, stayed around, alongside, checking in peridocially to chide and caution. With that secret sharer in his life now, for all seasons, Gellerman felt ready, a new self in the making, a revised history waiting to be written.

Manny sat stiffly in the wooden armchair on the high platform in the Stockholm Tingsrätt District Court. Even though it was just passed 11 a.m. and he had only been sitting here forty-five minutes, he began to perspire. The questions were the same ones asked yesterday, and just as relentless. He could feel the sweat twirl around his shirt collar, and he didn’t know how long he could go on with this steady Swedish torture. And this was only a preliminary hearing, for cause for a full trial! Every now and then he’d nod to his defense attorney; but when the taciturn fellow tried to help him by raising an objection, the judge always seemed to rule against him.

The Armani-suited interrogator, a lawyer from the firm of Danowsky and Partners, persisted, in good English, with the same repeated queries:

“Where have you first found the lady and family in question?”

“Did you check out thoroughly their credibility? How so?”

“Does the professor have documentation that could prove her claims? Or your own claims, in your defamatory essay and public statements?”

“Professor Gellerman, why hasn’t this Budapest lady shown up at this preliminary hearing, if she has nothing to hide, and why haven’t you, Professor, insisted that she be present now?”

“Please tell the court, are you able now to verify her cache of letters from her supposed father, which the Hungarian lady has claimed to be ‘authentic, and held in her possession for years?’”

“Why did you deliberately choose to follow up your oral presentation at the University of Uppsala in the spring with your winter essay in
American Scholar
on the subject,
If you are still not sure of documentation and substantiation?
”

“Does the professor have some personal secret agenda for wanting to defame the Wallenberg family, its noble history, its present family members, and its high professional name? Please think carefully before you answer.”

As Manny listened to these questions over and over, he loosened his collar (furtively) and sought to answer as best he could, repeating his own standard statements, which were rather weak generalizations:

“The lady in question, Mrs. Zsuzsanna Wallenberg, was invited by me to come here, but she adamantly refused, declaring such legal battles and defenses have nothing to do with her and her family. In fact, she says that they are a Swedish attack on her integrity and honor.

Well, as I’ve said before, more than a few times, I have been in the midst of trying to authenticate both the woman’s words and also the value of her private collection of letters and memorablia … I have had to check this out carefully, with several experts, including international ones, all of which takes time, much time.

Look, my article in
American Scholar
was as much about the nature of historiography, the writing of history, as it was about the Wallenberg case in itself. I could easily have published something for a much wider audience, something in the
Wall Street Journal
or the
New York Times Magazine
, if I had wanted easy fame and money from my project here.

I have tried to act as a historian, but also as an on-the-ground investigator, because of the many mysteries and vast gaps in the case of Raoul Wallenberg. And what I have learned and claimed has been based on my evidence and investigation, not on a preconceived political theory or personal agenda. Moreover, I have tried to be very clear in making distinctions between my speculative opinions and those based on hard, if occasionally circumstantial, evidence, such as what occurred just after the war for the Wallenberg business and banking interests, including its relationship with America and the allies …”

While Manny delivered those answers to the courtroom and judge and a scattering of spectators, including journalists, he berated himself again for having published his essay in a public magazine and not in a professional journal. If it had been placed in a historian’s obscure journal, no publicity would have come from it, and he wouldn’t be sitting here now, in a Swedish courtroom, pinned like a New England butterfly and grilled! In his “New Uncertainties, New Proposals,” he had talked about the old Wallenberg problems: How and when did Raoul die? Did he outlive his Lybianka days? Why hadn’t he been exchanged or bribed out of the Russian prisons? But it also brought into play Manny’s new findings, new directions, and options: the suggestion of Raoul’s gay inclinations and its ramifications; the Wallenberg family’s post–World War II jam-up with the FBI, when Enskilda Bank was put on their blacklist; their harmful if not criminal passivity during the two years of Raoul’s imprisonment; the Budapest lady’s claim of a Wallenberg daughter and grandaughter still living.

As the prosecuting lawyer continued his relentless press, asking him if he knew what the laws of character defamation were in Sweden, Manny gazed out beyond the beautiful wood panels of the courtoom to focus on an oblong of the gray sky emerging through the mullioned window. And he couldn’t help recall sitting within the green oval of his campus, lazy and easy, watching the students stroll or jog by. Oh, how far away was that green zone of academic ease! And having not one friend here, or colleague, made the ordeal all the worse. Later, when he returned alone to his bed-and-breakfast, on a side street, it seemed bleaker than any prison.