Searching for Wallenberg (5 page)

Raoul smoked, and said, rather casually, “You don’t really think that that man named Jesus actually died for
my
personal sins, do you, Pastor? Don’t you really think that that is an elaborate interpretation of that curious man’s death?”

The pastor reddened. “Raoul, so you don’t have faith, after all these years?” He paused. “At your confirmation, I was worried, and now … I am dismayed.”

Raoul restrained himself. “Oh, I think that would be an exaggeration to say that. I do have faith, sir, but it is not quite in the form, or frame, of your belief. My faith is in the human side of things, rather than in the divine. Or, the divine is rather subsumed under the human.”

“
Subsumed?
How strange a term to use here. What do you mean, Raoul?”

“Well, if we bring Jesus into the argument, that he died for our sins, does that include all human beings, or just Christians?”

“For all people, of course—once they are believers.”

“But are Jews believers?”

The pastor stood and rubbed his hands together. “Not in their present form, no. But certainly once they become believers—”

“But supposing they don’t wish to become believers of Jesus as a God?”

The pastor shook his head and spoke sternly, “You always were a rebel, Raoul, stubbornly rebellious. Rebellion for its own sake? I don’t know …” He strolled up and down in the office. “You are so different from the rest of your family. Never in step, always out on your own. In everything, from what I hear, but especially here in our sacred place. Why, Raoul, why?”

Raoul smoked and eyed the leather chairs, the large crucifix, the framed documents of divinity degrees, a portrait of Luther, alongside one of Marcus Wallenberg, Bishop of Linköping, 1819, and was comforted by these hard inanimate objects. “I want to thank you, and my cousins, for their concern over my spiritual welfare, Pastor. I appreciate it.”

The pastor pulled up into a chair opposite his pupil. “Do you not believe yourself a sinner, Raoul?” He paused. “All of us?”

“Tell me, Johann, are the Jews sinners too? And are they being punished by our Christ for not being believers yet? Is that why they are being persecuted and sent off to be murdered in Nazi camps now?”

The pastor swallowed visibly. “Are you being intentionally perverse?”

“No, not at all, sir.”

“You are confusing current political struggles with essential spiritual truths and facts. Is this intentional?”

“I am simply trying to apply principles to realities and see what the outcome is, Pastor.”

The pastor reached out for Raoul’s hand, but Raoul refrained, and withdrew his hand, out of reach.

“What happens now, here, on this globe, is less important than what occurs afterward, to our eternal souls.”

“Perhaps. But for now, before eternity, I have immediate situations to take into account.”

The pastor shook his head. “I will only repeat, from 2 Corinthians 5:7, ‘We walk by faith, not by sight.’ And from Ephesians 2:8, ‘By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God.’”

Raoul had prepared, just in case, and chose a favorite essayist instead of Spinoza for his retort: “Let me quote to you from one of my bibles: ‘How many things that were articles of faith yesterday are fables today.’” He stood up and put out his hand, and the pastor hesitated, then shook his hand. “Montaigne’s
Essays.
”

Dryly, the pastor said, “I wish you luck, Raoul. And God’s blessing.”

Raoul nodded, released the grip, and walked out of the office and back through the church. What had Johann meant, “from what I hear?”

Professor Gellerman sat and considered the scene. Had he put Raoul too much in charge? Was he too strong there at the end? … Raoul’s rebelliousness against authority and against the church—that was fitting, in keeping. And maybe too he resented his cousins putting up the pastor to invite him over and gossiping about him? (“from what I hear …”) … What about the pastor? Would—or should—he have been more openly anti-Semitic? Quite possibly. But perhaps, by 1944, something of a guilty conscience in a Christian minister was certainly realistic … So what Manny had presented in the end was a Raoul of his own personal faith, neither religious nor patriotic, but human and humanistic, standing for justice and for fairness. That indeed sounded a lot like the Raoul that Manny had learned about and come to believe in. Not a well-costumed saint, but a very good man and a brave soul … Not the Church, not the State, not the Family, with all of their bullying chauvinism and lip-service pieties, would deter him from following his high principles. Nor would the Swedes with their self-interested neutrality, or the Hungarians and Nazis with their brutality, deter him. Raoul was a man on a mission, a life mission, it may be said, shaped early on by his pragmatic and open-minded grandfather, and sustained by his own firm independence …

He went for a long walk, strolling briskly around the idyllic campus of huge trees, golf course, and oval pond, and onto the paths snaking around the redbrick buildings, and down along the boathouse and Dartmouth Canoe Club set alongside the Connecticut River; all the while, in the soft spring air, he passed joggers and walkers and bicyclists. So orderly, so bucolic, this site. Could he have imagined it as a boy in Brooklyn? And how many other green campuses and private oases were there, tucked away amidst the vast, busy, noisy, crazy country? Who ever dreamed, in history, of such a protected, lucky geography?

When he ambled on down the one main street of two or three blocks long, filled with spry shoppers, stores, banks, realtor offices, Manny again felt the presence of free and easy serenity, sanity. Just as God—or Private Property and well-heeled capitalism—had ordered, in His Intelligent Design, right? At the end he returned to the large oval green at the center of the campus, sat on a white rocking chair at the Hanover Inn, and read through the
New York Times
while sipping a bottle of water. A leisurely wait to pick up his son after school. Engulfed in this autumnal comfort, could he really project himself back into the gray world of East Europe, the unimaginable world of the Holocaust? A reach of the imagination, to be sure. And maybe even a world too far for the imagination to encompass? But how else to search for that RW mystery, now that his own past interest was re-ignited? …

As he basked in the spring sun, within the safe port of the campus, he remembered fondly his days in Madison, as a grad student, sitting in the student building overlooking the glorious lake, and waiting for one of his dynamic professors to join him for a coffee. It didn’t really matter who it was—Hesseltine or Curti, Williams or Mosse or Goldberg. Each contributed a different intensity, a new idea, to stir him up for the month. (George Mosse, the transplanted German Jew, had first talked to him about Wallenberg, suggesting he was a perfect ‘mystery study.’) A vibrant history department, in the late 1960s, in one of the heated intellectual centers of the country. Activism—including a real blowup or two!—combined with the scholarly. But the scholarly always trumped activism, no matter how activist the prof, and it remained the password to accomplishment.

An exciting five years, all told. Launched Manny into the future. Toward his teaching, his writing. And toward the track of easy academic jogging. Staring at the green oval, he recalled those salad days, a superior graduate ride of post-pubescent pleasure, where serious learning mingled with stretches of Wisconsin Dells idleness; bursts of study and paper-writing interrupted days of lazy ping-pong indulgence. Grad school had become a native pastime, a middle-class pastoral not to be missed. A pastoral that had continued into the faculty present, into Manny’s later teaching days.

He saw the clock hit ten to three on the white library tower, and knew it was time to go pick up the boy and drive him to his cello lesson. One of the unique pleasures of his adult life, having the boy, watching him turn into a little cellist, and listening to his music. (And the older boy, a budding literary fellow.) Manny stood up and moved off. Taking a pit stop in the inn’s basement bathroom, he washed his face vigorously and took a quick view of himself in the wall mirror: a sixty-four-year-old gent with a glint in his eyes, still swinging. Perhaps a pale version of the “Trotsky” that was his nickname in his forties. Was he ready for a new nickname?

Manny figured he’d surprise the boy with an ice cream cone, and he found the Ben & Jerry’s shop. As the aromas hit him, another memory wafted back, from his youth in Brooklyn. Al’s Pizza and Italian Ices Shop on Rutland Road, the Sutter Ave. El subway stop rumbling overhead. He had worked there as a young teenager, selling pizza slices for twelve cents, and custard or soft ice cream. Al was a round, pink-faced, kindly boss in his thirties, whose white T-shirt and apron were always smeared with ices or pizza. His two Hungarian brothers, older and less jolly, owned the restaurant next door. Once Manny had repeated a nasty Hungarian curse, and the shorter fellow had slapped him across the face. Another time, the older mustached brother had shown him two photos of his parents eating ice cream on a Budapest square, several months before they were shot. The boys had survived because of a Swedish diplomat. And he recalled, roughly, words from brother Imre: “No one here knows about Budapest 1944. But you’re a Jewish boy.” He poked Manny’s chest. “You should remember the name Wallenberg.” And further, on a different track, when he watched Ernie Kovacs—the mad mustached Hungarian who opened his show with a machine gun rattling the screen—on TV, he thought of RW. So, thoughts on the man had been planted early in Manny.

His mind caught up, and he picked up the boy. Little Josh did school dutifully, here in the ninth grade, but he didn’t enjoy the rules, the boring stretches. He was too singular a soul, his sensibility too musical. “Oh, nothing too much,” Joshie responded when Manny asked him how it went. “School is school, Dad. You know that.” While listening to Fournier’s version of the Bach Cello Suites— the boy already had developed a special interest in the suites—they chatted about mundane school. The boy took an ironic pleasure in describing the hallway wanderings of the tough principal. “Really, Dad, that’s what she does; she
prowls
the halls looking for trouble. You should see her!”

They drove down Route 89, carved through the mountains, Manny taking it easy at the windy five-mile stretch near Grantham, where, in winter, black ice frequently hid beneath the innocent snow covering. Alternating with his ex-wife on these journeys of thirty miles down the road, Manny enjoyed the drive, with the boy putting on his favorite CDs, commenting on the orchestra and conductor, and chomping on his chips. Presently they were turning off the ramp at the Springfield exit. Another ten minutes, and they proceeded up the steep dirt driveway of Constance Logan’s log house, a driveway that could be hazardous, and where they once got terribly stuck in the thick muck of snow and mud. The boy at ten or so had been an ardent little helper.

In the small music room, Manny sat in the rocking chair in the corner, a privileged witness to the lesson. The room was wood paneled, with photos of several of Connie’s students and her own chamber groups on the walls; and alongside some bookshelves sat a small chest of open files with musical scores. Connie was a heavyset woman who felt most comfortable with her young pupils; she had been teaching Josh since he was four and three quarters. Frequently she would still call him “Baby” or “Honey” when correcting him. “All right, what do we have for today? What have you worked on?” He answered her, sitting on his wooden chair with his cello, and she asked him to start with some warm-up études from his Schroder booklet.

As he played, the late afternoon sun slanting through the one window, Manny observed the boy’s small fingers handling the strings adroitly on his full-sized cello, and recalled the earlier quarter- and half-sized cellos. Connie eyed him from her chair a few feet away. For Manny, this was his enchantment hour, as he was transported by the boy’s deft hands and perfect pitch—though Manny himself was tone-deaf. How had the boy come to this passion, this talent? Not from the parents’ genes certainly. His wife had taken the boy to hear a quartet play in the local Monsthire Museum, and afterward the musicians had invited the children up to meet the players and view the instruments. Little Josh, age two and a half, rubbed his cheek against the cello wood, fingered the strings, and that was it. The passion commenced and never wavered.

And Manny, starting in his late fifties and still going strong, was converted, as the boy had opened him up to this new realm of listening—the cello and classical music, seen and felt from a (little) musician’s sensibility. These hours of weekly practice with the teacher, or those when the boy practiced alone, carved out time-units of new beauty in his late life. It was a startling discovery, like finding a new planet. Just now, Connie was correcting something in Josh’s bow grip, leaning over him and showing him, and next asking him to play the Bach he had rehearsed. Now the boy played the Prelude to the fifth Bach suite, and Manny tried his best to follow the meticulous intricacies and labyrinthian harmonies (with their variations), of this precise and amazing piece. Like reading a few pages of Proust. Periodically Manny closed his eyes and listened, seeking to discern the difference between the Prelude as played by the boy and by a professional. He found it difficult to tell. Even though he was a rank amateur, he took satisfaction in this.