Searching for Wallenberg (8 page)

Vilmos glanced over at him, his dark face staring, half-embarrassed. He uttered, “Have you forgotten that you rescued me from a forced labor camp? Among other small favors.”

Raoul nodded. He was thinking of something else, but still couldn’t get the proper words out. Did he even know them? He stared out the window, saw someone waving a white flag, and said, “You’ve been a good friend, a close friend, and that’s meant a lot. Personally, I mean, as well as professionally.”

Vilmos tapped Raoul’s leg with the back of his hand. “No need. I know.”

Did he know, really know? wondered Raoul. He pondered
whether he himself knew. And knew what
? Who understood anything about personal relations? He knew how to save Jews, how to stay calm in difficult and tense situations, how to stand up to authority. But about his own personal or intimate relations, what did he know or really understand? Very little—maybe nothing?

“They will probably try to turn us into spies, if we are not made honorary colonels—in the NKVD.”

“I will be happy enough to be a simple engineer again,” Vilmos remarked.

“And I, an ex-diplomat with architectural ambitions.”

They drove through the bleak landscape, Raoul catching fleeting images of his mother in Stockholm, and half-brother Guy, half-sister Nina. They hadn’t been in his thoughts in a long time. When would he see them again?

“There is the landmark, less than a dozen kilometers now.”

“If we should be split apart,” Raoul offered, “we must find a way to stay in touch. If it is prison for a while, we will use that same knocking system as we used for our entrances in Pest, yes?”

“Perfect. Yes.”

They drove, and Raoul said, “You must survive, Willy, that is the most important thing.”

Vilmos looked over at him, with his dark grin beneath his longish nose, and replied, “Oh, I know how to do that. It is you I am worried about, Raoul. They may want to press you for information, which …”

“Which I may or may not know, I understand. But remember, I have important friends, both in Budapest and in Sweden, so they will probably go easy on me. And besides, I am sure our cells will be airier than our home in the Hazai Bank vault.”

Vilmos laughed and nodded, remembering.

“Well, the motorcylist friends are signaling us, so we are almost there.”

Almost there—but where? thought Raoul—and still he had not gotten to say what he wanted to say. Better left unsaid anyway, he figured; not a good time or space for the intimate. There were more pressing matters at hand. Like where to hide that bag if possible …”

Was there enough evidence to warrant the subtext of baffling intimacy here? Was Manny making certain emotions too obvious for the evidence? Well, he’d have to continue his investigating and research for sure, but from what he understood now, it seemed to fit. At least the basic material facts were real enough: the trip down to Debrecen under the Soviet overseers, the uncertainty of what awaited them; all that he had added was an interpretation. And the personal was as important as the historical.

Again, what sort of hybrid genre was he seeking to create with these little scenes? A shadow history, a docu-fiction, a what-if narrative? Well, who cared for now? Manny thought, getting out his workout mat for his yoga exercises. Just proceed ahead and figure things out later, especially when he had more to go on. If the whole thing blew up in a comedy of smoke and illusion, a fog of wishful thinking, so be it. It wouldn’t be the first time, he thought, bending forward in Sun Salutation, neck and back stretching, feeling familiar body-joy.

For the next several months Manny taught, read, researched, walked, saw his son, and listened to him play regularly. He learned a bit about pizzicato and pitch and intonation, and about three classical cellists, Feuermann, Fournier, Piatigorsky. (Josh had put a photo of Feuerman, his favorite, inside his cello, the way Manny used to collect cards of baseball heroes.) The weather was better than in the old days, when minus twenty degrees at night would last for two weeks; freezing pipes and snowstorms would arrive late in spring, weighing down flat roofs and blocking walkways. Now, there were milder temperatures, less snow, and reports of disasters elsewhere. Apart from his class work and the newspapers—for the news, the sports, the obits—he read all he could about Raoul and tried to absorb the many parts, the odd gaps, the accepted information, conventional wisdom, attempts at interpretation. The mysteries remained, even deepened, it seemed to Manny.

Yet, when he brought the matter up to a British colleague at a local restaurant one day, the fellow said, “Forget it; it’s ancient history. The Rooskies knocked him off; so where’s the mystery? Standard operating procedure—you know what Stalin said, ‘Where there’s a man, there’s a problem.’” Coughlin smiled, drank his beer. “So they got rid of him.”

“But what about the other problems, the more serious ones, like why didn’t someone get him out? Or trade for him? The family, the country?”

Tom said, “Hmmm. Hadn’t thought much about that. You have a point. What’d the Soviets have him locked up for, two years or so? Yeah,” he nodded, “that is strange, and may be worth looking into. I don’t know much about him personally, actually. Was he an interesting fellow?”

As Manny went on to explain a little about Raoul, he understood how much he had taken in, in recent months, about the man, and yet how much there was left to know. Yes, he was interesting, but exactly how? His identity was still a mystery.

“Was he Jewish?” Tom asked. “I always wondered that, because of what he did.”

“Oh, he was one sixteenth or so Jewish on his mother’s side, from way back. But he wasn’t raised Jewish and didn’t feel that way.”

Tom circled the rim of his glass. “Gelly, you always were skeptical of the conventional lines given on stories, so maybe you are sniffing up a trail that will lead you somewhere interesting. So, let’s see what you turn up.”

Soon, driving home, listening to the frustrating three- or four-minute news segments on frustrating NPR, Manny replayed the conversation with Tom and felt a certain stirring. What was it? Did Manny himself, a totally secular fellow,
feel Jewish
? Well, he had always felt culturally Jewish, but was that a polite defense mechanism of sorts? And in recent years, hadn’t he felt, more and more— maybe subconsciously?—the hangover wounds of the Holocaust? Wounds that had been transformed into certain emotions, attitudes, that were complex and undifferentiated. Had these now been raised more to the surface, like an injury causing blood vessels to discolor the skin, by his Wallenberg reading? … Manny bounced along his dirt road, bumpy with early frost heaves, and tried to understand these inchoate feelings.

How interesting was this legendary Swede? Who knew, who really knew? But certainly it was a real and intriguing question. And how many of those big figures in history were truly interesting, rather than standing out by means of an important circumstance? … In other words, History carried so many pipsqueek figures on its shoulders, and made them seem like little giants.

On an impulse, Manny hopped on a plane to Ann Arbor, where Raoul had gone to the School of Architecture for three years, in the early 1930s. There on the campus Manny moseyed around, walked into the outdated Lorch Hall, with its wonderful staircase and its studios, where Raoul had done his drafting. Found the old architecture library in the West Engineering Building, and visited the large skylighted room on the fourth floor of the north end, where the freehand drawing and projection drawing was done. (It had been cited by Raoul.) He walked to the pleasant house on tree-lined Madison Street, where Raoul had lived for his three years. Visited the archives and found several items of interest, including a small notebook with his clear handwriting and a humorous photo of Raoul kidding around at the Architects’ Ball, wearing pantaloons and holding his hand over his face in feigned shame. (One note of interest in the notebook: how he wanted to visit the Southwest and see the Frank Lloyd Wright Taliesin West project, and also one of the Indian reservations. Did he ever get there?) Raoul graduated with honors in 1935, and received a silver medal from the American Institute of Architects, given to the student with the highest scholastic standing. (Manny saw the citation.) Finally, he came across a later clipping from the
Detroit Jewish News
, of all places, from his professor, Jean Paul Slusser, describing Raoul as one of his brightest students in his thirty years of teaching there. (Had Raoul known that his favorite professor was Jewish?)

Manny had taken along the
Letters and Dispatches
volume and the letters to the grandfather, and he put a few relevant letters together with bits and pieces from the archive to get a fuller picture of the young man: how popular a student he was among his peers; how much he preferred the students here to the snobbish Swedish kids; how he loved wearing his sneakers and eating hot dogs and wouldn’t join a fraternity because it would isolate him from other student strata; and how he loved hitchhiking all around the country on school holidays. As he explained to his grandfather, “When you travel like a hobo, everything’s different. You have to be on the alert the whole time. You’re in close contact with new people every day. Hitchiking gives you training in diplomacy and tact.” What a perfect training for his later role as diplomat.

So Raoul got a full robust education in America, just as his grandfather had hoped when he sent him here and not to Swedish or European architecture schools. (And he sent him to a public and not an Ivy school.) Here he learned up close about the land, about democracy, about different ethnicities, and maybe about
who he was
, at heart. For Manny perceived quickly that all his best pals were male; when he traveled about, to Chicago or Mexico, it was always with his male friends. Nary a woman was mentioned in his three-year sojourn here, let alone one dated on a regular basis—circumstantial evidence, to be sure.

In his honor, now there was a plaque and a distinguished lecture series, by architects, some of whom, it turned out, hardly knew who he was. Well, that was about par for the course. In fact, it seemed that no one at the school, or the university, knew much about RW (including a humanities dean, who had never heard of him). Several faculty were skeptical that he had ever attended Michigan. (“Are you sure it was the
same Wallenberg
?”) Well, why not? After all, he had made his mark in the world beyond Michigan, beyond architecture. And beyond the classrooms in the streets of humanity.

One memorable incident stood out, when Raoul was hitchhiking and was kidnapped and in real danger, taken into in the back of the car of three young gangsters, who brandished a loaded revolver. He gave them his wallet, made a casual joke, and convinced them to leave him in a deserted ground—not bad for the young lad. Raoul tossed off the whole thing, to his grandfather, as nothing to fret over. He had escaped any real injury, and exhibited supreme cool and calm—perhaps preparing him for his future adventures with larger gangsters: the Arrow Cross Nazis of Budapest. Manny came to realize how playful and witty was this Raoul, how adaptable, brave and dedicated, back in his late twenties. And how highly talented. He was a figure in the making, to himself, to Grandfather perhaps, and later, to the world. A singular soul.
Was it Manny’s job to complete the making of that unfinished identity, with his own vision and the facts as they were given? Well, he surmised, let that be part of my task, my mission. Help him out, in history at least. Though that was a long way off, just yet.

Manny returned home, strangely fortified, feeling he had been in touch with the real man behind the legend, the thin, darkly-complected figure hidden within the clouds of history. Even Raoul’s small but clear handwriting, in the one notebook there, gave Manny a surge of intimacy. Oh, he knew, driving back from the Manchester airport, that he had only scratched the surface of who Raoul was, but that was enough. A modest breakthrough. Maybe he’d try to stop in Sweden sometime during the spring trip? He had a friend in Lindingö, a suburb of Stockholm, and he’d write him. A young architect no less. Perfect.

At home he took care of all the immediate needs—his part-time handyman, Russ, had done a good job of house-watching—and then went through the snail mail and the few dozen e-mails. He wanted to get to sleep early, but his head was still filled with the trip, with thoughts, impressions. So he sat down by his computer, checked some of his notes, and got ready to compose a new little scenario. As he felt a bit sleepy, however, he put on an Ella Fitzgerald CD and sat back with a drink listening to the velvety smoothness of her voice.