Searching for Wallenberg (9 page)

But a stranger came in silently, a gentleman in a dark suit; he nodded, as though familiar, and sat down on the leather chair in Gellerman’s study. He removed his fedora, and spoke in a quiet, slightly accented voice:

“Ella and Louis, my favorites, and no one had her wonderful clarity,” he began, and crossed his leg. “But now, Professor, here with me, do you really think there is a point in this pursuit? What’s done is done. The past is the past. What happened to me will never really be found out, or completely understood. I was alone through it all, please remember. Well, almost alone; my driver was with me for a time. Suffice it to say, I managed to help a good number of Jews, and they in turn gave me a sudden sense of purpose. So we each benefitted from the other.” He gazed at Manny. “Isn’t that enough of a story?”

Gellerman responded calmly. “I understand your views, sir, but I am determined to push forward and find out the truth. Well, if not the whole truth, a piece of it, or perhaps several truths.”

The gentleman fiddled with his hat. “I see you are one of these ‘stubborn’ Americans that I used to know back in Ann Arbor—stubborn in their pursuit of any adventure of interest. Even off-limits.” He flickered a smile. “Well, do me one small favor then. If you should find out anything too dark in my ‘case,’ don’t be afraid of exposing it. Even if it might hurt me personally.”

“Why do you say this, or rather, sir, think this way?”

“You should call me Raoul.” A pause. “I lived so long with truth as my only bedfellow, that I became devoted to it; it was the only thing I had, you see. So, if you should by accident find out anything resembling it, feel free to reveal or expose it.”

“Sounds a bit dangerous, sir.”

“Dangerous? Well, the real truth always is, I suppose, to one or another. But in my case, it would be something like Sicilian revenge, served up nice and cold.”

Gellerman was quietly stunned, and also somewhat confused over what was being said.
And who was saying it.
He felt the heat from the fire.

“Let me caution you, if I may, about certain things. You will find in your path false leads, varieties of disguise, appearances of truth that are in fact untruths or semi-truths. Are you prepared?”

Gellerman opened his palms in uncertainty.

“And beware the Swedes—their government dispatches, subsequent covering statements. And beware my family. They both have an interest in concealing the past, brushing it clean, leaving no marks, protecting it from outsiders, whom they view as unpleasant intruders. All of this will pose a problem for you, Professor, an obstacle. Not to mention the usual zealots and cult followers, harmless though most of them are, in Stockholm, Budapest, maybe Moscow. They also will cloud your vision.”

Manny felt uncomfortably chided, and nodded. “Why are you telling me all this, sir?”

The stranger crossed and recrossed his leg. “To prepare you, to warn you, so you do not waste months or years on this pursuit.”

Manny stared at the strange, formal figure.

“Please remember, Professor Gellerman, what I said earlier: that if you come upon something of importance, or if you are avenging me in some way, you must not worry about my personal feelings, but ‘go full steam ahead!’ as my Michigan friends used to say”—he smiled—“and reveal it to the world.”

Presently, as the gentleman departed, Ella also finished. Manny poured himself a scotch and reflected. Did that chat really happen? Or, if not, why had he conjured it up? “Avenge him” in some way, Raoul had said. Like Hamlet’s old man, eh? Go forward then, and full steam ahead! Just watch out for the pitfalls, disguises, traps. Paradoxical wisdom …

The strange conversation lingered in Manny’s head for weeks, and haunted him with its words, its hallucinatory credibility. And the closeness he felt with the presence of that ghost. Was this the way the real RW had to be discovered, he mused, by invention? Like his true history?

Spring came, and suddenly all the outdoor fields sprang up—not merely with flowers, but with sports. The little college town suddenly was blooming with tennis matches, track runners, jousting lacrosse battlers, joggers with headbands, Frisbee tossers, baseball players, fierce bicyclists, canoeists and kayakers—sports players popping up like Dutch tulips. The town waited to play, to rise up from winter interiors and gray weather and enter into the sunlight and soft winds. Yet, through all this sudden spring sprouting, Gellerman tried to keep his concentration focused back there and then: Budapest 1944 and Moscow 1945. A bit difficult, sure. But soon he would be heading over there—and it would be easier to enter into memory and history, while walking around amidst the dour streets of scarcity—instead of staying here, amidst the fields and greens of pastel plenty.

“Why do you have to go there now? Why not wait till June and take me, Dad?”

“Well, first of all, you have school, my boy, and secondly, if I have a successful trip, I return in June or July, and then you could be freer to perhaps accompany me.”

The boy shook his head in sharp disappointment. He exaggerated all the gestures of an adult, and the result was the fondest (for Dad) comic mimicry.

“Now, why don’t you practice, okay?”

“All right,” he muttered, and picked up his cello and began to tune up.

“What’s on for today?”

“Oh, some Schroder and then a Bach prelude.” He practiced with his back to the windows in the living room.

Gellerman nodded, and soon felt the boy’s cello pleasing his senses. How had he been ignorant for so long of this form of beauty?

Now, looking out through the windows, he saw what looked like a wild turkey out by the far end of the oval pond, and he wished he had his binoculars right there. The sun went in and out. He pointed to the outside, and the boy turned about and stared.

“What is it, Dad, a turkey?”

“Actually, I think a wild peacock. Look—see the fantastic tail with those iridescent feathers?”

“Wow!” Josh stared. “Amazing!”

“You’re right, and wait till you hear the mating call sometime. Fierce! But now go back to Bach. Remember, you have math homework as well.”

So the boy played, and a pair of swallows flew by, and Manny wondered why he would ever want to leave this place, this sanctuary of boy, cello, and birds? Wasn’t it comfortable to the point of perfection?

As the musical intricacies developed, Gellerman read through the revised pages of Angela’s competent thesis, and considered the pale tenacious Swede. Manny felt he was getting to know him, from the inside, not from the pages of historical material after the fact. Partly from his own words in his
Letters and Dispatches
, partly from his footprints at Ann Arbor, and lastly from Manny’s own inquiry and imagination. Who was he? A private soul. A subtle man. An outsider, both within his conservative family and his country. And maybe a lost soul too, until he received the commission from K. Lauer, the Hungarian businessman in Stockholm, to help the Jews of Budapest, an offer augmented privately by Iver Olsen, who worked for the US War Refugee Board. The commisson that evolved into a life mission. And the little office in the Swedish legation building in Buda—with Vilmos on hand—became an ideal sanctuary. Where saving Jews became
his calling
, not a job.

To the world at large he was a figure of political turbulence and heroism; to Manny, he was becoming a personal puzzle, and probably a puzzle to himself!

“Dad, the phone’s ringing. Don’t you want to get it?”

Manny answered it—a local nursing charity asking for his annual contribution. Afterward, he was back in his living room chair, with a glass of red wine, listening, contemplating. This boy had come to Manny when he was fifty, and he had been a mighty bundle of work, and a little human blessing. All that high maintenance had been channeled into his curved wooden instrument of energy and devotion. In a similar way, Manny, in his middle age, had channeled his devotion and energy toward the boy. You needed something serious in your fifties to lift you up from complacency or melancholy for the final few decades. But maybe now, a dozen years later, he needed a new channel and a new challenge—like RW. One with as much unpredictability as the boy, but with high risk, professionally. Was this turning into
his mission?

“Hey, Dad, how long have I been practicing? What’s for dinner?”

“Well, lamb chops with potatoes.”

“Can I make mashed, please? I’ll use the Cuisinart, but I won’t make a mess, I promise! It won’t be like last time.”

He remembered the last time, with bits of mashed potatoes shooting out from the whirring machine over pots pans and dishes onto kitchen shelves and walls, like a July 4 shower of potato stars. Manny winced, smiled, and gave in. Spoiling the boy had become second nature, and he felt fine with it, just fine.

On the river, on a sixty-degree sunny day that felt like eighty after winter, Gellerman canoed with Jack Littletree, a graduate student and pal, carrying sandwiches and coffee. They canoed upriver, the current light and the sun glinting off the greenish-blue water. A single sailboat was out, and a pair of kayakers.

“Out here spring is different from back home.”

“Yes, I imagine.”

“We sure could use a river like this.”

“I’ll bet.”

They headed upriver about forty minutes, and chose a small island on the New Hampshire side to have their lunch. They pulled the canoe onto the shore, tied it to a rock, and found a flat patch to sit on, by the shade of a maple.

“I read on Yahoo that the Danube’s flooding right now,” Jack observed.

“Yeah, that happens over there periodically, and it can be pretty bad.”

Jack smiled, revealing yellowing teeth. “Still, we’d take a river anyway.”

Manny nodded, remembering his several visits out to Hopi land in southern Arizona, where the land was dusty, arid, a moonscape without rivers or lakes breaking up the monotonous brown landscape.

“Warmer than last year, remember?” Jack said. “And do you remember that wind, going back?”

“Yeah, I do, actually.” Manny laughed. “Almost turned us over!”

Shielded from the high sun, they opened their co-op tuna salad sandwiches and began eating, watching the smooth water.

“So, how did you do this quarter, tell me? How was the work?”

“Not too bad,” Jack replied. “A couple of high passes in Globalization, Oral History.”

“Hey, what’s going on? Sucking up to the profs?”

The young man in his early thirties with the jet-black hair broke into a warm smile. “Yeah, you got me pegged.”

Gellerman enjoyed this mature student, who was one of a series of Hopi Indians that he had mentored through the years, here at Dartmouth, a college whose original charter was devoted to educating Native Americans (and making them over into Christian gentlemen). And now he was devoted to pampering young Caucasian natives. Years ago, he had met a colleague in anthropology, an expert on Native Americans, with a focus on Hopis, and he had recruited young men from the tribe to come to this rural Ivy League college, first setting them in local private schools for a year of prepping. And when that prof retired, he asked Manny to continue the tradition, which he did, making annual trips to the reservation and recruiting one student every few years for his graduate interdisciplinary department. He had seen Jack Littletree three or four times a year, over lunch or dinner, for a fall or spring day trip, either on a mountain trail or out here on the river, which Jack delighted in.

“How’s the family doing?”

“Pretty well, thanks. Kids miss me, but I talk to them at least once a week.”

“I hope some of the family will come for your graduation.”

Jack shook his head. “Too expensive, man, the travel from there to here.”

Manny made a mental note to seek some travel money for the wife at least, or maybe the parents.

“Yeah, if we had some water out there, there’s no telling what we could do.”

Manny nodded, and marveled at how they had sustained themselves for hundreds of years in that high desert plateau, through all the adversities of arid landscape, disease, and predatory Navajo.

“How’s the job going, with that timber framer?” It was a job that Manny had arranged.