by Alan Lelchuk
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.
And for some reason the music led him to another forgotten Wallenberg memory, a television movie from the 1980s starring Richard Chamberlain as the Swedish hero. Very long, and filled with the usual TV emphasis on the obvious melodramatics, Manny recalled, but played credibly by the actor. The show had prodded Manny to wonder about the case at the time. Thus, another subtle marker had been planted quietly in his brain …
“That was good! Really expressive!” approved his teacher, gleaming. “Only in those middle notes I think you could go a bit more slowly, for emphasis, okay?” Josh nodded. “And I definitely think you can use that for one of your audition pieces, yes?”
At this the boy’s broad little face beamed. She asked him to go over a few of the scales before finishing up, and he restarted …
Later, in the rambling country house, Gellerman, after dropping the boy off with his mother in town, made a scotch and water, glanced through the mail, took some cheese and sat in the book-filled living room, putting on the radio. He loved radios almost as much as books, and kept a radio in every room. He was especially fond of an old KLH and a Grundig. (He still preferred those to iPods and earbuds.) The late afternoon filled with the darkening sky, hanging low over the meadow and the forest. The house needed decluttering, for sure— as his ex-wife always complained—but so what? The mounds of books were piled everywhere, but he knew where to find any book, and the wild ménage seemed finer to his eye than the clarity of orderliness. Sitting in his Swedish leather chair, he looked through the new books he had borrowed from the library on Raoul, and drank the scotch. Quietly, he read. After two hours he was stirred, and, acting on an urge, walked to his far corner study to give his new project a little twilight surge. He took out a notebook and scribbled a few notes to add to his gathered pages. Vermont Public Radio 89.5 delivered classical music through his old Emerson radio.
From his old knowle
dge of the case and the new studies, he saw that the obvious problems with the case remained. Had Raoul been killed by the Russians in 1947? (Originally they said they knew nothing; years later, they claimed heart failure; and in the 1980s, they said he had been shot, but that no records existed—no interrogation or criminal case file, no documentation of the killing or a death certificate.) Had he lived on somewhere in the Gulag? More significantly, why hadn’t he been traded out, or exchanged, by the Swedish government, during those two years in Soviet imprisonment? Or purchased into freedom by the very wealthy and prominent Wallenberg family in Stockholm? Wouldn’t the Rockefellers, for example, have rescued one of their own, by hook or by crook (money, threats, influence)? Manny read a few dozen of the letters between Raoul and his paternal grandfather who had replaced, with affection, the naval father who had died when Raoul was less than a year old. He had tutored the young man well, sending him all over, from Haifa to Capetown, including three years at Ann Arbor for his architecture education. The grandfather’s letters hardly ever mentioned the rich cousins, let alone suggested that Raoul join up with them. In other words, the grandfather and Raoul were on the same page, the same axis of feelings and values regarding money and power.
Gradually Manny began to get a clearer sense of things, a sharper angle: Raoul was the outsider within the conservative and iron-fisted Wallenberg family and its vast banking and business empire. But an outsider with what qualities? Manny wondered and jotted. Was he a threat? If so, what sort?
He took a hike through the long rambling house—a kind of three-part Lego creation of an old house, a barn, a 1930s wing, put together in different decades—arriving in the kitchen and cutting a few slices of cheese and apple, and setting them on a plate with stoned wheat crackers. In the large living room he searched through a few piles of books and found several old black and white postcards from Budapest, of the charming Lancid and Elisabeth Bridges, and of the tree-lined Andrássy Street boulevard. Manny recalled his days there, a few years back, as a visiting professor at the Eötvös Loránd University; his friends Lazslo, Tibor, Loke, Julia, Andras; and the bronze statue of RW near his apartment in the second district of Buda. The bronze Raoul had seemed to eye him daily as he had walked up the Szilágyi Erzsébet Fasor to shop at Budagyöngye. (He learned that his Salgo Professorship was named after the same man, Nicolas Salgo, who had commissioned the sculpture.)
Revved up, Gellerman opened his laptop and began writing a scene:
At the grand mansion of Marcus Wallenberg in Stockholm, in the salon with family portraits in gilded frames on the walls, a red-jacketed servant appeared with drinks on a silver tray.
“I don’t really see how we should arrange anything, Marcus, without putting ourselves and our firm at some risk,” said Jacob.
Marcus nodded. “Maybe great risk, I concur.”
“Also,” Jacob went on, “it’s not like he’s one of us really. His father was part of our inner circle, to be sure, but when Raoul Oscar died, the connection grew much thinner. His mother—well, she didn’t count. As for that disagreeable grandfather …”
“Yes, I understand, and quite agree.” Marcus drank his aquavit.
“And Raoul’s personality … arrogant, skeptical, not a family player. I never trusted him, or even liked him. Far too independent. And stubbornly so. Even when we gave him those few handout jobs to perform, he had to go around poking his nose everywhere.”
“And not really interested in Enskilda or any of our business ventures, no matter—”
“Or very interested in females, from what we have observed. Just the one so-called girlfriend and ten-minute ‘engagement’ perhaps, but that ended quickly enough. Who knew if that was even real? Or a clever camouflage, like all of them? And since then? Never a steady woman, definitely strange. And we will not permit queers in our family.”
Marcus nodded. “Too much risk all around. Practically speaking, he knows a little too much about our business. Our dealings with the Germans. And remember, he looks at matters from a very different angle. I cautioned you a long time ago”—he accepted a new round of drinks—“we never should have let him get so near to our private arrangements and our international dealings.”
“He cannot prove anything, of course.”
“True enough. Still, when I go off to the states to clean up things and try to get us off that nuisance FBI Blacklist, it would be most unfortunate if there were any ‘entanglements’ dangling whatsoever. And Raoul, let us face it, could create a few if he wished to.”
“I don’t think—”
“He is a purist ethically, isn’t he? The naïve fool!”
They sipped their aquavits, in their monogrammed glasses.
“Then we will do nothing on the Lybianka matter, agreed?”
“Agreed.”
“And if the shrewd PM or the king should ask our advice, our counsel?”
“Sympathy from a distance, neutrality from up close. Whatever the government wishes to do, we will respect that wish, but not push them in any way, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Will it look … odd? Or cold-blooded?”
“Oh, I think it will look patriotic, first and foremost. Our family and Enskilda Bank have always sought to look like, and act like, true Swedish patriots.”
A pause, while the grandfather clock ticked loudly.
“Poor fellow, though—Soviet prisons are not exactly a tea party.”
“He brought it all on himself. The kind of headstrong and stubborn fellow he was, and remained. Helping Jews! Imagine! Why? What business was it of his anyway?”
“Well,” Marcus considered, “his side of the family did have some Jewish blood, ages ago, before the conversion. And his aim may have been … idealistic.”
“In our day and age,” Jacob declared, “there is only room for aims that are realistic, determinedly realistic.”
“Come, let us take our drinks in to dinner, and not let the ladies complain of our usual lateness.”
The two gentlemen stood up.
Gellerman stopped, leaned back, read his pages. Too exaggerated? A convenient scene? Was there enough evidence to support this psychological picture, this 1945–46 “situation” of these tough Wallenbergs scheming for their self-protection and abandoning Raoul? Well, yes, there was, and if some of it was only circumstantial as yet, it was strongly circumstantial. Verify, only verify, Moritz Schlick had said, in Manny’s college reading. He recalled the aphoristic wisdom of the Austrian philosopher. Not an easy task, he told himself. Would he need Stockholm, Budapest, Moscow, to fill in the gaps, test his ideas? Or would Google do the job—well, fill in parts at least? … His imagination would do the rest.
He looked out at the Japanese crabapple tree, whose pink May blossoms made the month burst with delicate beauty.
Why was he getting involved this way, drawn in to Raoul’s ordeal and mysteries? The thesis may have sharpened Manny’s probe, and the surprising hidden memories unfolded to enhance the interest, true enough; and yet, was there more? Something deeper, which he didn’t know of? Was there something about Raoul and his situation(s), his outsider status, his sense of family exile, his apparent aloneness, that appealed especially to Manny? Well, he’d have to wait and see it through, work it through, and then understand, judge. Wallenberg was a personal conundrum wrapped in a mystery of history, which in itself drew in Manny the historian.
“Wallenberg and Gellerman,” he murmured to himself. “What a strange pairing.”
CHAPTER 3
The next day Manny played tennis at the indoor courts with his regular partner, Peter Harrison of the English department. They were a good match: roughly the same age of mid- sixties, the same sturdy five-foot-eight build, and had the same hearty stamina and competitive desire. Peter was a steady player, a crafty southpaw, and the two battled to a close match for an hour. Manny loved the sport, which he’d learned relatively late in life at age twenty-nine, and continued to absorb new aspects of strateg
y. Against this player, for example, he had to cope with high lobs from his backhand side, to his own backhand, and he had two choices: either to hit the ball with his weak backhand or to run around it and smash it with his stronger forehand, either cross-court, or down the line. Today the tendonitis in his forearm felt well enough to hit through, so Manny ran around the lob for his firm forehand hits and did well. They played a 6–6 set, and then ran to 8–6 in the tiebreaker, with Manny losing. They shook hands, chatted, arranged another match, and showered. Afterward, Peter asked what he was working on, and Manny found himself answering, “Oh, I think I’m onto a new project, something over in East Europe, but it’s a little too early to talk about it just yet.”
In a few minutes he was driving over to the college, body relaxed, spirit lifted—as from yoga—and he grew conscious of the taken-for-granted pleasures of this little town, the ease of daily acts, the rounds of sporting pleasures. Something like what Raoul had said about his life in Ann Arbor, in letters to his grandfather, including tennis. Immediately Manny’s sunny feeling diminished as he thought of that faraway young man wasting away in the Soviet prison, his harrowing two years there, and uncertain ending … Gripped by a darker feeling, Manny felt that faraway hand for the next few hours, before he came up again.
He sat in his office and read through the thesis draft once more, for Angela was coming to see him later. There was not much new in this reading, as he had expected. Raoul was still a great savior of Jews, etc., except for the brief few pages on that fanciful Budapest lady and her mad fantasy; and something else, buried in a long footnote: the sightings by those other prisoners. These were cited in a Swedish-Russian Working Group paper. Well, he’d have to check into that—maybe have Angela “research” it on Google, where “research” of fifteen minutes equalled fifteen hours of the old ways of pursuing a subject—and probably missed crucial tucked-away items. Also mentioned was an unpublished manuscript suggesting again that RW may have been that double spy working for the Germans and Americans, this one written by a Soviet émigré living in New York. He recalled that the U.S. News article was cowritten by a Hungarian émigré, and realized that conspiracy theory was an East European specialty, like one of their rich strudels or thick custards. Manny jotted down the information, and would check up on that as well.