Searching for Wallenberg

by Alan Lelchuk

  In a half hour they were alighting from the red-line Lybianka metro stop, and in the cool gray air, Natasha headed them across the wide street. “Here is the monster itself, Lybianka Prison, home of the old KGB, where all the best secrets—and acts—of Soviet horror have been kept and preserved.” A huge fortress of a building, a large square block of cement and stone, with small windows peering out over the square.

  “What is it now?”

  “Home of the new security force, the FSB.”

  As they ambled by, a Russian guard eyed them beneath his absurd thick cap, and Manny felt the first chill of the legendary infamy.

  “So this is where Wallenberg was kept,” he observed. “And killed.”

  She nodded. “Or perhaps they transferred him at the very end to Vladimir Prison, a few hours away, for his finish.”

  They strolled around the mountainous fortress in the somber light, and he was gripped by the Stalinist force of the architecture, an authoritarian block of death.

  “No file was ever found on the case. Do you think it still exists somewhere?”

  She gave him a skeptical look, and indicated the lower part of the building. “Down there, in the basement, there remain files locked away, but it’s so off-limits that most of today’s officials have no access, and they don’t even know what they have. That ‘lost’ file may very well be there, and probably is. No file is ever lost, just conveniently misplaced.”

  They walked up the street a few blocks, found a café, and sat for a coffee. Moscow was no Budapest for elegant cafés. He checked the list of four or five names he had given her and told her the priorities, and she explained her progress with each.

  “Come, at 6 p.m. I am introducing you to a friend of mine who works at night at a very interesting place. He is an archivist and historian, and knows a good deal about all sorts of Soviet matters.”

  Memorial House, later, was in another part of town, but the efficient crowded subway got them there in a half hour. They alighted at Pushkinskaya, walked fifteen minutes to an undistinguished side street, and halted at a modest three-story house. If Lybianka Prison was a lethal Mount Rushmore in the city, this Memorial House was a small, shabby triple-decker that belonged in South Boston. They entered, walked up to the first floor, saw posters on the walls of various Soviet political prisoners and noble dissenters, and rang at the door. They were buzzed in, and met a fellow who said to follow him down a small narrow corridor, off of which were pigeonhole rooms attended by researchers invariably smoking and poring over papers and computers.

  “Ah, there you are,” Natasha said, finding her man. “This is Nikita, Nikita Petrov.”

  Manny shook the man’s firm grip, gave him his name, and Nikita asked if he wanted tea or coffee. He chose tea, and Nikita went to make it. The room was not more than a cubbyhole, with a few computers on small desks. A man in shirtsleeves worked at one. On the walls were portraits of Gulag survivors and Soviet dissenters. In a minute Nikita returned, with tea in teacups for them, and he asked if Manny wanted to look around. Nikita was a black-haired man, handsome, in his late forties, and wore a Levi jacket and dungarees. Not exactly your Western historian dress code. Manny nodded and they proceeded. The house was divided into small rooms, mostly filled with research scholars working.

  “Everything to do with Stalin’s murders we try to document here. Letters about missing people, records of deaths, camp names, family inquiries, unknown victims, everything.” There seemed to be plenty of work to occupy this many people, as they walked about, finally entering a small room of odd objects in cases and bookshelves.

  Nikita explained their presence to the librarian, and said, “Our museum and library.”

  Manny walked amidst the windowed cases, noting a wooden nameplate from Perm, a pair of old shoes, a homemade knife, a deck of cards, a striped prisoner’s uniform, an abstract wooden sculpture made from twigs, pages from a tattered diary, a lined torn notebook, an old rusted wristwatch … These everyday objects were the poignant remains that had been retrieved and saved from the long horror show. Their simplicity moved him.

  “And once a year we have a contest for high school students across Russia, asking them to write an essay on some aspect of the Stalin years. Then we bring the winner and his parents for a week to Moscow, where they have never been. You see, many or most of them have never learned anything in the high schools about the Gulag. Or the truths about Stalin.”

  Presently they sat in his office and chatted some more. It was amazing to Manny that the entire building of researchers was devoted to the One Great Ordeal: Stalin’s purges, prisons, and murders. It turned out that it was the Germans and Americans who supported Memorial House. “The present regime tolerates us, since we don’t go after them; but for how long?”

  Before leaving, Manny showed Nikita the list of people he would like to see. He nodded at one, said he’d never get to see that one (RW’s interrogator), crossed off another as useless propaganda, and said another was of dubious use; he added a name, in case Manny went to Vladimir Prison. “And please forget all the nonsense about those later witnesses of Wallenberg, who claimed to see him in the Gulag somewhere; none has ever been verified or documented.” At the end of another forty-five minutes they said good-bye to the amiable fellow, who rose and said that if he could be of help, Manny should e-mail or call him.

  “Quite a place,” he commented.

  “Yes, it is very special. Most citizens do not know of it, even Muscovites.”

  Following the local tradition, they hailed a citizen taxi in the street—several cars immediately pulled over when they put out their hands—and went back to his hotel. Natasha and he parted, agreeing to see each other the next day, or else talk on the phone if she couldn’t make the conference. “I may be busy trying to find one of your spies to talk to,” she said. He nodded and went inside. He read the Moscow Times, thought about that Budapest woman, and took notes before falling off.

  The next day at the conference he drank coffee and tried to concentrate on the next set of speakers, realizing why he hardly ever attended such meetings. Too many speakers, too much to hold in your head at one time. At the intermission he was found and collared by the Soviet émigré bear and conspiracy specialist of the day before, who took him to the cafeteria and proceeded once again to play the same tune. RW was a Swedish playboy and dandy, and worked for the American OSS as well as probably the Germans. He said this with unassailable authority, no doubts or qualms. “I am trying to publish my long essay at Harvard. Do you happen to know Rick Lansing there? He has held my paper for over a year now, and I need to get him nudged a little!” I told him, happily, that I didn’t know Rick, and couldn’t help. Sagging perceptibly, he said, no matter, he’d send Manny the piece and he might be able to suggest another place to send it. When the afternoon session began, he felt relieved.

  In the evening he found Natasha at his hotel, waiting in the lobby. “I have found out that this one fellow, the KGB interrogator Daniel Pagliansky, is still alive and lives not far away from here, a short walk from Pushkinskaya, and I have found his phone number and called him; but his wife, who is actually alert and nice, says he is ill and doesn’t really want to speak with anyone. As for the others, this Dmitri is off somewhere, and …”

  He nodded, realized it was pretty futile, and invited her to dinner to reward her for her trouble. They went to a classy restaurant, The Pushkin, a fifteen-minute walk; and inside, over some superb borscht with sour cream and a wild boar entrée, they chatted more. This Nastasha was truly civilized, and had spent a few years at Indiana University, where she had honed her English. “I even taught two summers at Middlebury, a charming college and town.” She added, “Well, we still have two days before you leave, so maybe we can turn up something.”

  Two days later, his last day in town, he and Natasha decided to give it a shot, and simply go show up and knock on the door of the Pagliansky apartment. After asking their identity through the closed door, a bulky gentle
man of about sixty opened the door, asked them in cordially, and took their jackets. He inquired what they wanted. Natasha explained that Manny was an American writer who was working on a novel about World War II and the old days in Moscow in the 1940s. Just then there was a calling out from the other room, in Russian; the son smiled, used to such screaming, and said it was his father, who was angry that they had come after he and his wife had clearly refused Natasha’s requests twice on the phone!

  Gyorgi, the son, ushered them into a study, explaining, using Russian and body gestures, that they should take it easy, and asked specifically what Manny wanted to ask his father. He cited the Soviet and Moscow atmosphere in the forties, and perhaps a few questions about Wallenberg, the KGB …

  Gyorgi shook his head, told Natasha he could not ask about the latter two subjects—the old man would throw them out—and said to wait; Father was finishing lunch with Mother. He went to the adjoining room to see them, and perhaps pacify them.

  In the book-lined study, maybe nine by fourteen feet, Natasha and Manny stood and waited. He looked about at the bookshelves, the large glass-top desk, the numerous small photos on the shelves and desk. Voices came from the other room. On the wall bookshelf, he was startled to see a few books in Yiddish, and focused on the nineteenth-century novel by Mendele, which he had read decades ago in his old Hebrew school in Brownsville. He glanced through it, trying to recall his Yiddish reading. So this Daniel got around. Next, Manny saw a small photograph of a Soviet officer, handsome and vital. Was this the Daniel Pagliansky that was in the next room? He had an inclination to slip it into his pocket, as evidence of the meeting … On the desk, he viewed other old photos, the mother and father and small son in the playground … other military and personal photos … That youthful Daniel had been rugged, good-looking, energetic.

  The door opened from the adjoining room, and Gyorgi, escorting in a very old man, introducing his father, who proceeded slowly. The father sat down opposite Manny, in the guest chair, while he sat in his, at the son’s gesture. He was blind in one eye, his white hair was thin as a baby’s, the bones of his face were pushing forward from the taut covering of skin, and his visage was the mask of Death.

  “Why did you come here?!” he suddenly proclaimed in loud English, “after we had told her on the phone not to come!” He pounded the desk with his frail hand, shouting now. “Why do you Americans think you can come wherever you want, whether you are invited or not?!”

  Manny was shocked, by the English, by the declarations, by the death mask.

  “Well, it was my last opportunity to see you, as I am leaving very soon,” he said, surprisingly calm. “And to try to chat with you.”

  The old man looked at him savagely, and turned to his son for the full translation—even though he may have understood the words—who in turn waited to hear from Natasha.

  On an impulse, Manny said quietly, “You see, even though I am trained as a historian, I am writing a novel, and I wanted to get the atmosphere of the old days in Moscow, during the war years.”

  The old man eyed Manny skeptically, from beneath bushy eyebrows, and waited for the translators to finish their transaction.

  He waited a moment, considering Manny, who faced him squarely; he believed the old man was asking him to face his frightening face without flinching or turning away. Fair enough. Finally he said, in Russian, “The climate was special, despite the danger. We were all united against the Nazi threat.” He paused and added, “It was a great time in Russia.”

  Manny took in that Stalinist accolade, and cautioned himself about approaching the two taboo subjects. “And you were studying at the time—what? Where?”

  His hands had moved to the table, and one began to fidget, tremble. Parkinson’s? He offered, “Of course, I studied, at the gymnasium. Poetry. Mathematics. Architecture. Excellent school in those days. I am a trained architect, as is my wife.”

  “I see,” Manny said, nodding, exhaling, and remembering Wallenberg’s desires and training in the field of architecture.

  “So you studied poetry too in the gymnasium?”

  “Yes, of course. Especially German poetry I read, and enjoyed.”

  “Your German was fluent then?”

  Manny waited for the translations to go through.

  “Of course, one had to learn a language well. German was my second language, after English.”

  So that was how he and Raoul conversed, in German. “Oh, you studied English that early?”

  Pagliansky sneered at him. “Soviet education demanded high standards. Not like these days. I studied English in the first school.”

  Manny paused in appreciation, staring at him; his rage had receded as he had entered into the conversation. Manny got up and found the Mendele book and brought it to the desk. “I read this in my Hebrew school in Brooklyn, a Sholem Aleichem Bund school. It was good.”

  The old man looked at him with new interest. “You can read Yiddish?”

  “Well, I did then, but probably not now. But Mendele was pretty good, as I recall.”

  He nodded, and continued in English, “In Brooklyn? You came from there? I used to read the writers from Brooklyn from the 1930s—Michael Gold, Daniel Fuchs.”

  Manny stared at this amazing, ghostly bag of bones, who was startling him with his memory, his education, his precision.

  “Why?”

  “To learn the idiom, of course. Reading those novels was the easiest way to obtain the idiom.”

  No wonder they had picked this fellow for Raoul! he thought. A multipurpose brilliant talent.

  “I didn’t know they had Bund schools over there,” Pagliansky murmured in Russian to his son. “So you are Jewish yourself?”

  “Yes,” I acknowledged. “Like yourself.”

  He shrugged. “Religion played no part in our education, you understand.”

  “I understand. I am not religious either.”

  “So tell me,” he said in Russian, “what sort of book are you writing?”

  “A novel.”

  “Fiction?”

  “Yes, fiction.”

  Pagliansky nodded, half dismissing it, he thought, half relieved.

  “But you have written histories before this?”

  “Yes. Would you like to see one?”

  “Why not?” he said in English, before speaking in Russian to his son, who then said to him, “Father is tired. He should go rest now. You must leave.”

  Manny stood up as the old man did, and put out his hand; he put out his limp one. He was very small. Age had shrunk him to less than five feet. “Thank you, I enjoyed our chat.”

  He nodded, and they went into the adjoining hallway, where their coats were hung on a clothes tree. The son Gyorgi handed the coats to them, and as Manny was getting his on, the old man suddenly spit out something in Russian.

  “What did he say?”

  The son smiled sheepishly, while Natasha raised her eyes. “Fuck off!” Gyorgi added in Russian, apologetically. “He says that to me quite frequently too, so please don’t take it too personally. His mind …”

  Manny didn’t know how to take it, but thought it half-comical, half-serious.

  “If you can bring a book next time, that would be good,” said Gyorgi.

  “Next time?” Manny repeated low. But he was leaving the next day …

  As they turned, the old man again offered his fierce cry of fuck off! (in Russian). Nashasha smiled as they shook Gyorgi’s hand and thanked him. He told Natasha to call him in the next day or two.

  Outside the apartment, walking down the large renovated staircase, Natasha said, “Quite a meeting. You may have to stay on a few days now …”

  Several hours later, they returned to Memorial House, and indeed were able to catch their friendly mentor, Nikita Petrov. They told him of their lucky meeting with Pagliansky.

  “What? Are you sure it was him? No one has been able to see him from the West, at all, ever. In 1991 the KGB called him in, here in Moscow, and tried
to put questions to him about that period, without judging him, and he said, ‘I remember nothing.’ And that was it; they never bothered with him again. And a few years ago, Guy von Dardel, Wallenberg’s half brother, came from Switzerland to meet him, but Paglainsky never opened the door. So this is quite extraordinary. Did he tell you anything of value?”

  “Nothing direct, but indirectly it was of great value, I believe.”

  “He even agreed to see us again,” said Natasha. “But the professor is scheduled to leave in a day.”

  “Well, maybe you should think about it? …”

  “Yes, maybe I should.” Manny considered his great good luck and asked, “Do you think he also did actually torture Wallenberg? Or participate?”

  Nikita shook his head. “No, no. The KGB had professional medical persons who were trained specifically in torture; they knew all the methods and devices. They were a separate branch from the regular interrogators like Daniel.”

  “I see,” Manny said, comforted somewhat, as he looked at one of those dissident meeting posters from post-Stalinist days on a bulletin board.

  “You must write up your interview; it is a first,” Nikita urged.

  Walking back to Pushkinskaya with Natasha, he felt a certain quiet glow at their small victory, which Nikita had verified. “You did well,” he told her.

  “You mean we did well,” she replied, “Will it be of real use for your work?”

  “I don’t know yet,” he said, “but when I think it over, and maybe start to figure it out, I will let you know.”

  They reached the black marble statue of Pushkin, surrounded by people waiting for friends. He thought it best to walk alone to his hotel, to gather and digest the information unto himself. He explained this to Natasha, and she said, “I will call Gyorgy in a few hours and see how the father reacted afterward, and when he might be free again to see you. Then you can make up your own mind about leaving tomorrow afternoon or not.”