by Alan Lelchuk
As he departed, Miklös offered, “So tell me, are we to be forgiven for our sins because of this special time of chaos?”
“Oh, I thought we would be charged doubly for our current immorality, until I met a few priests the other evening, with their collars, and pants, off!”
Everyone laughed and toasted that quip, though Raoul barely smiled.
Gellerman got up, walked from his study, came back, read through his pages. Was he being too blunt, too coarse? Was he overreaching, moving beyond what his evidence had suggested? After all, what and where was his hard evidence? … Yes, he had surmised something of that gayness himself, and built on that supposition with the confirmation from the historian and the words of the trusted journalist Mária E. But still, nothing hard existed … He pondered his text, his imagined scenario. Supposing it were true, more or less, what he was inventing. Would Manny want to go on record with it? If he were writing a shadow thesis or drama like the one he was perhaps creating in this series of invented scenes, would he choose to go public with these radical findings, unsettling conclusions? Probably not. After all, which world did Raoul W. deserve? That vulgar, amoral, sensation-crazed media world that dominated the masses, or that hypocritical government and family world that had abandoned him in the first place? Which Raoul? The idealized Raoul who was pure and saintly, or the truer Raoul who was flawed and tainted? (Both existed.) The choice was hardly a choice; for Manny had grown steadily closer to Wallenberg, as he understood him more, climbed inside his skin. No, he would not really want to betray him to that larger world. But in doing that, would he not be betraying the historian Gellerman? And going against the request of the intrepid ghost?
The interpretation of Raoul through that franker lens gave him even more of an outsider status, Manny realized, which in turn fit in well with his abandonment in Soviet prison by the Wallenberg family; after all, he was more useful tucked away in Lybianka than alive and well in Sweden. Through his reading and research, Gellerman had learned a good deal about the family dynasty of that time. It wasn’t a pretty story. The Enskilda Bank in Stockholm, a Wallenberg institution for centuries, had been the main banking institution in Scandanavia for the Nazis; there they were free to to use their various accounts, transfer monies, etc. Their European laundering machine. From the Wallenberg SKF mines in the north, the Nazis were able to purchase coal and iron ore, and from their factories, wheel bearings for their airplanes and tanks. In other words, the Nazis and the Wallenbergs were intertwined and mutually dependent, financially and practically. Without them and their resources, the Nazi war machine would have had a much more difficult time proceeding across Europe. Unfortunately for Raoul, he knew a good deal about that murky activity, which was borderline legal, brazenly unethical.
And later after the war, that wartime marriage of convenience, in “neutral” Sweden, created a practical problem for the Wallenbergs in the Allied countries. In America, they were put on the FBI list of about fifty banned companies that were off-limits to do business here. This occurred in 1945, just when Raoul was taken to Lybianka by the Soviets, and it was decided by cousins Marcus and Jacob that one of them had to go to the States and make a lobbying pitch, which would include a bribe, to get the Wallenbergs off of that list. It would not help much if Raoul—a loose canon, a man of morality and a family outlaw, as well as a figure of growing international reputation—were around and available to be called upon as a witness, to speak to the FBI, the media, American political leaders. On the outside, Raoul might be a dangerous figure for the Wallenberg dynasty. On the inside, in a Soviet prison, however, without voice or presence, armed only with a noble reputation for the family name, Raoul could be very helpful. So if he were to linger there, invisible, unheard, until his end, Marcus and Jacob would not mind too much, and could lament his misfortune.
And as for the Swedish government? There too the family could have played a strong influence. Yes, the government had its own business interests and military fears relating to the Soviets, and they were also feeling pressured by their own “neutral” stance amidst their angry Norwegian and Danish friends. Cowardice, pragmatism—and maybe guilt?—were built in to their 1945 diplomatic decision making. Plus they had an incompetent and stubborn foreign minister. Still and all, if they had they been pushed hard by the Wallenbergs— the Swedish Rockefellers in money, power, and prominence—the government would have been hard pressed not to seek an exchange for Raoul (as the Swiss, the Italians, and the Spanish had done). All the more so since the Swedes had discovered an important Russian mole high up in their military, whom the Soviets badly wanted back (and received, for the asking!). But the government did nothing, made no exchange, voiced no public outrage, made no fuss, and received no prodding from Marcus and Jacob, or from the King, who might have acted if he had gotten a signal from the Wallenbergs.
Thus, Raoul, a family member, a nation’s diplomat, a distinguished gentleman, was sacrificed, left to rot in Lybianka. This was not a pretty chapter in Swedish history.
Nor would it be an easy dilemma for Gellerman, if the dilemma came to its point of no return, to have to choose between the intellectual historian (in himself) and the personal gatekeeper of Raoul. To choose between the obligations of his history profession and the personal ethics of biographical protection? How would this play out in himself? Manny wondered …
CHAPTER 9
When you entered the ballpark in the evening, at twilight, and walked up the grandstand ramp and first viewed the oval of grassy green, it was a return to the countryside and a return to childhood for Gellerman. The crowd was still settling in, the blue-gray sky was pink striped, and the ballplayers were just finishing up their infield practice, with fungo hits to the outfielders, infielders fielding ground balls, the sounds of balls hitting wood and smacking leather.
“Hey, these seats are pretty good,” Manny complimented Norm, whose brother had given him the four company seats, and whose son was a pal of Josh’s. “Maybe we should have brought our gloves just in case of a line drive foul.”
“Do you really think we have a chance, Dad?” Josh asked, excited.
“Why not?” Manny answered.
The lower grandstand seats were behind third; the two boys were sitting next to each other, and the fathers, alongside. “Yeah, we might just get a ball here.”
Fenway Park was much like the old Ebbets Field, a small bandstand of a park where the stands were very close to the field, and the fans had an intimacy with the players. (Always surprising, how young the players looked!) For Manny, it was a return to his boyhood in Brooklyn, 1947, where he had gone to many Dodgers games as a young boy, courtesy of his older friend, a kind of big brother, who had been wounded in the war and thus got in free to the games, wearing his uniform. And in 1947 he had gotten to see Jackie Robinson in his first season, when he played first base, and Manny and Burt, his big brother friend with the Purple Heart, sat behind first, mostly in empty boxes during the weekday games. It had been exciting for nine-year-old Manny to see Jackie play baseball, his style so daring, his skills so unusual—apart from his being the only ebony player in a sea of white faces.
“I actually prefer sitting behind third for foul balls,” Norm said, “because there are more right-handed pitchers, and therefore you have many left-handed hitters in the lineup, who will foul balls over here. Only they can come hard.”
“Yeah, I see what you mean; you have a point.”
Manny enjoyed Norm, an emergency room doctor at the college hospital, because he knew his baseball, and was laid back, not one of the crazy driven Jews. And his son, Dan Y., was easygoing too, and a great friend of Josh’s.
The Red Sox were playing arch-rival Yankees, and for Manny it was a return to the old Dodgers-Giant games or Dodgers-Yankee World Series games. Any kid who had rooted in those days, and gotten to see any of those games, had had a rare treat, a memory not to be forgotten. That was baseball played at the highest level, a game of native excellence and unusual subtleties
.
“No matter how much big money, TV, and agents have ruined this game,” Manny said, “when you see the players out on the field for the actual game, it’s a dream.”
“Yeah, it’s still the best, no doubt.”
The instant the boys spotted a vendor in white, they asked for hot dogs and soda, and Manny got them for the fathers too.
The heat from youth rose in his adult bones, and Gellerman felt strongly present in the here and now, a passionate moment, amidst the filling crowd and sparkling baseball diamond. And as the crowd stood and roared in unison as the home team took the field, Manny felt at home, nestled and easy, and oddly free. If he closed his eyes he could actually see Jackie and Pee Wee in their soft white and blues down around second, waiting for the final practice throw from the catcher. He wondered, What did all this have to do with his life now?
The pitcher threw the first pitch; you could hear the spinning ball thwack in the catcher’s mitt, and Josh said, “Wow, Dad, he’s fast!”
He was right too; this young gunner was fast, and when the batter actually made contact with the fourth pitch, it was indeed a foul, toward them over third! Over their heads, fortunately, as it landed with a quick thud!
Presently, Manny saw in his memory Jackie tormenting Ewell “The Whip” Blackwell, who was thirty feet down from third base, arms wide out, body ready to spring; he sensed the vivid presence of the ebony outsider, daring the pitcher to throw to third to try to keep him from stealing home. Not merely an outsider, but a black outlaw too. And Manny sensed Raoul in Budapest the same way—not merely an outsider but a daring outlaw as well, threatening the Arrow Cross, the Nazis, even the conventional Swedes, with his will, his gutsy mission, his intimate ways. Oh, Manny knew how crazy this comparison was, how personal, but he felt its truthfulness. There was something untamed in both, a passionate gene of individual will. Implacable will.
The batter cracked the ball, and Manny could tell immediately that it was a line drive. Everyone stood, hoping it was going out of the park, but the center fielder was in perfect position. The crowd sighed and sat.
Even the sound of their names, Robinson and Wallenberg, suggested some association, albeit a mysterious one. And Gellerman had come to know, or believe, that certain sounds, certain truths resided deep down in himself, and they had little to do with logic or external reality. They simply emerged from his central nervous system, crisscrossing out of the past, and waited for him to recognize and accept them. His truths. And here was one: this curious affinity between the gutsy Swedish diplomat and the daring American ballplayer; 1945 Budapest and 1947 Brooklyn. A most unlikely pairing of persons and towns.
The crowd grew suddenly, terribly hushed, as a Yankee hitter smacked a three-run homer over the Green Monster. A perfect gloom settled over the large crowd, which slowly turned into a kind of mourning as the Yankees began pounding the ball and running up the score … Just like the old days, when the old Yankees pounded the ball against all opponents … Many found himself staying back in youth, with Robinson and the Dodgers, and that 1947 Brooklyn of small shops and cozy neighborhoods and electric trolleys. Not very different from the current Budapest of zigzagging trams and small pastry shops and cracked sidewalks …
While Manny meandered in his thoughts, the lights came on, and the green diamond had a bright sheen to it. Norm was talking about the pitcher, and Manny nodded, trying to catch up. “He loses his fastball after a few innings, right?” Manny responded, “Yeah, I think so.” How odd, that here at the ballpark at night, he should notice such unlikely symmetries; and that he should yield himself up to this one. Jackie and Raoul stirred him, and he felt he understood the Swede in a new way now, via his own native youthful hero.
“Tell me, Dad,” Josh said on the drive back, “Was Ebbets Field really like Fenway Park?”
How did his sports-innocent Josh know about that old field? “Certain similarities, yes. Both small and intimate parks, with the fans up close. But how did you know about Ebbets Field?”
Josh shook his head in dismay. “Daad!”
Driving home to New Hampshire in the soft but now drizzly night, Manny felt a kind of surge from his new feeling, and odd insight. Cultures and families had their outsiders, and those outsiders or outlaws made little sense outside those spheres. So too, through his pairing of Jackie and Raoul Manny understood Wallenberg better. The wiper blades slapped back and forth, the rain droplets appeared and vanished, the boys were chattering, and Norm was saying something, but Manny was elsewhere, far away. Where was this journey taking him? he wondered anew …
During the next few days he was in a quandary about what to do next, especially as the woman from Budapest had written him an e-mail asking when he was returning. A good question, along with the other questions swarming in his head. So he did what he usually did when he was baffled and excited: he walked over to the small redbrick Hood Museum of Art on the campus, a rectangular gem squeezed between a residence hall and the Hopkins Center for the Arts. There, in the large central viewing room on the ground floor, he walked amidst the huge Assyrian reliefs, contemplating their origins. Six of those ten- to twelve-foot-high reliefs were on permanent display, thanks to a Dartmouth alum who had been a missionary in Iraq in 1856, who reportedly cut the reliefs down from one-foot to three-inch thickness and arranged for them to be packed and shipped across the Syrian desert by camel caravan to Alexandria and then by sea to America. Another six reliefs were part of a visiting show. These panels served as decorations for walls of palaces and monumental buildings. He stopped and studied the details from Genie with Pail and Date-Palm Spathe and King, a relief from the Northwest Palace of Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BC). Manny was taken by the serenity of the pose, the lines of detail on the armor, the austere beard and stylized hair, the smooth bronze terra-cotta finish. A calm and sure king. In another he observed the hunting and battle scenes, created with meticulous detail, and yet affording the same serene impression. Now, here, the long distance of ancient history seemed closer, and those Assyrian figures, behind the masks, much more human … Manny felt calmer, surer.
Manny had an impulse, a travel whim, but first he decided to view at home a Wallenberg video that he had once seen, early on in his inquiry, and forgotten about. It was a European documentary about Raoul, in which Lars Berg, a colleague in the Swedish legation, spoke of a meeting between Wallenberg and Eichmann, something Manny had wondered about. And there was Berg, about sixty, recalling the meeting that he had set up at his apartment in Budapest. Manny watched it with interest, and still had his doubts … No one else had ever witnessed such a meeting, or even mentioned it. In it, Lars Berg says little about what transpired. Had it in fact happened? Could he have made it up? … Why? Afterward, Gellerman went into the living room, sat down in his leather chair, leaned back, and pictured a scene between the pair. But he found that he was not yet ready to write the scene, not sure yet how to imagine Raoul negotiating over the “banality of evil.” He got onto the Internet and searched for flights. Budapest beckoned.
Before taking off, however, Manny attended a party for the graduates of the master’s program. This included, of course, Angela, who was accompanied by her dad to the graduation. Her thesis had turned out just fine: well written, well reasoned, a good accounting of RW and his achievements; the more eccentric aspects of the history, like the dubious lady of Budapest, were set down in footnotes. After the graduation ceremony, the pious talks and inflated honorary degrees (one given to a corporate mogul and donor who had contributed to the partial financial meltdown), the party was held in the faculty room of the Hopkins Center, the performing arts center of Dartmouth.
Taking a beer and avocado dip outside to the sunshiney terrace, he immediately was met by Angela, looking like a tulip blooming in her pink suit and broad hat, and with her was Jonas Anderson, her father.
After introductions, the tall, angular, white-haired lawyer, dressed smartly in a cord suit and yellow tie, thanked Gellerman for all he had don
e for his daughter. He draped his arm around her. “You were a great guide for her.”
For some reason Manny thought of the movie Chinatown, but only said, “Well, she did the work, and a good deal of research, interesting research.”
“I know. I paid for those trips.” He laughed cordially. “I am half Swedish, you know. And so I had my own interest in Mr. Wallenberg.”
“Yes, she mentioned your original enthusiasm and encouragement.”
“Well,” he said, drinking white wine, “We all wondered what had happened to the poor soul. Still no satisfying answer, I gather. Maybe one day the Swedes will open up—when we are all safely tucked away in our graves.”
Angela inserted, “Or maybe there will come along a trustworthy Russian defector, who can supply some more definite answers.”
As if on cue, we all paused, as though to drink in the pastoral scene, the summery June air, the view of the green with rows of white folding chairs and the large striped tent, the steepled Baker Library in the far end, and perched on the hillside, the three oldest white academic buildings, like Ivy judges.
“Did you ever think he lived on beyond his prison years?” Jonas asked.
“Oh, I don’t think so; at least it’s highly doubtful. But who really knows?”
“Yes,” he agreed, “who knows?”
“So many different sightings, by so many different prisoners,” Angela mused. “Maybe one of them was onto something.”
“Could very well be.”
“An old man Wallenberg living on somewhere, off in some remote region,” Manny smiled. “It’s an interesting fantasy. Or reality.”
“With the Swedish government paying him a handsome pension to stay put!” said Jonas.
“Or his family paying him a handsome bribe to stay put,” Manny added, to everyone’s mirth.
“Say,” Jonas offered, “would you like to join us for dinner? Angela’s half brother is coming up, and her aunt, a stern character, and we would love to have you along.”