Searching for Wallenberg

by Alan Lelchuk

  In response, he always shook his head steadily, said very little, but occasionally asked for a little medicine, some fresh meat or vegetables, and a real doctor. (He spoke in German, which one agent usually knew, and in his simple Russian.) They laughed and said, of course, help was on the way. They would be arriving quite soon, here in Perm, in the middle of nowhere, just another few months, hold on. From teasing they turned serious, “But if you tell us the truth about Budapest, and where you have kept hidden all those old paintings and Jew jewelry all these years, then a doctor can be found. And you will see Sweden again.”

  Once he trusted me, he asked to see a Swedish newspaper, if I could bring one, and every few months I managed to, through a Moscow friend who asked a foreign office assistant. I would bring a newspaper, like Dagens Nyheter, and also some architecture magazines. (I recall an old Arkitektur, and Forum, which he pored over carefully.) Oh, yes, I remember something else he wished for, a photograph of the Stockholm city library, the “stadsbibliotek,” by the architect Asplund. (I wrote down these names.) Sometimes he would sit and draw sketches on rough sheets of paper for an addition to that oddly shaped building, a sort of top hat housing a circular library, his reading room in childhood, and asked me to save them for him. How strange! But I put them in an old burlap feed bag and set it in the small animal shelter. A mistake.

  Many of the prisoners were beaten, almost by habit, by the more veteran guards, when they had little to do, but mostly he was left alone, a tottering sick old man. Once, however, early in maybe 1972, I did see a guard hitting him, for no reason or other, and I interceded, bribing the brute. His eyes were astonished, and he had a bloody mouth—nothing serious. I aided him. That’s when he started to believe in me. You see, he had been transferred from Vladimir Prison to this hellhole in the Urals, where there was no accountability whatsoever. Just the concrete blocks, the prisoners, the guards. Well, actually, for a few years he did have a friend in there, a general in the Soviet Army, a Ukranian from Khartov who had been a hero in the Great War, but who had spoken out afterward against the injustices of his superior; he was warned, but again protested about the Russian’s brutality and stupidity, so he was sentenced to six years in Perm. This General, Artunian, was civilized, and he and the old man hit it off, and for several years they were friendly, before the general was released.

  But most of the time my Swedish old man was a man alone, forlorn in a foreign country and penal colony, gradually getting sicker, coughing, a thin bag of bones, until one day he didn’t awake in the morning. I think this was as late as 1981 or ’82, and that was the end of him. When they took him away, no one named him on the death certificate, of course; he was simply prisoner number 71392. That’s the way it went, you see—nameless in prison, nameless in death. I missed him. Truly. And when I went to find that burlap bag, it had feed in it; when I checked with the guard, he said he had tossed those papers into the incinerator; some fool had filled a good feed bag with that paper nonsense!

  That’s what I remember; that’s what I told the investigating commission in 1991 that asked me to tell what I might have known about a Swedish prisoner in Perm. He was there, all right, I can swear to that.

  Gellerman, exhausted, got up and wandered through the long house to the kitchen, to make himself a coffee. He felt as though he had been the pained witness, the narrating guard. He checked the plants and saw they needed water. He filled a small pitcher and watered three plants. (The twenty-five-year-old towering avocado, started by his ex-wife from a pit, was scraping the ceiling, but leaning over like a leafy Tower of Pisa.) When the coffee was ready, he took it back to his study and reread his scene. Manny thought it conveyed basic facts, based on what he knew about Perm and Wallenberg—if RW had survived beyond Lybianka and Vladimir. With those more than fifty witness “sightings,” the survival was a possibility, and Manny chose Perm because he had met, in Moscow, the son of the real Ukranian general from Khartov who had been imprisoned there for standing up to authority. If RW had survived the despair, the loneliness, the determination of the old RW—had he captured it adequately?—stood in contrast to the heinous moral delinquency of the W. family and the Stockholm government. What a state of rotten Swedish affairs! Who in innocent America could understand such moral and physical geography, such years of Soviet ruin and Swedish decay? …

  The cheery town of Hanover was like a little domestic park, with one commercial main street and adjoining roads of suburban homes, and well-behaved citizens, a site to view for the anthropologists (or any wild animals), to examine and muse over. As Gellerman performed his errands at one of the four banks and the redbrick post office, passing the overpolite pedestrians, he thought how important it was to keep in his mind the rougher geography and fate of Raoul. So in his mind he created a montage, superimposing the dark streets of Budapest and the concrete fortresses of Lybianka and Vladimir Prisons over this dainty dollhouse town of neat streets, small shops, boutiques, and banks. Over the tidy sidewalks and cheery shoppers, he placed the burly Slavic types, the gloomy Hungarians, the choppy streets. Quite a feat of his imagination, if he kept it up. But he felt it was necessary, a kind of backup storage unit of the imagination, akin to backing up your a disk. Gulag camps over white Georgian buildings, patrolling secret police over patrolling meter maids.

  Could he keep Wallenberg firmly in place in this very polite topography, Manny wondered, walking over to Rosey Jekes coffee shop?

  Over coffee he opened his laptop, and, via his airport card, there appeared the words of the lady from Budapest:

  Dear Professor,

  I have worked hard to gather all my materials and have them ready for you. I am almost done, and I want to know when you are returning? Have you made a date yet? Budapest is hot, but out here in the countryside, it is much cooler. Of course, we can work here, where there is space and quiet.

  Z.

  He shook his head, drank his coffee, and considered matters. Here in the dingy basement coffee shop, downstairs from the clothing shop with the same name, Manny observed a round black table with a group from the Tuck School of Business, their voices loud, discussing a business policy paper; and at another, a tall gentleman of sixty with whom he had once had a sharp political argument, when the ex-New Yorker began lauding Reagan as the greatest modern president. It never failed to surprise Manny when a Jew was an arch conservative; but after Podhoretz and his betrayal of the liberal Commentary, anything was possible.

  Here in the middle of nowhere, he knew he had to answer the lady, feeling reluctance but also a certain inevitable pull, like an RW magnet drawing him. So he wrote her:

  Yes, my new friend, I shall be booking my ticket soon, so gather your wits and papers and I will gather my resolve. You see, summertime in New Hampshire—I always feel a bit lazy, seduced by the weather, like some Monarch butterfly hanging around and waiting for the milkweed stalks to appear, before it takes off for Mexico.

  Manny G

  He drank up, not minding the absurdity of his metaphor, and trekked to the tennis courts to practice his serve, before his match arrived in twenty minutes. He never warmed up enough, and usually paid for it early on in the first set.

  After a competitive match, of split sets, 4–6 and 6–3, he took a shower and checked his e-mail from the college. Surprisingly, he opened a note from a stranger in Sweden:

  I said too much to you, Professor, in my Stockholm meeting, and have been exiled to a tiny branch of the bank, in a remote town. If I say a word more, I will lose my job entirely. I have a family and cannot afford any free exchange. May I therefore wish you luck in pursuing your goal, of finding out what really happened to RW and why it was never investigated properly in the Swedish media. Is it a true mystery, or is it a true cover up?

  Peter Magnusson (pseudonym)

  Gellerman, astonished, reread the message, absorbing the news. Now Magnuson had been warned, just as he had warned Manny.

  He walked over to the inn, bought a New York Times, and settled
to read in the formal lounge, where he felt hidden out of view in a corner wing chair.

  The front page had its usual column on the Iraq war, with a new suicide bombing in a market in Baghdad, killing sixty Iraqis and five more American soldiers. This had become the daily fare, more or less, and the American total was now close to three thousand. As for the Iraqis, was it two hundred thousand or more? Who could tell? In another column, a feature story on the new Asian gangs in big cities like LA and NY, and their taking on the Latino gangs. The number of deaths had risen sharply in the past year. Manny read a few more pieces, then turned to the Arts section, where there was a huge review on The Sopranos, and a particularly violent episode. Death and violence were not only in the air; they saturated the climate. Wherever you went—in the streets, in the media, or in classroom subjects—violence was hot, so much so that you took it for granted, maybe even valued it, hungered for it, like some sort of instant high sugar food. Consider the native movies, the advertisements, the vast print dedicated to The Sopranos. Was this the America of Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman? Or was it the America of the Wild West and the slaughtering of the Indians, updated with our wars, our gangs, our HBO shows?

  He got up and took a walk around the back to Lebanon Street, and down toward the large stone Catholic Church on the corner, where he stopped and looked in and saw the priest talking to a few parishioners. He recalled a couple of favorite Graham Greene stories about Catholicism: “The Hint of an Explanation,” “The Basement Room.” He walked up the narrow street, turned the corner at the hidden hostel, and ambled past the town library; then, he went back up onto Main Street, crossed over and walked past the Foodstop Gas Station, and made his way down and up School Street, nodding hello to a passing stranger. In a half mile or so, he marched up the hill to his favorite site, a small obscure park, kept hidden by shrubs and trees, on the right (northern) side. A park that no one but occasional dog owners set foot in. He sat on a wooden bench, serenaded by the chirping birds, smelling the freshly cut grass, and focused on his European plan. Which was what? Well, at least he had researched some handwriting specialists in Boston and the Cape. A good start.

  CHAPTER 15

  A few days later Manny attended a college talk on randomness by an old friend from Jerusalem, and Maya put on a good show, in the large auditorium, to about 150 students. Apart from talking freely from notes, she used a variety of video charts and graphs—no PowerPoint, thank god—and played clever games with the audience, showing how it was the predictable patterns that they were looking for and expecting, for answers to many things. Through an examination of World War II war codes and code breakers, charts with numbers on them, and various multiple choice questions, Maya pushed forward, with wit and intelligence, explaining to the attentive audience how much they were subject to expected patterns of behavior. And how they therefore imagined things that weren’t really there. The best example was the idea of “hot streaks” in basketball, studied by the psychologist Amos Twersky, which proved that there was no such thing as hot streaks, but rather, just the ordinary shooting percentages over the course of the game. Manny, a hot-streak set-shot artist as a high school player, smiled at that. But he did appreciate the value and independence of the truly random, in nature and human nature, that she was emphasizing.

  Sitting there, in the modern Filene Auditorium, its hard woods lit softly by indirect lighting, Manny felt the Easy Life pour through and over him, like light rain from a sun shower blessing him, as he listened to the question and answer period and the chatter. Academic life was the soft green oasis in the midst of the dark topography of the Iraq war, Sudan genocide, African famine, Guantanamo torture, Russian assassination, immigration border battles— those terrible woes of the world which were exciting to argue and read about, fret over and forget, here on this remote college isle. Why ever retire, when this life meant a permanent ongoing retirement, in wireless pastel rooms and softly lit air-conditioned auditoriums amidst innocent students and civilized profs? And engulfed by the latest Macs and great books, available for a year at a time.

  Afterward, body rested, mind refreshed, he congratulated Maya, made a date to see her later, and walked outside in the warm sunshine.

  Later in the afternoon, at the bar in the inn, he had a beer with his cynical colleague, the lively European historian, Tom Jameson.

  “Here’s the question,” Manny said. “This may be—no, probably is—a wild goose chase, returning to see the mad lady over there. But there is something about her fantasy, or her devotion to her fantasy, that is intriguing, though I don’t know what it is. So I shouldn’t go, right?”

  The ruddy-faced fellow replied, “So you should go, precisely for the reasons you give. That you are intrigued, but you don’t know by what; and also, that you are aware of her possible fantasy. Otherwise,” he smiled, “you will stay around here, play tennis, vacation in Maine, do your routine, and miss all the fun of the hunt, even if it leads … nowhere.”

  “So I should go for the fun of the hunt?” Manny smiled.

  “You will always wonder if it could have led somewhere. Now you get both, a possible answer to your question, or a closing down of that path. And don’t forget, crazy people can lead you to doors that you wouldn’t get to with reasonable people. And in a case like this, of unsolved mysteries, holes everywhere, reason will only get you so far. Believe me, I know about that. Besides, you get a free trip to an exotic country. Any good wines over there these days?”

  While Manny talked about the Tokaj dry white wine, his thoughts stayed with his colleague’s words about crazy versus sane.

  “Are you going to publish a book or an article about this?”

  Manny shrugged his shoulders.

  “Well, you’ll need to; don’t do all this work for nothing. And by the way, what about that Swedish warning? Did that lead anywhere?”

  “No, not in the end. Except that the fellow wrote to tell me he’d been banished from the Enskilda Bank in Stockholm.”

  “Really?” His friend fixed him. “You sure he wasn’t playing you?”

  Manny nodded. “Could be. Though I don’t know why.”

  “For the sake of playing an American; these days that’s a great sport, all around the world,” Tom drained his glass, “when they are not shooting you.”

  Budapest in late August was hot, not quite like New York with its humidity, but hot enough. Fortunately, he was whisked away to a little village down the Danube about forty-five minutes from the city, called Kismaros. Hardly a village, just one general place, with a bar and an outdoor eating patio. She took him to her surprisingly comfortable house up a small hillside, and, over tea, ushered him into a large living room with a rectangular wooden table in the center. There, she had laid out piles of papers in careful order.

  Is this what it had come to, he wondered, sheaves of papers from a weird woman about a probable (or improbable) fantasy life of hers, in some remote village in Hungary? And making sense out of these piles was supposed to be his task? Who was the crazier one, she or he? …

  Beaming, she said, “It is not done yet, you see,” and she pointed to several bulky cartons over by the windows, “but it is a start.”

  “Yes, it is a start.”

  “We will have to arrange regular working hours—do you prefer mornings, with an afternoon break, or mornings sleeping late and work during afternoon hours?”

  More wild words. He walked around the modest living room, with the simple 1940s upholstered chairs and a stuffed divan, and the odd smells …

  “Well, we can look into that, yes. How often do you come here? And does Dora come here too?”

  She took two steps closer to him, her face animated. “So you do like Dora? Yes, she is wonderful. So unlike me,”—she giggled—“in every way!”

  Manny smiled at the humor. (Was it humor?) “How long have you had this place? It looks very well lived in.”

  “Do you like it? Americans are used to so much comfort; I didn’t think you woul
d think much of it. It was mother and father’s, used for retreats … escapes.”

  Digesting that, he gazed at books in the windowed bookcase. Histories, geographies, classics like Gibbon and Spengler; literature of Schiller and Goethe, novels (Márai, Möricz, and Kosztolányi, Steinbeck and Hemingway, Selma Lagerlöf and Sigrid Undset), even plays by Strindberg, Lessing, and Ibsen—a real collection.

  “You approve?” she asked, over his shoulder.

  “Well, it’s certainly various.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Diverse, many different kinds.”

  “Yes, they were readers, and so am I.” She smiled. “The world is different now, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “So we will start on Monday. Tomorrow I have a surprise for you, back in town.”

  “A surprise? What is it?”

  “But it wouldn’t be a surprise then, would it? Come, I will get you a drink; white wine perhaps? And while I warm up dinner, already cooked, you can read my preface, or introduction, yes?”

  Caught unawares, he accepted the folder, and was led over into the wing chair, where he sat and opened the folder. Amusing, for sure, he figured.

  Momentarily, he was brought a glass of the dry wine, with a wedge of cheese on a cracker. She smiled and said, “I have had my pages translated for you, of course.”