Searching for Wallenberg

by Alan Lelchuk

  Where did he stand now? he wondered the next day, riding his bicycle along the river. The late sun glinted off the Connecticut, and he wore his shade visor over his helmet. A Martian with a beard he appeared. He rode the bicycle leisurely, a good pace for mulling things over. Clearly, just now he was in limbo, waiting to hear from the writing analyst, waiting to figure out what his next step should be. But was there another step? Or were all the steps used up now? What did he have in mind, if the word came through as expected and he cut himself free once and for all from Lady Z. of Budapest? What could he do for RW then—call out to him from across the great boundary as the medium did? Join her in the calling?

  The river ran smooth and bending, some angles as smooth as glass. Maybe he should have gone out for a canoe trip with Jack. But Jack was still back in Arizona until the fall term in September. He’d have to write him and see how he was doing. And make sure that he got back here to finish up his degree.

  Had Manny been right in his interpretations, personal and professional, for Raoul? Of course, he might wander the globe and search out more witnesses who claimed to have seen an elderly sick Swede in later years. It would be a long wandering, with more bizarre tales, half true perhaps, half made up. And more books would appear, speculations disguised as semi-facts, semi-fictions called biographies. (All future biographies, he projected, would have more pages for apparently new information, but would remain essentially repeats of the past, a life with the mysteries intact.)

  As far as Zsuzsanna and her helpers were concerned, they had done brilliant and even heroic work—created a large oeuvre, which, even if a fraud, was fantastic in its construction. Like some giant Lego creation, done by a genius eight-year-old. Little wonder that she was unique: she had built a house of cards upon a foundation of faith. So much stuff she had collected, to match her storeroom of faith and obsession. She had imagined an entire life story, fabricated a detailed biography, out of her obsession with Raoul. Methodically, she had filled in the openings, gaps, holes, with manufactured letters, photos, documents, memories. An impressive, audacious accomplishment.

  What next? He pedaled upward, in the twilight, toward Lyme Road. Suddenly, he pulled up short, as there stood in the road a huge animal, and as he crept closer, really slowly, he saw that it was a moose, staring at him with big liquid eyes. Manny stopped fifteen or twenty feet away and looked at the huge odd creature with the fantastic wide antlers and long face and drooping neck. The mysterious creature observed him carefully. Manny stood by his bicycle, waiting quietly—a standoff, scary, thrilling. Here in the fading light on the small country road, there was mystery, bewilderment. On both sides? Manny waited, and the moose, satisfied there was no threat, walked on spindly legs across the road and back up into the thick woods … Manny, still stunned, sat down on the grassy bank. What an odd minute or two. Beauty and mystery, suddenly appearing in the midst of an ordinary summer day …

  Was the meeting a sign? Signaling what? … An ESP from the Budapest medium? Or from someone farther out? … A moose sighting was a rare event, especially up close, and he had to take it for what it was. Presently, he was pedaling back toward his car, on clear Route 10. But the experience stayed, the moment of connection between himself and the strange animal a resonant moment.

  He sought to refocus his thoughts on RW and the current limbo …

  In the coffee shop, his historian colleague, Tom, commented, “Whatever it is, it is. But I’m afraid I see a lose-lose situation for you in this. If your expert rules that the material is a fraud, then you will have to back out, gracefully, and will have wasted your time altogether. Too bad, eh? Now, if he were to say that there is a possibility that some of this stuff may be authentic, what do you do? Spend the rest of your years trying to help her write this thing? Or do you try to write your own book, based on her materials? This may not be legal, or moral. So, you are about to be in a bind.” He smiled, like a player who had just checkmated his opponent.

  Manny considered this. “I don’t know,” he responded, “my interest is in the man himself, what happened to him, and why. No matter how this particular situation unfolds, that will remain my aim.”

  The smile was wiped away. “You might recall, you do have a career to think of. And you’ve spent a good long time on this. Charity work and philanthropy are one thing, but your discipline is another.”

  Manny nodded. “Thanks for the reminder. You do make a point.”

  The colleague leaned back in the straight chair. “If I can help hold up the limb you are out on, let me know.”

  Manny half smiled, “I will remember to.”

  From the Wall Street Journal reporter came an e-mail, asking if he had news about RW, perhaps from a Hungarian source. And did he in fact uncover and interview in Moscow the original KGB interrogator of 1947? Was there a book in the making, Professor, with all this news? Did he care to share it with the reporter? Amazed and anxious, Manny wrote back and said he had no news, and would let the reporter know if anything were to emerge. And he wondered, How in the world? …

  The report came back in the first week of September from the Boston analyst. Mr. Blaylock wrote:

  It is unfortunate, Prof. Gellerman, that I cannot report anything definite to you, one way or the other, based on the materials you have supplied me with. Both handwriting specimens being copies of originals, I would not venture to give an expert opinion. Without the original sheets of handwriting of Mr. Wallenberg, it is impossible to make a clear and firm determination. Yes, they look the same, on the surface; but we do not deal in surfaces, I am afraid, when we offer our professional opinion. Should you come up with more verifiable materials, i.e., the originals, we will be glad to revisit the issue.

  The good thing about the once-over was that the bill was only $350. It also gave him some more time to explore.

  So much for being a good boy and not stealing the original pages from Zsuzsanna’s collection—it never paid to be “a good boy” in those situations, did it?—though without the Wallenberg originals from the several museums and the family archive, they wouldn’t have done much good.

  So, he was back to square one. In a never-ending limbo, it seemed …

  The Swedish-Russian Working Group was begun in 1991 and continued until 2001, when it ceased; its mission had been to find out what happened to Wallenberg, and it was composed of historians, diplomats, and other interested professionals from Sweden, America, and Russia. (Previously, from 1989 to 1991, there had existed the International Commission on the Fate of RW, led by Guy von Dardel, his step-brother.) The Working Group did research, conducted interviews, met with Soviet and Swedish officials—and came up with very little in their decade of existence. They put out several long papers detailing Soviet lies and deceit, Swedish tepidness and cowardice, family passivity, ephemeral witness sightings, but nothing of substance that was new about Raoul. No hard evidence of how he was caught or died, or if he had lived on; no discovery of the “lost” Wallenberg file in Lybianka; no serious diplomatic revelations. The Working Group continued to encounter Russian stonewalling of the issue, and Swedish fear and callous temerity about pressing the case with the Russians. Altogether, the original history from the late 1940s and the recent history from the Working Group’s era had revealed embarrassing, even venal, activity by the Swedes, and the Russians’ brutal track record. In sixty years, there had been nothing new in solving the deep mysteries surrounding RW.

  So he had good reason, Manny informed himself, to become a detective in pursuit of the case, and the real Raoul.

  In 2000, Alexander Yakovlev, head of a Russian presidential commission that investigated the case, acknowledged that Wallenberg had been shot and killed. (He had not died of a heart attack, the previous Gromyko line.) Yakovlev said that an ex-KGB secret police chief, Vladimir Kryuchkov, had informed him in a private conversation that RW had been executed at the KGB Lybianka Prison in Moscow. (The only problem here, Manny knew, was that Stalin had issued an edict, in June 1947
, forbidding any killing by shooting.) To close down that avenue of denial and stonewalling, another official, Andrei Artizov, offered, “Unfortunately, all materials relating to the case have been destroyed.” Very convenient. However, in all probability—according to Nikita Petrov, a KGB expert—the true Wallenberg file lay buried in the infamous basement of Lybianka, beyond the reach of historians, diplomats, politicians, and even most KGB/FSB officials.

  Strangely, all of the above suggested to Manny the ending of Bartleby the Scrivener, in which the scrivener dies forlorn in the Tombs Prison of New York. The narrator, his old boss, “betrayed” the scrivener by abandoning him when he became an embarrassment. Yet Bartleby sought only to stay in his office with him. Later, when the narrator sees the dead scrivener at the Tombs and discovers that Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letters Office at Washington, the narrator regrets deeply his abandonment. Manny decided he was not going to imitate that conventional lawyer and abandon the Wallenberg he was getting to know, ghost or man. The novella ends, “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” Manny would substitute his own charge, “Ah, Wallenberg! Ah, humanity!” and stand by him, in whatever way that he could. But what did that mean? Or how might that play out? …

  A new missive arrived from Zsuzsanna, right on cue, after a week of silence:

  Professor G., you mustn’t leave me. Not now after I have put my full trust in you, opened myself up to you, and offered you my papers, and a full commitment. It will not be fair of you. I will suffer greatly. I need you as a partner in my project to tell the truth about my father, once and for all, and not allow the spiteful enemies and deceivers to fill the void, and ruin his reputation. You will be his savior, as well as mine. And if you should need any papers from me to confirm their truthfulness, I am ready to turn those over to you. But please, don’t abandon me!”

  Your friend, and partner, Zsuzsanna

  Gellerman, who simply hadn’t known what to write her and therefore had stayed silent, was now rewarded for his silence. He would receive some original pages for the handwriting analyst to check on and check out, at last.

  Summer was ending, and autumn approaching, and Manny was nearing … what? A resolution?

  He walked around the tidy town and familiar campus, played some tennis and ping-pong, visited with his son between music camps, tried to clear his head of all unnecessary matters. (But what was necessary?) He listened to music, classical (Bach, Schubert, and the Vienna Phil. playing Mozart—son’s suggestion) and jazz (Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, Ellington’s “Mood Indigo” and “Solitude,” and Sarah Vaughan). He drove on country roads up through Lyme, Orford, Thetford, and felt pleased by the narrow dirt roads, the thick overhangs of foliage and the dappled sunlight, the green hillsides and low mountains, the privacy and pristine clarity in these New Hampshire and Vermont towns. On this late summer trek to no particular destination, he considered his own quest, specific but open-ended, a destination without a name. Did one journey mirror the other? Not really. But if he took pleasure in the one, couldn’t he take solace in the other? …

  So was it a journey without end—or, maybe a journey on the installment plan? …

  He called Jack in Hopi and asked how he was doing.

  “Well, not too bad, but not so good either,” he said. “Family problems.”

  Manny quickly understood. “You mean you’re uncertain about coming back for the term?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. But don’t worry, Professor; if I miss out on this term, I’ll make it up in the spring!”

  “Really?” Manny knew better. “Well, I’d like to see you come back now and finish up, and start on the thesis, Jack. The writing you can do back home.”

  A pause, and Manny realized that Jack was under pressure, maybe even pressure right there in the room.

  “Well, I’ll give it my best shot,” Jack said, feebly.

  “Is it the money? I can try to get you some more funding, Jack. Should I?”

  “Nah, you’ve done enough already.”

  “I can loan you some, no problem.”

  “Nah, you’ve been great, Manny.”

  “So it’s the family; they don’t want to let you go, huh?”

  “Something like that. I can understand them, you know. Arwitha has two kids to take care of, plus her job … my parents; it’s not easy without me around …”

  Manny nodded; it didn’t matter that Jack had only one term of classes left; the family wasn’t interested in the long run. Manny knew that if Jack returned, it would only come about if he went, coerced them, and pulled him back.

  “Well, you still have a month to get things straightened out, Jack.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said, “that’s right. Maybe things’ll turn around. Let’s see.”

  “Sure, let’s see.”

  “Hey, Professor, don’t you worry over me, okay? I’ll make it through the … situation here.”

  Manny felt tugged, but it was not in Arizona that he found himself; it was in Sweden, at a gathering of experts on the state of RW studies. At the University of Uppsala, he sat on the dais at a table of six panelists, waiting for his turn to speak. The invitation had come from a professor there who said he understood that Gellerman had access to possible exciting new information concerning Wallenberg, and they would welcome his attendance at the conference. Ambivalent about accepting, Manny nevertheless decided on going, not really sure about what he was going to say. Even on the plane going over, he wasn’t sure which of two talks he would deliver.

  Now, as he sat at the table listening to the diplomat, the historian, the newspaper journalist speak, he felt his heart beating strongly, as much out of indecision as anything else. The lines of the discussion, before an auditorium filled with about five hundred students, teachers, citizens, repeated the old saws: early Swedish diplomatic incompetence, Soviet secrecy and deceit, the witness sightings through the years, and the need to go forward and keep searching. For twenty minutes each of them gave an opening speech, while Manny shuffled his two packets of notes like two hands of poker cards, one with his interpretation of Raoul’s personal nature, helping to enhance his outlaw status, and the other, his notes concerning Zsuzsanna’s crazy tale … He stared well into the back of the auditorium, seeing a clock of some sort and a blinking red light, probably a video recording.

  The moderator, Professor Bergston, turned to Gellerman, introduced him, and everyone’s attention turned his way.

  Manny gave a low-key preamble to his main thread, citing his entry into the Wallenberg story via his graduate student’s thesis, his pursuit of research in Budapest, and his coming upon a Hungarian woman who claimed to be part of the Wallenberg family, indeed his daughter. “Of course, it is a speculative story, farfetched, and perhaps entirely fabricated and fanciful, but it must be checked out, and I have been in the midst of trying to ascertain its veracity for the past year or so, and checking on a whole pile of materials. Because of the nature of the claims and, also, to protect the privacy of the lady, I cannot go into the particulars of the case. But I am hopeful of coming to a conclusion, some sort of verifiable result, sometime soon, probably in the next few months.”

  There was much buzzing in the audience and a stirring on the stage, and immediately hands shot up to ask questions.

  Gellerman did his best to answer the questions with vague responses and nonanswers, all in the “service” of protecting the privacy of the mystery lady; but what was eminently clear, during the Q and A session, was that he had become the controversial star of the event. And when the session came to a close an hour later, he was surrounded by a crowd of scholars, diplomats, journalists, and ordinary citizens. Far from elated, Manny felt nervous, cornered, semi-shocked, like a jungle animal who has been brought in from the wilderness to become a celebrity cheetah or panda in a big city zoo, his long-time status of obscurity suddenly pierced and transformed into something else.

  What had he gotten himself into? he wondered, as the circle of people around him did not
seem to lessen, but grew.

  “Mr. Gellerman, can you give an interview to my newspaper, Svenska Dagbladet? Swedish citizens will be most interested,” asked a bespectacled blonde with a vertical journalist pad.

  “What do you think the Wallenberg family here in Stockholm will think of this news, if it turns out to be true?” inquired a small, middle-aged, goateed gentleman carrying a leather satchel.

  “Professor, can you tell us how you are handling the materials you have been given, and are so secretively guarding?” This, from the suave historian from the panel. “Do we not deserve to hear a full report about these materials?”

  A fiftyish woman wearing a traveler’s jacket with many pockets and carrying a camera, asked, “Does the Budapest lady not want to come to Sweden and present herself and tell her own story? Have you asked her this? Please, here is my card. I would love to do a documentary about her.”

  “You have raised some serious issues here, and I believe the diplomatic corps needs to have a thorough interview with you, Professor,” advised a tall rather stern gentleman, handing him a card. “Shall we have a car pick you up at 9 a.m. tomorrow?”

  Overwhelmed, dazzled, and exhausted, Manny was finally bailed out by the host, the Uppsala professor, who broke through the huge circling posse and escorted his guest out of the auditorium.

  “You created quite a ruckus in there,” the young professor said outside, with an American accent. “This is what Wallenberg fans and followers have been waiting for for years, a break in the no-news category.”

  Manny loosened his tie and shirt collar. “But I hope I made it very clear that this is not news yet, but just some sort of … research work-in-progress.”

  The young man smiled his crooked-toothed smile. “At least the rumor of news was true, and you fulfilled it. That’s why you were invited.”

  Manny nodded, bewildered about how to take that, and all of it.

  “I hope I haven’t created false hope.”