Searching for Wallenberg

by Alan Lelchuk

  The guard came by and informed him of his lawyer’s appearance, and Manny adjusted his shirt and jacket, alert, refreshed. He would have to get out, but on terms different from the plaintiff’s lawyer’s demand. Fitting, that a Jew should be helping Raoul now. And that he the historian should now evolve into a ghostwriter…. Should he speak to the judge directly? Or call in his American lawyer friend? Whatever. But outside, he’d be able to work hands-on to gather significant documents, alongside his guiding shadow, who had much experience in this old town and knowledge in avoiding predators, just in case Manny himself became too hot to handle. He lived on, really? Where? How? For how long? Did the Mystery Lady from Budapest have anything to do with that?

  Meanwhile, over pickled herring (in cream sauce) and Swedish schnapps in the smaller conference room, with a framed photo on the wall of Björn Borg hitting a two-handed backhand with a wooden racket, and another of the king, Manny discussed with Advokat Sonnerup the various options he had for returning to the orderly streets and his newfound (collaborative) work. Yes, he’d work a compromise out, now that he knew from his lawyer that the other side, the Wallenberg family, wanted one too, as it was getting embarrassed and slammed more and more in the daily media.

  While waiting for his release, he sat in his cell and took up a favorite book he had brought along, Bernard DeVoto’s “The Course of Empire,” which he admired for the passion and the sweeping narrative, a book which always relaxed him.

  At the same time he understood, or sensed, that he was pushing farther his imaginative projection, and hoped that it was taking him in the right direction; and yet not taking him too far out, like sailing in the Archipelago with his friend and finding themselves drifting into the Baltic Sea.

  CHAPTER 24

  The cordial guard, Lovah, came over while he was reading, and announced that he had a visitor from abroad. He looked up, surprised, and was led into the small conference room, where he found, sitting at the long table, Dora. She was dressed in a blue wool cardigan sweater and green blouse, looking about fifteen.

  He sat down across from her and shook his head slightly.

  “Hello,” she said.

  He nodded. “You’ve cut your hair.”

  Half smiling, she said, “Twice, since I’ve seen you last.”

  “Yes, it’s been a while. How’s your mother?”

  “Fine. Worried about you.”

  He paused. “Did she send you here?”

  She shook her head. “No, she wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t listen.”

  He nodded.

  “So you came on your own? I am flattered.”

  She smiled her small crooked-toothed smile.

  “How long will you stay here?” she asked.

  “Oh, not much longer, I don’t think.”

  She fixed him, concerned. “Where will you go then? Do you have plans?”

  “I don’t think so, not firm ones.”

  “Then will you return to Budapest?”

  He half smiled. “It’s a thought.”

  She paused. “I would like that.”

  He wondered, What did she mean? “You know that I have more work to do, and it may take me to different places, like Moscow or here in Stockholm.

  And—”

  “But Budapest surely is one of those places, yes?”

  “Yes,” he conceded. “It is one of those places.”

  She fingered the large collar on her blouse. “Do you think I can help you?”

  He removed his glasses and wiped them with a tissue.

  “Well, that is an interesting proposition. Let me think on it.”

  She nodded.

  “Do you offer this for Mr. Wallenberg’s sake, yours, or your mother’s?”

  She smiled. “You forgot the professor’s sake.”

  Yes, he had. “You are good, and brave, to come here independently and get involved this way and even offer me this. Thank you.”

  “But you haven’t accepted me yet.” She smiled. “Or have you?”

  Oh, how clever and wily were the perfectly innocent! That much he knew, for sure. “You will have to do a bit of traveling, and taking notes, and keeping your eyes open and ears alert.”

  She smiled broadly, her looks rather dazzling.

  “You may not even like some of the things you hear, or see.”

  “I am not a child, you know,” she retorted sternly. “You mustn’t treat me as one.”

  He took that in. “All right, accepted.”

  “Good.” She softened. “Now, is there an immediate task?”

  Impressed, he said, “Well, not really”—but then he thought of something. “I understand that Mr. Wallenberg may have lived on, beyond his supposed death in Lybianka Prison. Can we find out more about this?”

  She took out a journalist’s notebook and jotted a note with her left hand.

  “You came prepared, I see.”

  A light smile, still note-taking. “Any more details, Professor?”

  How ironic, that this young Budapest beauty—perhaps, on the long-distance chance, Raoul’s granddaughter—was now agreeing to work to find the grand old man’s whereabouts. Was she doing this for him, or for Manny? (Or did the ghost himself send her?)

  He put that question to her, soft-toned.

  She eyed him carefully. “I am working for you, Professor. And if we discover useful new facts about Mr. Wallenberg, that will be good, very good.”

  “Yes, this is true.”

  She stared at him, mustering force. “I am serving you, sir, not any wild dream or vision.”

  He understood, and thanked her.

  “I will get to work, Professor Gellerman—”

  “Please, call me Manny.”

  “All right, I will get to work and report back tomorrow or the next day.” She paused, looking at him. “Professor.”

  She stood up, took her wool coat from the wall hook, smiled curtly, and left.

  In his room, he considered matters, looked through some recent documents online, and wondered if indeed Wallenberg himself had sent her as his living emissary. How clever that would be!

  Two days later he found himself sitting in the small kosher café/restaurant in Budapest, the same shabby one in the Jewish Quarter where he had first met the lady a few years ago. (He told Dora to meet him later, after his meeting with her mother.) Zsuzsanna looked the same: oval pale face with smooth skin, and hair tied up in a bun, looking like a young teenager. She greeted him with a warm smile.

  “You have missed our Event while you were over in Stockholm.”

  “Yes, the séance; your daughter told me.”

  “But something important has perhaps resulted, as I told you on the phone, which I have waited to pursue with you personally.”

  “Thank you.”

  She stood up, tucked her cashmere shawl around her, and took him by the hand. “Come, it is a short walk from here, please.”

  She walked with him down the long narrow street toward the Great Synagogue, holding his hand firmly.

  “Spring will be here soon. You remember this, yes?”

  “Of course.”

  “Lots of excitement since I last saw you, Emmanuel.”

  “Yes, although I myself have been away from it all for a few weeks.”

  “I have heard.” She giggled and her eyes twinkled.

  She marched them down Dob utca, nodding to several people and giving a Yiddish greeting, gripping his hand. Just before the Holocaust sculpture garden with the metal tree of remembrance at the back of the Great Synagogue, she steered him into the old wooden doorway of the dilapidated old Shul.

  “And this perhaps you remember too?”

  He nodded, recalling, surprised.

  They walked inside, down the long decrepit corridor, passing an old Jew in a fedora, moving to the other shul rooms in back, where they had sat for the Tisha B’Av ceremony a few years before.

  What was going on? he wondered. Yet another of Lady Z.’s “revelations”?


  In the drab, modest library room, she took out a spiral notepad from her pocket and found her notes. Then she motioned for him to follow her along the musty bookshelves, where, with reading spectacles, she fingered the Dewey decimal numbers on the book spines, searching them according to her notes.

  What was this? he wondered. Jewish Raiders searching for the Lost Ark?

  She led him along, finally stopping at a rickety shelf of history books; she set down her large handbag and took out a row of a half-dozen books, and then, strangely, she stretched in vain to reach behind to the empty space.

  “Please, you can help?”

  She pointed to the vacated space on the bookshelf, and he reached up and inside, bewildered, but quickly felt something. He lifted it out and handed it to her.

  She smiled blissfully at the long brown envelope, blew dust from it, and wiped it with her hand. Reading the words on the face, she nodded and handed it to Manny.

  “There you are, Professor, directly from my father to you.”

  He stared at her, astonished, and accepted the missive, wondering what the hell she was talking about. Crazy, as usual?!

  “To Whom It May Concern,” was written in cursive on the outside, and inside was the handwritten letter, on some crinkly old airmail paper.

  Manny shook his head, baffled, sat down at the end of the long wooden table in the center of the room, and the Lady Zsuzsanna followed him, sitting across. She clasped her hands together like a little girl waiting for the teacher to direct the lesson.

  Privately, Manny read the letter, handwritten in pencil, reasonably legible:

  My Last Thoughts

  I have been living in Labor Camp 701 in Vörkuta region for these past dozen or so years, making the best of the worst. I have benefited from the fortunate luck of owning a small Chagall painting in Budapest bank vault—due to an elderly Jewish couple, with no relatives, deported to Auschwitz—so my guards have been persuaded to allow me certain privileges, like sneaking out this letter.

  Grandfather did the right thing, choosing to send me to America to study architecture, believing correctly I would learn many other things while I lived in Ann Arbor. Those three years were the best of my young adulthood, and the memories have sustained me here, in Lybianka and in the Gulag. I can still close my eyes and be sitting in Lorch Hall with Prof. Slusser.

  My 18 months in Budapest were the most challenging, and vital. They provided life at its highest intensity, and forced me to live in the moment. A true education. My days in the Swedish diplomatic delegation were aided by brave friends like Per Anger and Lars Berg. But no one could have dreamed of a more trusted comrade and valuable friend than my driver, Vilmos Langfelder, whose dire fate I have been responsible for. I still see him vividly, in our Studebaker, urging me to hurry! Forgive me, Vilmos, if you suffered at the end. And to the many Jews whom I was lucky enough to protect in my Safe Houses until they were able to escape, you were my salvation as much as I was yours.

  Reflecting on my Stockholm family, I am sure that Marcus and Jacob would have done better, if they were in a less pressured situation. Guy van Dardel and my half sister Nina were exemplary. Yes, our ambassador at the time did not help them or me much, but Soviet Russia was not an easy country to deal with. I know this personally. As for Daniel P., my interrogator who betrayed me, it was my own naivete. Now, regarding those very close to me in Budapest, the less said the better, since the KGB has great big ears, and they never forget, never let go. But you mustn’t forget me, as I have never forgotten you.

  How does one survive? In “bits and pieces,” as my friend in Michigan used to say. If you can find someone to play some chess with, on the makeshift board, you are lucky. If you get a potato in your soup, or a vegetable, you are doing well. If you can get new socks and “bushlati” every year or so, you are lucky. Also a thin mattress made of straw and sawdust to put on top of the concrete slab made for tolerable sleep. These favors are in exchange for the right bribe—my “vziatka,” was a Swiss bank account, a good arrangement for both sides, the prisoner and his guards, and the warden. Naturally they expect you to die here of one or another causes, malnutrition and freezing among them. I have suffered from frostbite, TB, emphysema, arthritis, and a steady hacking cough. But the guard has managed to get me some aid on occasion, even a doctor’s visit and a few aspirins every so often. (Not too often.) One lives by habits if not hopes. A grand pleasure has been the two books smuggled in, which I read again and again, Jack London’s short stories and the first half of Copperfield by Dickens. Boyhood nature in one, and boyhood in London in the other; these always boost my spirits.

  Mine was not a kindly fate, one could say; but on the other hand, it was a truly lived life, offering big challenges and affording a few personal victories. Had I stayed in Stockholm and entered the family business, I would have been more comfortable but not terribly challenged. Or felt so needed and useful. So, adding all things up, I am grateful. Even satisfied.

  RW

  When Manny looked up, his heart beating hard, he saw her sitting there watching him, her shrewd cat-like eyes belied by a shy smile.

  An old Jew wandered in and picked up a Sidur from the table. He looked at them and left. The room smelled of age and mustiness. Manny held the two pages in his hands, scratching his lower lip with his teeth.

  “Naturally, I will want to see if I can get this handwriting analyzed here, and see what to make out of this. Or, I could send it abroad to my analyst in the Boston area?”

  Zsuzsanna spoke softly. “You must do what you must do, Professor. You have been a doubter for so long now; I expected this. Please, may I read this letter?”

  He slid it across the table to her.

  She put on her spectacles and began reading, slowly.

  But now, to his amazement, he found something else in the envelope, a small dog-eared black and white photograph. Brittle with age and faded badly, it showed an older man with a narrow face and goatee, in profile, playing a game of chess with another prisoner. Could it really be RW? Manny couldn’t actually tell. On the back, was printed, “Vörkuta, 1962.” He felt a bit dizzy.

  She wiped her eyes with a handkerchief, “So now, Emmanuel, what is your decision, a final step in the puzzle so we begin serious work, or yet another delay tactic?”

  He bit his lip. “You are a very determined woman, Zsuzsanna, and I respect you a great deal. But I … I really don’t know what to make of this. I shall have to—”

  “Please.” She stood up and slid the letter back into the envelope, and reached her hand out for the photograph.

  “Do you recognize him in this photo?”

  She looked at it closely, wearing her spectacles, and nodded. “Poor father!” She sunk down, her head in her hands.

  Gently, he said, “If you give me the original, I can have it looked over carefully, and we can begin our work.”

  She smiled, weirdly. “All will be taken care of, in due time. The important thing is, Professor, that we have communicated with him and found his words and direction accurate.” She shook her head. “And now we have new evidence of how he ended.”

  She started to pack up.

  He asked if he could help her with anything.

  She shook her head, now rather distant.

  They retraced their steps to the outside. Gray and cool.

  “I must go now,” she said.

  “So, when shall we meet?” he asked, “I’d like to make a copy of the letter and the photograph. As soon as possible would be best.”

  She thought a moment. “Yes, tomorrow morning at nine, at the Central Café,” she offered. “You have not yet said what you think of this … news?”

  “Well, I must digest it, of course. And verify it. But thank you, and I will see you in the morning.”

  He kissed her cheek, and they departed.

  That night in his small hotel he e-mailed several friends about finding the right handwriting specialists, both in Budapest and in Stockholm. Also, he called
Dora, telling her of the strange news and arranging a meeting. He wrote to his expert friend, the historian Berger, telling her too. He tried to tamp down his excitement by going out and taking a walk along Andrássy Avenue, which pleased him with its old-world shabby charm. He slept well, feeling, curiously enough, a burden being lifted from his shoulders. Of course, he knew he was jumping the gun, but …

  At 8:45 a.m. he was seated at the large Central Café, ordering his juice, rolls, and coffee, and waiting. The square marble table and stiff wooden chair suited him.

  At 9 a.m. he was drinking his coffee and peering up to see some of the famous artists and writers of Hungary of yesteryear staring down at him from the walls.

  At about 9:20 a woman appeared, wearing the Scheitel (wig) and demeanor of the religious, and asked if he was Gellerman, the American professor. She handed him a note in an envelope and excused herself:

  Dear Emmanuel,

  I was very disappointed in your response yesterday to a true mitzvah. You treated it with your usual American skepticism, while I was much overwhelmed. Imagine, a real letter from my father, and you act with disbelief and mistrust! I am sorry, Professor, but I have to take a little time off now, to decide if I wish to work with you any longer. You have disturbed, maybe destroyed, my belief in you. Please do not try to reach me, as you will not be able to. When I am ready to see you again, I will let you or my daughter know. Believe me, for you to act as you did, when I was ready for us to celebrate, was a big damage to my feelings, and my memory.

  Zsuzsanna Frank Wallenberg

  Manny sat there, in shock, at what had occurred. He saw the customers walking to and fro, heard the clattering sounds of dishes and silverware, barely heard the waiter asking if he wanted more coffee, and he nodded.

  It had all happened so fast! Had he truly misplayed his hand? Had he missed the chance of a lifetime? Was he totally reasonable in his doubt, but stupid and insensitive in his wording to her yesterday? His eyes grew blurry, his chest heaved.