by Alan Lelchuk
“Professor, are you alright? Sir?”
Dora was suddenly sitting at the table, wearing a simple cardigan and looking at him with her beautiful youthful face.
He shook his head and told her what had occurred. “The letter even spoke about ‘those very close to him in Budapest,’ or words like that. Of course, it could easily have been made up, but … who knows? …”
She ordered tea from the waiter.
She shrugged. “My mother is up and down, moody, you know that. She is very sensitive. Easily offended. I think she will come around, though it may take some time. But we have time, don’t we?”
He sipped coffee, looked at the trusting girl, wondered if he did have time, and smiled wanly. “I don’t really know what to believe, actually.”
“I understand that, sir.” She put her hand on his, for the first time. “If it was a genuine letter, she will let you have it, I think. It’s too important for her not to.”
“I am not clear any longer about what is genuine and what is not.”
She smiled. “That is true; sometimes it is hard to tell. In people too.”
“You should call me Manny, while we are waiting for her.”
Dora nodded dutifully, accepting the porcelain teacup and saucer set on the table. “Where should we wait, do you think?
He gazed at her and tried to focus on the question.
She smiled softly, “Budapest? Stockholm? New Hampshire?
“How about Vörkuta—do you think they’ve opened it up yet to foreigners?”
She raised her eyebrows, wondering if he was serious.
He looked up, and saw through the big windows, and figured, for now, this new piece of “evidence” was as good as any in the giant RW conundrum. And maybe Vörkuta was the right place to start the next leg of the hunt?
“Come, let’s walk down by the river and see what we think.”
Gellerman paid the bill, and they went outside and walked across the traffic to the old law library, and down toward the Elisabeth Bridge. They walked along the river—she had taken his arm—like a couple strolling. The air was cool and windy. They walked on, and on.
What to do now? he wondered.
They came to the Parliament area and the Margaret Bridge, and a small area that was set with a striking memorial on the river embankment at the edge of the Danube—a stark grouping of a dozen or so bronze shoes, a testament to the Jews who were shot by the Arrow Cross and tossed into the river.
The bronze shoes stopped Manny.
He thought of the brave soul who had saved so many but who remained such a personal mystery. How much had Gellerman entered into it, shed light on it?
“Imagine if that letter was real,” he said aloud. “In any case, either way, he was quite grand—either as your grandfather or as a grand illusion or mystery.”
She looked up at him. “And you are perhaps grand, for searching for him the way you have been and continue to do.”
“Well, he’s become a friend, actually, a friend who comes and goes, sometimes with advice, sometimes with cautions. I’ve become his invisible shadow, you could say.” He smiled. “Or he mine.”
They stood a while looking at the roiling river, with the Margaret Bridge nearby, at the randomly set shoes symbolizing the dumped, murdered Jews. Manny peered at the hilly area of Buda across the river; and beyond, above the hills, he saw a configuration of cumulous clouds, forming architectural shapes in slow motion. He was reminded of a Wallenberg sketch in a notebook, and they created in him a kind of dense music, which resonated mysteriously. Without thinking, he took the young woman’s hand—this Dora who may or may not have been related to his heroic friend, and who stood alongside him and stared silently.
And now he began to feel something, some motion within that mirrored the wind outside, and he tried to discern its meaning. Here, beside the choppy blue-gray river, not far from the bronze shoes of memory, he began to understand, or feel, what Zsuzsanna was furious about—his lack of faith in her Wallenberg. Why of course. In truth there were several Raouls, some imagined, some real. For didn’t all complex souls require several selves and demand multiple interpretations? Wasn’t his Wallenberg just as mysterious, just as much a matter of faith, speculation, as hers? Hadn’t he created his Wallenberg, his living ghost, through his own deepening faith, based on his knowledge of the evidence at hand? He half-smiled. In fact, the same means were often, maybe inevitably, used in the writing of history, when crucial facts were missing and one interpreted—or even unconsciously invented—based on a collection of other, circumstantial facts. So why shouldn’t Manny should give credence to Madame Z.’s version of the family Wallenberg, as strange as it might seem, with its mystical reasoning, its medium’s sightings, callings? Deliverance could be reached along very different paths. The clouds shifted, a bit of dusk light escaping through the edges.
“Yes, we have work to do,” he offered, “but I feel promising vibrations.”
The young woman looked up at him and squeezed his hand, in concert.
About the Author
Alan Lelchuk, novelist, professor, and editor, was born in Brooklyn in 1938. He received his BA in world literature from Brooklyn College in 1960 and his PhD in English literature from Stanford University in 1965. He is the author of seven novels: American Mischief, Miriam at Thirty-four, Shrinking: The Beginning of My Own Ending, Miriam in Her Forties, Brooklyn Boy, Playing the Game, and Ziff: A Life? For young adults he wrote a memoir, On Home Ground. His short fiction has appeared in such magazines as The Transatlantic Review, The Atlantic, and Partisan Review.
Lelchuk has taught at Brandeis University, Amherst College, and, since 1985, Dartmouth College. He has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, such as Guggenheim and Fulbright awards, and visiting professorships and writer-in-residence appointments in the US, Israel, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Russia.
He served as associate editor (with Philip Rahv) of Modern Occasions, and was a cofounder of Steerforth Press. He co-edited 8 Great Hebrew Short Novels in English.
Alan Lelchuk lives in the countryside of New Hampshire, and has two grown sons.