Free Searching for Wallenberg by Alan Lelchuk Page A

say”—he smiled—“and reveal it to the world.”

    Presently, as the gentleman departed, Ella also finished. Manny poured himself a scotch and reflected. Did that chat really happen? Or, if not, why had he conjured it up? “Avenge him” in some way, Raoul had said. Like Hamlet’s old man, eh? Go forward then, and full steam ahead! Just watch out for the pitfalls, disguises, traps. Paradoxical wisdom …
    The strange conversation lingered in Manny’s head for weeks, and haunted him with its words, its hallucinatory credibility. And the closeness he felt with the presence of that ghost. Was this the way the real RW had to be discovered, he mused, by invention? Like his true history?
    Spring came, and suddenly all the outdoor fields sprang up—not merely with flowers, but with sports. The little college town suddenly was blooming with tennis matches, track runners, jousting lacrosse battlers, joggers with headbands, Frisbee tossers, baseball players, fierce bicyclists, canoeists and kayakers—sports players popping up like Dutch tulips. The town waited to play, to rise up from winter interiors and gray weather and enter into the sunlight and soft winds. Yet, through all this sudden spring sprouting, Gellerman tried to keep his concentration focused back there and then: Budapest 1944 and Moscow 1945. A bit difficult, sure. But soon he would be heading over there—and it would be easier to enter into memory and history, while walking around amidst the dour streets of scarcity—instead of staying here, amidst the fields and greens of pastel plenty.
    “Why do you have to go there now? Why not wait till June and take me, Dad?”
    “Well, first of all, you have school, my boy, and secondly, if I have a successful trip, I return in June or July, and then you could be freer to perhaps accompany me.”
    The boy shook his head in sharp disappointment. He exaggerated all the gestures of an adult, and the result was the fondest (for Dad) comic mimicry.
    “Now, why don’t you practice, okay?”
    “All right,” he muttered, and picked up his cello and began to tune up.
    “What’s on for today?”
    “Oh, some Schroder and then a Bach prelude.” He practiced with his back to the windows in the living room.
    Gellerman nodded, and soon felt the boy’s cello pleasing his senses. How had he been ignorant for so long of this form of beauty?
    Now, looking out through the windows, he saw what looked like a wild turkey out by the far end of the oval pond, and he wished he had his binoculars right there. The sun went in and out. He pointed to the outside, and the boy turned about and stared.
    “What is it, Dad, a turkey?”
    “Actually, I think a wild peacock. Look—see the fantastic tail with those iridescent feathers?”
    “Wow!” Josh stared. “Amazing!”
    “You’re right, and wait till you hear the mating call sometime. Fierce! But now go back to Bach. Remember, you have math homework as well.”
    So the boy played, and a pair of swallows flew by, and Manny wondered why he would ever want to leave this place, this sanctuary of boy, cello, and birds? Wasn’t it comfortable to the point of perfection?
    As the musical intricacies developed, Gellerman read through the revised pages of Angela’s competent thesis, and considered the pale tenacious Swede. Manny felt he was getting to know him, from the inside, not from the pages of historical material after the fact. Partly from his own words in his Letters and Dispatches , partly from his footprints at Ann Arbor, and lastly from Manny’s own inquiry and imagination. Who was he? A private soul. A subtle man. An outsider, both within his conservative family and his country. And maybe a lost soul too, until he received the commission from K. Lauer, the Hungarian businessman in Stockholm, to help the Jews of Budapest, an offer augmented privately by Iver Olsen, who worked for the US War Refugee Board. The commisson that evolved into a life mission. And the little office in