Free Searching for Wallenberg by Alan Lelchuk Page B

the Swedish legation building in Buda—with Vilmos on hand—became an ideal sanctuary. Where saving Jews became his calling , not a job.
    To the world at large he was a figure of political turbulence and heroism; to Manny, he was becoming a personal puzzle, and probably a puzzle to himself!
    “Dad, the phone’s ringing. Don’t you want to get it?”
    Manny answered it—a local nursing charity asking for his annual contribution. Afterward, he was back in his living room chair, with a glass of red wine, listening, contemplating. This boy had come to Manny when he was fifty, and he had been a mighty bundle of work, and a little human blessing. All that high maintenance had been channeled into his curved wooden instrument of energy and devotion. In a similar way, Manny, in his middle age, had channeled his devotion and energy toward the boy. You needed something serious in your fifties to lift you up from complacency or melancholy for the final few decades. But maybe now, a dozen years later, he needed a new channel and a new challenge—like RW. One with as much unpredictability as the boy, but with high risk, professionally. Was this turning into his mission?
    “Hey, Dad, how long have I been practicing? What’s for dinner?”
    “Well, lamb chops with potatoes.”
    “Can I make mashed, please? I’ll use the Cuisinart, but I won’t make a mess, I promise! It won’t be like last time.”
    He remembered the last time, with bits of mashed potatoes shooting out from the whirring machine over pots pans and dishes onto kitchen shelves and walls, like a July 4 shower of potato stars. Manny winced, smiled, and gave in. Spoiling the boy had become second nature, and he felt fine with it, just fine.
    On the river, on a sixty-degree sunny day that felt like eighty after winter, Gellerman canoed with Jack Littletree, a graduate student and pal, carrying sandwiches and coffee. They canoed upriver, the current light and the sun glinting off the greenish-blue water. A single sailboat was out, and a pair of kayakers.
    “Out here spring is different from back home.”
    “Yes, I imagine.”
    “We sure could use a river like this.”
    “I’ll bet.”
    They headed upriver about forty minutes, and chose a small island on the New Hampshire side to have their lunch. They pulled the canoe onto the shore, tied it to a rock, and found a flat patch to sit on, by the shade of a maple.
    “I read on Yahoo that the Danube’s flooding right now,” Jack observed.
    “Yeah, that happens over there periodically, and it can be pretty bad.”
    Jack smiled, revealing yellowing teeth. “Still, we’d take a river anyway.”
    Manny nodded, remembering his several visits out to Hopi land in southern Arizona, where the land was dusty, arid, a moonscape without rivers or lakes breaking up the monotonous brown landscape.
    “Warmer than last year, remember?” Jack said. “And do you remember that wind, going back?”
    “Yeah, I do, actually.” Manny laughed. “Almost turned us over!”
    Shielded from the high sun, they opened their co-op tuna salad sandwiches and began eating, watching the smooth water.
    “So, how did you do this quarter, tell me? How was the work?”
    “Not too bad,” Jack replied. “A couple of high passes in Globalization, Oral History.”
    “Hey, what’s going on? Sucking up to the profs?”
    The young man in his early thirties with the jet-black hair broke into a warm smile. “Yeah, you got me pegged.”
    Gellerman enjoyed this mature student, who was one of a series of Hopi Indians that he had mentored through the years, here at Dartmouth, a college whose original charter was devoted to educating Native Americans (and making them over into Christian gentlemen). And now he was devoted to pampering young Caucasian natives. Years ago, he had met a colleague in anthropology, an expert on Native Americans, with a focus on Hopis, and he had recruited young men from the tribe to come to this rural Ivy League college, first