Searching for Wallenberg (40 page)

Giving Manny a bear hug, he said, “Good to see you, Prof!”

“You too, Jack, you too.”

“C’mon, let’s get over to the house, where we have some lunch.” His face had grown darker, leaner, in such a short time.

With Jack directing, they drove out on the single two-lane road, passing isolated small houses, run-down and shack-like with giant antennas or new satellite dishes on the rooftops. The landscape was hilly, gray, and bare, with two mountains looming nearby. Jack explained again the tragic history of the tribe, which had been reduced by smallpox at the turn of the century, and by the marauding Navajos, who had raided and pillaged them again and again. “It’s not the white man who was my boogeyman when I grew up, you know, but the Navajo and his greed and deceit. They stole all the great land from us, and left us with this. And we’re still fighting them through the legal system, but once Senator Goldwater died, we didn’t really have a champion to fight for us. But I told you all this, right?”

“Well, maybe some years ago, yes. But I always need a refresher course.”

At the small house three kids were shooting hoops in the yard. Jack introduced his two sons, teenage boys, dark, with big eyes and good smiles.

“Do you have a favorite team?” Manny asked.

“Phoenix, of course!” they shouted in unison. “Steve Nash!”

Jack shook his head. “My Celtics are too damn bad right now, wrong generation to have raised them!”

Inside the dwelling, in the small kitchen, Jack’s wife, Arwitha, had prepared sandwiches, with salad and bottled water. She was a small dark woman, with jet black hair and narrow dark eyes. Manny shook her hand. A television was running in the adjoining room.

With his wife leaving to do errands, Jack hosted their lunch, and soon they began the discussion of relevance, how to bring Jack back to school.

“Look, as I said, if it’s a question of the money for travel, and even to bring your family, we can try—”

Jack shook his head, stopping Manny. “No, sir, it’s more than that, really. It’s my mom and dad too; they count on me in more ways than one. Maybe you’ll meet them and see.” He crossed his arms. “It’s a kinda different culture here than back east; the old folks here really rely on their children to take care of them; they don’t go off to assisted living or nursing homes or things like that. They die at home here. And the kids, like me, care for them.”

“I understand,” Manny countered, seeing a framed photo of JFK on the wall, “but you’ve got to understand too—finishing your graduate degree will help you seriously, and it can be completed in a few more terms. You’ll then be eligible to be the principal of the high school you’ve talked about, or even go on for a PhD as you’ve sometimes joked about. In the meantime, you can come back here every few months for a visit; we can arrange that.”

His arms crossed, grinning softly, Jack said, “You know, Professor, I really appreciate the time you’ve taken to come all the way out here, just trying to persuade me. Let me think on it for a few days, okay? And you can have your own room too, for your work, for the few days here, like I mentioned. And maybe, at the end of the day, I’ll drive you around and show you the sights if you won’t be too bored. Not much grass or water around these parts!”

“The room would be useful, and yes, maybe later in the day, we can see some sights.”

Jack stood up, lean in his jeans, and Manny too, less lean.

Outside in the warm dry September day, Jack spoke to the kids for a minute, citing chores (“Pick up them eggs!”), and told Manny to follow him.

Jack jumped into his Ford Ranger pickup and rumbled away, with Manny on his heels in his rented white Impala. They drove down the rickety road, past an isolated ramshackle house with old people sitting on the porch, who waved at Jack. It was a moonscape area up on this mesa, with an occasional patch of green, where corn was high and plentiful. The ride was potholed and bumpy, but Jack drove along like it was a highway. Manny took it easier. This arid, strange landscape was a long way from green New England and its smooth roads, fertile earth, and picture-postcard campus town.

In twenty minutes they were parked by a modest modern building, one floor, with an awning and a sign: “Hopi Artifacts For Sale.” Inside, he followed Jack to meet his niece, LuEllen, a young woman reading
Glamour
, at the front counter. In a glass showcase behind her, there were shelves of Hopi jewelry, leather pieces, and colorful kachina dolls of all sizes.

Escorting Manny inside to the adjoining room, Jack introduced him to his Aunt Linda—“her American name,” he said smiling, touching her shoulder—a short dark woman in her fifties, working at a workbench, painting dolls meticulously. She smiled and explained how she couldn’t shake hands properly. “You see, she doesn’t have time for small talk!”

Jack took Manny by the arm, and walked him through a plank door to the other half of the studio, which had a sort of workbench/desk with a high chair. “You can work here, Professor, and there’s a chair for reading as well. And you can use the cot for naps if you wish! Not the prettiest, but it’ll do, right?”

Manny was charmed by the makeshift studio space, and said, sure, this was just right for a little work. “I’ll get my papers and laptop from the car. And do a little of my own homework.”

Jack grinned widely. “I thought you’d like the place. And Euella, or Linda, she’s a mouse, never peeps a word or listens to loud music, any of that stuff. A good person and a good artist too. Also, there’s a little fridge out in the front, and you’re welcome to use it, Mr. G.”

Manny tapped his friend’s arm, went to the car, got his stuff, and was helped by Jack back to his side of the studio.

“All right, thanks, now you know what you have to do this weekend,” advised Manny. “Reflect on the things I’ve said to you, your long-term future, okay? Ask me any questions. Let’s try to come up with a pragmatic solution.”

Jack nodded. “A perfect place for decoding Mr. Wallenberg, right?” he teased Manny. “Your own private kiva! Anyway, I’ll see you about six, when I pick you up, okay? We can have a ride and some evening chow with the family. Good luck today!”

“You too.”

Left alone, he sat in the wooden armchair—a crude version of a Morris chair, with wide arms—the upholstery torn, the wood splintered—and picked up his files of Lady Z.’s papers and his own notes. The room’s walls had small symbols painted on them: a curlicue, captioned, “oraibi”; another of a hand and a sideways S, “Chaco Canyon,” and one of an angled seesaw with circles at the ends, and a narrow snake-like creature shimmering up alongside. Manny would have to ask Jack what these little designs meant and who had done them? The space itself was a spare rectangle, shabby but decent, a few pieces of furniture, including a bookcase with books. Resisting those, he sat back and realized it could be easier to focus here than in NH, without routines or college responsibilities, friends or students; maybe a serendipitous weekend after all?

He started looking through the notes and realized how much he missed his radios, to surround his boring background. He got up, quietly knocked on the door, and, excusing himself for interrupting Euella, asked if a radio on low would bother her. She shook her head.

“Do you happen to have one around?”

She nodded, called out to her daughter, and asked her to bring in the little portable radio. The girl, on the sullen side, went and did her small task.

Back in his space, he turned on the old Emerson, searched the dials, found only pop and country music on AM and FM, and settled on the latter. A case for Sirius Satellite Radio, or at least a CD music box. Well, if he returned some time and stayed on, he would bring one with him. Just like crazy Manny—he told himself—to skip Europe, skip the Caribbean, and return to this desolate, haunted land …

So, with Sugarland singing, he started reading his madwoman’s pages …

He was about twenty minutes into reading, or rereading, the materials when he opened his laptop to check contacts—Jack had told him of the new Wi-Fi connection for the store out front—and he found two new messages of interest, one from his Washington, DC, historian friend. She wrote to alert him that a Russian historian, Arkady V., was claiming, in an essay or book, that the KGB interrogator Daniel P. was perhaps present at the death of Wallenberg. Was this true? she asked. Manny, amazed, didn’t really know, but wasn’t sure he believed it. He wrote back and asked her to let him know when “something tangible” turned up. Yet her note, and the claim, brought back to him the last scene he had created, Daniel P.’s late good-bye to Raoul, and he realized how ironic that would have been, if the Russian historian’s claim had real evidence behind it. Manny would have to wait and see, and check it out … But imagine if Daniel had been there, witnessing it …

He pondered the new gambit put out there, and it revealed to him the full power of the new Internet world: here, on a southwestern mesa on a remote reservation, one didn’t need a real library for research and information, a necessity in the old days; one could sit here and do work through the virtual world. Especially if one knew what one was searching for. (Just now, for example, he googled KGB and found a brand new site created by the Lithuanians! A handsome site, too, presenting the whole KGB structure in East Europe beginning in the 1940s.). This new world might have surprised Aldous Huxley too.

Here, in the shabby partitioned studio, he felt okay, semi-real, up to par; cut off and not cut off from modern civilization; alone, and yet surrounded by these ancient pre-Western Americans; engulfed by the curious little symbolic drawings on the walls, and protected in the background by one special friend who provided the local hospitality. Things could be worse, far worse.

The second message came from somewhere in Finland: “My understanding, Professor, from your website, is that you hunt for the whereabouts of Mr. Raoul Wallenberg. Let me tell you I was in a cell with him, in Lefortovo Prison, cell 151, after Willi Roedl left. Then he was sent to the Gulag, somewhere in the Urals. Maybe you find someone who was there with him? Keep me on your list, please.”

On my list? My website?
Manny was baffled, shocked; and, of course, he understood. Yes, naturally, Lady Z. had “creatively” set it up, helping him out.

Later, in Jack’s pickup, he sat in the shotgun seat, and bumped along the rutted dirt road as his student drove up these narrow winding roads, taking them high up to Old Oraibi on Third Mesa. Slowing down as they headed into the village of a dozen at the far edge of the mesa, Jack pointed to a handwritten sign and grinned. It read: “This village is offlimits to whites because you have broken our rules. You are no longer welcome here.” Jack tapped him playfully on the shoulder. “Take it easy, I’ll get you through,” he kidded, or half kidded. “You’re with me now.”

“Hey, thanks, but you know, I like to go where I am not invited, been doing that all my life.”

Jack smiled. “We’ll pay a brief visit to some relatives of mine.”

Presently, they were driving on the dirt road of the small village, sitting on the precipice of the mesa. This stark countryside was different from any that Manny had ever seen.

But his mind was drifting to the wiry KGB interrogator and his prisoner, what had happened, and how Manny had imagined it.

“Why create a village in so extreme a neighborhood?” Jack answered his own question. “Because the Spanish conquistadors, when they came, couldn’t conquer them—too steep to get up here from the other side of those cliffs.”

During the visit with Jack’s elderly relatives in a small adobe house, in the small spare kitchen with the photo of Barry Goldwater on the wall, Manny was wondering about that last meeting between Daniel P. and Raoul. At the end of the visit, the relatives gave him a book written by their uncle,
Sun Chief: The
Autobiography of a Hopi Indian.
He thanked them and accepted the paperback.

The old man held up his hand. “I’m too old now to read small print. But you read that and tell me or Jack what you think, whether it’s understandable to someone outside of the tribe.”

For Manny this was like an old Jew giving “The Rise of David Levinsky” to a foreign Gentile to read. “I’ll do that.”

They drove back down, more slowly, and Manny soaked up the bizarre mountaintop landscape and isolated clumps of small houses, and tried to think of what sort of architectural sketches Raoul might have drawn for his Michigan professor. What a strange country this was, Manny thought, right here on the other, far side of America.

They had dinner at Jack’s house; he chatted politely with the kids and quiet wife, and, when it got late-ish, about nine, Jack surprised him by taking him down to the Hopi Cultural Center, where he had secured a room for him at the hotel.

A small, cozy, clean room. “It’s quiet, you’ll get a good night’s rest here.”

“Hey, I could have slept in the studio, on the cot.”

“Nah, this is more ‘civilized.’” Jack beamed. “The studio is for working on your book. And here’s your bag.”

“You’ve thought of everything.”

“Almost.”

He faced Jack, nodded, thanked him, and added, “I’m here to take you back to school, you realize.”

“Yeah, my very own bounty hunter. Gellerman for DeNiro.”

“Never thought of it that way, but why not?”

Jack nodded. “You get some good sleep now.”

“And you think of what you have to do.”

“It may take a while. You may have to stay longer than the weekend.”

“Well, I’ve brought my work.”

“That’s the spirit. But you gotta finish up your project; we’re all waiting.” Jack punched Manny’s shoulder playfully. “Maybe especially Raoul?”

When he closed the door, Manny washed up, sat on the bed, and replayed the day, the Jack advice. He took out the gift book and read in different sections. An interesting Hopi life, especially from an anthropological point of view, with unusual aspects of daily life, like the roles of man and woman … Certainly it would upset some current fashionable positions. How would the contemporary moralists handle it: Native American ways versus current political correctness?