Searching for Wallenberg (43 page)

“Mr. Wallenberg, have you been with us?” asked the Professor, amused. “Or have I so enchanted you that you are off dreaming?”

The buzzer rang, interrupting the professor, who nodded and called it a day.

“Hey, Wallflower, come join us for a beer!” said John H. “You’re always going off on your own. C’mon!”

Two students teasingly lifted him up and escorted him out of the lecture room, where they were joined by four others. Soon, they were hustling Raoul into a large jalopy, Ted saying, “We need to give you a nickname; what do you think?”

Tim jumped in, “How about “The European?”

“Or,” suggested Jake, “The Swede!”

“God, no, let’s be inventive,” said Hermansky “Let’s see …”

“I have it!” said Phil Roberts, “We’ve known you for nearly a year now, and no one knows anything about you, so, you are hereby annointed Mystery Man.”

The sardine-squeezed gang of six cheered!

Raoul, uncomfortable, found himself saying, “Is that really a nickname?”

“Well, it will do till a better one comes along!”

Raoul relented, smiled, and allowed the joking to proceed. As the Plymouth careened along through the leafy streets of the charming college town, Raoul thought how surprising these colleagues were, all this good-natured kidding masking their true talent and intelligence. And maybe Hermansky was right; maybe he was the Mystery Man—to himself as well. Well, for now, he’d have his beer with the fellows, and then, later, sit in the library and work on a serious sketch for his bold thesis inspiration.

Phil Roberts meanwhile continued to hold him by the arm, and Raoul wondered about the friendships of these Americans—how loose they were, how loose and easy, so very different from his own more formal Stockholm culture.

Phil turned and smiled broadly, sitting in his lap, saying, “You see, Mystery Man, you can rest easy with us, your secrets will always be safe with us.”

Gellerman pulled himself back up from the scene and reread it. Did it catch the youthful but complex spirit of Raoul—his appealing quest for learning and understanding in the New World, but also his uncertainty? While the little portrait captured certain traits, like shyness, propriety, collegiality, did it reach deeper into his personality? Maybe
there, at the end, with Phil so close?
When Raoul wrote to his grandfather that America was changing him, did that include a freeing of his inner self and desires, which were taboo in Stockholm? Or was Manny reaching out too far? Perhaps. But for now, he let it be. The Wallenberg with whom he had recently chatted on the Hopi Res deserved a replay of his spirited youth, his comic spirit, and his rebel’s stance, but also his complex character. If he imagined a scene based on his interview with Olaf Selling, would more emerge?

An elderly couple stopped and asked Manny for a direction on the campus. Manny took them outside the inn and pointed out the small redbrick Hood Museum, down the street a few hundred yards. The gentleman thanked him and turned away. But as he did, Manny realized the man reminded him of someone: Daniel Pagliansky in Moscow, with the thin wisps of hair flying, the small wiry frame, the lively brown eyes. And right there Manny stopped, suspended briefly, for he suddenly felt he
understood
something, or rather, understood that he had
failed
to see something. How naïve, of course!

He returned inside to his obscure corner, opened the laptop, and composed:

Late July 1947; Lybianka Prison, Moscow

Raoul was led into a Medical Lab 272 by two guards and set down on a metal armchair. The square room was lit by several unshaded bulbs and a standing lamp, and it contained two large glass medical cabinets, an examination table, a wash basin, several chairs. Presently, a bespectacled doctor wearing a white medical coat walked in, nodded, and examined a file at the green file cabinet. Two minutes later the doctor was followed in by two KGB agents, wearing full uniform, including large military hats. Raoul at first barely recognized his interrogator friend, since he looked so different, dressed formally in his military uniform of olive and red.

Raoul looked at him, and Daniel looked back, and nodded very slowly. No words were exchanged.

The doctor read through his file, turned to the two agents, and had them sit down on two chairs by the far white wall.

He gestured for Raoul to move up to the examination table and remove his shoes. Raoul got up, removed his shoes, and sat at the front edge of the narrow table covered with a sheet.

The room smelled of sulphuric acid and other chemicals.

Raoul said, “Daniel. Good to see you came, to say a real good-bye to me.”

Daniel took off his large officer’s hat and nodded.

The doctor motioned to the prison guards, who came alongside Raoul, each on a side, and each gripped an arm. The doctor returned from the medicine cabinet with an ammo box container of bandages, small vials, and an injection needle.

“Do you wish to say anything?” he asked Raoul.

Raoul shook his head slowly but firmly.

“We have your confession sheet for you; would you like to sign it?”

Raoul shook his head.

“No matter, we will sign it for you. An enemy of the state doesn’t have to sign for himself.” The doctor walked close to Raoul, nodded to the tall guard, who gripped the right arm. Carefully he filled the needle with a grayish liquid.

Daniel and his associate agent stood up, holding their hats.

Suddenly, in a small but distinct voice, Raoul spoke: “Daniel, wouldn’t you like to do the honor?”

The doctor looked strangely at Raoul and then over to Daniel, who stood small and stoic; no one was very amused.

Returning to the business at hand, the doctor searched for a prominent vein, found one, and injected the needle. The doctor waited, along with the guards, for maybe twenty seconds, with Raoul looking straight ahead, before he lost consciousness; at the doctor’s nod, the guards laid him down on the narrow bed. The doctor leaned over, opened his eyelids, and checked his pulse.

Turning to the KGB agents, he said, “Which one of you will sign the death certificate?”

Daniel and his associate looked at each other, hesitated, before Daniel came forward and scribbled his name.

The doctor, adjusting his spectacles, proceeded to sign his name. He said, “Sign again here.”

Daniel signed a second sheet.

The two guards rolled in a gurney, lifted the body onto it, and waited for one of the certificates to be attached to the gurney. The doctor put the second sheet into the file.

“Case number 4581 is now officially closed, comrades.”

The two agents put their hats on, nodded, and filed out, while the doctor stayed. He began cleaning up, tossing out the empty vial, cleaning the needle, and washing his hands. He organized his medicine cabinet and locked it. He put the certificate into the manilla folder, wrote something on it, and set the folder in the iron basket on top of the cabinet.

Finally, looking about, satisfied, he closed the lights, stepped to the door, and exited.

Manny felt depleted, melancholic. He sat in the wing chair in the formal lounge, entranced, while well-dressed guests and students paraded through, chatting. His throat was dry. Had the scene
really
happened? Here, now, the scene of Last Betrayal seemed right, in keeping with Soviet ways and KGB tactics. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Because, he figured, he had been thinking like an American scholar, not like a Soviet comrade. He tried to console himself with the thought that this scene was imaginary only, right? No hard evidence for it! … Still, he felt awful.

“Thank you,” said the elderly man, suddenly reappearing with his wife, “but the Hood Museum is closing now. We will try tomorrow.”

Manny, taken from his depths, looked up, and for a moment swore he saw Daniel right there—the bony structure, the wispy white hair, the alert eyes.

Manny nodded, “Oh, I see. Well, yes, try tomorrow.”

Who had sent the fellow? This montage of lives, which Manny had experienced before, proved a revelation. The accidental meeting was a sign, yes.
His imagined character of a minute ago was revealing to him the real one whom he had visited in Moscow.
A historian’s irony? Or history’s irony? … The cycle was now complete: RW was abandoned by family, state, and friendly interrogator. Manny saw now how in his earlier scenes he had been a naïve romantic. But now, he felt more the realist … For now he understood—it made perfect sense—why the real Daniel P. had never told his son or wife, or spoken to anyone else, even when it could have benefitted him, anything concerning RW and his dealings with him. Nor did he acknowledge anything to the KGB when they interviewed him in 1991 and offered him complete immunity. Silence became his signature, for family, state, and history. To be a KGB operative was one thing—involving institutional perfidy—but to be a personal betrayer on top of that, added a new layer of evil.

Standing up, Manny heard in his mind the last sounds of his son’s finale, those harsh dissonant melodies that Shostakovich had dedicated to Rostropovich, to be played at the composer’s funeral.

The apparent “downfall” of Manny didn’t occur for another few weeks, in October, when the leaves were falling, the colors were changing, football had begun, and the baseball playoffs were heating up. But there was little time to enjoy the foliage and sporting fun for Manny. It happened this way. In Budapest the Medium lady couldn’t—or wouldn’t—restrain herself and take a chance on missing out on her several minutes of fame and glory. So she managed to leak a story to a Hungarian journalist about
her so-called identity
, and which “famous professor” was editing her papers in America. The rest happened fast, furious, and was not so pretty. Newspaper services from around the world picked up the story, printed first in the Budapest magazine
HVG
, and it spread like rumor-wildfire to all sorts of media, starting with the likes of the
International Herald Tribune
, the
Wall Street Journal
, and the
New York Times
, and going on to
Dygens Nyheter
and the
Huffington Post.
Was YouTube next? Manny was phoned, faxed, beeped, wired, e-mailed, texted, confronted. How were the lady’s papers proceeding? When would the memoir be finished? Who was the publisher? (Several New York publishers, plus Yale and Chicago, had expressed immediate interest.) Conveniently, a few inquired whether her revelations were accurate.

When CNN and the BBC called and asked for interviews, and Tom Lantos and the Swedish-Russian Working Group chipped in to ask for and demand answers, what was he to say?

In the next few weeks, there were surprise meetings, journalists, lawyers, interviewers, a detective, scholars, lawyers. His life quickly became a circus; he was followed around by a new group every day on the quiet Ivy League campus. One day he was ambushed inside his classroom by that journalist from Uppsala, who now, with her camera/sound man, sought to film him in class, as part of the process of making a documentary about him; the fifteen graduate students grew very excited, and Manny, very nervous; naturally, he turned them away, to the dismay of the students.