Read Searching for Wallenberg for Free Online Page A

mustached brother had shown him two photos of his parents eating ice cream on a Budapest square, several months before they were shot. The boys had survived because of a Swedish diplomat. And he recalled, roughly, words from brother Imre: “No one here knows about Budapest 1944. But you’re a Jewish boy.” He poked Manny’s chest. “You should remember the name Wallenberg.” And further, on a different track, when he watched Ernie Kovacs—the mad mustached Hungarian who opened his show with a machine gun rattling the screen—on TV, he thought of RW. So, thoughts on the man had been planted early in Manny.
    His mind caught up, and he picked up the boy. Little Josh did school dutifully, here in the ninth grade, but he didn’t enjoy the rules, the boring stretches. He was too singular a soul, his sensibility too musical. “Oh, nothing too much,” Joshie responded when Manny asked him how it went. “School is school, Dad. You know that.” While listening to Fournier’s version of the Bach Cello Suites— the boy already had developed a special interest in the suites—they chatted about mundane school. The boy took an ironic pleasure in describing the hallway wanderings of the tough principal. “Really, Dad, that’s what she does; she prowls the halls looking for trouble. You should see her!”
    They drove down Route 89, carved through the mountains, Manny taking it easy at the windy five-mile stretch near Grantham, where, in winter, black ice frequently hid beneath the innocent snow covering. Alternating with his ex-wife on these journeys of thirty miles down the road, Manny enjoyed the drive, with the boy putting on his favorite CDs, commenting on the orchestra and conductor, and chomping on his chips. Presently they were turning off the ramp at the Springfield exit. Another ten minutes, and they proceeded up the steep dirt driveway of Constance Logan’s log house, a driveway that could be hazardous, and where they once got terribly stuck in the thick muck of snow and mud. The boy at ten or so had been an ardent little helper.
    In the small music room, Manny sat in the rocking chair in the corner, a privileged witness to the lesson. The room was wood paneled, with photos of several of Connie’s students and her own chamber groups on the walls; and alongside some bookshelves sat a small chest of open files with musical scores. Connie was a heavyset woman who felt most comfortable with her young pupils; she had been teaching Josh since he was four and three quarters. Frequently she would still call him “Baby” or “Honey” when correcting him. “All right, what do we have for today? What have you worked on?” He answered her, sitting on his wooden chair with his cello, and she asked him to start with some warm-up études from his Schroder booklet.
    As he played, the late afternoon sun slanting through the one window, Manny observed the boy’s small fingers handling the strings adroitly on his full-sized cello, and recalled the earlier quarter- and half-sized cellos. Connie eyed him from her chair a few feet away. For Manny, this was his enchantment hour, as he was transported by the boy’s deft hands and perfect pitch—though Manny himself was tone-deaf. How had the boy come to this passion, this talent? Not from the parents’ genes certainly. His wife had taken the boy to hear a quartet play in the local Monsthire Museum, and afterward the musicians had invited the children up to meet the players and view the instruments. Little Josh, age two and a half, rubbed his cheek against the cello wood, fingered the strings, and that was it. The passion commenced and never wavered.
    And Manny, starting in his late fifties and still going strong, was converted, as the boy had opened him up to this new realm of listening—the cello and classical music, seen and felt from a (little) musician’s sensibility. These hours of weekly practice with the teacher, or those when the boy practiced alone, carved out