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deepened, it seemed to Manny.
    Yet, when he brought the matter up to a British colleague at a local restaurant one day, the fellow said, “Forget it; it’s ancient history. The Rooskies knocked him off; so where’s the mystery? Standard operating procedure—you know what Stalin said, ‘Where there’s a man, there’s a problem.’” Coughlin smiled, drank his beer. “So they got rid of him.”
    “But what about the other problems, the more serious ones, like why didn’t someone get him out? Or trade for him? The family, the country?”
    Tom said, “Hmmm. Hadn’t thought much about that. You have a point. What’d the Soviets have him locked up for, two years or so? Yeah,” he nodded, “that is strange, and may be worth looking into. I don’t know much about him personally, actually. Was he an interesting fellow?”
    As Manny went on to explain a little about Raoul, he understood how much he had taken in, in recent months, about the man, and yet how much there was left to know. Yes, he was interesting, but exactly how? His identity was still a mystery.
    “Was he Jewish?” Tom asked. “I always wondered that, because of what he did.”
    “Oh, he was one sixteenth or so Jewish on his mother’s side, from way back. But he wasn’t raised Jewish and didn’t feel that way.”
    Tom circled the rim of his glass. “Gelly, you always were skeptical of the conventional lines given on stories, so maybe you are sniffing up a trail that will lead you somewhere interesting. So, let’s see what you turn up.”
    Soon, driving home, listening to the frustrating three- or four-minute news segments on frustrating NPR, Manny replayed the conversation with Tom and felt a certain stirring. What was it? Did Manny himself, a totally secular fellow, feel Jewish ? Well, he had always felt culturally Jewish, but was that a polite defense mechanism of sorts? And in recent years, hadn’t he felt, more and more— maybe subconsciously?—the hangover wounds of the Holocaust? Wounds that had been transformed into certain emotions, attitudes, that were complex and undifferentiated. Had these now been raised more to the surface, like an injury causing blood vessels to discolor the skin, by his Wallenberg reading? … Manny bounced along his dirt road, bumpy with early frost heaves, and tried to understand these inchoate feelings.
    How interesting was this legendary Swede? Who knew, who really knew? But certainly it was a real and intriguing question. And how many of those big figures in history were truly interesting, rather than standing out by means of an important circumstance? … In other words, History carried so many pipsqueek figures on its shoulders, and made them seem like little giants.
    On an impulse, Manny hopped on a plane to Ann Arbor, where Raoul had gone to the School of Architecture for three years, in the early 1930s. There on the campus Manny moseyed around, walked into the outdated Lorch Hall, with its wonderful staircase and its studios, where Raoul had done his drafting. Found the old architecture library in the West Engineering Building, and visited the large skylighted room on the fourth floor of the north end, where the freehand drawing and projection drawing was done. (It had been cited by Raoul.) He walked to the pleasant house on tree-lined Madison Street, where Raoul had lived for his three years. Visited the archives and found several items of interest, including a small notebook with his clear handwriting and a humorous photo of Raoul kidding around at the Architects’ Ball, wearing pantaloons and holding his hand over his face in feigned shame. (One note of interest in the notebook: how he wanted to visit the Southwest and see the Frank Lloyd Wright Taliesin West project, and also one of the Indian reservations. Did he ever get there?) Raoul graduated with honors in 1935, and received a silver medal from the American Institute of Architects, given to the student with the highest scholastic standing.