The Street Sweeper

by Elliot Perlman

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, he was embarrassed to admit this just now but, reading between the lines, I think he got the names wrong, either the historian’s name or the university’s name or both. I’m guessing that when he offered it up to the researchers so that they could find the interview with the survivor, they couldn’t find it. The producers wanted to believe him but they were drawing a lot of heat from the press, from the channel, from a lot of people by all accounts. He said he never thought it would ever be so important. After all, it had only been by chance that he’d copied down the Chicago guy’s details in the first place. He said this was something he read about in the first year or two after demobilisation and he clipped it out of the paper because it was about a time and place he was familiar with – Dachau concentration camp in April 1945. There was a lot going on but he said he made a note of the Chicago professor’s name …’

  ‘Do you think he’d still have the Chicago guy’s details?’

  ‘Well, he had them twenty minutes ago.’

  ‘There’s an Australian expression you might want to use on him. Ask him if it would be “stretching the friendship” to pass on to me via you any details of the Chicago historian he read about after the war. I mean the guy’s name, his department, the institution, anything.’

  ‘You want to check it out?’

  ‘It shouldn’t take long to confirm that he did indeed have the name wrong. But it’s always possible he got it right and that the researchers made a mistake or perhaps they were just lazy. It only takes one person to be fed up, lazy, busy … who knows?’

  ‘I go back a long way with this man. I know this is still important to him. I don’t think it would be “stretching the friendship”.’

  William called Adam again ten minutes later. The name on the scrap of paper his Boston friend had written down all those years ago was Professor Boardman. That’s all that was written on the paper, ‘Professor Boardman, Chicago Institute of Technology’.

  *

  ‘One day when they had brought us back to the ghetto at Dabrowa Gornicza,’ Mr Mandelbrot continued, ‘I saw a gap in the security and took the chance to escape the ghetto. I had no time to think. If I was going to act I had to do so immediately. It was what they call now a “window of opportunity”. I tore off the Jewish star what was stitched to my jacket and walked into the street leading out of the ghetto. It was very late winter, maybe early spring, and late afternoon and already it was getting dark outside. The street was completely deserted. I didn’t know where I was going or if I was doing the right thing. Although I did not look the way they thought Jews look, I still had to think of some story to tell if I was pulled up. I was walking away from the ghetto when a man stepped out in front of me and stopped me. It did not matter whether I looked like a Jew or not. This man knew that I was a Jew. It was the SA man.’

  *

  Professor Adam Zignelik learned that the US Army Center of Military History, while not surprisingly aware of the PBS documentary on the liberation of Dachau and the controversy it had provoked some fifteen years earlier, would neither confirm nor deny that African American troops were involved. That was its official position on the matter. Additionally, within thirty-six hours of learning from William what was written on a scrap of paper by his veteran friend in the mid- to late 1940s in Boston, Adam had established that there is no Chicago Institute of Technology, not now nor back then, not ever. There was and is, however, an Illinois Institute of Technology but it has never had anyone named Boardman on the faculty, not in the 1940s or later. It has never even had a history department.

  Adam made notes of the places he checked. In the mid-1940s the University of Illinois had two campuses, at Navy Pier and at Urbana-Champaign. History was taught at Navy Pier from the time it opened in 1946 to cater for the huge influx of veterans returning home. According to the 1947–48 catalogues, there were ten history courses on offer and nine members of faculty to teach them. But not one of them was named Boardman. As for the Urbana-Champaign campus, there was a Department of History within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences there during the 1945–46 academic year. According to the Board of Trustees Report of 29 August 1945, there were thirty employees in the Department of History of whom fourteen were faculty, all of them with only ‘indefinite tenure’. None of these fourteen academics was named Boardman. Adam even checked the University of Chicago simply because it was in Chicago. He found that it had had a history department right from the time of its establishment in the 1890s but there was no Boardman there,not in the 1940s or before or after. Without asking himself whether he was motivated by scholarship, desperation or some combination of both, Adam checked DePaul, North Park and Loyola universities. He thought to check Northwestern. But while some of them may have existed at the relevant time, there was no Professor Boardman teaching history in the 1940s, ‘50s or ‘60s at any of them.

  Adam had to conclude that there really was nothing to follow up. William’s Boston friend was either lying, mistaken or sending him, advertently or inadvertently, on a wild goose chase. He might have had his reasons to lie about the broader issue, about being at the liberation of Dachau – perhaps to ingratiate himself with liberal Jews who were active in the civil rights movement, Jews like Jake Zignelik. He might have lied perhaps because he had Jewish friends, because he wished he’d been there for quite noble reasons or perhaps he could have lied just to have a story to tell.

  But why, Adam wondered, make up a story about some Chicago historian and the interviews he’d conducted in the mid-1940s? This was so easy to check and yet, some sixty-odd years later, the man was still mentioning it. Whatever motivated William’s friend from Boston, it was looking less and less like the business of a historian. With this knowledge came the sinking re-emergence of the dread that the business of a genuine historian was not really the business of the man whom Adam Zignelik found roaming his apartment alone aimlessly in the middle of the night, his own insensate face looking back at him pathetically from the bathroom mirror. He opened the mirror cupboard and found the comb that Diana had left still entwined with strands of her hair and he wondered how he became the man that held that comb.

  ‘So that’s it, is it?’ Diana whispered to him in the middle of the night.

  ‘I looked everywhere I could, did everything I could do … everything I could think of.’

  ‘Yes, you did. And didn’t it feel good? For a minute there you had something to do.’

  ‘Yeah, it did feel good. I could stop thinking about the future and allow myself to become intoxicated with delusions of adequacy.’

  ‘Wasn’t there someone at the Illinois Institute of Technology?’

  ‘No, they don’t even have a history department, never did.’

  ‘But there was a Boardman, a Professor Boardman.’

  ‘No, there was no Boardman.’

  ‘Yes, there was.’

  ‘No, there wasn’t. Believe me, I’d remember.’

  ‘Have a look at your notes.’

  ‘Is it not enough that you visit me and talk to me when I know you’re not here? Now you even read my notes. And what’s more, you misremember them.’

  ‘Check them, Adam.’

  ‘And if I’m right?’

  ‘If you’re right I’ll tell you what to do with the surplus raisins.’

  ‘Will you forgive me … for what I’ve done … to us?’

  ‘Sweetheart, check your notes.’

  Adam went to his desk as he’d heard her direct him and started flicking through the pages. He could see in his own handwriting the fleeting moments of his fragile enthusiasm. ‘Illinois Institute of Technology. No History Department. Not ever. No Professor Boardman. Not ever. Once a Professor Border on the faculty but not a historian. No Boardman.’

  ‘Sweetheart, are you sure you’re finished?’

  *

  ‘I said good evening to the SA man, trying to act calm as though maybe, if I talked like someone who was permitted to walk th
ose streets at that time, he might be tricked by my confidence. I was eighteen or nineteen then and I had confidence. He said good evening back to me and I walked on no more than three steps before he said “stop”. He had known what I was and in my three steps each of us had considered our positions. When he said “stop” I thought for a moment to run but this man who said good morning could have had me shot or he could be the best friend I had for many streets. What would you do?’

  Lamont Williams didn’t know what he would have done and so said nothing. He did not want to delay hearing what happened.

  ‘I didn’t run. I turned around to look at the SA man and saw that he had the beginning of a smile on his face. “You are outside the ghetto after curfew,” he said. I told him I was strong. I could work. What did he want? I looked up at the second floor of his house, which was still not finished, and I told him I worked in construction and that I could work on his house to help finish it. He shook his head a little bit, not far but very slowly and said that the work on the second floor of his house was work what was being done by civilians. There was nothing in it for him to take the risk of them turning me in.

  ‘But when he said this, I saw for the first time that it was possible, maybe, that he could let me go. If he was already imagining the civilian workers turning me in, it meant that in his head I was living past these few minutes standing there on the street with him. I knew then that there had to be something I could offer for him to let me stay alive. What could he want what I could give? I didn’t know but I knew I had to think of something quickly. But I had nothing. I had just before slipped out of the ghetto, like they say, impulsively. I said to him I could do things for him around his house while he was at work in the day, told him I was strong but he laughed. He could see my mind going, running, running while my body stood there on the spot. My heart beat like the heart of small rabbit. He told me to wait there outside while he went inside his house and I said I would wait. Should I run or should I stay? I didn’t know. Someone else could have seen me in the light of the street lamp while I waited. The streets were still quiet but I didn’t know if they would stay quiet. I didn’t know how long he would be gone. What had he gone to do? If I stayed there and waited and no one else saw me and then he came back, what would he do when he came back? This man had said good morning to me every day but he could come outside and shoot me dead in the street with no consequences for him. What was “good morning” worth to this SA man?’

  *

  What would it take to determine which faculty at the Illinois Institute of Technology had this Professor Border as a member? It took a ten-minute phone call the following day to determine that Professor Henry S. Border was a professor of psychology in the 1940s and the 1950s. This couldn’t be the man William’s Boston friend was talking about. This man was a psychologist. Exactly what kind of work did this Professor Border do? No one at the end of the phone in Chicago knew offhand. Why should they? The man worked there long before the computer age so there was little that Adam would be able to learn about Professor Border online. Someone on the phone from the School of Psychology told Adam he was welcome to come out there and take a look at Border’s files, if he was interested and had the time. They were sorry but, unfortunately, no one there had the time. Of course they didn’t have the time. These people were real academics. Only Adam had time. Adam had only time.

  What was to stop him flying to Chicago and going to the Illinois Institute of Technology? He could leave for the airport immediately after his Monday morning ‘What is History?’ lecture. Who would it bother? Who would even know? Adam stood on the street with a little suitcase and his laptop safely packed away. Maybe he was going to a conference. Maybe he mattered. No one he knew saw him. He had no trouble hailing a cab and an immigrant from the subcontinent took him to the airport, no questions asked. He stood in Hudson News at JFK looking at magazines. He looked at cigarette lighters though he didn’t smoke, looked at gum and at playing cards. He bought a pen that he didn’t need, a copy of The New York Times and some peanuts.

  The lines at the airport were longer than they used to be, more slow-moving, the security checks more invasive. New York was still on a code orange alert. Or was it yellow now? He didn’t know and wondered if anyone there knew. Which was worse? Orange had more red in it so that was probably worse, he figured. No fluids were permitted on the flight, not enough to be useful for anything. Before your legs got crammed under the seat in front of you, you had the opportunity to be shamed by worn, torn or mismatched socks, courtesy of the shoe-bomber. Diana had warned him about the elastic in his socks. ‘We appreciate you have a choice of airlines and we thank you for choosing United.’ It flew to more than a hundred destinations and in and out of Chapter 11. On a flight to Chicago, towards the rear of the cabin, there was a man impersonating an academic historian. Could anyone tell? Would someone report it? Adam opened the Times and tried to read it. There was an article about the Turks, the Kurds, the US and Iraq. He read the same two sentences over and over, trying to take a running start into the article, but could not get engaged.

  Adam thought he might be hungry. He was having trouble opening his peanuts. In disgust with himself he ended up tearing violently at the pack and some of the peanuts flew towards the front of the plane as though more serious than Adam about getting to Chicago. With salt on his hands, Adam watched them fly and then crash-land. He had no children. His parents were long dead. He’d tell people at the Illinois Institute of Technology that he was a historian from Columbia University in New York but soon that wouldn’t be true. When wouldn’t it be true? How fast did the plane fly? A man across the aisle and one row ahead turned back to look at Adam and what was left of his peanuts. Adam smiled weakly. He felt there were bits of peanut caught between his teeth. What was he doing flying out to Chicago to examine the sixty-year-old work of an unknown mid-western psychologist whose name was a little bit like the name an old man in Boston once wrote on a scrap of paper? This was absurd. Adam looked at his salty fingers and thought, Fuck, I hate me.

  *

  ‘He came back out into the street. It seemed to me I had been waiting for an hour but it was only really a few minutes. I don’t know how long it was. He looked around the street, which was still empty. With his finger he beckoned me to come inside to his house. I didn’t know what he was going to do but I did as he wanted. I could have tried to run away, but to where? And, anyway, he could have shot me in the back with a pistol. It was still chilly at that time and he wore a coat. Perhaps he had a pistol inside the coat. I didn’t know.

  ‘We went inside, he closed the front door behind him and he told me to wait in the hall. He walked away from me into a room, maybe it was the bedroom, and he closed the door. I listened but I couldn’t hear much what he was saying. It was more like loud whispering between him and a woman. This woman was his wife. After some minutes he came out of the room alone. He told me that I could sleep in the unfinished upstairs part of the house but in the day I would have to go somewhere else. I thanked him and then he went and got his wife. She looked at me like I was something she had never in her life seen before, a strange animal. She seemed fascinated. Maybe she was even a bit afraid of me. I don’t know. It was not how the guards who took us from the ghetto to work looked at us. They looked at us with contempt but it was different with her. It was a kind of fearful fascination; I would describe it like that. I nodded to her, not knowing whether I should shake hands with her or even with him.

  ‘He showed me upstairs and told me that he would come in the morning to make sure I was awake before the sun came up. I had to leave there before the builders came to start work on the upstairs. Then his wife came up behind him with some bread. They used a ladder. I don’t know what he had told her. I didn’t even know for sure if she knew I was a Jew but I guessed because of the way she looked at me that she knew. Perhaps this was the first time that the reality of what the Germans were doing there was getting through to her. I didn’t know what she k
new. It was hard to imagine that she couldn’t know what was happening to us in the ghetto a few streets away from her new house, but perhaps she didn’t know. Even outside the ghetto they had hanged some Poles, non-Jews, and made their neighbours watch. But if she didn’t see this and nobody told her …’

  *

  Adam Zignelik checked into what looked like an out-of-the-way truck stop passing itself off as a hotel in a neighbourhood that had been described on the internet as downtown Chicago but which felt more deserted than any downtown should feel. A website had lied. A few days earlier he had not ever heard of the Illinois Institute of Technology. Now he was instructing a cab driver to take him there on Chicago’s south side. Though he had little time to observe his surroundings and was concerned not to look an idiot to the young professor he was due to be meeting in the office of the School of Psychology, Adam couldn’t help but notice that, with its unusual variety of greenery among a mix of very old and very new buildings, some almost ostentatiously modern, the campus was unlike any he had ever seen before.

  ‘That’s the Mies van der Rohe touch, amazing, amazing architect, very famous,’ the young psychology professor waxed lyrically, walking Adam out of the building and escorting him to the Galvin Library, the institute’s largest library. ‘You should take a tour of the campus, if you’ve got the time. We often get people visiting just for the architecture. I hate to do this to you but I’ve got to rush. It was … What did you want to see again? It was the Border stuff you wanted to see, yeah?’