The Street Sweeper

by Elliot Perlman

  *

  Sahera Shukri, the Dean of Libraries at IIT, left Adam alone with the papers she’d given him from the colleague’s late uncle’s attic. He watched her walk away and wished he had somewhere he had to be. He didn’t know whether to go back to the pile he’d been examining before she came or to look at the much smaller one she’d just given him. He chose the new smaller one because he’d get through it faster and then might possibly have some small feeling of accomplishment. This was the rationale behind his decision, the only rationale for it.

  The first few pages were things he’d seen before concerning the psychological museum but the next page was new to him. It was an IIT newsletter from 1947. In an article written by Border himself, it referred to a recent expedition Border had made to Europe as part of his research. The article said the research trip had led to Border’s then current work, particularly a paper titled ‘The Adjective–Verb Quotient: An Investigation of the Speech Patterns of Displaced Persons’. Who were these ‘displaced persons’? Could this be the source of the interview William McCray’s veteran friend from Boston was talking about? After a little research on a different floor of the Galvin Library, Adam learned that it wasn’t until 1980 that post-traumatic stress disorder was accepted as a psychopathology in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The timing of the inclusion had a lot to do with the by then frequently reported experience of Vietnam veterans. But what kind of work was Border doing in the mid-1940s?

  *

  ‘I knew I had to give them something so I told them I would tell them where I had been hiding. From when I was younger bringing animals to my father I knew the roads and also the short cuts through the fields and farms in the area and I knew where there were the ruins of an old castle. A place I had hoped one day to bring a girl but I never did. Now I could still try to make use of it in a way I had never imagined. It was quite a long way from Sosnowiec but I had thought that if I needed to go there I could. I never got around to going to these ruins but I told the criminal police that this was where I had been hiding. They didn’t believe me and they took me back to the cell and left me there.

  ‘You might not believe it now looking at me here in this room that I was ever twenty-one but that is how old I was at that time. And I was in a prison in my own country just for being what I was when I was born. It hadn’t been so much of a crime when I was born, maybe a bit sometimes, but now it was a capital offence. I didn’t know exactly where my family was and I had been beaten by the criminal police for not betraying the people what had helped me. After four days they took me again to the interrogation room and asked me again, “Who has been hiding you?” I said to them that I already told them the truth. I was living in the ruins of an old castle. I said, “I could take you there and show you and you can check.” Even this might have been bad for me because I was afraid that maybe they would ask me to take them there. Then, Mr Lamont, they would see that there was nothing there what showed a person had been living there; no bits of food or any scraps from a life. Unless, of course, some other Jew had been hiding there but two Jews were never so lucky in Poland at those times. And then if they didn’t believe me they might just shoot me in the fields. Yes, why not? But they didn’t want to travel so far or maybe they didn’t believe me in the first place. They didn’t beat me this time, just threw me back in the cell. After one or two days they took me to the Gestapo headquarters.

  ‘A car came for me, I remember. It was still in Sosnowiec.’

  ‘What was the Gestapo, more police?’

  ‘Yes, it was the German Secret State Police. The criminal police took me to Gestapo headquarters and the Gestapo asked the same question, “Where have you been hiding and who has been hiding you?” I told them the same what I had told the criminal police. I was living in the ruins of a castle in the fields. I can show you where it is. They didn’t believe me and they also beat me. They smashed me in the face with the butt of a rifle. I said the same thing again and again but they didn’t care. Blood flowed in a line in the centre of my face from the top here to my chin. They hit me in the same place again and again and after a couple of hours the Gestapo put me in a car. They took me to a prison. I remember it; I can see it on Ostrogorska Street. They took me to a cell on the fourth floor of the prison building and put me in a cell what had in it six Jews and ten Poles; sixteen people in one cell. The Poles, most of them were older than the Jews. The Jews were about my age. When I saw there were young Jews we all started to ask each other questions to see who might know something new what had to do with one of our families, anything we might learn.’

  ‘Do you know where your family was at that time?’

  ‘My parents,’ Mr Mandelbrot sighed, ‘my parents were probably by that time already sent to where I was going.’

  ‘Where were you going?’

  ‘To Auschwitz.’

  ‘What is Owswich, I mean, exactly?’

  ‘Auschwitz.’

  ‘Owswitz.’

  ‘Auschwitz.’

  ‘Ausch-vitz.’

  Mr Mandelbrot slowly nodded once with his eyes half closed to convey assent to his student.

  ‘What exactly is Ausch-vitz?’ Lamont asked quietly.

  ‘This,’ Mr Mandelbrot said, tapping the number tattooed on his left forearm with two fingers of his right hand, ‘this, what you’ve been staring at, this is Auschwitz.’

  *

  Back in the first of the two piles of documents, the larger one, Adam found drafts of grant applications by Henry Border to a myriad organisations for funding to take him to Europe, some of them dating back as far as 1945. It looked as though Border had attempted to get to Europe almost as soon as hostilities had ended there after the war. There were so many applications and rejection letters that it was clear Border was not making any progress, yet he didn’t quit. Application after application, he just kept going. Somehow Border seemed to have got there in 1946. It wasn’t making sense to Adam. It seemed absurd to think that this man’s professional interest in linguistic analysis, something Border was calling ‘The Adjective–Verb Quotient’, would necessitate that he go all the way from Chicago to recently liberated war-ravaged Europe in 1946 simply to gather data for his hypothesis with respect to the relative rate at which distressed people used adjectives and verbs. Something was wrong with this picture. Who in particular among these displaced persons did he want to interview? And who on earth was Henry S. Border?

  ‘You have to talk to Eileen Miller, the Dean of Psychology. You have to examine the other papers. You have to stay longer,’ Diana whispered. But Adam was due to fly back to New York the next morning. The lights might be left on over night but most of the eight million people who lived there would be trying to get some sleep. Many of them wouldn’t sleep. Some of them couldn’t. They would do what they thought they had to do to get to the next day. One of them was up talking to himself under the strip light in the kitchen of his grandmother’s Co-op City apartment in the Bronx. Not one of them would know if Adam Zignelik changed his flight.

  ‘You have to stay longer,’ Diana whispered to Adam Zignelik. ‘You know you do.’

  *

  Lamont Williams’ grandmother woke in the middle of the night to check on a sound, a dull sound. She looked over at the digital clock and saw that it was 2.47 am. She had wanted a good night’s sleep. Her granddaughter was to be taking her out to lunch in the next few days. She always looked forward to these lunches and wanted to be well rested for it but something was keeping her up. The sound she heard was the muffled voice of a man talking to himself out loud. It was her grandson. He was speaking quietly, at times in a particular rhythm, single words most of which she could not make out, and what she could make out she couldn’t understand, words that seemed to be from a language she hadn’t known he spoke. He said them as though they were an incantation of some kind. His grandmother put on her robe and opened the door of her bedroom to better hear what it was her grandson was saying to himself in the mid
dle of the night. Was she going to need help with him? Maybe she could finally prevail upon Michelle to help her with him. He was out now. He had a job; he’d paid his debt to society. What in hell was he saying? It was best to know the worst as soon as possible, however much it might hurt. You lessen the hurt that way. Had he learned a new language in prison? That would be a good sign. Was that even possible? Was it some kind of relaxation technique? Even that would be good. Please let that be it, she said to herself.

  ‘He was born 15 December 1922 in the town of Olkusz. His father was a butcher,’ Lamont Williams said, sipping a teacup of Seneca frozen apple juice.

  Whose father was a butcher? Who was born in 1922? his grandmother wondered. She heard him take a few sips more and put the cup down again.

  ‘Ol-kusz. Zab-ko-vitz-ay. Dab-rov-a Gorn-itch-a. Volksdeutsche. Sos-nov-ietz. Sosnowiec.’

  Was he using drugs now? she wondered. Was he high? What on earth was he saying? She made her way as silently as she could down the hall past the shrine of family photographs, which included one of her then two-and-a-half-year-old great-granddaughter, and continued to listen as he whispered to himself above the hum of the strip light and the refrigerator.

  ‘Dab-rov-a Gorn-itch-a … Dabrowa Gornicza.’

  It was just after 3 am in Co-op City, the Bronx. Lamont Williams, the new guy, still on probation in Building Services, kind of quiet, a nervous guy, was sitting in his grandmother’s kitchen under the strip light talking softly to himself. Lightly he rubbed two fingers from his right hand over his left forearm. His grandmother pulled her robe shut tight with one hand in the darkened hallway and tried to listen to her grandson. What was going to happen to him? He spoke in a curious whisper. She thought to pray that she might understand him.

  ‘Sos-nov-ietz. Sosnowiec. SS Shutzstaffel. Ausch-vitz. Auschwitz.’

  part six

  THE WAITER HELD OUT HER CHAIR FOR HER and, once she was seated, pushed it back in towards the table. Then he did the same for Michelle. This only ever happened to her when she was taken out by her granddaughter. Doubtless, she speculated, watching the waiter push in Michelle’s chair, it happened to Michelle all the time. This discrepancy in their experience didn’t bother her. On the contrary, watching the waiter lavish attention on her granddaughter filled her with pride. Michelle could have been an actress or a model, her grandmother used to tell her. But Michelle was never interested in drawing attention to herself. When people complimented her on her looks it would embarrass her. It was not an attribute she had worked hard to achieve like good grades, which she got but which never garnered her anywhere near the same praise.

  At college the men who were most likely to ask her out were vacuous and shallow, uninterested in the person she really was and what she thought about things, and she thought a lot about most things. They were either arrogant jocks or else delusional desperadoes who had no idea of the way the world saw them. Sensitive men, she had always felt, were intimidated by her looks, thinking that rejection was so likely that, as rich as the prize might be, they were too flawed, too certain to fail, to do anything but admire from a distance. Men like these pursued women just slightly prettier than plain and then married whichever of them they were next to when suddenly the music stopped to announce that graduate school was over. A single guest at weddings, couples would admire her appearance almost excessively and, in so doing, embarrass her, never for a moment dreaming she might know loneliness every bit as well, every bit as sharp, as they ever had.

  A bright student, she graduated with a Masters in social work because helping people had seemed like the best thing she could do with her life. She got a job doing just that, dispensing help to people in need and teaching others to do the same. She dressed down both for her colleagues and her ‘clients’ but still her appearance didn’t go unnoticed by either her male clients or her female clients, though not in the same way. She was well liked and highly regarded by her colleagues but even with them there had been problems that she had needed to overcome. The women, suspicious of her motives for working there, had to be won over since, for the most part, had they looked like Michelle they would not have been social workers earning a relative pittance. Michelle’s male colleagues weren’t susceptible to this kind of suspicion but they were vulnerable to moments of mistaking the friendliness of someone as attractive as Michelle for something more.

  For at least the last year or so Michelle had wondered if she hadn’t chosen the wrong career. Nobody can be asked to display limitless compassion and especially not to people who so often didn’t even heed her advice. She had to stop herself from blaming them. When she had been a student it had been a lot easier to blame history, society and free market fundamentalism, the Federal Government, the City and racism. Now it could take all her strength not to shake some of her clients when they came back with the same problems again and again. She and her husband Charles would go to dinner parties in Westchester, Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope and dine with liberal academics, white and black, Hispanic and Asian, and she would envy their capacity to continue thinking exactly as she had as a student. Theory always trumped experience at these occasions and she envied the time they seemed to have to find peer-reviewed evidence to support their long-held views.

  Despite all of this she worked on herself to exhibit kindness in all her dealings with people both professionally and in her private life. This was how she came to be taking her grandmother out to lunch one Saturday. They had gone to a place the family had at times gone to on special occasions in the past. It was a steak restaurant in the city, downtown near Union Square, and this was one of many times the two of them had had one of their ‘special’ lunches there since those now distant occasions when Michelle had been a little girl.

  ‘Sonia didn’t want to come?’ Michelle’s grandmother asked tentatively.

  ‘Are you kidding, Grandma? She was desperate to come. I wouldn’t let her. She had soccer this morning and has to study for a test she’s got on Monday and then another one she’s got on Wednesday. No, she really wanted to see you and we even had words over it. She was especially mad at me for not letting her come since we got you a little present and it was her idea.’ The last time they had met downtown Michelle’s grandmother had left home without an umbrella and when it had rained suddenly but emphatically she’d had no choice but to go against her New Yorker’s instincts and buy the nearest cheap umbrella proffered by an African immigrant who had materialised on the street with the first drop of rain and was in a new line of work by the time the last drop hit the sidewalk. She had known that the umbrella was likely not to last very long and it hadn’t, succumbing to the wind on its very first outing. It was for that reason that before meeting her grandmother at the steak restaurant Michelle had stopped at a specialist umbrella store on East 45th Street and bought her a distinctive Guy de Jean umbrella with a shiny black wooden handle and a houndstooth-like design in charcoal grey topped by a wraparound frieze of Scottish terriers with bright red bow ties as a gift ostensibly from Sonia.

  Michelle was all the more attuned to her grandmother’s financial circumstances since her cousin moved back in with her grandmother after his release from prison. She knew that her grandmother’s household expenditure would have suddenly risen dramatically without any corresponding increase in income. She wasn’t counting on Lamont being in a position to contribute anything despite, as her grandmother had told her with pride, his having got a job in Building Services at a hospital. But it was difficult to give her grandmother money without embarrassing her.

  The best way would have been to slip a cheque or, even better, some cash inside her grandmother’s purse when she was distracted but this wasn’t practical and, in any event, Michelle had wanted her to know that there was extra money to help her through the week or through the month. To accomplish this she hit upon the idea of presenting her grandmother with a gift from Sonia accompanied by a card with some cash inside the envelope about which Michelle wouldn’t comment.


  ‘Oh, my goodness it’s beautiful!’ her grandmother said, examining the umbrella at the table in the restaurant. She leaned over to kiss her granddaughter. ‘You really shouldn’t have done this,’ she said opening the card from Sonia. It read, ‘Dear Nanny, I hope you like the umbrella. I wanted to give it to you myself since it was my idea but Mom wouldn’t let me ‘cos of my tests and soccer. Sorry she did this. Hope to see you soon. Love, Sonia.’ Then Michelle’s grandmother saw the cash that waited in the envelope behind the card.

  ‘Now before you say anything,’ Michelle pre-empted, ‘we know, Charlie and me, we know that things might’ve got a bit harder now that Lamont’s home and we just felt that, you know, since we could, we wanted to try to –’

  ‘’Chelle, he’s doin’ real well.’ She used the diminutive version of her name that her cousin had coined in their youth. It wasn’t lost on her granddaughter.

  ‘That’s good, Grandma.’

  ‘Real well. They talkin’ ’bout givin’ him extra duties.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘He’s still hoping to see his little girl but … I don’t want to crush his hopes ‘cause I think that maybe … maybe they help him get up in the morning.’ She looked out into the middle distance and then returned her gaze to the umbrella and then to Michelle.

  ‘Do you think he’ll find her? Maybe you … ain’t that the kind of thing … will you see him? At least see him.’ She took her granddaughter’s hand.

  ‘I will, Grandma.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You will?’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t right now.’

  *

  In 1945, immediately after the end of the war in Europe but before the war in the Pacific was over, before the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a civilian, a little-known professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology on Chicago’s south side by the name of Henry Border began tirelessly to make what seemed like an endless succession of grant applications in an attempt to get himself into the heart of Allied-occupied Europe. Why? Searching through the Galvin Library at IIT, Adam Zignelik found, from a 1947 university newsletter, that Border’s stated purpose was to gather data from ‘displaced persons’ to further his research into what Border, the psychologist, called the ‘Adjective–Verb Quotient’. Border’s at least tentative hypothesis was that people in ‘distress’ will use adjectives and verbs in a different ratio to each other than will people who are not in ‘distress’.