‘I know that,’ Lamont said quietly.
‘He was not even your friend, the young one with the gun,’ Mr Mandelbrot added.
‘I know that too. But it didn’t seem to matter to them.’
‘To who?’
‘To the jury … and the judge.’
‘And so this is why you went to prison?’
‘Yep.’
‘Because the jury and the judge didn’t believe that you had nothing to do with the gun?’
‘Yep.’ Mr Mandelbrot shook his head slowly. ‘Hey, I don’t even think my own lawyer believed me,’ Lamont continued. ‘Public Defender. Busy man, overworked. Didn’t have time to believe me.’
‘So nobody believed you. Why didn’t anybody believe you, Mr Lamont?’
‘I didn’t have the money to pay someone, a lawyer, to get them to believe me. Two young black guys did it and they confessed that they did it. Lookin’ at a plea. Now it takes a whole lot of money to slow things down long enough for people to look differently at the third guy. I was the third guy and I didn’t have that kind of money.’
‘I see. So you went into prison and this is where you lost your daughter.’
‘Yeah.’
‘And you’re looking for her now?’
‘I’m taking steps all the time to find her.’
‘How old is your daughter?’
‘She’s eight.’
‘And your wife –’
‘Chantal. We weren’t married.’
‘I see. She didn’t let you keep any contact with your daughter?’
‘No.’
‘Because you were in prison?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know why. I haven’t seen her to ask her why. So …’
‘And you’re living again now with your grandmother.’
‘Yeah, back in the Bronx.’
‘In the place where you grew up?’
‘Yeah.’
Mr Mandelbrot considered his interlocutor carefully. ‘You like your grandmother?’
‘I love my grandmother.’
‘And she loves you?’ ‘Sure.’
‘You are good to her?’
‘Sure.’
‘Of course you are; you’re good to me. I’m a stranger.’
‘Well, not any more. I know you now.’
‘Yes … you know me … and I know you. I know that things are getting better for you now, Mr Lamont. No more in prison, you’re free to look for your little daughter now, you have this job here.’
‘Yeah and they said they’re gonna give me extra duties so I’ll learn a whole lot of –’
‘Extra, you mean instead of –’
‘No, no, not instead of anything. Extra, as well as. Extra duties will help me to keep my job. The more I know how to do around here …’
Mr Mandelbrot turned towards the window.
‘Yes, it’s true. Extra duties. Sometimes … extra duties can save you.’
*
Adam listened to Sahera Shukri, Dean of Libraries at IIT, describe over the phone to Eileen Miller, Dean of Psychology, the full significance of Henry Border’s transcripts and the effect reading some of them had had on her. There was a lot to do but he still hadn’t figured out just what. What should he do with the material? Should he at least read it all himself or should he notify specialist historians of the Holocaust at Columbia and elsewhere about the transcripts and leave it to them? He didn’t have an answer but nevertheless he felt that sense of calm that comes with achievement or at least with vindication. If you’d asked him what exactly he’d achieved, he would have been stuck for an answer other than to say what it was he’d found and to explain their historical significance and perhaps even their importance to psychology. Could someone else have found the transcripts and surmised their importance? Yes, but nobody had. Adam had saved these transcripts from eventual degradation and ultimately destruction. In doing this he had preserved the stories of the survivors and enlarged the record of precisely what had happened. As he’d told his students, this was no small thing.
‘Don’t give this to somebody else,’ Adam heard Diana say. ‘Have you lost your mind … again?’
‘It’s not my area and, anyway, how long will it take me to read fifty or more transcripts in the hope of finding a reference to black troops at the liberation of Dachau? Look, when I’m not seeing out my time teaching I need to be looking for a job.’
‘You need to be looking for a wife. This is your job: Henry Border and his transcripts.’
‘I don’t know, I’ll ask him,’ Adam heard Sahera say over the phone. ‘Eileen asks who translated the transcripts into English.’
‘You know, I hadn’t got to that yet. Mentally, I’d just assumed that Border had translated them himself but of course that’s not so likely. Firstly, I don’t even know if he spoke any language other than English and, secondly, the survivors would have been speaking different languages. Border couldn’t possibly have spoken them all.’ Adam started flicking through the book.
‘No, he’s looking through the book now … Okay. Great. See you,’ Sahera Shukri said before putting the phone down. ‘Eileen’s coming here to pick you up and take you back to her office.’
Adam was reading through Border’s introduction again. He found that Border’s self-effacing language hid the most likely, albeit unexpected, origin of the translations, namely that Border had indeed translated the transcripts himself. Nowhere in either the acknowledgments nor in the introduction did Border thank or even refer to a translator and the copyright was held by Border alone. It wasn’t shared with a translator. Border had written, ‘A technique of translation was developed to assist me with the recording of adjectives and verbs.’ In writing ‘A technique was developed’, Border had used the passive form so often employed in the sciences to suggest objectivity and to remove the observer from the report. On balance though, one had to conclude that Border himself had been the translator. Could he really have spoken so many languages so well? Adam flicked through the eight transcripts translated in Border’s book. At the end of each interview it had, in italics, the language spoken by the interviewee. The first interview was translated from German, the next from Polish, then German, then French, then Russian, Polish again, then German. Could Border really have spoken all these languages himself? The next interview finished with the words translated from Yiddish. ‘Yiddish!’ Adam exclaimed under his breath. That was impossible. Surely Border couldn’t have spoken Yiddish? Either the interviewee spoke a language other than Yiddish and it was mistakenly reported in the book as Yiddish or else some other person had translated it. Did Border have help that he didn’t want to acknowledge? Did he have someone with him whom he hadn’t mentioned anywhere in the book, someone who could speak Yiddish? Only Jews spoke Yiddish.
On this realisation a third possibility occurred to Adam Zignelik. Perhaps Henry Border was himself a Jew? But what about the allusion in his writing to Christianity, ‘the raiments of the crucified’? What about the donation to the church? Which church was it? Adam would check. Suddenly, though, a lot of things started making sense. Border had to have been around sixty when the book was published in 1949 but he had received his PhD from Northwestern University only some time in his forties. How many Jews was Northwestern graduating in the 1930s? Had he converted for the purpose of smoothing the pathway to a PhD from Northwestern? He claimed to have studied under Wundt but Wundt died in 1920. By the time Adam met Eileen Miller, the Dean of the School of Psychology, he was convinced that, whatever Henry Border might have been telling the world about who he was, Henry Border was in fact a Jew, a European Jew.
‘I know him as a psychologist, one of the earliest members of the faculty here, the person who established the Chicago Psychological Museum,’ Eileen Miller said. ‘I don’t know whether you’ve come across them yet but he reported his research in papers on the use of different devices designed to test people’s visual acuity using both eyes in coordination.’
‘What ki
nd of device?’
‘A dipthometer. This was the early research that laid the groundwork for understanding the different sides of the brain, how different information received by each eye gets coordinated, assimilated, by different sides of the brain into a single image.’
‘So he was an important psychologist?’
‘I’d say he was. Look, a lot of the artifacts that he collected for the Chicago-based psychological museum are now held in Akron.’
‘Akron, Ohio?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why there?’
‘After he retired the Chicago Psychological Museum folded and all the equipment and documents that he collected went to Akron where the American Psychological Association houses its collection of historical psychological apparatus. Border had the foresight to collect and preserve these things. Nobody else did.’
‘Did he get sufficient credit for this?’
‘I’d have to say no. If you read his papers, if a psychologist reads his papers, and I have to admit there’s an awful lot in those boxes in the storeroom that I haven’t read, I think you’d have to conclude he was under-recognised.’
‘At the time?’
‘Both at the time and now. Are you interested in his work? He really should be better known, at least by psychologists.’
‘Well, however important he was as a psychologist, and I’d be in no position to say, he was perhaps even more important as a historian.’
‘A historian?’
‘When you read the transcripts of his interviews with DPs, people we would now call Holocaust survivors, you have to conclude that he might well be the father of oral history. However he arrived at the idea – and perhaps he stumbled on it through his work on the “Adjective–Verb Quotient” – he’s one of the first people to have realised the importance of recording people’s testimony in their own words in the interests of historical research. I don’t know of anyone having done that before him, certainly not recording the testimony of Holocaust survivors, perhaps not of anyone. He hasn’t paraphrased these people. You read the transcripts and you get every stumble, every verbal tic, albeit in translation.’
‘And you think he translated them himself?’
‘I don’t know. My hunch is that he did but I can’t say for certain. Do you know whether he was Jewish?’
‘I don’t know. Why?’
‘Because Yiddish was one of the many languages it appears he spoke. It’s easier to imagine one person speaking all these languages than it is to imagine a gentile in the mid-west of mid-twentieth-century America speaking Yiddish, especially someone with a church affiliation.’
‘What do you mean, a “church affiliation”?’
‘Well, I might be putting it too highly but he did at least once make a donation to a church. He kept the receipt. I made a note of it.’
‘That doesn’t mean he worshipped there, doesn’t mean he was part of the congregation.’
‘No, I guess it doesn’t. But why make a donation to a church you have no connection with?’
‘What’s the name of the church?’
Adam consulted his notes. ‘It was … the Pilgrim Baptist Church.’
‘Oh, that’s just around here. But he wouldn’t have been a member of that church. I’m confident of that.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘The Pilgrim Baptist Church is a black church, one of Chicago’s oldest black churches. There was a fire there last year but it’s still there, sort of. Border might have made a donation just in passing on his way to and from work.’
‘Sure, he could have. And if that was as far as his connection went there’s nothing to say he wasn’t Jewish, which would help explain why he was so keen to get to Europe and record the experiences of Jewish victims of Nazism. It’s not possible that you have contact details for any of the faculty who knew him, if they’re alive?’
‘No, I doubt if any are. But we have lists of his students. Some of them might still be alive.’
‘I’d only need to speak to one person who knew him.’
‘But that person might not know whether he was Jewish or not.’
‘No, but I suspect he was a European Jew and I want confirmation of some kind of accent. Although it might be easier just to check his birth certificate.’
‘Dr Zignelik –’
‘Adam.’
‘Adam, why are you interested in him? What is it in particular?’
‘I guess it’s not really him that’s going to be of interest to historians but his work. But if he really is one of the first oral historians he does deserve some biographical record himself. Is there much known about Marvin Cadden, the sound engineer he worked with?’ Adam Zignelik asked.
‘Yes, there is – a shameful amount – shameful to us in the School of Psychology considering the way we’ve ignored our Dr Border. The Engineers held a huge exhibition not long ago concerning his life and work. Everybody went. It got all sorts of attention, not just on campus but also in the media. They’re very proud of him and his accomplishments.’
‘You don’t know if there’s anyone in the Faculty of Engineering who could talk to me about him, maybe show me some of his equipment? I’d really love to see the wire recorder Border took to Europe in 1946. You don’t think there’d be anyone here who knew him?’
‘He died some time in the 1990s so it’s not out of the question that someone from Electrical Engineering met him or even knew him a little,’
Dr Miller said.
‘Died in the 1990s, that recently?’
‘Well, he was much younger than Border, twenty or thirty years younger. Someone there can probably tell you a lot about Cadden’s work, maybe even a little about his life. I’ll give them a call for you. I know you don’t have a lot of time and we’re keen to do anything we can to assist you with your research into Border. But it’s not likely they’ll be able to tell you anything about Cadden’s interaction with Dr Border.’
‘No, probably not, but I’d still be very interested to see Cadden’s wire recording device, the one Border took with him. It must have been state of the art.’
‘Must have been. They’ll be falling over themselves in Electrical Engineering to help you. Cadden put them on the map. But we’ve got a lot of material from Border himself in the reading room in Psychology that no one’s ever been through, as far as I know. I don’t know what it all is. I’ll give Engineering a call now and at least see when someone can see you.’
‘You mean if someone can see me.’
‘No, I mean when. They really put us to shame. Whenever it is you see them, and it might be now for all I know, don’t let them dazzle you with the history of twentieth-century sound engineering.’
‘No, don’t worry. The devices aren’t of themselves of interest, not to me. It’s Border’s importance in the development of oral history that might well be my subject.’
‘Might well be?’
‘I need to see the full extent of what’s here before deciding exactly what to do with it. It might well be that I simply pass on the transcripts to historians of the Holocaust.’
*
On the ninth floor of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Dr Washington, the young African American oncologist, was finishing her visit to her patient Henryk Mandelbrot. Her professional demeanour seldom wavered. It served to protect her from the pain that might be occasioned by the daily attempt to tame cancer. But with some patients it was harder to maintain than with others. As she was leaving Mr Mandelbrot’s room she said, ‘I guess I’d better be leaving now. This is about the time when your family comes to visit, isn’t it?’
‘No, I asked them to come later,’ he said. ‘They will avoid the traffic. But I have another appointment.’
‘I see.’
In truth it was not so much an attempt to save various family members their battle with the end-of-day traffic but to space out his evening visits as much as he could to avoid loneliness. The first regular visitor came in the late af
ternoon and did not have to battle the traffic to get there since he worked at Sloan-Kettering and so was already there. Somehow a routine had developed in which, at the end of his shift, Lamont Williams, an employee from Building Services, would visit the old man before taking several buses uptown to his grandmother’s apartment in Co-op City, the Bronx.
Initially Lamont had thought his visits to the patient would need to be brief for he didn’t know how they would be viewed by the hierarchy within the hospital. As much as Mr Mandelbrot assured him nothing negative would come from these at first brief visits, it took a long time for Lamont to act calmly on these assurances. The consequences for him, the breach of rules or even of some perhaps unspoken institutional protocol before the end of his probation period – the loss of the job with its attendant economic consequences, the setback to his post-prison adjustment, his concomitant decrease in confidence, and the disruption to his search for his daughter – all of these made him slow to accept the old man’s assurances that no harm would come to him if his visits were discovered. But despite his unease Lamont would come anyway.
Such was the regularity of the visits that it was evident that not only was Mr Mandelbrot getting something out of them but that Lamont was too. And, bit by bit, Lamont was coming to the view that, at least as long as the visits were at the end of his shift, no one at the hospital would care, indeed, that no one would even notice them.
But the one person who definitely did notice them was the visited patient himself, and he took comfort from them not only because they helped consume otherwise dangerously undistracted time but because he too came to conclude that his incongruously regular visitor was gaining some sustenance from them and this realisation in turn multiplied many times the sustenance Mr Mandelbrot himself got from them. So, one day, at around the time when Lamont Williams was normally due to stop by the room on the ninth floor but did not, the old man noticed it, not merely in passing but acutely. There was no one there to see him crane his neck from his bed in his room at each passing sound beyond the door, no one there to see him, while nervously smoothing the sheets on his bed, look at the alarm clock and speculate why it was that the quiet young black man wasn’t there. What could have gone wrong?
The Street Sweeper Page 25
