The Street Sweeper

by Elliot Perlman

  ‘Side entrance, bud,’ somebody called over the vacuum cleaner.

  Chantal was the name of the woman he had taken there and everyone had looked at her. She was beautiful.

  ‘Side entrance.’

  ‘You done yet?’ someone called to one of the waiters.

  ‘Almost.’

  ‘Side entrance.’

  Lamont remembered looking at the size of the wine glasses next to the water glasses and thinking it was going to take all the money he had ever seen to fill those wine glasses even once. But if anyone had been worth it, he’d thought she was. He remembered leaning in to hear her against the noise of the traffic in Union Square. And that she never leaned in, not once.

  ‘Side entrance, bud. Hey, I’m talkin’ to you!’ a man with authority within the hierarchy of the steak restaurant barked at Lamont. ‘Deliveries to the side entrance!’

  ‘I ain’t here to deliver anything,’ Lamont said quietly, causing the maitre d’ to approach him in order to hear him.

  ‘What did you say?’ he said, looking Lamont up and down.

  ‘I ain’t here to deliver anything. I’m here to pick something up.’

  ‘What’re you talkin’ about?’

  ‘My grandma was here last Saturday. She left her umbrella. Special umbrella. I’m here to pick it up for her.’

  ‘Lotta people leave their umbrellas here,’ the maitre d’ said suspiciously.

  ‘No doubt they do. She’s one of ’em. Last Saturday. Table for two, reservation made under the name of McCray.’

  The maitre d’ thought for a moment.

  ‘Special umbrella, you say?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What’s it look like?’

  ‘It’s got Scotty dogs on it … Scotty dogs with red bow ties around the edge … and it’s grey … charcoal grey. It’s got … she said it’s … it’s got a dog’s-tooth design pattern.’

  ‘Dog’s tooth?’ the maitre d’ said sceptically.

  Lamont pulled out a slip of paper from his pocket. ‘Houndstooth, it’s got like a houndstooth design pattern in charcoal grey.’

  Again the maitre d’ thought for a moment before he spoke. ‘Come with me.’

  Lamont followed him to the coat check room and was told to wait. After about a minute, the maitre d’ brought out a kind of shopping cart that held a collection of some twenty or so umbrellas.

  ‘See any Scotty dogs with red bow ties?’ the maitre d’ asked him. Lamont took his time and looked carefully inside the trolley but he couldn’t see any umbrellas matching the description his grandmother had given him.

  ‘I’ll take that one,’ Lamont said, pointing at a large and sturdy-looking umbrella with a shiny black handle.

  ‘That ain’t the one you described,’ the maitre d’ said.

  ‘I’ll take that one,’ Lamont repeated quietly.

  ‘Well, what am I gonna do when the owner of this one comes in lookin’ for it and it’s gone?’

  Lamont beckoned to the maitre d’ to lean in over the counter as he picked up the large sturdy-looking umbrella with the shiny black handle and spoke to him almost in a whisper.

  ‘You tell ’em whatever shit you gonna try on me.’ He turned slowly towards the greeting station and walked in no hurry past the other waiters and then on in the direction of Union Square, the umbrella with the shiny black handle tucked firmly under one arm.

  *

  It was 9.15 pm when Adam found himself alone, not merely in the reading room but also alone in the building. Arturo Suarez had gone home to his wife long ago. Adam had left messages on the office answering machines of both Sahera Shukri at the Galvin Library and Eileen Miller explaining that he had found Border’s wire recordings, the source of the transcripts. Eileen Miller would have to ensure they were kept safe. The wire recorder should be returned to Arturo Suarez in Electrical Engineering. He thanked each of them and promised to call them from New York. He looked at his watch again and wondered if he had time to listen to one last wire recording before trying to find a cab in the dark to take him first to his hotel downtown and then on to the airport. Not knowing how long the journey would take at that time, let alone even how difficult it would be to catch a cab, Adam was playing with fire. He picked another spool anyway and, with clammy hands, started to thread the wire into Cadden’s machine. He chose the one nearest the right wall of the crate. Each spool was labelled but Adam hadn’t yet started paying attention to the markings. For now he was just listening.

  This interview – it turned out to be the last one Border recorded – was in Yiddish, a language Adam didn’t speak but recognised and partially understood from his maternal grandparents. He recognised also the name of the interviewee because the interview happened to be one of the eight included in Border’s book, I Did Not Interview the Dead. In the book Border had described the woman. The interviewee, a fair-skinned Jewish woman with light hair, who had been in both of the two ghettoes established for the Jews of Grodno on the ethnic border of Poland and Belarus, had told Border how her husband had convinced her that their newborn baby’s only chance of survival lay with the woman trying to pass as a Christian at least long enough to get the baby to the door of the local church-run orphanage. It snowed the night she set off to try.

  She told Border, seated with her back to him, that it was minus twenty-six degrees Celsius, which Adam calculated to be about minus fifteen Fahrenheit. After ripping off the yellow star from her coat and being handed the baby by her husband, the woman tried to make it out of the ghetto gate with a group of other Jews, but she was unsuccessful. Shots were fired and sixteen Jews lay dead in the snow on the street at the side of the ghetto. Holding her baby against her chest in an attempt to balance its need for air and for protection, she stifled a scream as she looked down at the corpses of the people next to whom she had stood moments before. She and the baby kept quiet as blood trickled out of five of the escapees and coloured the snow. But she must have shuddered at the sight of a twitching leg on one of the corpses because the tiny girl started to cry. The mother tucked the baby into her coat and ran back into the ghetto proper.

  Later with the help of her husband the woman tried again, this time through the wire fence, which in this ghetto was not electrified at the time. Her husband raised the wire and, holding the baby wrapped up in swaddling cloth, the woman crawled through. There was a curfew even outside the ghetto for the non-Jewish residents and the woman had an hour to save her baby daughter’s life. She went to the home of a Polish Christian woman whom she’d liked but had met no more than twice and she begged the woman to take her child to the local orphanage. But the Polish woman was afraid and explained that she could be shot merely for speaking those few words to her. All of it in whispers, all in shadows, all of it in the snow, the two women looked at each other, pleading with each other to understand the other’s position.

  Then the Polish woman came up with an idea. She told the Jewish woman to leave the baby wrapped in the swaddling in the street a little bit away from the door, maybe thirty paces, and then to go. She would come out a few minutes later with a neighbour. They would come out together and, as if by chance, the Polish woman would find the baby in front of her neighbour. The neighbour would then be a witness. Then in the morning the Polish woman would take the baby girl to the orphanage.

  There was nothing else the Jewish woman could do. She spoke into Cadden’s wire recording device and explained what it is like to leave your newborn baby in the snow in the streets not far from a ghetto. She told of how she gently placed her daughter on the ground, how she kissed the baby’s forehead, knowing how unlikely it was she would ever touch her daughter again, how unlikely it was she would ever see the child again. She told of how she hid across the street and watched her baby lying in the snow, waiting for the woman to come out of her house with the neighbour as a witness. She described her anguish in the minutes as she waited hidden, her only hope being that a virtual stranger would come and pretend to find her
baby, how in those minutes which seemed to last an eternity she wanted to run out into the street and grab the baby and keep her with her and how the pull of the child screamed against her reason, which said that in this strategy lay the best chance of the child’s survival. She described the bitter-sweetness at seeing the Polish woman come out with her neighbour and ‘discover’ the baby, just as she’d promised.

  Border listens, occasionally interjecting a question without any emotion, although the woman often broke down in tears, sometimes sobbing uncontrollably for minutes. Adam found it hard to breathe as he listened, following along with the transcript as it was translated and printed in Border’s book, I Did Not Interview the Dead. The woman described unspeakable horrors, including the beating and then the death of her husband, her own suffering in the ghettoes, and then in Auschwitz, until she was finally liberated.

  Throughout all of it, and indeed throughout all the interviews Adam had heard thus far, Border had betrayed no emotion at all once the interviewees had started their stories. As far as Adam could hear, Border remained always the scientist, the academic psychologist interviewing these people in a range of languages simply for the raw data they provided. Then, when it appeared that this woman had finished her story, Border asked about the fate of the woman’s daughter. The woman explained that she had been in that DP camp in Wiesbaden for a year. There was silence on the wire but for its own hiss and crackling and the faint background sounds of the other displaced persons. Then the interviewee spoke.

  ‘The Polish woman had come out … with her neighbour … and she picked up my daughter. It became known that she picked her up from the street. There was an investigation … The authorities determined that the child was Jewish and –’ At this point Border interrupted.

  ‘How could they determine that?’

  ‘I don’t know, perhaps because my daughter had my husband’s colouring not mine, perhaps because my husband’s family was well known in the town. I … really can’t say. Perhaps it was because the woman had not given my daughter to the orphanage after all.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I suspect it was because she loved her. The woman was childless. It was just three weeks before the Russians came that … they buried her … my daughter. She is in the Christian cemetery. I would … the Jewish one was completely desecrated. There is a woman in Lodz, the wife of a doctor there, and this woman …’ Again the interviewee collapsed into uncontrollable sobs.

  ‘And this woman … the wife of a doctor in Lodz?’ Border asked. The woman took in deep breaths before answering in a tiny voice.

  ‘The woman in Lodz … she has photographs … of my daughter.’ After this, Border had lost her. She had disappeared inside her own agony and he spoke directly into the machine for the first time, not to an interviewee or to anyone else in the vicinity but to Cadden’s machine. As the woman continued to cry Adam heard Border speak in an English with a strong European accent. Now for the first time, Adam hears emotion in Border’s voice.

  ‘You are lighting a cigarette,’ he says, even though the woman doubtless doesn’t speak English. ‘Well, we have to conclude … Wiesbaden, September 1946, in the synagogue that was desecrated in 1937 or ‘38 and which has its holiday service for the first time … although it has not been rededicated … What we have heard from this woman … is the story we have heard from everybody … I’m concluding my project in Germany … I want to thank the UNRRA, Jack Thompson from The Chicago Tribune … and … I can’t speak. I don’t remember the names … now … because I’m too emotional … this woman’s report. I’m concluding this project. The automobile is waiting. I am going to Frankfurt.’

  Then the crackle, the hum and the hiss of the wire recorder continue without competition from any other sound for a few moments with Border remaining silent. He was just sitting there, exhausted, behind the now silent woman. The moments pass and his voice begins again. Adam hears that it is the voice of a man who feels unutterably alone. He hears, ‘… Who will sit in judgement over all this?’ Again there is another long silence save for the hum and the crackle of the equipment. Then Border speaks again. ‘And who is going to judge my work? … Who is going to judge … me? IIT wire recording. Leaving tonight for Paris. This project is concluded.’ That was the end of the wire. A little over sixty years later Adam Zignelik too had a plane to catch.

  *

  Some time between 9.30 and 10pm on a Saturday night a young African American girl kept herself upright by holding on to the pole of a very crowded subway car going uptown on the Number One line. She had got on at the Lincoln Center stop and was tired enough to have fallen asleep, had it been possible to sleep where she stood without falling down. There was a bit of a racket going on at the other end of the car but it seemed far enough away not to concern her. She listened to a nearby conversation to try to keep herself awake so she wouldn’t miss her stop. A man and a woman who, from their tone, clearly knew each other were talking.

  ‘You know the One and the Nine were voted the dirtiest trains.’

  ‘No kidding?’

  ‘Yeah, I read about it.’

  ‘They’re voting for that now? I remember the Nine. They don’t have it any more.’

  ‘No, you know why?’

  ‘Too dirty?’

  ‘Gotta be.’

  At the other end of the carriage the ruckus was being caused by a man the young girl deemed obviously deranged. He was talking at an inappropriately high volume to people he was treating as friends but who, their response made it clear, did not know him. With difficulty he tried to maintain his balance as he slowly made his way over to her end of the carriage. He had matted hair and torn clothing and moved the fingers of one hand rapidly and consecutively like a consummate pianist passing through an arpeggio. He swayed on another axis entirely to the one that had him shuffling towards the young girl’s end of the carriage. A tourist might have thought he was drunk but she knew better. He slurred his words and spoke too loudly. His non-arpeggio hand was more or less outstretched. One had to quickly formulate a policy with respect to each mendicant. Did he warrant any money? Did you have any change? Did you have easy access to the change? Did he have a story that was sad enough? Did you believe it? Could you make the slightest bit of difference to him? Her mother would have known what to do. Were you afraid of him? Were there other people around to help you if your policy had unforeseen consequences? What was the young girl doing on that train?

  The previous day she had made arrangements to go to the movies. She was to be meeting a group of friends at Loews Movie Theater but, with the alacrity and the logic that seemed acceptable only to the collective judgement of a group of fourteen-year-old girls, the plans had been altered drastically at the last moment and then suddenly none of them were to be meeting at the movies. But since it had taken Sonia so long to convince her parents to let her go in the first place and since she was intent on spending the evening away from them, she didn’t tell them that her plans had fallen through. She didn’t want to hear them pretending they hadn’t just been arguing. Instead of staying home, she had gone ahead with the original plan and seen the movie on her own without telling her parents that she would be out on her own. She’d been planning to look at the CDs and magazines in Tower Records but had forgotten that it had closed down so, tired and disappointed, she spent some time in a Starbucks watching people, before making her way to catch the train that arrived carrying the broken man now coming towards her.

  He made a lot of sounds but it wasn’t always clear what he was saying. The outstretched hand was contorted. At the other end of the car he’d been causing a few people to laugh but no one was laughing around him now. A dishevelled African American man, he looked to be in his early fifties. Sonia thought he had to have been around her father’s age. Discreetly she put her hand in one of her pockets to see if she had any change. She wondered as she did this whether giving him change would be the right thing to do or the smart thing. It might move him along faste
r or it might win her unwanted attention. Her mother would have known the right thing to do. He dragged his body past the people near Sonia, mumbling and slurring most of his words until they were too incoherent to be understood. He seemed to know on some level that no money would change hands without a story but he wasn’t able to get the story out. Sonia had reached into her pocket and was ready to give him something when he dragged his body past her and everyone else without stopping long enough for anyone to give him anything. Still mumbling, he made his way through the carriage door into the concertinaed section between that carriage and the next one. The train continued on its way uptown.

  *

  One night, early in the Chicago May of 1945, a man aged about sixty but who felt older, and whose manner was entirely of another time and place and whose heavy coat was of another season, walked alone on the city’s south side. He travelled from his home some ten miles away to this neighbourhood five days a week in order to get to work and, although he had at times worked late into the night, he was certainly not accustomed to being at work this late at night. His normal route home took him from his office in the Main Building at the Illinois Institute of Technology to the Elevated train station at 33rd and State streets. He was certainly not accustomed to being in the surrounding streets in the dark. With the bearing of a Europe that had vanished, less at this moment an immigrant and more a refugee, he kept glancing at a piece of paper in his hand and then up at the street signs, from one to the other again and again, looking for assurance that he was headed in the right direction.

  There were a lot of people, men and women, old and young, passing him on the street. In passing them he caught snippets of conversation but understood none of it. All of the people he passed were black. It was their neighbourhood and when they looked at him what they saw was an oddity. So many people out at night, he thought, as he walked past the rib joints and funeral parlours, the storefront churches, pawn shops, bargain shoe stores and liquor stores. The people swirling all around him were of different ages but most were much younger than him. The men wore suits that can’t have been theirs when the suits first were sold some time in the previous decade. The women’s clothes were of more recent vintage, often obviously homemade. So many of them were recent arrivals to Chicago from the south. Many had arrived more recently than he had and to a casual onlooker not a few of them might have seemed lost but it felt to him that every man, woman and child belonged there more than he did.