‘He’s a friend of yours, you said? Ever meet any of his kids?’
‘No, I only ever see him at the plant but –’
‘Not one of his kids? ‘Cause he’s got five kids. He’s slowed down a little. You know it and you know why.’
‘I don’t know what you talkin’ about.’
‘It’s his back, James,’ said Herbert Marks. ‘He’s got a problem with his back. Sounds like a lower disk problem but, hey, I’m no doctor. He doesn’t want anyone to know but he’s confided in you.’
‘I ain’t sayin’ … I don’t know what you talkin’ about.’
‘James, we know about it ‘cause the company knows about it and they know about it because his numbers have dropped.’
‘Billy Moore, he’s a master splitter,’ James said quietly.
‘He suffers back spasms. The company’s noticed he’s slowed down. He’s slowing down the whole line. You’ve tried to cover for him but he’s slowed down.’
‘Not much,’ James countered.
‘No, not so much. Enough so they noticed. Some time in the next week –’
‘We don’t know exactly when,’ Ralph Hellerstein interrupted.
‘Some time in the next week they’re going to send him to see the company doctor. He won’t have a choice, James, he’ll have to go.’
‘Now the doctor’s going to give Billy a series of tests, physical tests, and Billy’s not going to make it. They’re goin’ to keep testing his back until it spasms.’
‘And then?’ James Pearson asked.
‘Then they’re going to fire him.’
‘But he can still work. Might of slowed some but … I mean I know the man. He’s right next to me every day.’
‘Well, he won’t be soon,’ Herb Marks said.
‘He’s got five children, James, worked there eleven years and they’re going to ease him on out the door with nothing in his hand after the handshake leaves him cold with his arm stuck out and his palm facin’ up. They give you that handshake and you’re ready to beg.’
‘But he can still work,’ James protested.
‘James, if the hogs could process you do you think they wouldn’t round them up, pay them what they’re paying you? They’d corral them, spy on them …’ Ralph Hellerstein trailed off and Herb Marks took off.
‘They’d even kid those hogs into thinking they had an independent union. The only reason they don’t do that is that they can’t think of any way to make money out of getting people to eat you.’
‘James,’ Ralph Hellerstein began, ‘they hire and fire as they wish; they pay as little as they can get away with.’
‘Mr Hellerstein –’
‘Ralph.’
‘Ralph, there ain’t nothin’ we can do about any ‘o this.’
‘Who’s we?’
‘We … I don’t know; the workin’ man, the workin’ black man.’
‘Well, see, if you meant “we”, the men on the floor, all the men on the floor, I’d say that’s where you’re wrong.’
‘That what you want, all the men on the floor?’ asked James Pearson.
‘We want you to consider, now just to consider, no undertakings, just to think about joining the Packinghouse Workers Organising Committee.’
‘What!’
‘We’re not asking you for an answer now. We’re not asking you to join tonight. We’re asking you to consider joining. We’re going to come back and talk to you about this another time after you’ve given it some thought. Please just think it over. We need someone like you. A lot of people do. In the meantime, if you want to talk to us, you call this number.’
James Pearson looked at the card and put it in his pocket. ‘Mr Hellerstein –’
‘Ralph.’
‘I like to get me my sleep at night. No offence but how do I know when you comin’ back?’
‘When Billy Moore tells you they’re done with him and that he doesn’t know what he’s gonna do, doesn’t know how he’s gonna feed his kids; very soon after that you can expect to hear from us.’
*
Ten miles away Elly Border thought she knew the sounds of her house very well. She had lived there alone with only her father and he was a quiet man. The noises around her home weren’t something she had given conscious attention to. It was rather that they were the dots in a pointillist aural landscape that had been etched into her unconscious. This was different; something was going on outside. It was louder than any cat or any wind could have made and there had been no wind to speak of all that night. She couldn’t avoid the feeling that the something that was out there was a person. What was he doing around her house? Maybe he was drunk.
‘Callie,’ she whispered as she knocked on Callie’s door.
‘Elly, go back to bed.’
It took a few more attempts. ‘Callie! Callie!’
‘You sure better hope you sick or somethin’, young lady,’ she said, opening her door and putting on a bathrobe.
‘There’s someone here.’
‘No, there’s not. Go back to bed. I’m not jokin’ with you, child. You gettin’ me mad.’
‘Callie, I’m serious. Listen!’
But now Callie heard something too. She went downstairs and Elise followed her. Whatever the source of the sound, it was hovering around the front porch. Through the frosted glass at the front door Callie could see a figure right outside. She went to the broom closet not saying a word and, with Elly close behind, she picked up a broom and took it out. She switched on the outside light and could see the shape of a human figure unambiguously. Holding the broom she called to the person, ‘What do you want?’
No spoken answer came, only a little knock at the front door, almost timid.
‘Who is it? What do you want?’ Again no answer came from the other side of the door, nothing but a knock.
Elly stood right behind her at the front door and for the first time she doubted the wisdom of her protector as in horror she watched Callie, broom in one hand, slowly open the door. Elly had been right. She really had heard noises that hadn’t belonged at her home. They had come from a human. Now standing behind Callie, Elly Border saw who it was that had made those sounds. She saw a black man with a crazed look in his eyes. She was terrified. Callie Ford, standing in front of her, saw something quite different. She saw her fourteen-year-old son, Russell. He was terrified.
‘Momma,’ he said, breathing heavily. ‘They taken away Mr Pearson. Two white men took him away. I saw it.’
*
It was unusually good luck for Henry Border that almost immediately upon entry to the Stuttgart West DP camp the first person he came across was a DP named Gruenberg who seemed to be some kind of camp elder, a spokesman or communal leader of some kind of the Jewish inmates. This man knew the camp and understood the way things worked there.
‘What is this?’ Gruenberg asked Henry Border, pointing at the heavy recording equipment the older man lugged with him. When Border explained that he was there to record the experiences of the Jewish DPs, Gruenberg nodded encouragingly.
‘You can record people on this? How does it work?’ he asked but before Border had a chance to reply, a young man walking so briskly he was almost running interrupted them. ‘Very soon, Mr Gruenberg, very soon. I think it will be today.’
‘You come and get me as soon as you think she’s ready. You won’t forget, Shmuel?’ Gruenberg answered.
‘I won’t forget, Mr Gruenberg.’
‘Promise me?’
‘I promise,’ the young man called back, now running away from where Gruenberg and Henry Border were standing. They watched him go.
‘That young man there, Shmuel, he and his wife are expecting a child.’
That Shmuel himself looked like a child, that neither of them knew how long it would take, if ever, for the remnants of European Jewry to numerically replace the ones they had just lost but that there was no greater impulse than to try, all of it went unsaid by Gruenberg and by Henry Border as they watched th
is man Shmuel run back to his wife.
‘Well,’ continued Gruenberg, ‘anything you can tell the Americans about what we have been through can only help. Initially they made no distinction between us and any other DPs. In fact, it’s still this way in the British Zone and also in the French Zone.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You had a situation where, for example, they would put all DPs together, no matter where they came from. So you might have Ukrainians who had fought on the side of the Nazis, but who now don’t want to go home for fear of retribution from the Russians, living in the same camp with us. These Ukrainians are as anti-Semitic as anyone we have ever seen. A few Jews said they recognised some of them.’
‘Recognised them from where?’
‘From Auschwitz.’
‘I don’t understand. If they were fighting on the side of the Germans what were they doing in Auschwitz?’
‘They were working there as guards, Dr Border.’ Gruenberg looked at Henry Border as if for the first time. He was perplexed. ‘You are American, you said. Are you here from the Joint?’
‘No.’
‘You’re not? Who are you with?’
‘I’m not with anybody.’
‘But who sent you?’
‘Nobody.’
‘What do you mean “nobody”? Who’s paying you to be here?’
‘Nobody’s paying me.’
‘But how did you get here, on whose money?’
‘My own money.’
‘Just for these interviews on your machine?’
‘Yes.’
Gruenberg looked at him for a moment without speaking. ‘Well, as I said, anything you can tell the Americans about what we have been through can only help. I imagine it will, I hope it will, but who knows? With some of them …’ he trailed off.
‘Maybe it will encourage people to give us provisions, supplies. We need men’s clothing, everything; shirts, trousers, jackets, socks, shoes, underwear. Women’s clothing too. If we had the material and sewing machines there are people here who could make it for us themselves. Better than nothing. Much better, actually. There are tailors here in the camp. If we only had the fabric and of course the sewing machines. We need writing equipment for the children and also for letters. People here write letters all the time, sending them to people they don’t know, to people they’ve never met, sending them into every corner of the world looking for the latest news, the freshest news they can get of the dead. Well, we need everything. There’s nothing we don’t need. Men walk around here, like that young man before, Shmuel, and –’
Border interrupted him. ‘What did you mean before about the Americans? You said “With some of them”. What about some of them, the Americans?’
Gruenberg seemed reluctant to go on. ‘You know, the way your General Patton felt about us is not very different from how the Nazis felt. It’s true. He said the Jewish DPs are lower than animals. He described the Jews as a subhuman species without any of the social or cultural refinements of our time. Really, that’s what he said. You have to wonder if these views were based on the starved, wretched, barely alive Jews he’d seen in a just-liberated concentration camp. Or were his views older than that? You have to wonder when exactly he developed these views.’
Henry Border didn’t know what to say to this. He wasn’t used to being part of the ‘you’ that possessed a victorious four-star general, now dead, a hero to the country that helped liberate the remnants of the people some of whom he saw all around him even now in ill-fitting rags surrounded by wire.
‘I didn’t know that,’ Henry Border said quietly with a shame that might have suggested that he himself felt responsible for what Patton had said. There were so many thoughts rushing through his mind at any one time, all of them rushing too quickly to be caught and catalogued. But worse than this for him, as each thought passed the upper reaches of his consciousness they would not dissolve or evaporate. Instead, each thought he’d had since arriving in Europe and seeing his first Displaced Person stayed on his mind and backed up, congregated and concertinaed into the next one as it jostled for attention as primus inter pares. Each recollection, each anecdote, each missing family member of someone to whom he had spoken cried out to be his only thought. The enormity of what had befallen these people, his people, weighed down on him far more heavily than a thousand Marvin Cadden wire recording devices. It was taking every ounce of his mental strength to remember what he was doing there. And this was before he had even turned his mind to what had happened to his own family and friends.
‘Tell me,’ said Gruenberg, as they walked towards a building to which Gruenberg clearly wanted to take him, ‘you said you’re American but you speak Yiddish like a Polish Jew.’
‘I am a Polish Jew.’
‘When did you get to America?’
‘Before the war.’
‘Before the war! And your family, what do you know about …’
Gruenberg’s attention and then Border’s too was abruptly transferred from their conversation all the way to the other side of the camp by a man shouting. DPs often shouted at each other in a babel of languages but this was different. It came from the side of the camp from where they had come, the side where the gates were. There was some sort of commotion. A lot of trucks had arrived and were parking in a row beside the long line of trees outside the camp. A visible wave of anxiety rippled through the inmates nearest the gates. Gruenberg turned away from Henry Border mid-sentence and walked hurriedly over to the DP who was shouting.
‘You have no right,’ the man, whose short sleeves revealed the number tattooed on his arm at Auschwitz, yelled. ‘Get out of here at once!’
Henry Border, carrying his recording equipment, hastily followed Gruenberg to see that the man was shouting at two armed German policemen. The crowd of inmates was growing bigger.
‘We are not asking you. This is an order.’
‘We don’t follow your orders any more. Your thousand-year Reich is over. You lost.’
‘What seems to be the problem here?’ Gruenberg asked as a crowd of DPs started to gather.
‘They want to search the camp! Can you believe this, Mr Gruenberg?’
‘Why do you want to search the camp?’ Gruenberg asked.
‘What is your name? What authority do you carry here?’ the older of the two policemen asked.
‘Where are the Americans?’ an old man in the crowd called out. ‘How come they let them in? They’re never here when you need them.’
‘Get the man from UNRRA. Where is he now, any of them from UNRRA?’ a woman called out.
‘The Americans took so long to get here and now –’ the old man continued.
‘How do you think these thugs got in?’ someone else shouted in reply to the old man. ‘It’s the Americans who let them in.’
‘My name is Gruenberg,’ he said over the top of the sounds of the growing crowd. ‘What authority do I have? I have moral authority.’
‘We are not obliged to explain anything to you,’ the younger policeman said.
‘Well, that depends on where you look for your obligations,’ Gruenberg said.
‘I am not obliged by law to explain anything,’ the younger policeman said.
‘How well do you know the laws of the occupation?’ Gruenberg asked the policeman.
‘Mr Gruenberg, there’s no point arguing with them. They’re Nazis out for a last frolic,’ shouted the man in the short-sleeved shirt.
‘Stand back, all of you. We are going to conduct a search of the camp. You are advised –’
‘Are you up to date with the laws of the occupation for this Zone, officer?’
‘Yes,’ the older of the two policemen answered.
‘It is changing all the time and –’
‘We don’t need to answer to you.’
‘Oh, you will answer to us. You will. More than you know, you Nazi thug,’ the man in the short-sleeved shirt called out.
‘If you tell us what you’re lo
oking for,’ said Gruenberg calmly, ‘we might be able to save you some trouble.’
‘We are here because of black market activities,’ the younger of the two policemen said.
‘You think there are black marketeers in this camp?’ Gruenberg asked.
‘Listen, there’s a black market flourishing all over Stuttgart,’ the man in the short sleeves said. ‘The German civilians are up to their necks in it and you know it. The Americans soldiers too. They’re selling cigarettes, stockings and everything else under the sun and you know that too. Everybody here knows it.’
Border looked at the policemen in their perfectly fitting uniforms. How fast they make themselves uniforms, he speculated, or were these the same uniforms they wore during the Hitler years, and on the same men but now serving different masters? More and more DPs were gathering around the policemen. In contrast to the policemen, the DPs wore an odd assortment of ill-fitting clothes of various weights for various seasons. Border looked at them too, these people arriving on the scene trying to understand what was going on. ‘What now?’ they wondered, bewildered in their misshapen clothing, dragging themselves around, running from themselves, looking for the past with every mail truck and now rediscovering anger. ‘What is it? What do they want? Criminals, you said, black marketeers? What kind of police are they? Who do they want?’ came the whispers, the murmurs from around the crowd, now of women and men of all different ages.
‘Mr Gruenberg!’ Border heard a voice calling from far away.
‘So with a black market selling goods from all over the world flourishing in every inch of occupied Europe why do you come here looking for black marketeers? Everybody here knows the answer to that too,’ the man in the short sleeves continued passionately.
‘I’m sorry but you are not meant to come in here like this,’ Gruenberg said.
‘This is Stuttgart and we are the police investigating illegal activity. We can go wherever it’s necessary for us to perform our duty,’ the younger policeman said.
‘Mr Gruenberg!’ came the voice from the distance again, now getting closer.
‘No, actually not,’ said Gruenberg. ‘As of March of this year only the American police are entitled to enter and search here and even they are answerable to the camp police.’
The Street Sweeper Page 33
