The Street Sweeper

by Elliot Perlman

  ‘I can’t wear these.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can’t wear these.’

  ‘You’ll wear what you’re given.’

  ‘No, I can’t wear these. One leg is bigger than the other. I’d hate to see the man these once fitted.’

  ‘Yeah, well, no one will see him again so shut up. You’ll wear what you’re given,’ said the prisoner functionary, looking up and down at the man behind Mandelbrot and going back to the shelves to find clothes for him.

  ‘Let me look for some better-fitting clothes,’ Mandelbrot called to the prisoner functionary.

  ‘No, you’ve got your clothes.’

  ‘Mister whoever-you-are, I told you I can’t wear these clothes. They make me look ridiculous. I can’t move properly, I –’

  ‘You think you look ridiculous! Don’t worry how you look, you stupid fucking Jew! You’ll be dead inside the week!’

  ‘You’ll be dead sooner than me,’ Mandelbrot said and then lunged at the prisoner functionary, pushing him back in the shelves nearest him, and proceeded to rain blow after blow on his face while the others looked on in astonishment.

  ‘Help! Help! This man’s killing me,’ he yelled between Mandelbrot’s blows, his lip now split and his face bleeding.

  ‘You let me get some better clothes or by all that’s holy you’ll die right now.’

  The prisoner functionary raised his arms up to his face and continued to call for help.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ a new man asked. Also a prisoner, it was clear to Mandelbrot and the other five, though they had never seen him before, that this man was in another category, a higher category of prisoner. It was there in the way he carried himself and in the way he spoke. He was tall, thin and blond and had come out from further beyond the shelves than any of the others could see.

  Mandelbrot let go of the prisoner functionary and looked at this new man.

  ‘He was going to kill me, Ober-kapo Fritz.’

  Ober-kapo Fritz looked Mandelbrot up and down.

  ‘What is the problem here?’

  ‘The clothes he’s given me don’t fit. I wanted to choose better-fitting clothes that I can work in and this man refuses to let me look and insults me into the bargain.’

  Ober-kapo Fritz looked at Mandelbrot with surprise, which grew into something bordering on admiration. Then he looked slowly at the other men standing silently in a row and then back to Mandelbrot.

  No one else said anything. The prisoner functionary was still panting. The Ober-kapo waited for him to wipe the blood from his face. Then he turned back to Mandelbrot.

  ‘I will stay and watch you while you choose some clothes that better fit you.’

  Henryk Mandelbrot hurried to the shelves to look for pants that would fit him. The Ober-kapo watched him with a smile.

  Then he spoke slowly to Mandelbrot while Mandelbrot searched through different pairs of pants.

  ‘You don’t seem to have any understanding of where you are now. You are now in Birkenau and you don’t seem to know what that means. Do you have the slightest idea … where you are?’ Mandelbrot stopped his searching to turn around and answer the man directly.

  ‘Ober-kapo, sir, I know exactly where I am.’

  *

  The excitement of the evening’s events would not let Elly sleep and a short while after they’d gone to their separate rooms Russell heard a knock at his door. It was Elly standing there with a glass of water for him.

  ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you,’ she said in a manner combining both formality and kindness that no one had ever accorded him before. ‘It’s just that I thought you might get thirsty in the middle of the night and not know how to find the kitchen in the dark so I brought you this … um … it’s just a glass of water. ‘Cause you know … it’s so hot and all.’

  Now for the first time since arriving at Henry Border’s home, Russell was embarrassed. Perhaps she hadn’t realised that under the covers he wasn’t wearing any clothes but he knew it all too well.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said uncertainly.

  ‘Your mom’s been great to me. You’re very lucky to have a mom like her.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Russell agreed cautiously. ‘You live here with your daddy?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Just you and him … here?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You sure got a lotta rooms.’

  ‘Yeah, we used to have boarders but …’

  ‘Borders … like your name, ain’t it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she laughed.

  ‘Your daddy’s away?’

  ‘Yeah, he had to go away for work … overseas to Europe. That’s why Callie, I mean your mom’s here.’

  ‘Your daddy … he in the military?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What work does he do?’

  ‘He’s a psychologist at IIT,’ Elise Border said matter-of-factly.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Russell said uncertainly. He didn’t know what any of that meant.

  Elly’s eyes had adjusted to the dark. When she saw Russell’s clothes folded on the chair she realised he must have been naked under the covers. Then she began to feel shy and foolish for not having felt this way sooner. Curiosity, loneliness and an attempt to bring comfort to a stranger had taken her to the very edge of her twelve and a half years. But that was all she had.

  ‘Well, I guess I better let you get some sleep then. Good night.’

  ‘Thanks for the water … Miss Elly.’

  ‘Oh you’re welcome,’ she said, opening the bedroom door to leave and then adding, ‘Oh … um … It’s Elly … just Elly.’

  ‘Elly?’ Russell began. ‘You got a momma?’

  ‘She died when … before we came here.’

  ‘Where you from?’

  ‘Poland.’

  ‘Poland! You Polacks?’

  ‘We’re Jews.’

  ‘Jews,’ Russell said, considering it as he heard himself say it.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Elise Border said, still standing at the slightly open bedroom door. She stood there for a moment not knowing whether their conversation had ended until Russell spoke again.

  ‘My daddy died.’

  ‘Oh, I’m … I’m sorry. How long ago?’

  ‘’Bout three years now.’

  Three years suddenly didn’t seem very long ago to Elly.

  ‘You must miss him a lot.’

  ‘Yep,’ he said from under the covers.

  She stood there in the dark, not leaving. After a little while he broke the silence.

  ‘You miss your momma, Elly?’

  ‘I was very small … when she died … very small.’ Then, deliberately, as though she was aware that her next comment would have the effect of automatically ending the conversation, she added, ‘It was back in Poland.’

  Whether they were simply tired or had reached a mutual understanding, those were the last words spoken in Henry Border’s house that night. There was, however, a long causal chain that linked their conversation to another night, in another place a long time before that. In Poland, before the war, before Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany, in the town of Ciechanow, as autumn turned into winter, a woman waited under a gas-lit street lamp on a windy street corner hoping no one would see her out at that time of night, hoping no one would see her but her lover.

  part eight

  IT HAD BEEN RAINING ALL DAY but now, as though the night was offering at least the hope of a reprieve to anyone foolish or desperate enough to be out so late, the rain had finally stopped. Had she looked up she would have snatched glimpses of the moon between black clouds that had come in from the Baltic Sea and were passing fleetingly over her on their way to Bialystock and then to Minsk and on still further east into Russia. Heartened only by the light from the street lamps and occasionally from the moon through the gaps in the clouds, a young woman stood waiting anxiously in a street in Ciechanow. The still-wet cobblestone pavement in the Polish town, where Jews quite like Rosa Rabinowicz had l
ived since medieval times, struggled to glisten for more than a moment now and then that night in the interwar years when news of the growing popularity of a new German politician, Herr Hitler, was beginning to seep through in the newspapers her father read. She read them too at her father’s urging and discussed them with her friends, the young men and women at the youth movement gatherings. But for Rosa, then seventeen, there were more urgent matters clawing for her attention that night.

  She was waiting for her love from childhood, Noah Lewental. There had been rumours about many of the boys she knew and Rosa Rabinowicz had heard all of them, believed some, disregarded others, but now for the first time one of the rumours concerned her Noah. The rumour was similar to all those she had heard about the other boys but they hadn’t mattered to her. She would react to them with shock or titillation as the mood moved her. But this one concerned Noah. Could it be true? It would certainly be out of character if it were. Still, she knew that boys had urges and she knew there were things that he wanted to do, that they all wanted to do, wanted to the point of portraying the want as a need, things that she felt unable to provide, not then, not yet. None of her girlfriends were able to provide those services to their intendeds either, at least that was what the girls told each other. But this left a gap in the market for the satisfaction of young men’s needs and this was where Ada, the shoemaker’s daughter, came in. This was where the rumours were born, right where the shoemaker lived with his strange young daughter. And this was where Noah had been seen, with Ada, the shoemaker’s daughter.

  For all that Ada was referred to as the shoemaker’s daughter, it was widely known among the Jews of Ciechanow that she was not really his daughter, not biologically. She had been barely three years old when both her parents were killed in a pogrom in Luban just south of Minsk. The little girl was passed from one Jewish community to another until the shoemaker of Ciechanow, a childless widower, found himself taking on the role of her father. He never knew and so she never knew whether her parents’ murderers were demobilised soldiers of the then newly formed Red Army or a band of anti-Semitic Ukrainian nationalists, but whoever they were, it was noticed from the time of her arrival that Ada was different from the other children. Like the other artisans and small traders of Jewish Ciechanow, Ada’s father travelled a lot, in his case to sell his shoes. To Golomin, to Preshitz, to Makow and to Churzel he went to sell his shoes and Ada was often left alone. It was said by some that being left alone so frequently was the source of her strangeness. Others said it came with her from Luban, came from what the tiny girl had seen; a lasting gift from the pogromists.

  It was not clear whether Ada was simple or just touched. She wanted to be liked and from an early age she would read the palms of the children around her, offering to tell their fortune. She would trace the lines in the palms of their hands with the tips of her fingers and in a quiet soothing voice tell them what they wanted to hear. Eventually some of the adult women started coming around in secret while their husbands were working and while her father was away. They brought food for the young girl but they too came to have their palms read. The boys of the town had always discounted Ada’s palm reading as the nonsense of a simple girl until suddenly, in her and their teenage years, they discovered she had other talents. There were differing degrees of religiosity among the Jews of Ciechanow, differing degrees of need for other-worldly prognostications, but nobody that had seen the stop-start stream of young men furtively making their way to the shoemaker’s home while he was away could seriously have believed that these young men were in the grip of some mass infatuation with palm reading.

  There, at last, was Noah. Rosa Rabinowicz could see him coming in the distance. Soon she would know. Noah spoke in a whisper even before they were within arm’s length of each other.

  ‘Sorry I was late. My father was up. He couldn’t sleep. He got up and was reading and –’

  ‘Is it true?’ she asked, holding on to him with all her strength for what she feared might be the last time.

  ‘Is what true?’ he asked, only serving to worry her even more. He knew exactly why they were meeting there at that hour. They had met in secret before and at night too but never anywhere near as late as this.

  ‘Have you been too?’ ‘Have I been where?’

  ‘Have you been … to the shoemaker’s house?’

  ‘Rosa, you know I have. I had to go.’

  ‘Noah, don’t try that again. You didn’t have to. You don’t have to do anything. You pretend you have this need. I’m sick of hearing about it. Admit what you are! You’re no better than an animal! And I’m stupid and gullible. I kept saying you haven’t been.’

  ‘Rosanké, listen to me. I had to go there and I had to see Ada. She was the only one there.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My father sent me.’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘My father sent me to the shoemaker’s house to pick up his shoes. They’d been repaired and –’

  ‘But what about Ada, why did you have to see Ada?’

  ‘Because her father was away. My sweet Rosanké, listen to me. She was the only one there. My father sent me to fetch his shoes. It had been arranged between him and the shoemaker. You can ask my father.’

  ‘Noah, you know I can’t do that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I can’t ask your father if he really sent you to the shoemaker’s house … to fetch his shoes. How could I ask him that? He’d know what I was really asking and I couldn’t possibly ask your father that.’

  ‘And yet …’ Noah said, moving a pace back from her and looking at the full length of her, ‘yet you seem to have no trouble asking me.’ He exhaled his disappointment. They looked at each other under the street light. Soon the milkman’s cart would be joining them.

  ‘I’m telling you. I went there to fetch his shoes. My father had arranged it with the shoemaker. She was expecting me. The shoes were waiting, they were ready. Why don’t you ask my father next time you see him?’

  Rosa raised the palm of her hand dismissively.

  ‘All right, don’t ask him. Compliment him on his shoes. I’ll come and fetch you after shabbos dinner and, in passing conversation, you can casually compliment him on his shoes.’

  She thought for a moment. ‘What if he’s not wearing those shoes?’

  ‘He always wears those shoes on shabbos. They’re his favourite shoes, had them forever. That’s why he was so desperate to have me collect them from the shoemaker.’

  She so wanted to believe him that she did. Still, she would go with him to visit his parents the very next Friday night. She was very fond of Noah’s family; his brothers and sisters were almost like hers. His parents were such intelligent and kind people; his father had always seemed so wise. And it happened just as Noah had promised. She complimented Mr Lewental, Noah’s father, on his shoes and he, smiling, praised the work of the travelling, never-prosperous, hardworking shoemaker. In fact, when Mr Lewental started waxing lyrical on the topic of the quality of the shoemaker’s work, she exchanged glances with Noah, who was now rolling his eyes at his father’s verbosity as if to say, ‘Now look what you’ve started.’ It was a beautiful evening in Ciechanow for Rosa Rabinowicz but such evenings were already numbered.

  Rosa was eighteen and still with Noah Lewental when the news came like a flood from a river that had burst its banks. Ada, the shoemaker’s daughter, was pregnant. It was an undeniable fact. When the simple Ada, the palm reader, identified Noah as the father, Rosa wasn’t around to hear the heated conversation between him and Mr Lewental. Whatever the simple girl’s circumstances, Mr Lewental had argued that if no one else came forward to own up to the child’s paternity, Noah had to do the right thing by the poor girl. That it was impossible for him to have been responsible for the pregnancy was not a lie Noah was able to tell his father.

  ‘What about Rosa?’ Noah argued. What would become of Rosa if he was made to marry Ada? Rosa would be free to find a genuinely honourabl
e man, Mr Lewental told his son.

  Rosa lost not only Noah but with him her self-confidence. Of all the romantically paired young people in their circle, she and Noah had been regarded as among the most compatible. Certainly their relationship had lasted the longest. The scandal had robbed her of confidence not only in herself but in others too. For a time she didn’t want to leave the house or see anyone. She was sure people were talking about her.

  In truth, many did talk about her and Noah, about his betrayal and her subsequent self-imposed isolation. Although in no version of the story was she anything less than innocent, it did not prevent her from being a ripe topic of conversation. Some just wanted to talk about how unlucky this striking and gifted young woman had so suddenly become. Even well-intentioned people pondered the meaning of it almost as a religious or philosophical exercise. Others asked how Ada could be so sure it was Noah who was the father when there were so many other young men it could have been. Did she just choose the boy she considered most likely to do the right thing? Perhaps she was not so simple after all.

  Rosa’s parents, inreasingly concerned for her wellbeing, and having tried without success everything they could think of to return her to her old self, in desperation agreed with someone’s suggestion that she spend time away from Ciechanow. Still numb and without saying goodbye to Noah or even to many of her friends, it was a shattered Rosa Rabinowicz who went to stay for an unspecified duration with distant relatives in Warsaw.

  *

  It was the honey-skinned woman with the jet-black straight hair, the student who no longer attended his ‘What is History?’ lectures, the one who had correctly guessed Gandhi, this was the person who served Adam Zignelik a Mango Mojito inside Zanzibar on Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen. She had recognised him despite the unfamiliar context. Professor Zignelik was from another part of her life.

  ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ she asked him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, trying to place her.

  She smiled. ‘Boy, we really are all the same to you guys!’

  ‘No, of course not. It’s just that …’ He tried not to look at her cleavage.