The Street Sweeper

by Elliot Perlman

  ‘Dad!’ Elise Border cried as she ran down the stairs to greet her father and throw her arms around him. The top of her head came to a little higher up his chest than it had before and it required only a slight bow from him to kiss her on her forehead. He closed his eyes. He was not the same man who had left.

  He would teach just as he had before the trip to Europe, he would pay his bills and his taxes, he would smile and even joke, especially in the years to come with his students – the favourite ones, Arch Sanasarian, Amy Muirden, sometimes even Evie Harmon and especially Wayne Rosenthal, who would go on a few years later to research his thesis on the ‘Adjective–Verb Quotient’ from the transcripts he would make laboriously day after day, night after night from the wire recordings – but Henry Border had heard things on his trip to Europe that had shaken his core understanding of mankind. He had heard things that had happened to people, his own people, including some he had walked out on, which had left him with an enveloping guilt that would in a very short time take hold of him, grip him under each arm, reach over his shoulders and down his back and would never let go, a guilt that would clamp his heart a little at every single beat from that time on. There were siblings and cousins, aunts and uncles. There was Rosa, his wife, the woman he had abandoned in a fit of jealousy, abandoned and stolen her child. All of them gone.

  ‘Dad! I thought you were never coming home,’ Elise cried.

  What else was there for him, apart from Elise, but to take the stories of the broken people in the DP camps and disseminate them as widely as possible? The world had to know what had happened to these people, not that, as he was to find out, anybody really wanted to know in those years immediately after the war. Driven, Henry Border was to work tirelessly, weekdays and weekends, day and night, listening and patiently transcribing and then translating every word, every nuance, every sound those wire recordings held. There was nothing else worth doing with his life and nothing more to live for but this and Elise. Fit of jealousy or not, act of cruelty or not, it could not be disputed that what he had done in leaving his wife was to save not merely himself but also his daughter. He had saved his daughter. Then why did he feel like a criminal, like an accomplice?

  ‘Elly! My Elly!’ He kissed his daughter again. Callie Ford saw that as he did this he had tears in his eyes. She heard the cab pull away. Henry Border was still gripping his daughter tightly when there was a slow creaking on the stairs. He looked up, still with moist eyes.

  ‘Dr Border, sir, this is my son Russell. You come down here and shake Dr Border’s hand.’

  Callie, supported by Elise, then proceeded to recount to him the events that had first led her son Russell to stay in his house. She had been afraid to tell him but she realised she really had no choice. She could neither ask nor expect Elly to lie to her father about Russell. But she hadn’t expected Elly to have the sway over her father she had nor to have the desire to exercise that sway so doggedly on Russell’s behalf. Elly told him about a man called James Pearson who lived where Russell lived, at a place called the Mecca Flats on the south side, not too far from IIT. Elly had been there with Russell and Callie that first morning after Russell had arrived on the doorstep of her home. She hadn’t been able to clear her mind of what she had seen there.

  Elly would take her father there. Twelve and a half years old, she insisted both on taking him there and on not revealing her reasons until they were there. He had always found it hard to stop himself letting her know quite how precious she was to him. Now, only recently back from the DP camps of Europe, she was even more precious so, though he was at a loss to understand why she wanted to take him there in those first weeks back home when he would take hold of her suddenly and weep silently above her head, he said little but would have done much more for his daughter than travel the ten miles to 34th Street between State and Dearborn. He had seen the building nearly every day but never like this.

  Elly showed him the hole in the pavement outside the front entrance that formed a tunnel where children crawled in and out as though life spent partially underground was normal. She showed him the broken tiles and the children running around with crazy eyes playing makeshift games that suddenly turned violent while up above on the third floor a small child casually urinated down at them through the cast iron grating. The smell was an assault to the uninitiated, especially in the warmer weather. A dog with garbage in its mouth was being chased by a gang of children. There were no towers with armed guards surrounding the Mecca, the malnutrition that the children tearing around the foyer screaming at one another suffered was subtle, and no one was being shipped off to be exterminated, but this was unequivocally a ghetto. It was the ghetto one got in a country pretending to be at peace with itself. Where did you put your slaves when you were no longer allowed to keep them? Henry Border knew a ghetto when he saw one. He had seen enough. They could go. ‘No,’ Elly Border insisted. He had to see more.

  She took her father to the apartment she had visited, the one where James Pearson lived, where Callie and Russell lived. She remembered where it was and, determined that her father see the conditions in which they lived, she knocked on the door.

  ‘Do you remember me, Mrs Sallie?’ The old woman thought for a moment. She didn’t remember the skinny white girl with the black eyes but since the girl knew her by name she pretended she did.

  ‘Yes, child. Yes, I do.’ Elly pushed past her on the pretext of looking for Callie and entered the apartment.

  ‘She ain’t here now, child. Who this man with you?’ Mrs Sallie said, looking Henry Border up and down.

  ‘This is my father, Mrs Sallie. Can he come in?’ Elly beckoned to her father to follow her and as he entered, Mrs Sallie asked him, ‘Have you met, met my friend?’

  ‘Miss Callie Ford? Yes, I know her.’

  ‘She doesn’t mean Callie,’ Elly explained.

  ‘Have you met, met my friend, Jesus?’

  The smell was almost unbearable to Henry Border. Mrs Sallie explained that neither Russell nor Callie was there, which Elly already knew. She looked at her father and could see her work was done.

  This was the new chapter in the life of the shy motherless Jewish girl, a girl whose after-school world had until then been largely confined to her homework and to her books, that Henry Border had returned to. It starred Callie Ford and her son Russell and increasingly the man whose apparent disappearance had started it all, James Pearson, Mr Anything-You-Want. After that first night when Russell had arrived terrified from having witnessed what he had taken to be the abduction of James Pearson, Callie had let him stay in that spare room each night. At the end of a day at the packinghouse he returned to his mother and Elly at the Border home. Sometimes James Pearson was with him. Callie made dinner for the four of them and suddenly a makeshift and unlikely family emerged from disparate origins. A deep bond, begun in the Mecca Flats and cemented in the packinghouse, had developed between young Russell and James Pearson. Callie had always been taken by James Pearson’s quiet manners but now in addition she felt a gratitude to him for caring for her son of a kind she had never again expected to experience after the death of her husband.

  Russell had not needed James Pearson to accompany him to Sheridan Road, Uptown, and Callie knew that each of them well knew this. It became clear to her that this was a shy man’s courting. James Pearson, who had independently taken a shine to her son to the extent of getting him a job and guiding him within its blood-soaked carcass-ridden floors, was now showing a gentle but committed interest in her. And it was all happening at the Borders’ kitchen table where there sat a mother, a father figure, a son and a white Polish-born Jewish girl who lapped up the benefits of this impromptu family. She had never known anything like this.

  Callie and Elly would talk about what they had done during the day and Russell and James Pearson would talk about the day’s events at the packinghouse. All of a sudden, Elly Border was hearing talk of heading and splitting hogs, of characters like Tommy Parks and old Mrs Sallie
back at the Mecca. Early on, she even heard what she was not supposed to hear, the story behind the late night visit of the two white men who had come to the Mecca the night Russell had fled to tell his mother what had happened to James Pearson. Those men had not taken him away to hurt him. They respected him; in fact, they had been trying to court him, all for something called a union. Whether or not it was going to be of any benefit to black folks, there was nothing to be afraid of, Russell had been told.

  What does a union do? Elly Border asked Russell Ford, breaking an unusual silence one night when they were sharing the washing up. In answering her, he came to understand it himself.

  It was into this world that Henry Border came home, returning from the DP camps of Europe, gatecrashing his own home. It was Elly who hatched the plan that would solidify and codify the radical change that had come about naturally during Border’s absence. Callie and Russell would live with them, each with their own rent-free room. Callie would continue as a permanent live-in housekeeper and save the rent she had paid for their room at the Mecca. Russell would take the ‘L’ in time to go to work with James Pearson who would continue to come calling the ten miles to Sheridan Road. And of course, Callie remained wonderful to and for Henry Border’s daughter. Essentially it was only this that really mattered to him.

  A man who valued his privacy, now that he had two new people living with him, one a teenage boy, surely he should charge them rent? The thought didn’t occur to him. Elly was growing into her womanhood every day and now there was a strange young man, almost fifteen, who worked at a meat works downtown, living, showering and sleeping a few doors away and under the same roof as his daughter. They went for walks together. She was going out downtown with him, Callie and James Pearson at weekends. Where exactly were they going? What exactly were they doing? Should he have been concerned? Elly was happier than he could remember. She came home safely and on time and when school started again she showed no sign of any diminution of interest in her school work. She was coming out of herself. Whatever qualms he might have had should these changes have been put to him in prospect at any time before his recent trip to the DP camps of Europe, Henry Border now gave the appearance of letting life wash over him. It was not that he was carefree. Rather, he cared now about only one thing. If his daughter was safe and not unhappy it would leave him completely free to concentrate on getting the story out. If anything, these changes helped him with his work. With the wire recorder stopping and starting he took down every word, every syllable. The house was often empty leaving Border free to work on the transcripts, the first eight of which became the book I Did Not Interview the Dead. It would take him years to find a publisher.

  ‘Can I get you something, Dr Border?’ Callie Ford asked late one night as he sat under a desk lamp in his study surrounded by wire spools. What was he doing till late at night, every night, so intently? What were those wire recordings that he sat listening to night after night, stopping and starting, playing and replaying? She looked at this ageing man. He looked right back at her as if he didn’t know she was there. She wondered if perhaps he was not quite all there. She hadn’t really known him before he went to Europe but it looked to her as though part of him was still there. What had he seen there?

  *

  At the very end of the day Lamont Williams walked into the ninth floor room of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center occupied by the old patient he regularly visited. His visits had lately been less frequent and the old man was unable to leave this uncommented on as soon as Lamont had sat down.

  ‘You don’t come now so much, Mr Lamont,’ and then seeing the bandage around Lamont’s hand, he asked, ‘Is it because of your hand? What is it with your hand?’

  ‘It’s nothin’ really. Just hurt it doin’ the extra duties. That’s why I haven’t been around so much. It’s the extra duties.’

  ‘The extra duties … well, it’s bad that you got hurt from them but it’s good that now you have them. Yes?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s good.’

  ‘What are they, the extra duties?’

  ‘Well, it’s to do with waste disposal. They got me –’

  ‘You already are collecting garbage. This is how I met you. They give you more to collect and call it “extra duties”?’

  ‘No, no, they’re teaching me how to work the incinerator; huge incinerator gets rid of toxic waste, all sorts of things. You don’t want to know.’

  ‘I already know.’

  ‘I don’t get you.’

  ‘The incinerator, it’s an oven, yes?’

  ‘Yeah, huge oven. They make us wear protective clothing. Dirty work but … you know … kinda interesting, I guess.’

  ‘I used to work with an oven … in the Birkenau section of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where a Frenchman gave me this,’ Mr Mandelbrot said, indicating the tattoo on his left arm. ‘I told him, “Small, I want it small as you can make it.” One, Eight, One, Nine, Seven, Zero. That was the number what I got when I came to Auschwitz.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Mr Lamont, you’re supposed to remember these things. I won’t be here forever. I won’t be here in a couple of days.’

  ‘What do you mean? Don’t talk like that!’

  ‘They letting me go back to Long Island.’

  ‘Back home?’

  ‘Yes. Either I’m better or I’m very sick and soon to be dying. I don’t know which but it doesn’t matter. Dr Washington’s keeping it to herself. You see, if you knew her better … One, Eight, One, Nine, Seven, Zero. I got it in April 1944. You need to remember. They put us – you remember I came with eleven other Jews?’

  ‘From Sosnowiec, you came in a truck. You hit a man to get clothes that fit you.’

  Mr Mandelbrot smiled. ‘Yes, you remember. It was April 1944. I was almost four weeks in Quarantine. That’s where I saw my first Muselmann. You know what that is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s a person what is finished with life before life is finished with him. They live because their bodies haven’t died yet. They are skeletons but they still move. They move, they’re hungry all the time like an animal but otherwise they are dead. I saw them and I promised myself I would not become one of them. But it’s easier said than what it is done. These Muselmänner didn’t want to become Muselmänner when they got to Auschwitz. Four weeks in Quarantine in Auschwitz. I thought I’d seen everything what a man could see. I was wrong. My education was only beginning.

  ‘Twelve Jews got off the truck with me and went to the Bekleidungskammer where they stored the clothes. After maybe four weeks three of us were chosen for the real education. We were the strongest three. Do you know what is the Sonderkommando?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The Sonderkommando was the work detail what worked the gas chambers and ovens in the crematoria. I was in the Sonderkommando. I’ll tell you about it and you’ll see why it doesn’t matter what Dr Washington says about why I go home.’

  *

  Birkenau, by far the largest of the component camps that made up Auschwitz Vernichtungslager, extermination camp, lay between two rivers. All around were scattered birch trees that, nourished as they always had been by the sun and watered by the rain, endured wind, frost, snow in the winter, scorching heat in the summer and everything else there was to endure in an upper Silesian Polish swamp. Day after day, month after month, year after year, they grew taller and saw everything that went on but, like all trees, they could not speak, not one word. Other than that, nothing about this place was like anywhere else on earth.

  Henryk Mandelbrot’s first day in the Sonderkommando came at night. Nothing, not even the ghetto, could have prepared him for this, and for the rest of his life each day for him would be without the sun. In the middle of the night he and two other Jews who had arrived with him on the same truck and had also been previously selected were summoned to report urgently to the Sonderkommando, the ‘Special Unit’. They had been chosen on the basis of their apparent physical strength. He
nryk Mandelbrot hadn’t heard of the Sonderkommando and had no idea what it was. He and the two others were taken hastily to a barrack by two SS men where the next of three shifts of Sonderkommando were getting ready to start their shift. The barrack was filled with men, all busily getting dressed; Polish, Dutch, Greek and French. All apart from a handful of high-ranking German prisoners, Kapos, were Jews. Henryk Mandelbrot saw that none of these men was talking. They were just putting on their clothes. The three new men stood among the others not knowing what to do and Henryk Mandelbrot asked a man who was busily getting ready for work, ‘We’re supposed to join you. What do you do?’ ‘You’ve come to burn bodies.’

  One of the two SS guards who had brought them to this barrack came inside and told them that since they were already dressed they could start ahead of the others.

  ‘What do we do?’ Henryk Mandelbrot asked.

  ‘You look pretty strong for a Jew. Come on, I’ll show you. All of you come with me. Hurry! You’ve got a lot of work to do.’

  Henryk Mandelbrot and the other two Jews who had arrived with him followed the SS guard. Joined outside by the second SS guard they were taken to what they would learn was Crematorium V. It had its own gas chamber and outside the gas chamber there lay a mountain of bodies. Mandelbrot shuddered momentarily. So it was true, and here he was, face-to-face with the truth. He had seen people die in the ghetto but he had never seen anything like this. So many bodies, inert, stacked hurriedly one on top of the other, a vast hill of them, a small mountain, so recently people. Here, Mandelbrot thought, was the end of every slur, racial or religious, every joke, every sneer directed against the Jews. Every time someone harboured the belief, or just the sneaking suspicion, even when it shamed them, that the Jews, as a people, are dishonest and immoral, that they are avaricious, deceitful, cunning, that they are capitalists, that they are communists, that they are responsible for all the troubles in the world, that they are guilty of deicide, that belief or suspicion, sometimes barely conscious, adds momentum to a train on a journey of its own; this is where the line finally ends, at this mountain of corpses. The prejudices, the unfounded states of mind, that grow from wariness to dislike to hatred of the ‘other’, they all lead to where Henryk Mandelbrot now stood.