The Street Sweeper

by Elliot Perlman

  ‘What’s the name of this camp?’

  ‘Chelmno.’

  Emmanuel Ringelblum cut short that evening’s Oneg Shabbas Executive Committee meeting and that night, with the assistance of Rosa Rabinowicz, he learned from a witness that, when taken away from the various ghettoes around Poland, the Jews were not being resettled and sent to labour details but were being gassed. At least, this was what was happening at a camp called Chelmno. Immediately a document was prepared in various languages and smuggled out of the ghetto so that the world might know what he and Rosa and then the Executive Committee now knew.

  Sometime in early August 1942 a member of Emanuel Ringelblum’s Oneg Shabbas group, a man called Israel Lichtenstein, summoned two of its youngest members, the young man, Nahum Grzywacz, who had kept watch the night the Executive Committee had learned of the gassings at Chelmno, and another young man, the nineteen-year-old David Graber. Ringelblum had entrusted no one but Lichtenstein with the task of burying the Oneg Shabbas archives and the older man took the two younger men to Number 68 Nowolipki Street. There in the height of summer the three of them dug and dug as far into the earth as their strength, their tools and their courage permitted, fuelled by the belief that they had in their safekeeping the last, most comprehensive record of the soon-to-be entirely obliterated Jews of Europe. There at Number 68 Nowolipki Street, a building that had once been a school, they buried the two giant milk cans and several tin boxes whose contents comprised the first part of the Oneg Shabbas archives of the historian Emanuel Ringelblum.

  It took them two days, and before they had finished, before they had filled in the hole, a tomb for the last words in the thousand-year history of the Jews of Poland, they each added a brief personal autobiographical note. The last to finish his note was Nahum Grzywacz who apologised to the future reader for the poor quality of his handwriting, explaining that his family was poor so he hadn’t had much education. He wrote furiously not merely because they were all in a hurry to accomplish their task but because he had recently heard that both of his parents had just been taken away and he needed to get back to check on the veracity of the report. This was the scene on 3 August 1942 on Nowolipki Street inside the Warsaw ghetto. By then Rosa Rabinowicz, mother of Elise Border of Chicago, had not been seen by any of the few remaining members of the Executive Committee for some time. Since her body had not been found in any of the places she used to frequent, it was suspected by some of those remaining who knew her that perhaps she had left the ghetto. But in that place at that time dead bodies went missing too. So perhaps she had died after all. Who could be sure? And who could be sure to remember to give it any thought?

  Young Nahum Grzywacz, who had always thought she was pretty and had many times taken comfort from her kindnesses, liked her very much and had often thought of her when he was alone in the corner of a room he shared with his parents, sisters and two other families. But even he had not thought of her in a while and was not thinking of her at all as, at 68 Nowolipki Street, within earshot of a man pleading then screaming amid a blur of bullets, in a shaky hand he wrote his last sentence for a reader he would never meet. And then along with the leavings of a people’s thousand-year history, he buried it. The earth weighed heavy on all the words, including this young man’s plea to the reader: ‘Remember, my name is Nahum Grzywacz.’

  *

  The secretary, receptionist, personal assistant or whatever she was to Charles McCray had gone to the bathroom leaving Charles’ father, William, alone and unguarded. Seeing that the gatekeeper was not there and that neither was his son, William McCray took the liberty of going into his son’s office uninvited. He looked around, picked up some journals, flicked through them but could not get interested. His mind would not be calmed. He was too upset. He sat down in a chair opposite his son’s desk chair and waited.

  The day before, someone had left a noose hanging on the door of a black professor from Columbia University’s Teachers College. The professor, a woman who hailed from a disadvantaged southern background, now a professor of psychology and education, was known for her particular interest in the psychological effects of racism on victims. Now she was a victim of it herself. The targeting of this woman in particular, with her professional interest, and in multicultural, liberal, ethnically diverse New York, at Columbia University of all places, in William’s own neighbourhood, filled him with a mixture of fury and sadness, impotence, fear and despair at what he was tempted to see as the futility of his life’s work. He hadn’t been able to sleep since he had read about the incident in the Times; in fact, it had been all he had been able to think about. Startled by his son when he got back to his office, it never occurred to William how affected Charles might be by the incident, how hard it had been for him not to rage at people around campus for what he felt was their collective failure to learn anything from history.

  ‘This isn’t Money, Mississippi, in the fifties! This is New York in the twenty-first century. This is a university. This is Columbia University. What the hell is happening here? One moment you got Jim Gilchrist and the Minutemen coming out here stirring up hate against illegal immigrants, that is until your students restore order with a riot. Then Bollinger invites Ahmadinejad to come up here and say the Holocaust didn’t happen but it’s okay, there’s no need to panic ‘cause he’s going to make his own Holocaust for the Jews in the twenty-first century. Then your good President Bollinger thinks he can redeem himself by getting up on stage and publicly ridiculing Ahmadinejad in order to be everyone’s new favourite superhero. How pathetic. How shamefully pathetic. Then I saw you got some good old-fashioned anti-Semitism going on over in Lewisohn Hall. Someone’s gone over there and drawn a swastika next to a caricature of a Jew in a yarmulke and now, yesterday I read about this. A noose is found hanging on the door of a black professor’s office over at the Teachers College. I’ve seen a lot in my time, you know I have. But when it comes out of the blue in a place like this … This is your university. This is where you work. What in God’s name is going on here?’

  ‘Dad, what can I say?’

  ‘I don’t know, Charlie, what can you say?’

  ‘The university’s a microcosm of society.’

  ‘Is that what you can say? Is that all you can say?’

  ‘Well now what exactly are you saying? How exactly is all or even any of this my fault?’

  ‘Charlie, I don’t mean you personally. I’m mean you academics. You all sit there watching the flames as the barn burns down crying, “How’s this our fault? We didn’t do it!”‘

  ‘What exactly would you have us do, me or any of us?’

  ‘Charlie, how did you get to be this age, sitting in this office with your name and title on the door, Chair of the History Department, and you’re not ashamed to be asking me that?’

  ‘Dad, leaving the question of my shame to one side, what the hell would you have me do?’

  ‘You should be speaking out publicly about these things. You guys should be writing letters. You should be organising like-minded people to do these things. You should be giving encouragement, comfort and support to those people, students, faculty, people around the city who don’t have the chance to be heard like you do but who fear this institution is going to hell in a hand basket instead of …’

  ‘Instead of what?’

  ‘Instead of staying back late in this office leaving your wife and daughter at home so you can write narrowly focused arcane academic articles to be read by a handful of people just to keep your quota up and all of it merely in the service of your own aggrandisement.’

  What does a good son do when the man you’ve most admired, the man who is responsible for all that you’ve ever felt was good about you, the man who has fought injustice all of his life, berates you for not actively protesting against the contemporary state of the world, which he views with ever-increasing powerlessness and horror? When this dear man, who has only you left in the world, is so eloquently delineating just how fully you’ve failed
him, when his version of your fundamental failings are coming at you like a torrent downhill, what do you do?

  If in doubt, keep quiet. There’s a rule for you, probably one he taught you. Don’t speak in anger lest you say something you might regret, something he’ll never let you take back. If in doubt, keep quiet. Hold your tongue even if he takes your silence as proof that he’s right. After all, in keeping quiet and letting him hurt you, in loving him and wanting to protect him even against your own anger, are you not the very essence of the man he wants you to be even if he doesn’t realise it?

  So Charles McCray let his father speak. He didn’t hurry him, he barely argued with him. But now it was late. William said he was too tired to come over to have dinner with his daughter-in-law and his granddaughter so Charles walked him home. He told Charles once again that Charles was the canary in the coalmine. He hugged him, which was how they always parted, and then the canary walked home.

  The keys being turned in the door of the house where the son lived made a series of clicking sounds. These sounds once signalled that a father, a husband, had come home and a wife and a daughter would acknowledge it with a greeting. The sounds were the same in the door as they ever were. He closed the door quietly and put the keys in his pocket. He was late. Should he explain then or later? Now all three people who lived there were home. Nobody called out to greet him. A copy of The New York Times lay open on the kitchen table. Charles McCray, Chair of the History Department at Columbia University, the good son, just not always good enough, the good husband seemingly a little deficient here too, the canary in the coalmine, stood alone in his kitchen, briefcase in hand. For a moment he didn’t know what to do. You cannot demand that someone greets you when you come home. He looked down at the newspaper and, still standing, started to read. The headline always calls first: ‘Turks Angry Over House Armenian Genocide Vote. Turkey reacted angrily Thursday to a House committee vote in Washington to condemn as genocide the mass killings of Armenians in Turkey that began during World War I … The Bush administration … vowed to try to defeat the resolution on Capitol Hill.’

  He looked over towards the telephone and saw the pen and a notepad he and Michelle kept there. They had always, since they started living together, kept a pen and paper near the phone for messages and shopping lists. Two educated, responsible people with similar values and aspirations had married and were raising a daughter. He had always thought they made quite a team. But a team is not a couple. He kept reading. ‘President Bush’s chief spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said, “We have national security concerns, and many of our troops and supplies go through Turkey.”‘ Charles McCray reached for the pen and paper and, still with his coat on, he sat down at the kitchen table. You cannot demand that someone greets you when you come home, not your wife, not your daughter. Maybe they hadn’t heard him come in. ‘In Turkey, there was widespread expectation that the House committee vote and any further steps would damage relations between the countries.’ Leaning on the newspaper he began to compose a note to the professor from Columbia University’s Teachers College who had two days earlier had a noose left hanging from her door. Maybe someone would need something from the kitchen and see him there.

  *

  James Pearson, Mr Anything-You-Want, had a story for Tommy Parks, the meatpacker who lived in a room in the same apartment as Pearson at the Mecca Flats, the same apartment that Callie and Russell Ford had shared before they moved to the Borders’ Uptown house. It was the story of the events of the night the two white men appeared from nowhere looking specifically for him. These men, Ralph Hellerstein and Herb Marks, were union men. They had accurately predicted the dismissal of James Pearson’s colleague, Billy Moore, when Billy Moore had become unable to hide a soft tissue injury in his back. They had invited James Pearson to join them on the Packinghouse Workers Organising Committee.

  ‘You don’t want no trouble? You stay the hell away from them white unions. They got some shit goin’ on but they won’t be tellin’ you nothin’ ‘bout it. Anyways, whatever shit they up to, it don’t mean you no good,’ Tommy Parks advised Pearson as the two of them drank a beer late one night on the broken steps outside the Mecca Flats.

  ‘But they asked me to join ’em, not just the union but the Organising Committee.’

  ‘Join ’em?’

  ‘On the Packinghouse Workers Organising Committee.’

  ‘What that mean?’

  ‘It mean I be the same as them.’

  ‘Same as them?’ Tommy Parks laughed. ‘You the same as them, how come you ain’t getting them two white boys join you and a group o’ black men on the Packinghouse Workers Organising Committee?’

  ‘’Cause they already started it.’

  ‘Yeah and they started it for themselves.’

  ‘Well, why ever they started it, now they askin’ me to join. Ain’t no rank and file thing, they askin’ me to join the Organising Committee.’

  ‘You ask some of them old boys. They tell how them unions do for the black man back in the day. It were more an’ twenty year ago but ain’t none of ’em there forget it.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘There’s union trouble so the meatworks go and hire a whole lot of black folks.’

  ‘What do you mean “union trouble”?’

  ‘You know, the usual, union lookin’ for higher wages as they do. Meatworks flat refused as they do. So the union go on strike and the meatworks go and hire a whole lot of black folks. Negro men come up from the south, bring their wives, children and all, for the best job they ever had ‘cause ain’t no white man want it. Then the union say we stealin’ their jobs. Lot of black folks’ blood spilt before the meatworks and the union reach a deal and the black man left with his wounds and not a pot to piss in. Bunch of Polaks and Irishmen do real good out of it. That’s the union you want to join.’

  ‘Yeah, but that’s the difference between the twenties and now. These men tell me they want black men in the union so they won’t be workin’ for just the Polaks and the Irishmen no more.’

  Tommy Parks smiled and slowly shook his head. ‘Man, I took you smarter ‘n that, I really did. Can you see all them Polaks and all them Irishmen workin’ for you? You be their nigger. You be their union nigger. Now how that feel, “Mister Anything-You-Want” union nigger?’

  ‘Tommy, we just talkin’, right? Now I ain’t sayin’ I’m smart or nothin’. But I’m smarter ‘n you if you don’t think maybe, just maybe I seen that possibility and I searched ’em out on it.’

  ‘Yeah? How you do that?’

  ‘They say they want a united union, black and white, all together, all equal. That’s why they ask me to join the Organising Committee.’

  ‘James Pearson! They got you dreamin’ of no place ever been on earth. They give you a fancy title, put you on the “Organising Committee” and you think you died and gone to heaven. Maybe they even want coloured workers to join. Maybe they do. So what if they do? They ain’t interested in the problems of a black man. They don’t even know the problems of a black man.’

  James Pearson took another sip from his bottle. Then he smiled. ‘Tommy, you be surprised what they know.’

  ‘I be surprised!’

  James Pearson turned to face him. ‘You know ‘bout the stars?’

  ‘The stars? What you talkin’ ‘bout?’

  ‘Ever wonder how when things get slow and the foreman gotta lay off people, he call out their name?’

  ‘Yeah, I seen it.’

  ‘They all Negro men.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Yeah, but how the foreman know whose name to call? He don’t know everyone by their name. Too many there for that.’

  ‘What you talkin’ ‘bout?’

  ‘Each and every man at the plant got a time card.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘The time card of every Negro worker got a little star on it, a little black mark. It tell the foreman who’s who.’

  ‘The union men tell you th
at?’

  ‘Yes, they did. They say if I join and if we can get enough black men to join, their first campaign be the removal of that black star off of every Negro worker’s time card.’

  ‘The whole union going to fight for that?’

  ‘That’s what they say … if we can get enough black men to join.’

  ‘Well, they good talkers, I give you that,’ Tommy Parks said, lighting up a cigarette.

  ‘That all you give me?’

  ‘You starting with me, ain’t you? Jesus, boy! If you don’t have a hide and a half! Get me talkin’ just so I agree every week to give a cracker-ass union some of my pay. How dumb you think I am?’ Tommy Parks laughed.

  ‘Don’t blame me; I know how dumb you are. It’s them union boys, they got no idea how dumb you are, much as I told ’em.’ ‘What you told ’em?’

  ‘I told ’em you don’t give a shit ‘bout no one but your own self.’

  ‘Wait a minute; this thing ain’t got nothin’ to do with me –’

  ‘I told ’em you squirm every single way God made just to get out of doin’ one thing for someone else, even for your fellow Negro meatpacker.’

  ‘Don’t put this shit on me, nigger. You let them sell you shit and all of a sudden I’m the bad guy.’

  ‘No, you the fool, Tommy. I told ’em that. But they want to meet you anyway. Insist on it.’

  ‘They want to meet me?’

  ‘They know how folks round here like you, here and at the plant. They want you to join the Packinghouse Workers Organising Committee. They want you to join with me.’

  A meeting was arranged. Tommy Parks was to be meeting Ralph Hellerstein and his younger offsider, Herb Marks, at Goldblatt’s Discount Store at the corner of 47th Street and Ashland Avenue. But given that it was still daylight, Hellerstein reconsidered his original choice of meeting place and later thought it wise to change the venue to the union hall at 48th Street and Marshfield Avenue, a mere five- to ten-minute walk from Goldblatt’s. He had tried to get a message through to Tommy Parks during the day but wasn’t sure Parks had got it. He talked it over with James Pearson later that day and Pearson had volunteered to meet Parks at Goldblatt’s, give him the message and walk with him to the union hall.