The Street Sweeper

by Elliot Perlman

  ‘You’re talking about issues of race?’

  ‘Yeah, not only but … He’s very sweet. In the course of trying to help me after we … He even suggested a topic for me.’

  ‘A research topic?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Is it any good?’

  ‘You know, it sort of is. It’s actually led me on a really fascinating path that I think is going to bear fruit, maybe more fruit than I can …’

  ‘Eat?’

  ‘I was going to say handle.’

  ‘That’s great! Isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, it is. I’m feeling more hopeful about things now. In fact this topic, I’d love to talk to you about it, it’s taking me to Melbourne. Can you believe it? By chance I have to go to –’

  ‘To live?’

  ‘No, no, just to interview someone. Not to live.’

  Adam’s perception of her concern that he might be moving to Melbourne to live emboldened him. ‘Diana, I made a mistake.’

  ‘Oh, don’t –’

  ‘In a long line of mistakes this is the biggest one I’ve ever made.’

  ‘Adam –’

  ‘I want you to come back. I want us to be together –’

  ‘Adam –’

  ‘I’m feeling better about my work now and –’

  ‘Adam, you can’t turn people on and off depending on how you’re feeling about your work.’

  ‘No, I know. That’s not what I mean. I mean that … Everything you said was right. I can see that. Look, it … it might have taken me till now. It might’ve taken me finding something to sink my teeth into for me to realise I could make a go of it professionally, but much more importantly than that, to feel confident that I could …’

  ‘That you could what?’

  ‘That I could provide for … take care of … a family. To feel that I would not be a husband to you and a father to our children like … like my father was to my mother and me.’

  ‘And what if you don’t get tenure?’

  ‘I’m not going to get tenure, not at Columbia. I don’t care. I mean of course I care but not as far as it affecting our plans to start a family. You were right. We should be together and have children irrespective of what’s happening to us professionally. I see that now.’

  He reached across the table and took her hand but after a few seconds she withdrew it. The waitress walked past just as this was happening. It didn’t look like either of these two was going to leave much of a tip, but other people’s turning points were often instructive and always entertaining, especially to the up-and-coming actress this young waitress thought of herself as. They looked like nice people. How old were they? she wondered.

  ‘Would you care to order something else?’ she asked just as Diana withdrew her hand.

  ‘No,’ Diana answered, seemingly for both of them. ‘No, thank you.’ Adam looked up at the waitress. She liked his eyes, mistaking the pain in them for something else. He wanted her to go away and having run out of questions, she went back in the direction of the barman.

  ‘Adam, you can’t turn people on and off. Do you know what I’ve been through?’

  ‘I can imagine. I went through it too.’

  ‘Yeah but you did it. It was all your fault.’

  ‘I agree … completely. Like I said, it was a mistake … a terrible, terrible mistake.’

  ‘You can’t turn people on and off.’

  ‘I know. You said that and I agree but I don’t think that’s something I generally do and –’

  ‘I mean, who the hell do you think you are?’

  ‘I think I’m someone who did something really, really stupid, but who before that loved you as much if not more than anyone has ever loved you or ever will, someone who made you laugh, someone who tried to take care of you, someone who shared your interests and your concerns, someone you thought you wanted to marry and have a child with.’

  ‘Who before that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said, “someone who before that loved you” –’

  ‘I didn’t mean “before that”. I didn’t mean only “before that”. I still love you. I talk to you. I’ve continued talking to you, having conversations with you, even though you’re not there.’

  Tears welled in her eyes. Such was the sadness, frustration and regret that fuelled them that she was beyond pretending that she wasn’t crying. Adam took her hand and again she let it rest in his for a few seconds before withdrawing it, this time, seemingly, in anger. That’s the way the waitress interpreted the gesture.

  ‘You’re such an asshole, you know that?’

  ‘No, I’m an arsehole but not such an arsehole. I am such an idiot though. Can we settle on that?’

  ‘I can’t do this.’

  ‘Can’t do what?’

  ‘I can’t get back with you.’

  ‘Diana, you’ve got to trust me. I’m not playing games with your feelings. I mean it. Irrespective of what happens to me professionally, and I think things might be looking up, but … Sweetheart, you were right, I don’t want to wake up without you any more. I’m tired of waking up in the middle of the night and going into the bathroom and –’

  ‘I’m seeing someone.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I met … someone.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Adam, does it matter?’

  ‘I don’t … I don’t know. I guess … Yeah, I guess it doesn’t matter.’

  He had not imagined this so it wasn’t possible for him to have prepared himself for it although, as the Number One train took him back uptown from Times Square towards Columbia, it occurred to him that, perhaps like a parent’s death, this was not something one could prepare for anyway. Now he really was alone. It wasn’t a dress rehearsal for some possible eventuality. This was permanent. He was going to have to live with the consequences of his fear of being a failed academic and a failed father and husband. Back home he sat on the couch staring into space. It was the couch they had chosen together, had lain on together, the couch they had watched television on as they held on to each other.

  ‘Now I can’t even talk to you. I can’t even imagine a private ongoing conversation with you … in my head.’

  ‘Sweetheart, you can, of course you can.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Like this, just like you’re doing now.’

  ‘But it was all … It’s always been predicated on us eventually having these conversations for real.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’

  ‘Yes, it was. Who are you to say? Who am I talking to? Who are you, anyway?’

  ‘I’m still Diana. I’m your imagining of her.’

  ‘Yeah but now that I know –’

  ‘I can still live in your mind.’

  ‘But who is it that’s living in my mind? You won’t marry me. You won’t have children with me. You’ve met someone else … which I don’t even want to think about.’

  ‘She has but I haven’t.’

  ‘What’s the difference between you and her?’

  ‘I’m how you remember her. As long as you remember how she was when you two were together, you can keep talking to me.’

  ‘But she’s gone. She’s met someone.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. She has. She really has.’

  ‘So I just keep talking in my mind to a version of her –’

  ‘Yes, but it’s based on all those years of knowing her and loving her –’

  ‘Before I …’

  ‘Before you fucked everything up.’

  ‘So I’m talking to myself?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘And it’s all my fault?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How sad is that?’

  ‘You know very well how sad that is.’

  ‘Is there anything sadder than living like this in some sort of permanent state of … knowing it’s all … knowing this is all my fault?’

  ‘You’re a historian.’

  ‘So?’

&
nbsp; ‘Use your imagination.’

  ‘I’m talking to myself and I don’t even know what that means. What does that mean?’

  ‘It means, if you think this feels bad, imagine being Henry Border.’

  *

  It was on 6 January 1945. The Appel, the roll call, in the women’s camp in Auschwitz began at four o’clock in the afternoon and was all over unusually quickly, not out of consideration for the prisoners but because there was something the SS wanted them all to see. A group of prisoners, men, had been brought to the women’s barracks in the camp and ordered to warm the rock-hard frozen ground. A small fire had been built with kindling in what would otherwise have been only snow. It was still light when the women who had returned from the day shift at the Weichsel Union Metallwerke factory and many others returning from other labour details arrived back inside the gates of the camp to see a structure that had been hastily erected on the warmed ground while they had been at work. It had not taken long to construct the scaffolding and gallows once the ground had been prepared. The Russians were coming. The rumours had reached fever pitch among the prisoners. They were coming, always coming, any day now. But then a new day came and on this day they still hadn’t come. But they were coming, any day now. So you tried to survive just one more day. In the late afternoon of 6 January the rows and rows of women were made to form a semi-circle between Block 2 and Block 3 in Auschwitz I. They stood motionless in the cold fading winter light as the SS led two women from the direction of Block 11 to the gallows, Estusia Weiss and Rosa Rabinowicz.

  An armed contingent of SS men surrounded the two frail young women who walked slowly towards the scaffolding, their arms unbound, their mouths ungagged; victims of beatings as vicious as any that had ever been meted out to prisoners whose death was to be kept from them a little longer. Four women had been arrested since the Sonderkommando uprising. All had been brutally beaten. They had not divulged the name of a single living person. This was widely known among the assembled women prisoners who stood in the snow watching in silence as the two tiny women were led to and then up the steps of the scaffolding.

  A prisoner, a hulking man some knew simply as the ‘Hangman’ and whom others knew as the Kapo Jakub, was waiting there for them at the top of the stairs. They seemed calm, almost serene. All was silent until a prisoner from within the crowd noticed a tiny gesture from the Kapo Jakub. With the noose in one hand, he gently stroked the neck of the prisoner Estusia Weiss with his other hand before slipping the noose over her head and around her neck. Everyone saw this but only one prisoner was unable to contain herself despite the presence of the guards. A young twig of a woman, a girl of only fifteen, let out a piercing shriek. It was Hannah, the sister of Estusia Weiss. After her shriek she began to cry uncontrollably, offering hysterical moans to the heavens, heaving sobs that shook the cold ground beneath her feet. When Jakub kicked away the wooden stool from under the feet of Estusia Weiss, her sister Hannah fainted. She lay motionless in the snow. But by then the sobbing had spread throughout the ranks of the prisoners. They stood there in the snow watching the execution of two beaten, half-starved, wingless sparrows, each woman knowing that these two, the two on the scaffold, had fought back against the Nazis. Jakub made the same brief gesture, gently touching the neck of young Rosa Rabinowicz, once of Ciechanow. He had fed both Rosa and Estusia a drug half an hour earlier. He whispered something to Rosa as he slipped the noose around her neck and then, despite her tranquillised state, in the seconds before he kicked the wooden stool out from under her feet, she roused herself and called out to the assembled prisoners, to anyone who could hear her, ‘Tell everyone what happened here! Tell everyone! Tell everyone!’ Young Hannah Weiss had recovered in time to hear it.

  Their bodies swung above the wooden planking as the Kommandant of the women’s camp, Kommandant Hössler, made it a point to touch their bodies with his black leather-gloved hands. In a show for the prisoners he explained imperiously that the fate of these dangling women was the fate of anyone who conspired against the Reich. He made a similar speech at around 10 pm that night for the prisoners of the night shift when the other two women of the Pulverraum, Ala and Regina, were hanged. ‘Sooner or later the Reich will find all those who conspire against it,’ Kommandant Hössler bellowed in the floodlights beside the dangling, half-starved, badly beaten corpses of Ala and Regina. Eighteen days later he was nowhere to be found when Russian tanks entered Auschwitz.

  *

  It happened that in Chicago in the early 1950s a young postgraduate student of psychology, by the name of Wayne Rosenthal, was able to find an ideal thesis advisor and topic for his dissertation. But what could have been even harder, he was also able to convince his parents that this ‘psychology business’ was not some mumbo-jumbo waste of time. His parents were Eastern European Jews and, while they had no special need for their son to come to terms with anything called the ‘Adjective–Verb Quotient’, it made a lot of sense to them for their son to be working with the testimony of the survivors of the camps. It was their civilisation, it was their people. Whether or not their son could earn a living with this ‘psychology business’, for the time being it didn’t matter to them. Moreover, the thesis advisor was a learned man, a cultured man who seemed to have a special fondness for their son. This fondness extended to inviting him to stay back late in his laboratory in the Main building at IIT where the young man took advantage of his first language, Yiddish, to translate wire recordings the professor had made in the summer of 1946. Quickly proficient in the use of the state-of-the-art wire recorder and fluent in Yiddish, the young man was a godsend to the Eastern European émigré.

  It would save Border so much time if the student himself could directly translate some of the wire recordings. It was so much faster to edit the translations than to make them from scratch. Perhaps he might get all the wire recordings translated after all. His book of eight translations had sold poorly but now there was the possibility, with the young man’s help, of transcribing and then translating the full complement of wire recordings. Not wanting to be seen to be playing favourites from among his students, Border had hidden the gratitude he felt towards this young graduate student. And knowing the value his mentor placed on integrity, Wayne Rosenthal was content in public to play the role of just another one of the students fortunate to have Dr Border as his thesis advisor. But he knew the way his mentor really felt about him. He would have been grateful enough just to have found the topic, and more so to have found the man who was Border. But there was more.

  The scholar had a daughter, a young woman who seemed to blossom a little more every day. At least, that was how Wayne Rosenthal saw her. With dark eyes for falling into and jet-black hair, she could be both serious and funny, often at the same time. She was gentle, well read, interested in ideas and in the world around her, and all with a sense of humour. It was not easy to concentrate on those seminars at her father’s home when you knew she was there listening in the back only a few feet behind you. When she served tea and coffee, when she cut up the cake while Callie Ford served sandwiches, more than anything else, the graduate student wanted to kiss her. But a seminar was neither the time nor the place. The time and the place, it turned out, was in the back of a movie theatre to which he had, with Dr Border’s willing approval, taken her, where Wayne Rosenthal tentatively bestowed the first of many kisses on the young woman he thought he might one day want to marry. And she seemed to him to reciprocate his feelings. Certainly she never behaved in any way inconsistent with that hypothesis.

  As was often the case, Wayne Rosenthal was alone in Dr Border’s office late that afternoon. It was the night a party was to be held at the home of one of the other graduate students, Evie Harmon. Evie had invited Wayne along with all her classmates as well as Dr Border and his daughter Elly. Caught up in his work, Wayne was only peripherally aware of the time but he knew he was due to leave or risk being late for the party. It was in this hurried frame of mind that he came across a spool of wire
that, although numbered, had become separated from the other spools of wire. Was this a mistake or did Dr Border have a reason for separating it from the others? He and Border had organised the spools into piles according to whether the recording had not yet been translated, translated but not yet transcribed, translated and partially transcribed, translated and completely transcribed, transcribed and fully edited. This particular spool was not in any of the piles. It sat under some papers on a shelf in the laboratory half of Border’s two-roomed office.

  Initially, Wayne thought that perhaps it was he who had been responsible for its being separated from the other spools. If he listened to just the beginning of it perhaps he would be able to identify which category this particular wire recording belonged to. He didn’t really have time to listen to much of it but he knew he would be unsettled all night if he left the office with the wire recording uncategorised. So he threaded the wire into Marvin Cadden’s machine and sat down to listen to just the first few minutes of the recording.

  Immediately he knew that he hadn’t heard this one at all. He wouldn’t have forgotten it. While each wire recording contained stories that were capable of devastating the listener, none of them began the way this one began. A woman was abusing Henry Border in Yiddish.

  ‘Now you will listen! No more of your stupid questions!’

  What Wayne Rosenthal heard was the story of Estusia Weiss, Ala, Regina and of the Sonderkommando uprising. If all this did not astonish him enough, he heard his mentor interrupting the interviewee, a young woman called Hannah, to ask quite specific questions about one of the participants, the woman she called Rosa. He knew Border never interrupted his subjects. If something needed to be clarified he had always waited for his subject to finish a topic or at least to pause.

  ‘What was her full name?’ he heard Border ask in Yiddish that crackled through the wire in Marvin Cadden’s machine.

  ‘Rosa Rabinowicz.’

  ‘Where did this Rosa Rabinowicz come from?’

  ‘Originally she was from Ciechanow but she’d lived for a time before the war in Warsaw.’

  ‘What did she look like?’