The Street Sweeper

by Elliot Perlman

  *

  Adam Zignelik was sitting home alone in his Morningside Heights apartment on a Saturday in late winter surrounded by the boxes that contained his career and going through copies of the papers of the Chicago psychologist, Henry Border, when the thought occurred to him that the great advance of the second half of the twentieth century was storage. To a large extent he had packed the boxes from his office at Columbia in such a way that each box contained a topic, a category of his own work or of history more generally that was of professional interest to him. Often a box also acted as a kind of time capsule recording what he had been doing during a given span of his professional life. The boxes physically closest to where he was sitting at the time, the thought occurred to him, contained information pertaining to Border, the 1946 interviews, and Adam’s own interview with the woman, Hannah, and the role she and her sister, Estusia Weiss, and Border’s wife, Rosa Rabinowicz, played in the plot to smuggle gunpowder to the men of the Sonderkommando resistance. But of even greater significance, if the notes kept by the recently deceased cancer patient, the friend of the street sweeper, were anywhere near as detailed as the account given by the street sweeper himself, Adam would also have a first-hand written account of life in the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz and of the Sonderkommando uprising there. In addition to all that, there was the issue of the role of black troops in the liberation of Dachau to follow up. As soon as the grandfather of the oncologist, Ayesha Washington, had recovered from hip surgery, he would have a first-hand account of that too.

  What is memory? It is the storage, the retention and the recall of the constituents, gross and nuanced, of information. How is it called upon? A certain protein in the brain, an enzyme, acts upon one neuron after another in rapid sequence as if to light them up in such a way as to paint a picture or spell a word, as if to cause an arpeggio of cellular stores of data to suddenly ring out some long-stored melody in your mind and you remember her face, her voice, her laugh, the way she moved, something she said, her views and tastes, until you remember the way her eyes widened with the pre-rational wonder of a child when watching a wildlife documentary or the way they move slowly downwards when her frustration with someone she loves starts to leak sympathy. When she is gone, that cascade of cellular data is all you have. Each neuron holds some pixel, some datum, and if even one is lost, the sequence is interrupted. Then you have started to forget.

  How do we fight to preserve each tiny datum? Everyone tries different things, different strategies which we call on until we are distracted by events or overwhelmed by weakness or infirmity. Adam kept a comb in his bathroom mirror cabinet.

  Again Adam was distracted, this time by noise coming from somewhere in the building. Before he could decide whether to search for the source of the noise or try to put up with it and return to his work, his intercom buzzed. He carefully put the copy of the page from Border’s papers he was holding back on his desk and went over to answer it. On the weekends it was as likely as not to be someone looking for a neighbour who had pressed his apartment’s buzzer by mistake.

  ‘Hello,’ Adam said, expecting to be asked for someone else followed by an enquiry as to whether he was sure he wasn’t speaking from the apartment the visitor had intended to call.

  ‘Adam?’ It was Sonia. He held the receiver to his chest so she wouldn’t hear him exhale.

  ‘Adam, it’s me, Sonia.’

  ‘Hi, sweetie, what’s up?’

  ‘Would it be a bad time for me to come up? I know I’m meant to call first but I was out and I left my cell at home.’

  ‘Sure, come on up.’

  ‘You’re not entertaining?’

  ‘I’m not even entertaining myself.’

  ‘Okay, coming up! You can go in,’ he heard her saying as he returned the receiver to its vertical cradle on the wall and he thought, Oh great! Not only is she still coming uninvited, now she’s letting random passers-by into the building. Was he too soft on her? he wondered. The problem was that whenever he saw her, he could never be stern enough for long enough to show her he was serious about teaching her anything and instead would be consumed by an overwhelming urge to be the ‘good cop’ even though there was never any ‘bad cop’ around. By the time the knock at the door came he was already looking forward to the hug she was going to give him when he opened the door. But it wasn’t Sonia. It was Diana.

  ‘Hi, I’m sorry to –’

  ‘Hey! Come in!’

  She was embarrassed. ‘It’s not a bad time?’

  ‘No, not at all. Where’s Sonia?’

  ‘She’s gone.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This was a ruse, her idea, to get me to come and visit you. I’d come uptown to have lunch with the McCrays and … sure it’s not inconvenient? I don’t think I’ve ever done anything like –’

  ‘It’s not a bad time. Please come in. It’s so good to see you. Everything okay?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Diana took just three steps inside the apartment she used to share with Adam before the proliferation of boxes left her unable to contain herself. ‘Are you moving?’

  ‘What? Oh, the boxes. No, that’s my career all lined up against the wall. I had to vacate my office. See, I promised everyone I’d commit career suicide and I’m a man of my word.’

  He closed the door and she came inside. He showed her to the gap between the boxes on the couch and that’s where she sat down.

  ‘Can I get you a drink, coffee, tea?’

  ‘Maybe something stronger?’

  ‘Sure, what do you have in mind?’

  ‘Are you still drinking cheap Scotch?’

  ‘Only when I’m alone or when I’m buying the round.’

  ‘Scotch please.’

  ‘Sure.’

  He went to the kitchenette to pour the drinks and Diana called to him, ‘You don’t seem very unhappy.’

  ‘I like that you’re here drinking my Scotch.’

  ‘No, I mean about your so-called career suicide.’

  He returned with a drink for each of them and the bottle under his arm and perched on a box that was beside her on the couch.

  ‘I don’t seem very unhappy? I guess I’m not.’

  ‘That’s … good.’

  ‘You seem to hesitate about that.’

  ‘I’m nervous. I don’t know if I should’ve come like this.’

  ‘I’m so glad you did. Maybe that’s why I don’t seem unhappy about my career suicide. Actually, boxes notwithstanding – and they’ve withstood quite a lot – I have to admit to being pretty upbeat about my work, bordering on optimistic.’

  ‘Bordering?’

  ‘Yeah. I’ve just made a pun which you couldn’t possibly have picked up and which I didn’t even intend. But you would have liked it. I mustn’t talk to you like you’re not here when you really are here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you remember when we met at that place in Hell’s Kitchen last time I was telling you –?’

  ‘You said you had some leads that were going to take you to Melbourne and that William had something to do with it.’

  ‘Well, in a way he did, but now it’s gone much further than even he could have imagined. You’re not in a hurry, are you?’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  He poured them each another drink and began a truncated but none-too-brief version of the story of Henry Border, Elly Border, Rosa Rabinowicz, Estusia and Hannah Weiss and the women of the Pulverraum in Auschwitz’s Weichsel Union Metallwerke factory, and the oncologist from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, her grandfather and her street sweeper.

  ‘So you’re going to be talking to the black veteran, Captain Washington, you hope to be getting the written testimony of the Sonderkommando guy from his family via a hospital janitor –’

  ‘Mandelbrot – that’s the plan, assuming the family hasn’t thrown it out.’

  ‘And the original wire recording of Bo
rder’s interview with the woman you met in Melbourne?’

  ‘It’s in that box. His former student had kept it.’

  ‘Is that the one that had been involved with the daughter?’

  ‘Wayne Rosenthal, that’s right.’

  ‘Adam, that’s incredible! It’s an incredible story. No wonder you’re hopeful. You’ve got so much to go on with. Does anybody know what you’ve got?’

  Adam ignored her last question. He had refilled their glasses a few times by then. ‘I’m really so happy to see you. I really am. Does he know … you’re here, the guy … you’re seeing? You didn’t … I don’t think you told me his name.’

  ‘I’m not seeing him any more.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. Don’t sound so happy.’

  ‘How long did it last?’

  ‘A few weeks.’

  ‘A few weeks!’ A few weeks, Adam thought, that wasn’t very long.

  ‘Well, he never made me laugh like you did. Are you seeing anyone?’

  ‘No, not even for a few weeks. I never get the time. I’m too busy talking to you. I just keep –’

  ‘Don’t … Adam … you’re making me –’

  ‘Look, I made a mistake but I only made one. I haven’t changed my mind.’

  Now she was crying and she got up to get herself a tissue, which she remembered they used to keep in the bathroom. Adam watched her walk away and heard her turn on the light. He heard her grab some tissues out of the box and then for a moment he heard nothing at all. He wondered what she was doing. Then he heard small sobs that graduated quickly to a much louder cry than any he had heard since his own in the middle of many of the nights since she’d left. The catalyst had been the same for him then as it was for Diana now, her comb. She saw it there and picked it up. She looked at it and momentarily thought it to be another woman’s comb before its origin dawned on her and then its significance. By the time Adam came to her in the bathroom they used to share she was crying uncontrollably.

  *

  There was to be a meeting. How long had it taken to arrange this meeting? The answer will vary depending on when the counting starts. By one measure it had taken almost forty years to arrange, by other measures even longer. But at last it was time. Some things will not be hurried. How should he start? He had lain in bed and asked himself this question in the dark in the middle of the night before the meeting. He had asked his grandmother who, in so many ways was still there as well. He woke that morning in the room of his childhood with the tart taste of uncertainty and anxiety born of the lucklessness that rarely left him. Orphaned twice before and so recently again, he poured his apple juice.

  Young and old drink Seneca …

  Rich, delicious …

  It’s funny what you remember. The tune stayed with him on the bus, holding his hand when he had a seat and also when he had to stand. She didn’t care. She would hold his hand when this was over, no matter how it turned out, no matter how he started. How would he start? His grandma advised him to just start from the beginning and tell the truth. He couldn’t do any more. She was right, he said to himself, taking a seat inside Danny Ehrlich’s office on the ground floor of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. There wasn’t any more that he could do than that. ‘Don’t be afraid, honey child, not any more.’

  He had taken that menorah around the streets of the east side of Manhattan with him all morning and all afternoon until the meeting. What a sight he must have made, one of those ‘only in New York’ sights. How many street sweepers were there in all the world carrying a menorah with them under their arms? Not even Numbers would pretend there was one. But there was one, just one. Lamont had to make sure he had it with him when he went to the meeting. That was part of the deal. No music came from the radio or anywhere else inside the office of the Head of Human Resources at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center that afternoon. But there were more people there than usual and extra chairs had to be brought in from the office of Juan Laviera, Deputy Head of Human Resources, and from other offices too. For in that office gathered for the meeting was Dan Ehrlich, Juan Laviera, Ayesha Washington, Lamont Williams, Adam Zignelik, a historian with an Australian accent, and the son and daughter-in-law of the late Henryk Mandelbrot, formerly of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz-Birkenau. On Danny Ehrlich’s desk, between the monitor for his computer and his visitors, sat the silver menorah.

  Danny Ehrlich began the meeting by thanking everyone for coming, particularly Mr and Mrs Mandelbrot. He explained his position within the hospital and that of his deputy, Juan Laviera, and then he introduced the oncologist Ayesha Washington, whom they already knew, the historian Adam Zignelik and the man, Lamont Williams, who had been a probationary employee of the hospital’s in Building Services and who had brought in the late Mr Mandelbrot’s menorah. At first the Mandelbrots were unable to make eye contact with Lamont Williams but the way Dan Ehrlich had structured the meeting they were not immediately obliged to.

  Mr Ehrlich explained the purpose of the meeting, which was slightly different from the way the Mandelbrots had previously had it described to them over the phone. Then they had been told that the menorah had been recovered and that if they were able to come in and verify that it was indeed the menorah they had brought in to the late patient, Mr Mandelbrot, they could take it with them. But now, surprised to see themselves as part of a meeting of seven people, another explanation was proffered. Danny Ehrlich had been approached by Mr Mandelbrot’s oncologist, Dr Washington, because she felt that an injustice might have been perpetrated against the hospital’s probationary employee. This man, Lamont Williams, had been dismissed from the hospital staff because of the missing menorah, which everyone had assumed he stole. But Dr Washington remembers a number of occasions when she had found the employee, Lamont Williams, visiting the patient for conversations of varying lengths, both during and after Mr Williams’ working hours. This, in and of itself, proves nothing but it does go some of the way towards corroborating Mr Williams’ story, namely that he had struck up a friendship with Henryk Mandelbrot and that in the days before his death Mr Mandelbrot had made a gift of the menorah to him.

  Then Dr Ayesha Washington took over the story. She explained that in conversation with Lamont Williams Mr Williams had displayed a quite specific and even remarkable knowledge of what sounded like the life story of the Mandelbrots’ father and father-in-law, particularly his war-time experiences. She said she happened to have been in contact with a historian from Columbia, she explained, at which point Dr Adam Zignelik introduced himself and gave the son of Henryk Mandelbrot a business card that carried both his name and that of Columbia University, his erstwhile employer.

  Adam interjected, ‘My area is twentieth-century political history, which recently has broadened to include the Holocaust. It’s just by chance that my work has taken me to some of the events that your father lived through. Dr Washington contacted me and asked me to meet with her and Mr Williams to help ascertain the credibility of his account of your father’s story. I’ve met him once before today and listened to his account of your father’s experiences, particularly in Auschwitz and, in my opinion, it’s almost inconceivable that he could be making up this stuff. I’m here to tell you that and also to ask for your assistance with respect to my own research. Mr Williams told me that your father told him that he’d made notes of his wartime experiences, particularly his time in the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz. I want to ask your permission to get a copy of the notes your father made.’

  ‘Notes?’ enquired the younger Mr Mandelbrot. ‘We haven’t seen any notes,’ he said, looking at his wife.

  ‘They’re in Yiddish,’ Lamont Williams interjected. ‘I think they’re in Yiddish.’ Now for the first time the son and the daughter-in-law looked closely at the black man in the bright blue overalls.

  ‘That must be what’s in that exercise book,’ the daughter-in-law said confidentially to her husband. ‘In the drawer with his tefellin.’

 
‘I understand a little Yiddish but I can’t read it,’ said the son by way of explanation and with some embarrassment as though now suddenly he was the one defending himself.

  ‘What I propose, subject to what you say, is that you hear from Mr Williams. Hear what he has to say,’ suggested Danny Ehrlich, ‘and if, at the end of his account, you still think that he stole the menorah, Mr Williams has agreed to give it to you even though he says your father gave it to him as a gift. But if you think that it’s likely, given the detailed knowledge Mr Williams has of your father’s experiences, that a friendship developed between the two of them and that your father gave Mr Williams the menorah out of friendship, you might want to consider letting him keep it. Mr Williams has said he’ll abide by your decision.’

  The son and the daughter-in-law needed only to look at each other for the son to nod his assent. Then Dan Ehrlich, the Head of the hospital’s Human Resources Department, who had been known in grade school as Danny Ehrlich, looked to his old school friend and said, ‘You want to … say a few words, Lamont?’

  Lamont Williams cleared his throat and prepared himself to speak. No one else in the room spoke or looked like speaking. He had not commanded a room like this since his trial for armed robbery. But even then he hadn’t been required to speak. In fact his attorney had advised him not to speak. The last time any gathering of people had waited to hear what he had to say was in grade school when he addressed Mr Shapiro and his class on the topic of horseshoe crabs. The six other people in the room waited for him to begin speaking.

  ‘So like you know,’ he began, ‘my name’s Lamont Williams. I met Mr Mandelbrot … your father, on my fourth day in Building Services. I was sweeping up outside on York Avenue. Someone from PES brought him down but he was cold –’

  ‘Patient Escort Services,’ explained Danny Ehrlich.