The Street Sweeper (13 page)

‘The young man sprang out of bed and ran to his father’s room. His father was dead. His uncle, the father’s brother, was with his father at the time of death. You know where the son was. You know what he was doing at the very moment his father was dying. Is this true, untrue, likely to be true, unlikely to be true or is there not enough known from what I’ve told you for you to say? Wait, don’t answer! There’s more. I’ll throw in a set of steak knives.’

The students laughed again. At least he had their attention. But then he’d have had that anyway if they’d realised they were watching the youngish professor with the slight Australian accent dying before their very eyes. Perhaps they’d seen him in the public television documentary talking about the legal battles of the civil rights movement. Maybe that’s why they’d enrolled in the course. It had been a few years earlier. He had been the one talking about his father.

*

There were a few photographs of Adam Zignelik around the apartment Adam shared with Diana and she looked at them as she was packing the last of the boxes. She knew the photographs and the stories attached to them so well and wondered if she was looking at them for the last time. It was a terrible thought, one she’d never entertained before, to add to the barrage of terrible thoughts that kept assailing her. Adam had been such a part of her life for eight years that it was no more possible for her
to imagine the next phase of her soon-to-be separate life than it was for her to imagine the soil hitting the wood at her own funeral.

In the days to come she would replay Adam’s ostensible reasons for ending the relationship and come to implicate his father in what she had described breathlessly and through tears as emotional vandalism. What couple did they know who loved each other more than they did? But she was in her mid-thirties and wanted children and Adam said he couldn’t in good conscience bring a child into the world. He felt he would soon be out of work. You don’t have a child on a whim the way you buy that jacket that you knew you really couldn’t afford. It looked great in the store. You wanted it. You took it home, tried it on but kept the receipt. You don’t have children by mistake, by accident, or even intentionally when a tide of uncertainty is welling up around you. Soon it will drown you. Adam felt that the biggest gift he could give Diana was a future, one with a child that she so badly wanted. But it was a future that wouldn’t contain him.

*

‘Okay,’ Adam Zignelik continued, ‘the very young man’s father had died and he, the dutiful son, had not been there with him in his last moments. The guilt was immediate and it was unbearable. Some time later but not all that much later, the very young man’s even younger wife gave birth to their first child. This newest, smallest member of the family fights to breathe but little more than three days after it was born it dies. The young man feels the child’s death is punishment for his having gratified a sexual urge when he should have been taking care of his ailing father. Furthermore, he is troubled that he had gone to his wife like that when she was pregnant. Is this true, untrue, likely to be true, unlikely to be true or is there not enough known for you to say?’

A student, a young man, raised his hand and answered at the same time, ‘It’s true.’

‘Why?’ Adam asked him.

‘Because you’re telling us the story.’ The other students laughed.

‘I’m pleased you’ve never known me to lie or to be wrong but I have to admit both
have
happened.’ The class laughed again. The student sought to explain his answer.

‘No, but you wouldn’t be telling us this story in class if it wasn’t true.’ The class laughed again.

*

‘This is insane,’ Diana had said many times since Adam had put to her that they separate. ‘People who love each other don’t split up.’

But as she looked, surrounded by all the boxes, at the photo of Jake Zignelik there was no one else in the room to argue on her behalf, on their behalf, no one else to put the case for them as a couple to Adam. Professionally, Adam described himself as a ‘dead man walking’. When the wheels of administration within the History Department turned far enough he would be crushed into insignificance and have no choice but to put his career into boxes not unlike those he was forcing Diana to put her life into that day. He could get another job, Diana insisted, but he said he couldn’t, not an academic job, not in New York, not in the city. He was convinced their relationship couldn’t survive him losing his job.

‘So you’re killing it
now?’
Diana had asked incredulously. It made so little sense to her that it took her a long time to believe there wasn’t another woman. ‘What about an academic position
outside
New York?’ she’d asked him. But he said he couldn’t make her leave her parents, who were growing old in Westchester. And he didn’t want to be the reason she left her job. She taught public school in New Jersey. He didn’t want to be the reason she left her friends in the city. How could he, in good conscience, get her to uproot her life knowing he was about to slide downwards but not knowing where he would land?

‘Uproot my life! Are you kidding? You
are
my life! I would change jobs for you in a heart beat.’

‘What about your friends? What about leaving your parents?’

Her heart must have beaten more slowly because she paused at this. Leaving her parents was harder. She didn’t say no but it was definitely harder. They both saw her hesitate at this. He told her that he didn’t
want to make her do it but he didn’t tell her how much the decision was killing him. It robbed him of sleep and led him to find himself tearful in the middle of the street hoping no one he knew would see him. He cried in the street, went into bars, drank and didn’t tell her any of it. If he had told her it would only have made things harder.

‘Maybe they won’t get rid of you?’

‘They will. They have to. I’ve left them with no choice.’

‘Can’t Charlie save you?’

‘Diana, there’s nothing he can do. I’m finished. I’ve really fucked up. I’m sorry. I’ve nothing to show them, the committee. There are people from all over the country, all over the world, who would kill for my position, kill for a shot at tenure in this department, in
any
department at Columbia. And I’ll tell you something, they’d deserve it more than I do. I’ve got absolutely nothing to show them and I don’t know how it happened. I’ve given Charlie nothing to fight for me with. Yes, he’s the chair of the department but I don’t expect him to go out on a limb for me in some futile gesture that smacks of something bordering on nepotism. I’ve got nothing to show him or the committee or … anyone, and he can’t save me.’

She would hug him whenever he’d say all this, which he would regularly in order to try to convince her they had to separate. Diana had raised the possibility of Adam writing history without an institutional attachment, without an academic position of any kind. There were examples of well-regarded historians who had done this with great success.

One of the historians much admired by Adam, the late Barbara Tuchman, had done this. Adam often cited Barbara Tuchman’s work to his students in his ‘What is History?’ class, not least for her easy yet erudite literary style. But her times and her circumstances had been very different from those Adam was facing. Barbara Tuchman’s first book came out more than fifty years before Diana needed to cite not Tuchman’s work but her life to Adam in an attempt to save their relationship. Tuchman had begun writing history for the educated public at a time when women weren’t expected to work outside the home and if they worked for paid income it was a bonus to the family’s resources. Adam, on the other hand, was expected by everybody to earn a salary that would
keep the nose of each member of a putative family permanently above the waves of economic vicissitude that were out there waiting to crash down on them. Perhaps Diana didn’t expect this now, not while her thoughts were focused on a child. But she could not be relied upon never to expect it. A child was a deal-breaker,
the
deal-breaker, and Adam would not let her take the child off the table. He knew that if she did she would regret it and resent him for it for the rest of her life.

Barbara Tuchman had been married to a prominent New York physician. Diana would have Adam married to a New Jersey public school teacher. Barbara Tuchman was descended from a family of diplomats and friends of presidents on one side, the Morgenthaus, and from investment bankers, the Wertheims, on the other. Adam Zignelik was descended from parents who had left him with meagre savings, a passion for social justice or at least guilt for not realising their passion for it, and a lot of fear, including the fear of bringing into the world a child who might know a sense of abandonment from which he, approaching forty, had suffered from almost as a birthright. How do you argue with this? Diana didn’t know and there was no one there to help her.

*

‘The gentleman in the front thinks I wouldn’t be telling you this story if it wasn’t true. Okay, don’t laugh; he might be on to something,’ Adam told his class. ‘He’s judging the veracity and the accuracy of the story on the basis of its source, on the basis of its origin. He’s using his powers of deduction, maybe even intuition, which I’ll come back to later. He’s got to start somewhere. Even if I’m only a secondary source for this story about the young man and his father, a secondary source can be your starting point. I’m a professor of history at Columbia University taking up my students’ limited time here with a tragic story.’

‘It’s
likely
to be true,’ another student announced with a vertically raised right arm.

‘Well, yes, but it could all be part of some ingenious pedagogic trick,’ Adam Zignelik answered.

‘Not enough is known,’ volunteered another student.

‘I’m telling you this story in a fair degree of detail. If I were making it up as I went along I’d probably stumble more or I’d gloss over the details. Remember the details. Five or six minutes after the young man and his even younger pregnant wife started having sex the loyal servant interrupted them with a knock at the door and a euphemism, “Father is very ill”. The child born later lived less than four days. Remember the details. Of course, I could have made the story up for some ill-conceived educational purpose and just have told it many times before.’

‘It’s
likely
to be true,’ a young woman answered.

‘Why?’

‘Because … you’re a professor of history at Columbia University taking up your students’ valuable time with it.’ The class laughed again. At least
they’re
having a good time, Adam thought. Then he spoke.

‘You’ll find in your lives that giving somebody back an answer they’ve already given you will usually work well. It’ll probably help you. But the answer you give might still be wrong.’

Adam wanted a drink. It was still morning. Although he felt his career was over, the lecture wasn’t. He wasn’t sure he was going to make it.

*

Diana was holding a photograph of Adam when he was not much older than a baby, a child between one and two. His mother had dressed him in quilted overalls. His parents’ marriage couldn’t have had much more than a year left to run at the time the photo was taken. Diana knew it was taken in only the second and last time Jake Zignelik had ever been in Australia. The three of them had visited during winter to spend the briefest time on the Australian summer with Adam’s mother’s family. There were really just her parents. Other people who were labelled family were not really family. There was a Mr and Mrs Leibowitz who had two sons, Bernard and another Adam. The two Adams were about the same age. Adam grew up with his grandfather pointing at the two of them when they were together saying, ‘I don’t know him from Adam.’ It was never funny. It was only years later that its very lack of funniness became funny and this was only funny to Adam Zignelik and Diana, no one
else. They said it to each other incongruously in restaurants, on buses, on the subway, as incongruously as it had seemed to the young Adam when his European grandfather had said it. This was an ‘in’ joke, one of many, that was about to lose its currency. With Diana gone it would join all those thoughts, comments, references and allusions no one else would know, understand or care about. No one would even remember it. Adam would. Along with so many other things, he would now have only himself to say it to.

*

‘You’re trusting the vetting procedure of Columbia University. And why not? You don’t have much to go on. It’s an Ivy League school. Is it bad for the health of a pregnant woman to have sex? Is it bad for the health of the baby? Let me go back a step. Without asking your assessment of any of the faculty here, including me, without asking your assessment of anyone in this room, is there anyone in any of your other classes whom you think is, well … an idiot? Thank you for smiling. That didn’t take long. Well, somebody at Columbia let that idiot in. Columbia can make mistakes. It does. You’ve seen it. Are you going to say this story is likely to be true because it’s told to you by somebody at Columbia who was vetted by somebody else at Columbia? The baby died and the man, convinced that the death was a direct consequence of him having sex with his pregnant wife, blamed himself. Is sex during pregnancy bad for the health of the mother or the baby according to the currently received view on that matter?’

‘No,’ a young woman answered.

‘The young man’s family had a servant. Whatever the family’s social position, this tells you there were families of lower status than his. If he had access to the received view at the time about the effect on the foetus of sex during pregnancy and was still wrong, what does
that
tell us?’

‘That he lived in the past,’ the same young woman answered.

‘If, from a family not without some social privilege or status, he married when so young a woman even
younger
, what does that tell us?’

‘Also that he lived in the past,’ the young woman repeated. Then a woman with straight jet-black hair, whom Adam couldn’t remember having ever seen in class before, interjected.