The Street Sweeper (27 page)

‘Oh, okay. And when I die will you find someone to research
me
researching
him
to show the last desperate flailing of a soon-to-be out of work early twenty-first-century historian? You’re not helping me.’

‘No, I am.’

‘No, you’re really not. It doesn’t help to encourage me to waste my time and make a fool of myself.’

‘Time is something, just about the
only
thing, you’ve got. As for making a fool of yourself, you said it yourself before, no one can see you. Who even knows you’re here?’

‘That junior psych academic and the Chief Librarian, they know I’m here. He told her I was here, told me to go and see her if I had any questions.’

‘Do you remember their names?’

‘His name is Phil something. I’ve got his surname written down in my notes and her name is …’

‘You don’t remember her name.’

‘It began with an “S”. It was unusual sounding. What’s your point? I’m wasting my time.’

‘Keep reading. She doesn’t remember your name, doesn’t even remember you’re here. Forget about shame.’

But the Chief Librarian clearly did remember that Adam was there because he saw her walking towards him with some papers in her hand.

‘Are you Dr Zignelik?’

‘Adam, yes.’

‘Phil Tolson told me I’d find you here. I’m Sahera Shukri. I’m the Dean of Libraries.’

‘I’m sorry, Sahera, I meant to introduce myself to you earlier but I …’ Adam trailed off as they shook hands.

‘No,
I’m
sorry. I’d meant to show you round the library but the day has gotten away from me. Phil said you’re a historian from Columbia.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you have an interest in Henry Border.’

‘Well, I might have an interest in him.’

‘You know, this isn’t everything we have of his. It’s all we have here in the Galvin Library but the university might have some more that’s not here yet.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, Eileen Miller, the Dean of Psychology, told me she thinks there might be more of his papers somewhere in their department but she hasn’t got around to checking if they’re all his and then sending them
to us. And as you can see we haven’t really begun sorting out what she’s already sent us. No one thought there was any particular urgency to it so I’m afraid your visit finds us a little embarrassed.’

‘Oh there’s no need to be embarrassed on my account. Believe me! Do you know much about Border’s work?’

‘No, almost nothing. By now you’d know more about him than I do. No, I guess Eileen knows more about him than anyone else here. Have you spoken to her?’

‘No, Phil Tolson said she’s away till tomorrow. My timing’s not great. I came out here sort of on a hunch.’

‘Well, I received something in the mail a little while back from a retired colleague of mine who used to work here at the library and your visit prompted me to remember it.’

‘Yeah?’

‘My colleague’s uncle used to work at IIT back in the ‘50s and he passed away not long ago. My friend was cleaning out her uncle’s attic and she found some pages from an old IIT newsletter. I think it’s from some time in the early ‘50s. You’d have to look. This one says 1951. There’s a bit here about Border and a psychological museum and I’ve meant to add it to the pile. Your visit has prompted me to get down here. Do you want to take a look? I can leave it with you if you’ll just add it to the pile when you’re done. I’m going to have to leave soon. It was nice to meet you. Love the accent, by the way. Are you British?’

‘No, my mother was Australian. My father was a New Yorker. The accent comes from my mother.’

‘It’s very nice. Good luck, Adam. I hope you find what you’re looking for.’

*

‘Like always, I didn’t know what to do. If I went to live in the ghetto I could get caught in an
Aktion
but I wanted to try to find my family. I had a chance of being selected to work in a local factory for the German war effort but also a chance of being selected in the other categories. I decided I would try to live outside the ghetto but I would try to survive smuggling things into and out of it. The people what were left there
were always hungry. There was never enough food. Never. As people became more and more desperate to have food they were more and more willing to give up something what they had brought with them into the ghetto.’

‘Like a piece of clothing or something?’

‘Yes, clothing, a watch, a child’s toy; something like this. What I did was take these things out of the ghetto and –’

‘Smuggle them?’

‘Smuggle them, yes, out of the ghetto and sell them to the people what my father and me had known from in the country and in the villages. I could get money. I could get food and bring it back into the ghetto. This is what I did.’

‘And your family?’

‘My family? When I got to Szrodula, to the ghetto at Sosnowiec, they were not there. What I needed to be able to smuggle out urgently was some good clothes that were not too torn or too old.’

‘Why?’

‘Because outside the ghetto I couldn’t be invisible and if people saw me they had to think I was a Pole.’

‘A Christian Pole?’

‘Yes. From what was left from Jews what were already gone I got some clothes what were in better condition than what I had from Dabrowa Gornicza which I had been wearing completely every day and even a brief case. So when someone saw me outside the ghetto they wouldn’t notice me.

‘I smuggled like this for some time when one day I was at a tram stop outside the ghetto.’

‘In Sosnowiec?’

‘Yes, I was in Sosnowiec. I had to go maybe four tram stops and then quite a distance on foot. I was already outside the ghetto and I was just standing there waiting for the tram. I was looking left and looking right, trying not to look to anyone, you know, suspicious. On the other side of the tram stop there was something like a small hill. Suddenly, there is a meeting of eyes, a face-to-face meeting of eyes; my eyes and the eyes of someone looking out at me from over the other side of the
small hill. I knew who this was. It was the boy from Zabkowice. He was older and now he was in Sosnowiec but I knew straight away that this was the boy who had called me a Jew what I had to fight when I was younger. We looked at each other, each with probably the same memory of the past. He had seen me so there was no point looking away. I had to stare right back in his eyes hoping that the memory would frighten him away. Who knew what had happened to him in the years since I had made him quiet in front of the other boys? He looked and thought and I looked and I thought for about two or three minutes. Then he disappeared. I thought maybe I had scared him away with my look and the memory it was meant to deliver but even so I wanted very much for the tram to come and take me away. Other people were now waiting for the tram and I thought that maybe I could blend in but within maybe five minutes a very tall well-dressed man came from behind the small hill. He had with him a huge dog and behind them both was my schoolyard colleague with the very straight hair. The man walked up to me in the middle of the crowd with his dog. He did not even look at the other people what were waiting also for the tram and, in German, he told me I was under arrest.’

‘Was he a soldier?’

‘No, he was a civilian.’

‘Was he a … 
Volksdeutsche?’

‘Yes, Mr Lamont, he was
Volksdeutsche.’

‘How could he arrest you if he was a civilian?’

‘He was a German, I was a Jew and I had been caught outside the ghetto and without the yellow Jewish star what they made us wear. If it wasn’t for the dog I would have run. But the dog was very, very big. The tall man with the dog took me to the civilian police.’

‘German?’

‘Yes. The civilian police took me to an interrogation room to find out how long I had been out of the ghetto and especially where I had been hiding. If I had told them about the people my father and I knew what had let me stay in their barns and on their farms and properties, all these people, they would all have been killed. So I wouldn’t say who gave me shelter. They ordered me to undress to my underwear and made me get
down sitting on the floor with my legs out. They got two sticks and put one between each elbow and each knee so that I was bowed in a semi-circle with my head touching the ground. Then they beat me.’

*

Sahera Shukri, the Dean of Libraries at IIT, left Adam alone with the papers she’d given him from the colleague’s late uncle’s attic. He watched her walk away and wished he had somewhere he had to be. He didn’t know whether to go back to the pile he’d been examining before she came or to look at the much smaller one she’d just given him. He chose the new smaller one because he’d get through it faster and then might possibly have some small feeling of accomplishment. This was the rationale behind his decision, the only rationale for it.

The first few pages were things he’d seen before concerning the psychological museum but the next page was new to him. It was an IIT newsletter from 1947. In an article written by Border himself, it referred to a recent expedition Border had made to Europe as part of his research. The article said the research trip had led to Border’s then current work, particularly a paper titled ‘The Adjective–Verb Quotient: An Investigation of the Speech Patterns of Displaced Persons’. Who were these ‘displaced persons’? Could this be the source of the interview William McCray’s veteran friend from Boston was talking about? After a little research on a different floor of the Galvin Library, Adam learned that it wasn’t until 1980 that post-traumatic stress disorder was accepted as a psychopathology in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The timing of the inclusion had a lot to do with the by then frequently reported experience of Vietnam veterans. But what kind of work was Border doing in the mid-1940s?

*

‘I knew I had to give them something so I told them I would tell them where I had been hiding. From when I was younger bringing animals to my father I knew the roads and also the short cuts through the fields and
farms in the area and I knew where there were the ruins of an old castle. A place I had hoped one day to bring a girl but I never did. Now I could still try to make use of it in a way I had never imagined. It was quite a long way from Sosnowiec but I had thought that if I needed to go there I could. I never got around to going to these ruins but I told the criminal police that this was where I had been hiding. They didn’t believe me and they took me back to the cell and left me there.

‘You might not believe it now looking at me here in this room that I was ever twenty-one but that is how old I was at that time. And I was in a prison in my own country just for being what I was when I was born. It hadn’t been so much of a crime when I was born, maybe a bit sometimes, but now it was a capital offence. I didn’t know exactly where my family was and I had been beaten by the criminal police for not betraying the people what had helped me. After four days they took me again to the interrogation room and asked me again, “Who has been hiding you?” I said to them that I already told them the truth. I was living in the ruins of an old castle. I said, “I could take you there and show you and you can check.” Even this might have been bad for me because I was afraid that maybe they would ask me to take them there. Then, Mr Lamont, they would see that there was nothing there what showed a person had been living there; no bits of food or any scraps from a life. Unless, of course, some other Jew had been hiding there but two Jews were never so lucky in Poland at those times. And then if they didn’t believe me they might just shoot me in the fields. Yes, why not? But they didn’t want to travel so far or maybe they didn’t believe me in the first place. They didn’t beat me this time, just threw me back in the cell. After one or two days they took me to the Gestapo headquarters.

‘A car came for me, I remember. It was still in Sosnowiec.’

‘What was the Gestapo, more police?’

‘Yes, it was the German Secret State Police. The criminal police took me to Gestapo headquarters and the Gestapo asked the same question, “Where have you been hiding and who has been hiding you?” I told them the same what I had told the criminal police. I was living in the ruins of a castle in the fields. I can show you where it is. They didn’t
believe me and they also beat me. They smashed me in the face with the butt of a rifle. I said the same thing again and again but they didn’t care. Blood flowed in a line in the centre of my face from the top here to my chin. They hit me in the same place again and again and after a couple of hours the Gestapo put me in a car. They took me to a prison. I remember it; I can see it on Ostrogorska Street. They took me to a cell on the fourth floor of the prison building and put me in a cell what had in it six Jews and ten Poles; sixteen people in one cell. The Poles, most of them were older than the Jews. The Jews were about my age. When I saw there were young Jews we all started to ask each other questions to see who might know something new what had to do with one of our families, anything we might learn.’

‘Do you know where your family was at that time?’

‘My parents,’ Mr Mandelbrot sighed, ‘my parents were probably by that time already sent to where I was going.’

‘Where were you going?’

‘To Auschwitz.’

‘What is
Owswich
, I mean, exactly?’

‘Auschwitz.’

‘Owswitz.’

‘Auschwitz.’

‘Ausch-vitz.’

Mr Mandelbrot slowly nodded once with his eyes half closed to convey assent to his student.

‘What exactly is
Ausch-vitz?’
Lamont asked quietly.

‘This,’ Mr Mandelbrot said, tapping the number tattooed on his left forearm with two fingers of his right hand, ‘this, what you’ve been staring at, this is Auschwitz.’

*

Back in the first of the two piles of documents, the larger one, Adam found drafts of grant applications by Henry Border to a myriad organisations for funding to take him to Europe, some of them dating back as far as 1945. It looked as though Border had attempted to get to Europe
almost as soon as hostilities had ended there after the war. There were so many applications and rejection letters that it was clear Border was not making any progress, yet he didn’t quit. Application after application, he just kept going. Somehow Border seemed to have got there in 1946. It wasn’t making sense to Adam. It seemed absurd to think that this man’s professional interest in linguistic analysis, something Border was calling ‘The Adjective–Verb Quotient’, would necessitate that he go all the way from Chicago to recently liberated war-ravaged Europe in 1946 simply to gather data for his hypothesis with respect to the relative rate at which distressed people used adjectives and verbs. Something was wrong with this picture. Who in particular among these displaced persons did he want to interview? And who on earth was Henry S. Border?