The Street Sweeper (30 page)

*

Lamont Williams’ grandmother sat across the kitchen table from her grandson in her Co-op City apartment while they had their dinner. He had the usual serving of macaroni and cheese but the serving she’d given herself was tiny. She denied she was feeling unwell when he asked her but he didn’t seem to believe her. He had known she’d been out that afternoon, even known that she’d been to the city. What he hadn’t known was that his cousin Michelle had taken her out to lunch to a steak restaurant off Union Square, a place with particular family significance.

He went over to his grandmother and put his hand to her forehead because he’d found her protestations of perfect health unconvincing. She was weighing up telling him the truth, telling him that she wasn’t hungry because she was still full from the steak she’d had with Michelle. If she told him, she reasoned, it would explain why she wasn’t hungry and allay his concern for her health but it would raise all sorts of other issues and memories that were so likely to distress her grandson, even if he said nothing about them, that she had wanted to get through the day without mentioning the true nature of her excursion downtown.

He would be hurt to be reminded that Michelle seemed to have turned her back on him a long time ago, not long after he first went into prison, that he didn’t know her family any more, that she wasn’t interested in his progress after he’d served his time in prison. It would remind him of the times when they had all gone to that steak restaurant, times when there had been hope, not merely for Michelle’s future but for Lamont’s as well. His grandmother was right. But a frank account of why she wasn’t hungry would have triggered not only these thoughts in her grandson but others as well. He would have given some thought to the evening he had spent with Chantal, the mother of his daughter, and the night he had taken Chantal there. He would have remembered how she’d made him feel both in the restaurant and then later, walking around the crowded surrounds of Union Square. Everything had seemed so close to perfect that night, closer than it had ever been. He hadn’t wanted to let anything that was within his control go the slightest bit wrong. He couldn’t control the traffic or the weather or the noise of the street, but he was going to get her anything she wanted, be the perfect gentleman, and he was going to hang on her every word. He would have remembered that such had been the noise on the street that he’d had to lean in just to make sure no single word of hers failed to reach his ears. And he would have remembered that when
he
spoke to
her
, she never leaned in, not once.

His grandmother sat there thinking. Should she tell him about her lunch with Michelle at the restaurant or quickly make something else up? She had to think fast. He seemed so concerned about her health. Then, as if gripped by the devil, she sat back bolt upright in her chair at
the very moment his hand was on her forehead and, without being able to control herself, she called out, ‘Christ!’

Lamont jumped back. There was silence between the two of them under the strip light in that Bronx kitchen. He had never before, not once, heard his grandmother swear. He thought perhaps it was something he’d done and was at once a small boy again trying to please his grandmother, the only person on earth who loved him unequivocally, unconditionally, the only person who was always there for him. What had he done to make her so angry that she would swear at him? She looked up at him mournfully. She was ashamed. Now she was going to have to tell him about her lunch. It wasn’t directed at her grandson but at herself and she was going to have to explain this. In remembering her lunch from earlier that day, she remembered how sweet Michelle had been to bring her the beautiful umbrella with the houndstooth-like design in charcoal grey with Scottish terriers with red bow ties and this was when she realised that she had left the umbrella in the restaurant.

*

On the front inside flap of
I Did Not Interview the Dead
was a photograph of its author, Dr Henry Border. Wearing the sort of round glasses often associated earlier with Vladimir Lenin and much later with John Lennon, he looked to be in his late fifties. He had a neatly trimmed beard that he’d restricted to his chin and an equally neatly trimmed moustache and, in the photo, he wore a dark suit jacket covering a white shirt whose collar was fastened with a tie, all of it ordered. The picture was of an older conservative-looking European gentleman. Perhaps Border
had
studied in Europe with Wundt after all? Adam speculated. For the man in the photo, this wouldn’t have been impossible, at least not by reason of his age.

From the brief introduction and from the even briefer acknowledgements, a clearer picture of Border and the task he had set himself began to emerge. Despite his unsuccessful draft grant applications, Adam saw that Border did get some assistance. He thanked a number of people from IIT: its president, vice-president, the dean of what was
called ‘Liberal Studies’, the chairman of what was then the Department of Psychology and Education and also someone from the Department of Engineering. He thanked a number of people, mostly unnamed, at various voluntary or charitable agencies in Europe: the ORT, the OSE, the JDC for their assistance in making contact with the people in the DP camps and the various safe houses he visited as well as people from UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. He thanked the National Institute of Health, the Chicago Psychological Museum, which, since he was its president, must have been like thanking himself, as well as someone from
The Chicago Tribune
, someone from the University of Illinois Press, the publisher of the book, and he thanked the DPs themselves. As far as Adam could tell, Border thanked only one member of his family, his daughter Elise.

In the introduction Border described the process by which he obtained the interviews and how the idea had come to him. A few days before the end of the war in Europe, the then Supreme Commander of Allied Forces, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, issued a call to American newspapers to come and see the liberated victims of Nazi concentration camps. Border observed that while newspaper reporters were heeding Eisenhower’s call and newsreel footage was being taken of the emaciated survivors in the camps, no one was actually conducting systematic, in-depth interviews with these people and recording their testimony. Serendipitously, at around the time this realisation dawned on him, Border learned of the development of a new recording device developed by a certain Marvin Cadden of the Armour Research Foundation (which was later incorporated into IIT). The recording device Cadden had developed was a wire recorder, an electronic device on which sound was magnetically recorded on to strands of carbon steel wire. Border sought out Cadden and established a professional relationship with him. Securing one of Cadden’s wire recorders and 200 spools of carbon steel wire along with assorted transformers, he then lugged it all across the Atlantic to Europe to various DP camps.

With the assistance of representatives from the various refugee agencies operating under Allied auspices, he would ask to be permitted to sit in on a meal with a group of DPs in the mess hall. After the meal
he would bring out Cadden’s wire recorder, show it to the assembled DPs and ask if anybody there would agree to sing a folk song from their home town or village or else a nursery rhyme from their childhood into the wire recorder. He would record one or more tunes from some of the assembled DPs’ past and then play it back to the group. Of course the people there had to have been astounded to hear the voice they had just heard singing played back to them through this box. They would never have seen anything remotely like that. By this time Border would have the unequivocal attention of everyone assembled and this was when he explained that he was gathering information about the experience of prisoners in concentration camps to take back and disseminate to people in America so that they would know better what had happened. He said nothing to them about research into the relative use of adjectives and verbs. Indeed, he said nothing at all to them about psychology.

Sometimes people working for the particular relief agency in charge would recommend a certain person because the person’s story had made the rounds of the camp and the relief workers considered it exceptional. But Border hadn’t wanted exceptional stories. He wanted and asked for what he described as ‘rank and file’ experiences. But he quickly learned that the rank and file experiences of anyone who was there to tell of them had to be, by definition, exceptional. Surviving had been the exception.

Border explained that he began each interview the same way. He would take the person away from the mess tent or from wherever else they had gathered with others. Despite what must have been a very recent and only cursory knowledge of his surroundings, he would look for a place to talk that was as quiet and as private as the circumstances allowed. Adam Zignelik tried to imagine the circumstances; a noisy makeshift camp where the weather followed you under doors everywhere you went and the dirt on your feet knew the rest of your body every bit as well as it had ever known your feet, where a cacophony of sounds approximating a myriad languages jostled fiercely with each other from the mouths of people of disparate ages and origins who shared only that, en masse, they were more broken from their first-hand experience of what humans are able to visit on one another, more broken from their unasked-for and unusually refined understanding of life’s jagged extremes than perhaps
any other collection of people on earth. Corralled again inside a camp, this one overseen by their liberators, they waited for a future almost as unimaginable to them as their recent past was to everybody else. Exhale too fast and you’d blow them over and with them their memories would spill out onto the very European ground their families now fertilised.

Border, the conservative-looking mid-western psychologist, would patiently get the person to sit down at a table with a microphone in front of them. Then, in order for the subject not to be influenced by anything Border did other than his asking of questions, he would sit behind the person seated at the table so that they were unable to see him without turning around. The interview subjects were not allowed to refer to notes or to any other stimuli and no other people were permitted to be present. When the person was ready to begin, Border would switch on the wire recorder and introduce the interview with, ‘In the United States we don’t really know very much about the everyday lives of the people who were forced to live in concentration camps during the war. With your help and with the help of other displaced persons, I am hoping we can change that situation. Thank you for agreeing to tell your story. Please can you begin with your name, your age, where you were when the war started and then go on to tell what has happened to you since?’ This was, according to Border’s Introduction in his book, exactly what he said every time.

Returning to Chicago, Border wrote in the introduction to
I Did Not Interview the Dead
that the purpose of the expedition to Europe was not to gain a comprehensive account of all the displaced persons there but to collect data from personal reports for future study by psychologists and anthropologists. He described a method of analysis he had developed for interpreting the DPs’ experience which he called the ‘Traumatic Index’. He listed twelve categories of traumatic experience in the Introduction but he made a point of informing the reader that this list was abridged. He didn’t state why it was abridged and so the reader was left to speculate both why and what the other categories might be.

Border then went on to provide a relatively detailed history of the general experience of the Displaced Persons to whom he’d spoken. Two things struck Adam as he read on. Border had been forced, either by his publisher or by the dictates of time and/or space, to abridge his
Traumatic Index and yet he devoted the rest of the introduction to the general experience of Displaced Persons despite the stated purpose of his book being to provide data for study by psychologists and anthropologists. Additionally, Adam noticed, the Displaced Persons, those in the book and those whose accounts Adam had read in the loosely bound files, had all been Jewish. They were all what would later come to be known as Holocaust survivors. In fact, the potted but still relatively detailed chronological account of the experience of Displaced Persons was perhaps the first ever attempt at a history of the Holocaust gathered from primary sources before the genocide even had its own name; indeed, before even the term ‘genocide’ itself had been coined. How did it come about, Adam wondered, that by the end of the summer of 1946 a certain Henry Border, Professor of Psychology at IIT, had put together perhaps the first account based on detailed interviews of survivors of Hitler’s systematic attempt to kill every last Jew in Europe?

It looked as though in the introduction itself Adam might find, if not the answer, then a clue to the answer. As Border described the stages of the Nazi genocidal process he wrote that at each stage the property of the local Jewish population was appropriated, stolen sometimes in front of them, largely by the Nazis but also by the local non-Jewish inhabitants of the area. It was not the fact of this, which Adam was aware of, that jumped out at him from the pages of Border’s introduction when he read it but the language Border had chosen to describe it. Was Border’s own choice of words as telling to Adam as the ‘Adjective–Verb Quotient’ was meant to be to psychologists?

Border had written, ‘From 1933 onwards there had been a race to steal the raiments of the crucified.’ Adam read the expression again and then again, ‘the
raiments of the crucified
’. This was the language of a Christian, not a casual Christian, not someone who just happened to be Christian, but of someone fairly familiar with scripture. Perhaps this was why Border had gone to such great trouble to go to Europe and collect these people’s stories against all odds. Adam wondered if the psychologist, the man of science, did not have a religious motivation to save the stories of these people. There was no necessary reason why the student of Wundt could not also be a student of Christ.