The Street Sweeper (31 page)

The digital age made it much easier to check registries of births, deaths, marriages and charitable organisations to see whether Border or his family had ever been affiliated, even nominally, with any local church. Among those of Border’s papers that Adam had already examined there was an apparently random receipt for a donation Border had made to a church. Adam had looked at it and put it back in the pile but perhaps it would lead him to Border’s congregation. The church was probably near Border’s home. How long would it take to find out where the psychologist had lived? Even if Border himself wasn’t a practising Christian, perhaps he was married to one and perhaps his wife had influenced him. But the only member of his family to be thanked in the book’s acknowledgements was his daughter.

More likely then, Adam considered, Border was himself a practising Christian or, if not himself religious, then Border’s parents had been devout Christians and, whatever his beliefs and practices as an adult, the language of scripture poured out of him at times of emotional torment of the kind any reasonable person might have been expected to experience when hearing these stories, especially hearing them raw and unfiltered directly from the people who had so recently lived them. Border would not have been the first secular humanist, the first scientist, to lean on religion when all else failed. Surveying the world in the mid-1940s, Border might well have concluded that all else had indeed failed.

Who was this mid-western, mid-century psychologist who, when no longer young, dropped everything in his life to fight his way into Europe apparently, according to the failed grant applications, largely on his own money, to record the stories of traumatised Jews when the rest of the world wanted to focus on the future? Adam was growing ever more curious about him and his undertaking. There was more he needed to find out. He was due to be meeting with Eileen Miller, the Dean of Psychology. She might know something of Border’s background.

On his way he chanced upon Sahera Shukri, the Dean of Libraries.

‘One of my junior colleagues told me, quite excitedly, that you think you’ve made some kind of discovery from the papers of our Dr Border. This is a library, Dr Zignelik. We do our best to keep excitement out of the building,’ she joked. But her smile receded somewhat when she
learned directly from Adam that her colleague had not been exaggerating. Adam explained just what it was that he thought the library had, taking her down to the basement to show her the transcripts. There in the half-light she began reading them. He watched her reading, turning page after page, said nothing for minutes so that she could read and then realised that she had begun in silence to cry. He didn’t want to embarrass her and so didn’t say anything until she looked up and, without any attempt to hide the effect on her of Border’s transcripts, wiped away her tears with the back of her hand. The quality of the light would have allowed her to pretend that she wasn’t crying but she made no attempt to avail herself of it. Adam knew that she understood perfectly what they had on their hands.

‘Have you told Eileen Miller about these?’ she asked.

‘No, she was away yesterday and this morning she’s been teaching. But I’m due to see her at any moment. In fact, I should probably call her now,’ Adam said, taking out his mobile phone.

‘Reception’s lousy here. Come with me back to my office and we’ll try Eileen from there. This is astonishing stuff. We’re going to need to protect it, to preserve it. It’s just been sitting there. No one here … So you don’t think that anyone at all knows about this? It’s all unpublished?’

‘As far as I’ve been able to ascertain all but eight of them are unpublished.’

‘And the eight, where were they published?’

‘In Border’s book.’ Adam held up the copy of Border’s
I Did Not Interview the Dead
as they walked. ‘And as far as I can tell, the book was pretty much ignored.’

‘Why publish only eight?’

‘I don’t really know. I could guess.’

‘Why do you think?’

‘I think it would have been a consequence of a commercial consideration made in light of the times by the publisher.’

‘The times … you mean people weren’t interested?’

‘Not really. It was just after the war. Some people knew a bit of the story but most people just wanted to focus on the future. There wasn’t much of an appetite to know about these experiences and the book would
have been a risk for the publisher. I’ll bet they didn’t pay him anything and it still would have lost money. My guess is they thought eight would be enough. I don’t know this. I’m speculating.’

They had reached her office and she asked him to wait while she went over to her crowded but ordered desk and phoned Eileen Miller.

‘Ellen, hi. It’s Sahera. I’ve got Dr Zignelik with me … The historian from Columbia.’

*

‘But the gun was not yours, Mr Lamont. You said it was not yours. You didn’t have a gun,’ Mr Mandelbrot said indignantly from his bed on the ninth floor of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

‘I know that,’ Lamont said quietly.

‘He was not even your friend, the young one with the gun,’ Mr Mandelbrot added.

‘I know that too. But it didn’t seem to matter to them.’

‘To who?’

‘To the jury … and the judge.’

‘And so this is why you went to prison?’

‘Yep.’

‘Because the jury and the judge didn’t believe that you had nothing to do with the gun?’

‘Yep.’ Mr Mandelbrot shook his head slowly. ‘Hey, I don’t even think my own lawyer believed me,’ Lamont continued. ‘Public Defender. Busy man, overworked. Didn’t have time to believe me.’

‘So nobody believed you. Why didn’t anybody believe you, Mr Lamont?’

‘I didn’t have the money to pay someone, a lawyer, to get them to believe me. Two young black guys did it and they confessed that they did it. Lookin’ at a plea. Now it takes a whole lot of money to slow things down long enough for people to look differently at the third guy. I was the third guy and I didn’t have that kind of money.’

‘I see. So you went into prison and this is where you lost your daughter.’

‘Yeah.’

‘And you’re looking for her now?’

‘I’m taking steps all the time to find her.’

‘How old is your daughter?’

‘She’s eight.’

‘And your wife –’

‘Chantal. We weren’t married.’

‘I see. She didn’t let you keep any contact with your daughter?’

‘No.’

‘Because you were in prison?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know why. I haven’t seen her to ask her why. So …’

‘And you’re living again now with your grandmother.’

‘Yeah, back in the Bronx.’

‘In the place where you grew up?’

‘Yeah.’

Mr Mandelbrot considered his interlocutor carefully. ‘You like your grandmother?’

‘I
love
my grandmother.’

‘And she loves you?’ ‘Sure.’

‘You are good to her?’

‘Sure.’

‘Of course you are; you’re good to me. I’m a stranger.’

‘Well, not any more. I know you now.’

‘Yes … you know me … and I know you. I know that things are getting better for you now, Mr Lamont. No more in prison, you’re free to look for your little daughter now, you have this job here.’

‘Yeah and they said they’re gonna give me extra duties so I’ll learn a whole lot of –’

‘Extra, you mean instead of –’

‘No, no, not
instead
of anything. Extra, as well as. Extra duties will help me to keep my job. The more I know how to do around here …’

Mr Mandelbrot turned towards the window.

‘Yes, it’s true. Extra duties. Sometimes … extra duties can save you.’

*

Adam listened to Sahera Shukri, Dean of Libraries at IIT, describe over the phone to Eileen Miller, Dean of Psychology, the full significance of Henry Border’s transcripts and the effect reading some of them had had on her. There was a lot to do but he still hadn’t figured out just what. What should he do with the material? Should he at least read it all himself or should he notify specialist historians of the Holocaust at Columbia and elsewhere about the transcripts and leave it to them? He didn’t have an answer but nevertheless he felt that sense of calm that comes with achievement or at least with vindication. If you’d asked him what exactly he’d achieved, he would have been stuck for an answer other than to say what it was he’d found and to explain their historical significance and perhaps even their importance to psychology. Could someone else have found the transcripts and surmised their importance? Yes, but nobody had. Adam had saved these transcripts from eventual degradation and ultimately destruction. In doing this he had preserved the stories of the survivors and enlarged the record of precisely what had happened. As he’d told his students, this was no small thing.

‘Don’t give this to somebody else,’ Adam heard Diana say. ‘Have you lost your mind … again?’

‘It’s not my area and, anyway, how long will it take me to read fifty or more transcripts in the hope of finding a reference to black troops at the liberation of Dachau? Look, when I’m not seeing out my time teaching I need to be looking for a job.’

‘You need to be looking for a wife.
This
is your job: Henry Border and his transcripts.’

‘I don’t know, I’ll ask him,’ Adam heard Sahera say over the phone. ‘Eileen asks who translated the transcripts into English.’

‘You know, I hadn’t got to that yet. Mentally, I’d just assumed that Border had translated them himself but of course that’s not so likely. Firstly, I don’t even know if he spoke any language other than English and, secondly, the survivors would have been speaking different languages. Border couldn’t possibly have spoken them all.’ Adam started flicking through the book.

‘No, he’s looking through the book now … Okay. Great. See you,’ Sahera Shukri said before putting the phone down. ‘Eileen’s coming here to pick you up and take you back to her office.’

Adam was reading through Border’s introduction again. He found that Border’s self-effacing language hid the most likely, albeit unexpected, origin of the translations, namely that Border had indeed translated the transcripts himself. Nowhere in either the acknowledgments nor in the introduction did Border thank or even refer to a translator and the copyright was held by Border alone. It wasn’t shared with a translator. Border had written, ‘A technique of translation was developed to assist me with the recording of adjectives and verbs.’ In writing ‘A technique was developed’, Border had used the passive form so often employed in the sciences to suggest objectivity and to remove the observer from the report. On balance though, one had to conclude that Border himself had been the translator. Could he really have spoken so many languages so well? Adam flicked through the eight transcripts translated in Border’s book. At the end of each interview it had, in italics, the language spoken by the interviewee. The first interview was translated from German, the next from Polish, then German, then French, then Russian, Polish again, then German. Could Border really have spoken all these languages himself? The next interview finished with the words
translated from Yiddish
. ‘Yiddish!’ Adam exclaimed under his breath. That was impossible. Surely Border couldn’t have spoken Yiddish? Either the interviewee spoke a language other than Yiddish and it was mistakenly reported in the book as Yiddish or else some other person had translated it. Did Border have help that he didn’t want to acknowledge? Did he have someone with him whom he hadn’t mentioned anywhere in the book, someone who could speak Yiddish? Only Jews spoke Yiddish.

On this realisation a third possibility occurred to Adam Zignelik. Perhaps Henry Border was himself a Jew? But what about the allusion in his writing to Christianity, ‘the
raiments of the crucified
’? What about the donation to the church? Which church was it? Adam would check. Suddenly, though, a lot of things started making sense. Border had to have been around sixty when the book was published in 1949 but he had received his PhD from Northwestern University only some time in
his forties. How many Jews was Northwestern graduating in the 1930s? Had he converted for the purpose of smoothing the pathway to a PhD from Northwestern? He claimed to have studied under Wundt but Wundt died in 1920. By the time Adam met Eileen Miller, the Dean of the School of Psychology, he was convinced that, whatever Henry Border might have been telling the world about who he was, Henry Border was in fact a Jew, a European Jew.

‘I know him as a psychologist, one of the earliest members of the faculty here, the person who established the Chicago Psychological Museum,’ Eileen Miller said. ‘I don’t know whether you’ve come across them yet but he reported his research in papers on the use of different devices designed to test people’s visual acuity using both eyes in coordination.’

‘What kind of device?’

‘A dipthometer. This was the early research that laid the groundwork for understanding the different sides of the brain, how different information received by each eye gets coordinated, assimilated, by different sides of the brain into a single image.’

‘So he was an important psychologist?’

‘I’d say he was. Look, a lot of the artifacts that he collected for the Chicago-based psychological museum are now held in Akron.’

‘Akron, Ohio?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why there?’

‘After he retired the Chicago Psychological Museum folded and all the equipment and documents that he collected went to Akron where the American Psychological Association houses its collection of historical psychological apparatus. Border had the foresight to collect and preserve these things. Nobody else did.’

‘Did he get sufficient credit for this?’

‘I’d have to say no. If you read his papers, if a psychologist reads his papers, and I have to admit there’s an awful lot in those boxes in the storeroom that I haven’t read, I think you’d have to conclude he was under-recognised.’

‘At the time?’

‘Both at the time and now. Are you interested in his work? He really should be better known, at least by psychologists.’

‘Well, however important he was as a psychologist, and I’d be in no position to say, he was perhaps even more important as a historian.’