The Street Sweeper (32 page)

‘A historian?’

‘When you read the transcripts of his interviews with DPs, people we would now call Holocaust survivors, you have to conclude that he might well be the father of oral history. However he arrived at the idea – and perhaps he stumbled on it through his work on the “Adjective–Verb Quotient” – he’s one of the first people to have realised the importance of recording people’s testimony in their own words in the interests of historical research. I don’t know of anyone having done that before him, certainly not recording the testimony of Holocaust survivors, perhaps not of anyone. He hasn’t paraphrased these people. You read the transcripts and you get every stumble, every verbal tic, albeit in translation.’

‘And you think he translated them himself?’

‘I don’t know. My hunch is that he did but I can’t say for certain. Do you know whether he was Jewish?’

‘I don’t know. Why?’

‘Because Yiddish was one of the many languages it appears he spoke. It’s easier to imagine one person speaking all these languages than it is to imagine a gentile in the mid-west of mid-twentieth-century America speaking Yiddish, especially someone with a church affiliation.’

‘What do you mean, a “church affiliation”?’

‘Well, I might be putting it too highly but he did at least once make a donation to a church. He kept the receipt. I made a note of it.’

‘That doesn’t mean he worshipped there, doesn’t mean he was part of the congregation.’

‘No, I guess it doesn’t. But why make a donation to a church you have no connection with?’

‘What’s the name of the church?’

Adam consulted his notes. ‘It was … the Pilgrim Baptist Church.’

‘Oh, that’s just around here. But he wouldn’t have been a member of that church. I’m confident of that.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘The Pilgrim Baptist Church is a black church, one of Chicago’s oldest black churches. There was a fire there last year but it’s still there, sort of. Border might have made a donation just in passing on his way to and from work.’

‘Sure, he could have. And if that was as far as his connection went there’s nothing to say he wasn’t Jewish, which would help explain why he was so keen to get to Europe and record the experiences of Jewish victims of Nazism. It’s not possible that you have contact details for any of the faculty who knew him, if they’re alive?’

‘No, I doubt if any are. But we have lists of his students. Some of them might still be alive.’

‘I’d only need to speak to one person who knew him.’

‘But that person might not know whether he was Jewish or not.’

‘No, but I suspect he was a European Jew and I want confirmation of some kind of accent. Although it might be easier just to check his birth certificate.’

‘Dr Zignelik –’

‘Adam.’

‘Adam, why are you interested in him? What is it in particular?’

‘I guess it’s not really him that’s going to be of interest to historians but his work. But if he really is one of the first oral historians he does deserve some biographical record himself. Is there much known about Marvin Cadden, the sound engineer he worked with?’ Adam Zignelik asked.

‘Yes, there is – a shameful amount – shameful to us in the School of Psychology considering the way we’ve ignored our Dr Border. The Engineers held a huge exhibition not long ago concerning his life and work. Everybody went. It got all sorts of attention, not just on campus but also in the media. They’re very proud of him and his accomplishments.’

‘You don’t know if there’s anyone in the Faculty of Engineering who could talk to me about him, maybe show me some of his equipment? I’d really love to see the wire recorder Border took to Europe in 1946. You don’t think there’d be anyone here who knew him?’

‘He died some time in the 1990s so it’s not out of the question that someone from Electrical Engineering met him or even knew him a little,’

Dr Miller said.

‘Died in the 1990s, that recently?’

‘Well, he was much younger than Border, twenty or thirty years younger. Someone there can probably tell you a lot about Cadden’s work, maybe even a little about his life. I’ll give them a call for you. I know you don’t have a lot of time and we’re keen to do anything we can to assist you with your research into Border. But it’s not likely they’ll be able to tell you anything about Cadden’s interaction with Dr Border.’

‘No, probably not, but I’d still be very interested to see Cadden’s wire recording device, the one Border took with him. It must have been state of the art.’

‘Must have been. They’ll be falling over themselves in Electrical Engineering to help you. Cadden put them on the map. But we’ve got a lot of material from Border himself in the reading room in Psychology that no one’s ever been through, as far as I know. I don’t know what it all is. I’ll give Engineering a call now and at least see when someone can see you.’

‘You mean
if
someone can see me.’

‘No, I mean
when
. They really put us to shame. Whenever it is you see them, and it might be now for all I know, don’t let them dazzle you with the history of twentieth-century sound engineering.’

‘No, don’t worry. The devices aren’t of themselves of interest, not to me. It’s Border’s importance in the development of oral history that might well be my subject.’

‘Might well be?’

‘I need to see the full extent of what’s here before deciding exactly what to do with it. It might well be that I simply pass on the transcripts to historians of the Holocaust.’

*

On the ninth floor of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Dr Washington, the young African American oncologist, was finishing her visit to her patient Henryk Mandelbrot. Her professional demeanour seldom wavered. It served to protect her from the pain that might be occasioned by the daily attempt to tame cancer. But with some patients it was harder to maintain than with others. As she was leaving
Mr Mandelbrot’s room she said, ‘I guess I’d better be leaving now. This is about the time when your family comes to visit, isn’t it?’

‘No, I asked them to come later,’ he said. ‘They will avoid the traffic. But I have another appointment.’

‘I see.’

In truth it was not so much an attempt to save various family members their battle with the end-of-day traffic but to space out his evening visits as much as he could to avoid loneliness. The first regular visitor came in the late afternoon and did not have to battle the traffic to get there since he worked at Sloan-Kettering and so was already there. Somehow a routine had developed in which, at the end of his shift, Lamont Williams, an employee from Building Services, would visit the old man before taking several buses uptown to his grandmother’s apartment in Co-op City, the Bronx.

Initially Lamont had thought his visits to the patient would need to be brief for he didn’t know how they would be viewed by the hierarchy within the hospital. As much as Mr Mandelbrot assured him nothing negative would come from these at first brief visits, it took a long time for Lamont to act calmly on these assurances. The consequences for him, the breach of rules or even of some perhaps unspoken institutional protocol before the end of his probation period – the loss of the job with its attendant economic consequences, the setback to his post-prison adjustment, his concomitant decrease in confidence, and the disruption to his search for his daughter – all of these made him slow to accept the old man’s assurances that no harm would come to him if his visits were discovered. But despite his unease Lamont would come anyway.

Such was the regularity of the visits that it was evident that not only was Mr Mandelbrot getting something out of them but that Lamont was too. And, bit by bit, Lamont was coming to the view that, at least as long as the visits were at the end of his shift, no one at the hospital would care, indeed, that no one would even notice them.

But the one person who definitely did notice them was the visited patient himself, and he took comfort from them not only because they helped consume otherwise dangerously undistracted time but because he too came to conclude that his incongruously regular visitor was gaining
some sustenance from them and this realisation in turn multiplied many times the sustenance Mr Mandelbrot himself got from them. So, one day, at around the time when Lamont Williams was normally due to stop by the room on the ninth floor but did not, the old man noticed it, not merely in passing but acutely. There was no one there to see him crane his neck from his bed in his room at each passing sound beyond the door, no one there to see him, while nervously smoothing the sheets on his bed, look at the alarm clock and speculate why it was that the quiet young black man wasn’t there. What could have gone wrong?

*

Eileen Miller set up an appointment for Adam with someone from the Electrical Engineering Department who not only had met Cadden several times but also could show him through the remains of Cadden’s laboratory there and then. He could even show Adam a wire recorder of the type that Border had used. Since Cadden was the archetypal engineer, it was explained to Adam, he was constantly cannibalising his earlier work for later models so it couldn’t be said definitively that the wire recorder Adam would be shown was the precise one Border had taken to the DP camps of Europe in the summer of 1946.

‘Well, this is it or certainly one like it,’ Arturo Suarez, the academic from Electrical Engineering explained. Adam looked at it.

‘Do you mind if I pick it up?’

‘No, so long as you’re careful. Might be a good idea to stand with it over the table so it won’t have too big a drop if you slip. But don’t let it slip.’ Adam held it. It was heavy, heavier in his arms than he had expected. He tried to imagine a man close to sixty dragging it in and out of DP camps immediately after the war.

‘You know, prob’ly still works,’ Arturo Suarez said with quiet admiration.

‘How exactly does it work?’ Adam asked.

‘Okay, let me tell you the whole thing, from the beginning. You want to put it down there for a moment?’ Arturo Suarez asked him. Adam gently placed it down. Eileen Miller had been right to predict the enthusiasm that the Electrical Engineers had for Cadden. Arturo Suarez continued.

‘So Marvin Cadden, born right here in Chicago, was tinkering with things in his parents’ house from the time he was five, you believe that? He’s in his early twenties when he gets to studying electrical engineering at the Armour Institute of Technology, which is what we were called before we were IIT. Well, bear in mind that he could have done anything; I mean anything, he was that kind of guy. You know? But it turns out that his cousin is some kind of opera singer or somethin’. I mean, I don’t know if he was any good as an opera singer but he was trainin’ to become an opera singer and Marvin was close to his cousin and the whole thing was Marv wanted to give his cousin a chance to hear what he sounded like – as an opera singer, I mean – a chance for his cousin to hear himself sing. So he remembers something he learned here about Poulsen’s idea. Valdemar Poulsen? You may not know of Poulsen, but no matter.

‘So Poulsen had come up with what he called a telegraphphone wherein he recorded sounds magnetically. Never been done before. Marvin Cadden had learned about this and wanted to do somethin’ similar for his cousin, the opera singer.

‘He tried using piano wire. He was able to record a range of sounds by converting them into a range of magnetic fields and to use these to induce a range of degrees of magnetisation in a travelling wire. And by reversing the procedure, he was able to reproduce the original sounds. He found, however, that the wire would twist during the process and distort the sound on playback. That’s when Marv revolutionised sound recording forever. To avoid the distortion due to the wire twisting, he came up with a magnetic recording head, see? By surrounding the wire with this recording head, but without them touching, he was able to induce the degree of magnetisation appropriate to a particular sound uniformly around the circumference of the cross-section of the wire passing through the head at that time. That was his idea and it worked. This was genius. The guy was still in his twenties.

‘I don’t know what happened to the opera singer cousin but Marvin got a position at Armour and started taking out patents and he was off and running. During the war the Navy used his technology to train submarine pilots. It was ‘cause of Marvin’s work they were able to simulate the sounds made during depth charge attacks. In this way the crew in the sub
could acclimatise, could get accustomed to operating with the pressure of that sound, the noise of being attacked. The US Army used his work too. They used the Model 50 to spook the enemy with decoy attacks, attacks that existed only aurally. It was his equipment, Marv’s equipment developed right here, that blasted out the prerecorded sounds of an infantry attack, high volume, on D-Day during the landing. Confused the enemy and saved lives. The guy was a hero and a genius innovator.

‘And it didn’t stop after the war, either. After the war he turned his attention away from wire and on to tape. All the magnetic tapes and magnetic coatings, magnetic sound for motion pictures, multi-track tape-recording, high-frequency bias, you know, of the kind that reduces the signal to noise ratio; that’s all Marvin. By the time he died he had something like 500 patents to his name and they’d get licensed to companies like GE, 3M and Eastman Kodak. Sony made a packet out of Marv but he never really saw any of it.’

‘When did he die?’

‘I wanna say … mid-’90s, I think about 1995. I can check for you if it’s important. His widow is still alive.’

‘What kind of man was he?’

‘Friendly, regular guy, one of nature’s gentlemen. He was very … what do you say? Unassuming, no airs or graces. Liked a joke, always smiling.’

‘Did you meet him?’

‘Sure, I was just an undergraduate comin’ up but everybody knew about him and if you wanted to meet him you could and anybody who had any interest in electrical engineering wanted to meet him. He was approachable. He used to play harmonica, I mean really play. He was a virtuoso with that. Played every week in one of a couple of bars. He was doin’ it for years. People asked him to tour, he was that good, show tunes as well as blues. Black guys asked him to play with them. Really! He could’ve made a living off of that.’