The Street Sweeper (42 page)

‘I promise,’ the young man called back, now running away from where Gruenberg and Henry Border were standing. They watched him go.

‘That young man there, Shmuel, he and his wife are expecting a child.’

That Shmuel himself looked like a child, that neither of them knew how long it would take, if ever, for the remnants of European Jewry to numerically replace the ones they had just lost but that there was no greater impulse than to try, all of it went unsaid by Gruenberg and by Henry Border as they watched this man Shmuel run back to his wife.

‘Well,’ continued Gruenberg, ‘anything you can tell the Americans about what we have been through can only help. Initially they made no distinction between us and any other DPs. In fact, it’s still this way in the British Zone and also in the French Zone.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You had a situation where, for example, they would put all DPs together, no matter where they came from. So you might have Ukrainians who had fought on the side of the Nazis, but who now don’t want to go home for fear of retribution from the Russians, living in the same camp with us. These Ukrainians are as anti-Semitic as anyone we have ever seen. A few Jews said they recognised some of them.’

‘Recognised them from where?’

‘From Auschwitz.’

‘I don’t understand. If they were fighting on the side of the Germans what were they doing in Auschwitz?’

‘They were working there as guards, Dr Border.’ Gruenberg looked at Henry Border as if for the first time. He was perplexed. ‘You are American, you said. Are you here from the Joint?’

‘No.’

‘You’re not? Who are you with?’

‘I’m not with anybody.’

‘But who sent you?’

‘Nobody.’

‘What do you mean “nobody”? Who’s paying you to be here?’

‘Nobody’s paying me.’

‘But how did you get here, on whose money?’

‘My own money.’

‘Just for these interviews on your machine?’

‘Yes.’

Gruenberg looked at him for a moment without speaking. ‘Well, as I said, anything you can tell the Americans about what we have been through can only help. I imagine it will, I hope it will, but who knows? With some of them …’ he trailed off.

‘Maybe it will encourage people to give us provisions, supplies. We need men’s clothing, everything; shirts, trousers, jackets, socks, shoes, underwear. Women’s clothing too. If we had the material and sewing machines there are people here who could make it for us themselves. Better than nothing. Much better, actually. There are tailors here in the camp. If we only had the fabric and of course the sewing machines. We need writing equipment for the children and also for letters. People here write letters all the time, sending them to people they don’t know, to people they’ve never met, sending them into every corner of the world looking for the latest news, the freshest news they can get of the dead. Well, we need everything. There’s nothing we don’t need. Men walk around here, like that young man before, Shmuel, and –’

Border interrupted him. ‘What did you mean before about the Americans? You said “With some of them”. What about some of them, the Americans?’

Gruenberg seemed reluctant to go on. ‘You know, the way your General Patton felt about us is not very different from how the Nazis felt.
It’s true. He said the Jewish DPs are lower than animals. He described the Jews as a subhuman species without any of the social or cultural refinements of our time. Really, that’s what he said. You have to wonder if these views were based on the starved, wretched, barely alive Jews he’d seen in a just-liberated concentration camp. Or were his views older than that? You have to wonder when exactly he developed these views.’

Henry Border didn’t know what to say to this. He wasn’t used to being part of the ‘you’ that possessed a victorious four-star general, now dead, a hero to the country that helped liberate the remnants of the people some of whom he saw all around him even now in ill-fitting rags surrounded by wire.

‘I didn’t know that,’ Henry Border said quietly with a shame that might have suggested that he himself felt responsible for what Patton had said. There were so many thoughts rushing through his mind at any one time, all of them rushing too quickly to be caught and catalogued. But worse than this for him, as each thought passed the upper reaches of his consciousness they would not dissolve or evaporate. Instead, each thought he’d had since arriving in Europe and seeing his first Displaced Person stayed on his mind and backed up, congregated and concertinaed into the next one as it jostled for attention as
primus inter pares
. Each recollection, each anecdote, each missing family member of someone to whom he had spoken cried out to be his only thought. The enormity of what had befallen these people, his people, weighed down on him far more heavily than a thousand Marvin Cadden wire recording devices. It was taking every ounce of his mental strength to remember what he was doing there. And this was before he had even turned his mind to what had happened to his own family and friends.

‘Tell me,’ said Gruenberg, as they walked towards a building to which Gruenberg clearly wanted to take him, ‘you said you’re American but you speak Yiddish like a Polish Jew.’

‘I
am
a Polish Jew.’

‘When did you get to America?’

‘Before the war.’

‘Before
the war! And your family, what do you know about …’

Gruenberg’s attention and then Border’s too was abruptly transferred from their conversation all the way to the other side of the camp by a man shouting. DPs often shouted at each other in a babel of languages but this was different. It came from the side of the camp from where they had come, the side where the gates were. There was some sort of commotion. A lot of trucks had arrived and were parking in a row beside the long line of trees outside the camp. A visible wave of anxiety rippled through the inmates nearest the gates. Gruenberg turned away from Henry Border mid-sentence and walked hurriedly over to the DP who was shouting.

‘You have no right,’ the man, whose short sleeves revealed the number tattooed on his arm at Auschwitz, yelled. ‘Get out of here at once!’

Henry Border, carrying his recording equipment, hastily followed Gruenberg to see that the man was shouting at two armed German policemen. The crowd of inmates was growing bigger.

‘We are not
asking
you. This is an order.’

‘We don’t follow your orders any more. Your thousand-year Reich is over. You lost.’

‘What seems to be the problem here?’ Gruenberg asked as a crowd of DPs started to gather.

‘They want to search the camp! Can you believe this, Mr Gruenberg?’

‘Why do you want to search the camp?’ Gruenberg asked.

‘What is your name? What authority do you carry here?’ the older of the two policemen asked.

‘Where are the Americans?’ an old man in the crowd called out. ‘How come they let them in? They’re never here when you need them.’

‘Get the man from UNRRA. Where is
he
now,
any
of them from UNRRA?’ a woman called out.

‘The Americans took so long to get here and now –’ the old man continued.

‘How do you think these thugs got in?’ someone else shouted in reply to the old man. ‘It’s the Americans who let them in.’

‘My name is Gruenberg,’ he said over the top of the sounds of the growing crowd. ‘What authority do I have? I have moral authority.’

‘We are not obliged to explain anything to you,’ the younger policeman said.

‘Well, that depends on where you look for your obligations,’ Gruenberg said.

‘I am not obliged by law to explain anything,’ the younger policeman said.

‘How well do you know the laws of the occupation?’ Gruenberg asked the policeman.

‘Mr Gruenberg, there’s no point arguing with them. They’re Nazis out for a last frolic,’ shouted the man in the short-sleeved shirt.

‘Stand back, all of you. We are going to conduct a search of the camp. You are advised –’

‘Are you up to date with the laws of the occupation for this Zone, officer?’

‘Yes,’ the older of the two policemen answered.

‘It is changing all the time and –’

‘We don’t need to answer to you.’

‘Oh, you will answer to us. You will. More than you know, you Nazi thug,’ the man in the short-sleeved shirt called out.

‘If you tell us what you’re looking for,’ said Gruenberg calmly, ‘we might be able to save you some trouble.’

‘We are here because of black market activities,’ the younger of the two policemen said.

‘You think there are black marketeers in this camp?’ Gruenberg asked.

‘Listen, there’s a black market flourishing all over Stuttgart,’ the man in the short sleeves said. ‘The German civilians are up to their necks in it and you know it. The Americans soldiers too. They’re selling cigarettes, stockings and everything else under the sun and you know that too. Everybody here knows it.’

Border looked at the policemen in their perfectly fitting uniforms. How fast they make themselves uniforms, he speculated, or were these the same uniforms they wore during the Hitler years, and on the same men but now serving different masters? More and more DPs were gathering around the policemen. In contrast to the policemen, the DPs wore an odd assortment of ill-fitting clothes of various weights for various
seasons. Border looked at them too, these people arriving on the scene trying to understand what was going on. ‘What now?’ they wondered, bewildered in their misshapen clothing, dragging themselves around, running from themselves, looking for the past with every mail truck and now rediscovering anger. ‘What is it? What do they want? Criminals, you said, black marketeers? What kind of police are they? Who do they want?’ came the whispers, the murmurs from around the crowd, now of women and men of all different ages.

‘Mr Gruenberg!’ Border heard a voice calling from far away.

‘So with a black market selling goods from all over the world flourishing in every inch of occupied Europe why do you come
here
looking for black marketeers? Everybody here knows the answer to that too,’ the man in the short sleeves continued passionately.

‘I’m sorry but you are not meant to come in here like this,’ Gruenberg said.

‘This is Stuttgart and we are the police investigating illegal activity. We can go wherever it’s necessary for us to perform our duty,’ the younger policeman said.

‘Mr Gruenberg!’ came the voice from the distance again, now getting closer.

‘No, actually not,’ said Gruenberg. ‘As of March of this year only the American police are entitled to enter and search here and even they are answerable to the camp police.’

From the corner of his eye Henry Border noticed column after column of armed German policemen dismounting from the trucks lined up outside the perimeter of the camp by the fir trees. He wondered if Gruenberg had noticed and, if Gruenberg hadn’t yet noticed, whether he should alert him. But he was a scientist there to record, not to participate. He was an American, not a DP. He was an Episcopalian and also a Polish Jew. He glanced down at his feet to check on Marvin Cadden’s wire recording equipment. It was still there untouched.

‘What camp police?’ the younger policeman asked.

‘The camp’s Jewish police here,’ Gruenberg said and at this the younger policeman started to laugh. The laugh was not quite to himself but nor was it bravado. It was involuntary.

‘Mr Gruenberg!’ a man was calling, running now out of breath.

‘You don’t laugh any more,’ the man in the short sleeves yelled and at the same time the older of the two policemen blew a whistle, which was the signal for tens of policemen from outside the camp to enter the camp. Approximately two hundred of them came in through the gates, running in predetermined directions. The older policeman started shouting, ‘Everybody stay where you are! Nobody is to move.’

‘Mr Gruenberg!’ said the man out of breath, now level with the crowd; but only Border noticed him. It was the man Gruenberg had earlier called Shmuel. Gruenberg either didn’t hear him or ignored him. The crowd was in panic. People started to shout. Women were screaming.

‘Jews defend yourselves! Throw stones, anything you can find!’ Hearing this, the younger policeman drew his pistol and this was the last straw for the man in the short sleeves and he lunged at the younger policeman.

‘Get his gun!’ the short-sleeved man called as the older policeman tried to pull him off his colleague.

‘Filthy Jew!’ the younger policeman said as the three men struggled. Other policemen ran in the direction of the first two and, at seeing this, a number of DPs started throwing stones and whatever was at hand at them. Henry Border moved away from the scuffling men, now on the ground. He hugged his recording equipment to his chest.

‘Mr Gruenberg! It’s time! My wife, she’s started!’

Henry Border heard the first shot fired just as everyone else did. People screamed. A man lay bleeding on the ground. Gruenberg cradled the man on the ground of Stuttgart West DP camp. The young man, Shmuel, the expectant father, now had Gruenberg’s attention.

*

A man went into a bar. It wasn’t a joke. It might have been funny but it wasn’t a joke, not even a bad one. And he wasn’t trying to get a laugh. This was just as well because nothing seemed particularly funny to Adam Zignelik that night as he walked alone among people who, unlike him, had some place in Hell’s Kitchen they wanted to be. He must have walked
along each side of Ninth Avenue between 38th and 53rd streets two or three times, just looking at the neighbourhood, Diana’s new neighbourhood. He looked in the windows of the Mercury Bar, the Marseille, the Greek Bakery and the Kemia Bar.

He walked into the Film Center Café and saw small groups of people in booths and at the bar talking, laughing, checking their mobile phones. And at the end of the bar he saw a man who sat waiting, looking expectantly at the entrance. In Rudy’s Bar & Grill he saw a man in a suit sitting alone at the bar singing to himself while he got steadily older and more tanked. At the other end of the bar it was ‘A Man Walked into a Bar’ night. People were lining up to tell a joke that had to begin with the line ‘a man walked into a bar’.