The Street Sweeper (43 page)

Adam had to get several drinks down in a hurry if he was to maintain the pretence to himself that he had come down there simply to explore a neighbourhood he didn’t much know. By subway, by chance, by metrocard he had ridden the downtown express via denial to an existential crisis in the city of orphans changing at Times Square, which is how he’d landed in Hell’s Kitchen. He had come to Ninth Avenue in the crushingly forlorn hope that he might run into Diana by chance and then they could begin talking again. He could tell her about his work, about Border and Chicago and the DP camps, and maybe he could erase what he’d done and start over again. It was a hope he was dimly aware he had harboured ever since she had closed the door to the Morningside Heights apartment he used to share with her.

So he went inside Zanzibar where the clientele ranged between twenty-five and forty and the waitresses and female bartenders had the figures of dancers and the striking looks of actresses for whom every new order placed was an audition. Asian American, African American, mid-western farm types, Hispanic and Scandinavian-looking women gracefully served people amid a chaos that only they could navigate and when one of them asked Adam if he would like a seat at the bar, he noticed that the bar stool at the very end of the bar, the one furthest from the street entrance, was freshly available and he went for it as though it represented his last chance at something he couldn’t quite name any more. The bartenders were women, all with designer jeans they’d been poured
into, all with exposed midriffs and then up above, all with cleavages from the designer who had given the world the Grand Canyon. Adam didn’t know what he was doing there and was trying to hide behind the menu when one of them half spoke, half called to him, ‘What can I get you?’ A shiver coursed through him because he shouldn’t have been there and because she couldn’t get him anything he wanted, let alone anything he needed, and so he heard himself above the din ordering the first thing his eyes could cling to that wasn’t the bartender herself.

‘I’ll have a Mango Mojito, please,’ he said, aiming a disconjugated gaze along the bench top of the bar.

‘One Mango Mojito coming right up, Professor.’

It was the honey-skinned woman with jet-black straight hair, the student who no longer attended his ‘What is History?’ lectures; the one who had correctly guessed Gandhi. True? It was unlikely to be true but beneath the palm fronds as the past and present wilted, beneath the candlelight where shadows snuff the sidle of evening, beneath the tropical motifs, thatch-clad walls and thud of the speakers there to help drown out people’s private internal, soon-to-be-publicly-misunderstood celebration of themselves, it was true.

*

Callie Ford had taken her son Russell into the kitchen of Henry Border’s house. How he had managed to find the house and at night might have been something she would have commented on had she not been so intent on absorbing and understanding the details of his story, the taking of James Pearson from his apartment in the Mecca Flats by two white men in the middle of the night. Elise Border was stunned to not only learn but to see that Callie Ford had a son, and to see that he was as old as he was. Elly’s father was old enough to be Callie’s father and yet here was Callie with a son older than Elly. Callie had never mentioned that she was a mother and for a moment that soon passed she felt a terrible sense of loss, almost a sense of betrayal, that Callie, for whom she had so quickly developed such strong affection, had failed to tell her so important a biographical detail. It indicated to Elly that they were not
as close as she had thought. While the hurt was not to last, what was to recur intermittently, even as she got to know and like Russell, was envy, envy that he had a mother.

But by the time the three of them were drinking lemonade in the kitchen, the dominant emotion was a fascination with Russell, with the world from which he (and now quite clearly Callie) had come, and with the story he told of James Pearson being taken away by the two white men. She had seen black children on the street, on public transportation, seen them working in the back of restaurants and shining shoes but she had never socialised with any. Now here was one in her home in the middle of the night. To add to her fascination he was a boy, an older boy, made harmless both by being Callie’s son and, at least temporarily, by his obvious vulnerability and distress. Elly listened to Russell’s account of what had happened to James Pearson and watched as Callie attempted to calm her son. In truth, though, she didn’t understand what had been so distressing to Russell. Had she been taken out of the kitchen and asked to retell Russell’s story to a third party, she would have said that a man named James Pearson, a friend of the family, had been seen leaving their building late at night with two men. The men happened to be white. It seemed that it was this that most distressed Russell, although at first she had thought that it was that Russell had been abandoned by the man who was meant to take care of him, just like Callie was meant to take care of her.

For all he knew, Callie told Russell in reassuring tones, Mr Pearson could be back at the Mecca safe and sound. The white men weren’t man-handling Mr Pearson, she got Russell to concede. Perhaps they were men he knew from the packinghouse. Despite Russell’s avowal that he hadn’t seen them there, mention of the packinghouse enabled her to change the subject by asking him about his new job and praising him for it. He told her how Mr Pearson had made him promise to save some of his wages for her. Mr Anything-You-Want had more than come through for her, she thought.

She finished the evening’s kitchen summit by suggesting a strategy. She would make up a bed for Russell in one of the vacant rooms and in the morning all three of them would go downtown to the Mecca Flats to
try to find out what had happened to James Pearson. And when Russell would go to work, maybe Mr Pearson would be there. Elly Border would come with them because Callie didn’t want to leave her on her own and didn’t know where else to take her.

*

For a while James Pearson didn’t give any serious thought to his meeting with Herb Marks and Ralph Hellerstein and their request that he consider joining the Packinghouse Workers Organising Committee. For a start, all he wanted was a chance to put a little money away until he had enough to get out of the Mecca Flats. Then maybe he could think of finding a woman. But additionally, it seemed to him far-fetched to the point of farcical to think that any group of white packinghouse workers was going to accept or take seriously any organisation with a Negro on its peak body. Anyway, how comfortable would he be working long hours at a physically demanding job only to spend his off hours going to meetings where he was the only black man? The more time that passed after his evening meeting with Hellerstein and Marks the crazier the proposition appeared to him.

It was at the end of his shift at Swift and Company a few weeks later and James Pearson was in the locker room, the one used by the black workers. There were a lot of men in there, some far off in their own worlds and some talking while they tried to get clean before leaving to go home or anywhere else they might care to go to unwind on the south side. That’s how it was that, despite his time at the plant, despite being well liked among his colleagues, nobody noticed Billy Moore come in. But James Pearson caught him from the corner of his eye wearing an expression that brought Pearson in an instant back to his meeting with Ralph Hellerstein and Herb Marks.

‘Billy?’ James Pearson said to him quietly but Billy Moore was in no mood for talking. He was experiencing something far worse than the back spasms he had been unable to hide from James and ultimately from the management at Swift. He was experiencing dread. Eventually James managed to get from Billy a story that confirmed that everything
Hellerstein and Marks had predicted had come about. Billy Moore was finished splitting hogs at Swifts.

‘But you can do other things,’ James Pearson said.

‘I can do other things. I can still split hogs. I told ’em that.’

‘What’d they say?’

‘They said they’d keep the doctor’s report in their records. Said they contact me somethin’ come up.’ The two men looked at each other and then, without James Pearson having to say a word, Billy Moore said what the other man was thinking. ‘Ain’t no one ever gonna contact me.’

The next morning James Pearson went in to the Personnel Office before the start of the shift to make enquiries on behalf of Billy Moore. Hellerstein and Marks had been entirely right and so had Billy Moore. It was clear that, even should a position somewhere else in the plant arise, Billy Moore was considered damaged goods. No one at Swifts was going to contact him. Why should they, when a younger man without any history of back trouble could take up the newly vacant position? And as James Pearson immediately realised, there was nothing to stop an injustice like this one to Billy Moore and his wife and children happening to him too. One company-observed back spasm, one soft tissue injury and Mr Anything-You-Want could also be let go. Who was there to stop it?

Seeing Tommy Parks leaning on the railing of the balcony outside their apartment at the Mecca having a cigarette late one night, James Pearson approached him.

‘You hear ‘bout Billy Moore?’ James asked.

‘Yeah, I heard. He looked all right to me. They say he got nothin’ now.’

‘Nothin’ but a wife and five kids.’

‘Yeah, well, them five kids, they his fault. Wife too.’

‘I’m talkin’ ‘bout Swifts.’

Tommy Parks took a drag on his cigarette and let it out slowly. ‘I know what you talkin’ ‘bout.’

Through gesture alone, Tommy Parks offered James a cigarette, which Pearson declined. The two men stood there for a while without talking.

‘While back I had a visit from two men.’

‘Two white boys,’ Tommy Parks interrupted. They were standing beside one another but James Pearson used his surprise to turn and look at Parks straight on.

‘How you know that?’ he asked.

Tommy Parks smiled. ‘Now I wondered when you gonna tell me ‘bout that. Even you break some time. You got a story for me?’

*

Sixteen men got off a truck one by one. Shouts accompanied the sound of their feet hitting the ground. They were in a place unlike any they had ever been before. The sixteen men ranged in age from their teens to their late forties. Some had heard the name before. Some had not heard it – Birkenau, the largest of the more than forty camps and subcamps that made up the
Konzentrationslager
in the Polish region of Upper Silesia known as Auschwitz-Birkenau, or just Auschwitz. They were told to wait. A physician was coming and they had to wait for him. Of the sixteen, the four oldest were Polish Catholics, the twelve youngest were Polish Jews. One of the twelve was Henryk Mandelbrot. Why did they have to wait for a physician? Nobody explained why. Questions were forbidden. Talking was forbidden.

Two SS men guarded them, which meant they too had to wait for the physician to arrive. The guards were bored. They knew the men they were guarding would have to have been afraid but since these men weren’t allowed to do anything but wait without speaking, their fear wasn’t very entertaining. One hour went past, then came another moving even more slowly. The two guards spoke to each other quietly in a voice too soft for most of their prisoners to hear.

‘You know what would break this up?’ the first guard whispered to his colleague.

‘What?’

‘Shooting. We could shoot one of them.’

‘They’ve been counted already,’ the second guard said, yawning as he stretched.

‘Yeah but who’d care?’

‘They’re not all Jews.’

‘Well, we could shoot one of them.’

‘We’ve got our orders,’ the second guard objected.

‘Well then … perhaps they tried to attack us, to disarm us?’ at which the other guard rolled his eyes.

‘Well,
you
think of something,’ the first guard said. Then with the excitement of hitting upon a good idea, ‘We could order two of them to race each other and shoot the two of them as they were running away. You choose one, I get the other. We give them a count of ten or fifteen if you want to make it interesting.’

‘And what were these two runners doing, escaping?’

‘Sure.’

‘You think they’d believe it?’

‘Oh God-in-heaven, no one’s going to worry about two of them. They’ll get two more.’

‘And what if there’s something special about these prisoners? What if they know something, if they’re to be interrogated? Maybe they have some special skills. You go looking for trouble. You shouldn’t. Enjoy the rest.’

Henryk Mandelbrot heard every word they said.

The sixteen prisoners and the two guards waited almost three hours before the physician arrived. He was harried. There was always too much work to do. He spoke quickly in a monotone to the guards.

‘Four Poles and the rest Jews, yeah?’

‘Yes, Doctor,’ the second guard said.

‘So,’ the overworked doctor called to the prisoners in a slightly weary, matter-of-fact tone, ‘Poles to the right, Jews to the left.’

Henryk Mandelbrot didn’t see what happened to the Poles. He and the other eleven Jews were taken to a place known as the
Bekleidungskammer
, a vast warehouse full of clothes and personal effects of all types. There were rows of shelves as far as he could see. It was a vast store of everything from all over Europe. This was what each Jew had taken with them when told they were being resettled. It was a physical answer to the question, ‘What do people consider most important for a long journey?’ Parents had packed for their children. In addition to clothes of all sizes
for men, women and children, in addition to cutlery, eyeglasses, books, toothbrushes, hairbrushes, artificial limbs and religious materials there were items of sentimental value, photographs, teddy bears. Here at the
Bekleidungskammer
it was collected, sorted into categories and cleaned of vermin in miniature gas chambers before being sent to Germany for distribution to the German people. Assignment of prisoners to this area of Birkenau provided them with access to goods that could be traded for food and it became known among them as
Kanada
.