The Street Sweeper (45 page)

Rosa raised the palm of her hand dismissively.

‘All right, don’t ask him. Compliment him on his shoes. I’ll come and fetch you after
shabbos
dinner and, in passing conversation, you can casually compliment him on his shoes.’

She thought for a moment. ‘What if he’s not wearing those shoes?’

‘He always wears those shoes on
shabbos
. They’re his favourite shoes, had them forever. That’s why he was so desperate to have me collect them from the shoemaker.’

She so wanted to believe him that she did. Still, she would go with him to visit his parents the very next Friday night. She was very fond of Noah’s family; his brothers and sisters were almost like hers. His parents were such intelligent and kind people; his father had always seemed so wise. And it happened just as Noah had promised. She complimented Mr Lewental, Noah’s father, on his shoes and he, smiling, praised the work of the travelling, never-prosperous, hardworking shoemaker. In fact, when Mr Lewental started waxing lyrical on the topic of the quality of the shoemaker’s work, she exchanged glances with Noah, who was
now rolling his eyes at his father’s verbosity as if to say, ‘Now look what you’ve started.’ It was a beautiful evening in Ciechanow for Rosa Rabinowicz but such evenings were already numbered.

Rosa was eighteen and still with Noah Lewental when the news came like a flood from a river that had burst its banks. Ada, the shoemaker’s daughter, was pregnant. It was an undeniable fact. When the simple Ada, the palm reader, identified Noah as the father, Rosa wasn’t around to hear the heated conversation between him and Mr Lewental. Whatever the simple girl’s circumstances, Mr Lewental had argued that if no one else came forward to own up to the child’s paternity, Noah had to do the right thing by the poor girl. That it was impossible for him to have been responsible for the pregnancy was not a lie Noah was able to tell his father.

‘What about Rosa?’ Noah argued. What would become of Rosa if he was made to marry Ada? Rosa would be free to find a genuinely honourable man, Mr Lewental told his son.

Rosa lost not only Noah but with him her self-confidence. Of all the romantically paired young people in their circle, she and Noah had been regarded as among the most compatible. Certainly their relationship had lasted the longest. The scandal had robbed her of confidence not only in herself but in others too. For a time she didn’t want to leave the house or see anyone. She was sure people were talking about her.

In truth, many did talk about her and Noah, about his betrayal and her subsequent self-imposed isolation. Although in no version of the story was she anything less than innocent, it did not prevent her from being a ripe topic of conversation. Some just wanted to talk about how unlucky this striking and gifted young woman had so suddenly become. Even well-intentioned people pondered the meaning of it almost as a religious or philosophical exercise. Others asked how Ada could be so sure it was Noah who was the father when there were so many other young men it could have been. Did she just choose the boy she considered most likely to do the right thing? Perhaps she was not so simple after all.

Rosa’s parents, inreasingly concerned for her wellbeing, and having tried without success everything they could think of to return her to her old self, in desperation agreed with someone’s suggestion that she spend
time away from Ciechanow. Still numb and without saying goodbye to Noah or even to many of her friends, it was a shattered Rosa Rabinowicz who went to stay for an unspecified duration with distant relatives in Warsaw.

*

It was the honey-skinned woman with the jet-black straight hair, the student who no longer attended his ‘What is History?’ lectures, the one who had correctly guessed Gandhi, this was the person who served Adam Zignelik a Mango Mojito inside Zanzibar on Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen. She had recognised him despite the unfamiliar context. Professor Zignelik was from another part of her life.

‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ she asked him.

‘Yes,’ he said, trying to place her.

She smiled. ‘Boy, we really
are
all the same to you guys!’

‘No, of course not. It’s just that …’ He tried not to look at her cleavage.

In truth, he remembered the student as somewhat older than the usual undergrad. But he had never seen her made up like this and he now found his mind toggling between a half-remembered image and the woman now in front of him, this alluring, suggestively dressed maker of Mojitos. No student had ever looked like this, at least not on campus, not that he had seen.

‘I was a student in your “What is History?” class. My name is Mehrzad Yazdi.’

‘Right! Mehrzad, of course!’ He had never known her name. ‘You dropped the course.’

‘I dropped every course. I had to leave college.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

‘Yeah, me too.’

‘I hope everything’s okay,’ he said tentatively, trying to get right the balance between concern and prying.

‘Well, I guess it is now … sort of. Look, I’m not really supposed to be talking now –’

‘No, of course not,’ he said, looking around at all the other customers milling around the bar impatiently, waiting to be served, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Look at you!’ she smiled. ‘I don’t mean you to apologise but if you could come back some other time.’

‘Some other time? I only just got here.’

‘No, listen. What I mean is … I’d
like
to tell you what happened. I kind of wanted to explain ‘cause … yours was my favourite class.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes and I just thought if you live around here –’

‘I don’t.’

‘Professor Zignelik, you’re not making this any easier, are you?’

‘Mehrzad, I won’t … embarrass you but if you want me to act like I don’t even know you … Are you trying to ask me … to leave?’

‘No, I’m trying to ask if you’d like to meet me for a drink … one night when I’m not working.’

‘You mean here?’

‘Sure, unless you don’t like your Mojito.’

On the night he was to meet Mehrzad Yazdi for a drink Adam stepped out of the shower and began to dry himself with a towel that hung on a hook at the back of the bathroom door.

‘The towel dries faster now there’s only one of them hanging on the back of the door,’ he heard Diana’s voice say in his head. Adam ignored the voice but she went right on talking. ‘You already shaved today,’ she said.

‘Yeah, so? I’m not shaving again.’

‘You’re putting on aftershave.’

Mehrzad Yazdi was dressed less provocatively than she had been when she was working. She’d arrived first and got them a table of the kind, Adam realised, tended to be reserved for well-connected people. Standing up to greet him, she put her hand on his arm just below the shoulder and offered him her cheek, which he half met with his lips but mostly with the slightly percussive sound he thought was meant to accompany the gesture. Halfway now between bartender and student, she appeared so unexpectedly attractive that it made him nervous. He didn’t know what he was doing there. He looked around the bar. He
had for a while been focusing on his work to pull him out of his hole. He was making progress. He now had more strands to follow than he had ever had when researching any other topic thus far in his career. There might well be more than one person could handle. He didn’t need any other distractions and there was a part of him that recognised this. But now here he was, nonetheless, sitting in this bar in Hell’s Kitchen with Mehrzad, the ‘Gandhi’ girl. This was Diana’s neighbourhood now. Surely she wouldn’t walk into this bar. But what if she did? Was he ever going to feel comfortable again anywhere other than in the stacks of the Galvin Library at IIT or else interviewing someone in Chicago? Mehrzad was very comfortable there. She knew what to order, how to order, where to sit, how to dress, even how to modulate her voice. She was ‘in the know’. He wasn’t. Despite this, it didn’t feel too bad to be there with her. Would Diana understand that? For all that Mehrzad Yazdi was alluring both in appearance and in manner, and for all that Adam had what amounted to a historian’s treasure trove to unpack, in the ongoing, never-ending, private, almost hallucinatory conversation he was in with Diana, it still mattered to him that Diana could understand what he was doing there. He needed her approval and wondered if that was ever going to change.

‘My parents felt this was the best way to exercise their control over me.’

‘To refuse to pay your tuition?’

‘Yep.’

‘But didn’t they want you to finish college?’

‘Yes, but they wanted even more to be able to influence all these other areas of my life.’

‘Your boyfriend?’

‘Him, yes … Actually, they were right about him although for totally different reasons … but even the way I dress, for God’s sake! Like it’s their business at my age! They might have left Iran but they sure took a lot of it with them. They might appear to have adapted to life here but they’re still very traditional people with very traditional values when it comes down to it. That’s their default position: tradition. This is where they go in moments of peril.’

‘Peril?’

‘Perceived peril. Immigrants smell peril where others smell roses. Especially those coming from the Middle East. Everyone here either thinks you’re a terrorist or else they’re liberals who fetishise “orientalism” and suck up to you because of it. That was part of the problem with my ex-boyfriend. Edward Said was right on the money with that. You’re English, sorry, Australian, I know the accent. So perhaps it’s different with you. You’re a different kind of migrant, less alien. My parents will always feel very alien here. They have a different standard when it comes to my brother, which doesn’t always help things between us. I mean, it’s not
his
fault but … Not that I’m saying you’re like my parents’ generation. Am I talking too much? Do you want another drink?’

They got another drink and another after that.

‘Mehrzad, have you talked to Columbia about financial aid? There are all sorts of options if you –’

‘Believe me, Professor, I’ve –’

‘You really gotta call me Adam.’

‘Adam,’ she smiled, ‘I looked into everything, talked to everyone. I will go back. I really want to but right now I’ve got rent to cover and … but I will go back. I promise. I don’t want to spend my life mixing Mojitos. Will you be there?’

‘Columbia?’

‘Yes, I really … I really do want to finish your course.’

They stood on Ninth Avenue. It was late. He kissed her on the cheek properly this time. When their heads parted she smiled at him intriguingly and walked off down the street. As he stood there with people brushing past him, Adam wondered whether she had wanted more, and whether he had.

*

It seemed that there was never a good time for Michelle McCray to speak to her cousin Lamont even over the phone and offer him whatever advice she could. As often as her grandmother had asked her, had urged her, to speak to Lamont and as much as Michelle had always intended to
speak to him in the near future, that future never arrived. At any given moment she found that she couldn’t bring herself to make contact with him to apologise for not having stayed in touch while he was in prison, and to undertake to see him, not only with her family but also professionally in order to help him wade through the mire that no doubt his search for his daughter presented. No task she could think of so filled her with guilt or laid her so open to inertia as counselling her cousin on the best way for him to find his daughter. Navigating between her guilt, her inertia and her grandmother’s pleading, she eventually gave her grandmother the name and the direct extension of one of her colleagues, a Ms Linh Tran, to whom she had explained her cousin’s situation.

Accustomed to the problems he experienced in life invariably becoming somebody’s case, Lamont Williams now needed to call Linh Tran, the colleague his cousin had recommended, in the hope that his search for his daughter might become her next case. The call would need to be made during business hours, which would likely mean during his lunch break.

Not being able to afford a mobile phone and not wanting to parade his past in front of his colleagues by phoning from the employee lunch room at Sloan-Kettering, he considered trying the payphone on 68th Street but abandoned the idea because of the traffic noise as soon as he’d left the building.

With his pen and notepad in his hand Lamont walked slowly into the St Catherine of Siena Church, which was also on 68th Street. The church was dark, cavernous and seemed empty. He was beginning to panic. His lunch hour was being used up and he hadn’t begun to talk to Linh Tran. Eventually he found the priest who, after some explaining by Lamont, was very understanding and offered him the free use of his phone from his private office. Aware that he would soon need to go back to work, he managed to speak to Linh Tran and arrange with both her and the priest of St Catherine of Siena a time and date for a long phone call.

At the agreed time the following week Lamont returned to the church, found the priest and made the call from the priest’s office with the priest intermittently standing there watching and listening to Lamont’s side of the conversation.

Was Lamont already legally recognised as the father? He wasn’t sure. What exactly did that mean, ‘legally recognised’? Was he married to the mother when the child was born? No, he wasn’t. He’s never been married to the mother. Did he get his name on the child’s birth certificate? Lamont didn’t remember. Wasn’t it meant to contain his daughter’s name? The parents too, yes, of course. He couldn’t say. Has the mother ever applied for child support? No, she hasn’t.

‘I used to give her money but … you know, nobody
made
me. I just did it. She was my daughter and I was working then but … never … you know … like, official child support.’

‘Did you or your daughter’s mother ever sign a form and submit it to the Department of Vital Statistics?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘’Cause you could get on the birth certificate that way.’

‘I don’t know if I ever did sign a form for the Department … Vital Statistics. Let’s say I didn’t.’