The Street Sweeper (60 page)

‘This is my sister, Hannah. She’ll come with us.’

‘No offence, but it might be better if she didn’t.’

‘Better?’

‘Better for everyone.’

‘I tell her everything.’

‘Well, you may want to reconsider that.’

‘She works with me.’

‘In the
Pulverraum?’

‘Not in the
Pulverraum
but in the
Union Metallwerke
factory.’

‘How old is she?’

‘Old enough to answer questions put to her by strangers when she thinks there’s a good reason to answer.’

‘How old are you?’ Rosa asked the younger of the Weiss sisters, Hannah.

‘I’m fifteen. What do you want from us?’

‘Come with me, both of you.’

Rosa Rabinowicz suggested they move to a corner of the block that was, at least temporarily, less crowded and that Hannah keep watch while she talked to Estusia, explaining that what she had to say was of the utmost importance and needed to be kept secret.

Rosa spoke almost in a whisper. ‘What do you know about the resistance?’

‘What do you mean “resistance”?’ Estusia asked.

Estusia Weiss had every right to find it difficult to believe that any resistance movement existed in Auschwitz, a place where daily she saw people she was housed with die on their bunks or drop dead where they stood in front of her during the
Appel
, a place where, day and night, transports of newly arrived people, nearly all Jews, were gassed and cremated in their thousands, the smoke and the unmistakable smell from the crematoria chimneys filling the sky and the air. But when Rosa explained that not only was there a resistance movement within the camp but that its members wanted her and her colleagues at the
Weichsel Union Metallwerke
factory to assist them, Estusia felt stirrings entirely alien to most inmates in the camp. To learn that there were prisoners, Jewish prisoners too, who were planning to sabotage the killing process, to fight back, to attempt escape, was to experience something akin to a religious revelation. Perhaps someone would survive all of this. Perhaps the world might get to know even a tenth of what had gone on there. Despite the risk, she needed no convincing to join them and she was certain that some if not all of the other Jewish girls of the
Pulverraum
also would. She pointed at one of them, her friend Ala, who she was sure could be counted on.

It was arranged that Rosa would make regular visits to the block housing Estusia and Hannah Weiss using goods from
Kanada
as bribes wherever necessary to facilitate entry and egress. There she would receive the tiny packages of gunpowder and see that they were delivered to the resistance within the
Sonderkommando
.

How they would get the gunpowder out of the factory was still to be worked out.

The woman Rosa had seen lying shaking with fever had died by the time she walked back out of the block. Nobody had noticed. Within twelve hours she would be on a pile of corpses that Zalman Gradowski would burn with the transport of Jews that would arrive after the transport that was arriving now.

The stratagem they used to get the gunpowder out of the factory and into their block was devised by Estusia together with her fifteen-year-old sister Hannah and their friend and fellow
Pulverraum
worker, Ala. Only four women at a time and Regina, their supervisor, worked in the
Pulverraum
. All of them were Jews. Hannah was one of a group
of prisoners assigned to maintenance in the factory. The women of the
Pulverraum
used presses to insert measured amounts of gunpowder into shell components that were delivered to them from somewhere else in the factory. The number and location of these munitions components were constantly checked by the Germans and there was no way any of these shells could be smuggled out of the
Pulverraum
. It was Hannah who thought of utilising the garbage collection system for smuggling out just the gunpowder. There were numerous small metal boxes throughout the factory for the purpose of collecting garbage to be emptied into large garbage bins that lined the walls and the corners of the factory. Prisoners in Hannah’s group were variously given the task of sweeping the floor of a section and emptying the small metal boxes as well as the piles of swept garbage into the large garbage bins.

Hannah took it upon herself to convince the German civilian forewoman that she was required to regularly collect the small metal boxes in the
Pulverraum
containing garbage, empty them into the big bins in the factory, and then bring them back filled with strips of cloth from other parts of the factory for emptying into a big bin in the
Pulverraum
. It was in these small pieces of cloth that Estusia and Ala and later others, including Regina, would wrap and knot tiny quantities of gunpowder that they would drop into the returned small metal boxes. Hannah would make her rounds with an air of confidence that suggested to anyone watching her that somebody in authority must have ordered her to do this. She would always come and then leave the
Pulverraum
with two of the smaller metal boxes. One would be legitimate; the other would be used in the smuggling, either to deliver the cloth strips to Estusia and Ala for them to wrap the gunpowder in, or else to collect the wrapped gunpowder. Once Hannah had the tiny cloth packages of gunpowder she would distribute them to a few trusted colleagues who worked with her.

None of the
Pulverraum
workers themselves ever left the factory with gunpowder on them. It was Hannah and her colleagues in other sections of the
Metallwerke
factory who carried the cloth parcels, which they hid in their clothes, back into their barracks block in the women’s camp in Auschwitz I. Their practice at the end of each shift was to position themselves in the middle of the formation of prisoners returning to their
barracks in the camp so that in the event of one of the random searches by the SS they would have valuable seconds in which to untie the cloth parcels and empty the gunpowder onto the ground before they were reached. But in the normal course of events, the gunpowder parcels were picked up from Estusia and Hannah’s block by Rosa and, later, another female prisoner from
Kanada
. From
Kanada
they could be picked up by members of the
Sonderkommando
when they were delivering the belongings of the freshly gassed transports. Every person involved knew the danger they were putting themselves in. But death there was certain. Only the way it came to you was not. And when.

*

When the Co-op City Express bus arrived at its final stop from Manhattan there were only three passengers still on it. The last one to get off was Lamont Williams. He had fallen asleep somewhere around 120th Street after another long day at work. He would have remained asleep on the bus had the driver not called out to wake him. Lamont was not more than two steps away from the bus when it pulled away from the kerb. The driver was in a hurry. It was dark, and since the other two passengers were already inside their respective buildings, Lamont started on his way home in what looked to be a deserted street. He didn’t see anyone else around until suddenly he felt a man’s forearm holding him around his collar bone and the blade of a knife against his neck. ‘Don’t turn around,’ said a voice.

Instinctively, he turned his head slowly to see who was attacking him.

‘Don’t move,’ said the voice.

From the little Lamont had been able to see there was only one person, a man wearing gloves and a balaclava under a hoody. Judging by his voice, the man was African American.

‘Listen, man,’ said Lamont, ‘I ain’t got no money and this whole place is crawlin’ with cameras so you gotta ask yourself if this really what you wanna be doin’.’

‘This ain’t about money,’ said the voice.

‘I ain’t got no drugs, no weapons neither. So you got yourself the wrong man.’

‘No, you the right man.’

Lamont drew a breath through his nostrils and with all the strength he could muster threw off the man’s forearm and ducked slightly so that when the knife moved in as he had known it would, it came in contact with the skin of his skull rather than into his neck. Feeling the blade against his head made the anger rise up in him and he fell onto his assailant who in turn fell onto the ground. The man still had not relinquished his grip on the knife but now Lamont at least had an even chance. As they rolled on the ground Lamont felt the knife cut his right hand. With his other hand he took a swing at the man’s face. The connection wasn’t perfect but the man felt it.

‘What the fuck you want?’

‘I want you to stay the fuck away from my mother!’

‘Mister, you got the wrong man.’

‘She told me you come around.’

‘I don’t know what you talkin’ ‘bout.’

‘You leave her alone, you know what’s good for you.’

‘Show you what’s good for you.’

‘Leave her out of it, Lamont.’

When he heard his name he rolled away from the man slightly. His assailant’s hoody had come off by this time and Lamont stood over the man, panting.

‘You a damn fool! You cover up your head so’s I won’t know who you are. But you don’t want me comin’ near your mother.’

‘That’s right,’ said the man, also panting, and now slowly getting up off the ground.

‘So I
have
to know who you are, fool. You the son of your mother.’

‘Yeah? Everybody the son of their mother.’

‘Take off the balaclava, Kevin, you damn fool.’

‘You scare her, Lamont. Why? She never done nothin’ to you,’ said Kevin Sweeney, the younger brother of Michael Sweeney, Lamont’s childhood friend, the one whose armed robbery had led to Lamont’s incarceration. Now his head was uncovered to reveal a bloodied ear where Lamont had hit him.

‘You’re comin’ with me, shithead.’

‘Where we goin’?’

With Michael’s little brother in tow, Lamont flagged a gypsy cab to take them both to the Emergency Room at Jacobi. Lamont explained why he had visited Michael and Kevin’s mother those months ago.

‘So you sayin’ you all about Chantal?’

‘No, relax yourself, Kevin. I’m lookin’ for my daughter. Chantal’s her mother so that’s where I start and I thought you might know where Chantal might be at.’

‘I don’t know where Chantal –’

‘I don’t care if you damn well married her, fool! I’m just lookin’ for my –’

‘Lamont,’ Kevin said sadly in the back of the cab, ‘I ain’t seen Chantal for years, like five or six years. She never wanted me, not really. I admit, I thought she was fine but …’

‘I can’t tell my grandma I’m sittin’ in the hospital. She don’t need to hear that. Damn you, Kevin! Fuck! How am I gonna work now?’ Lamont said, looking at his injured hand. ‘They might have to put stitches in my damn hand. This gonna need stitches! You dumber n’ your brother!’

‘Yeah, I heard that,’ Kevin said quietly.

‘He still inside?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Listen to me, you gonna put
your
hand in your pocket for this here cab ride. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Yeah, I help you out. I like to do what’s right. Think maybe they could look at my ear? You fierce, man!’

Lamont had to have several stitches put in his hand. He made a call to his grandmother telling her that he’d injured his hand at work and was waiting in ER for treatment.

‘No, it’s not too serious but I don’t know how long I’ll be so don’t wait dinner and don’t wait up … Well, I’ll just warm up what’s left when I get home.’

She was the only one in his life who cared enough about him to be lied to, it occurred to him as he put the receiver down and went back to the line he’d been in. When he got home he saw that she had left a note for him on the kitchen table explaining that there was a plate for him in
the refrigerator. Beside the note was a glass of Seneca apple juice she’d left for him just as she used to when he was a child. Over the stitches they had put a bandage and that’s what his grandmother saw the next morning before they both headed out to work. For quite some time nobody at work noticed his injury or thought to comment on it. He was making his rounds collecting the garbage from the patients’ rooms as quietly and as inconspicuously as possible when he heard a voice coming weakly to him from inside one of the rooms.

‘The hand, Mr Lamont, it’s
still
not healed? It’s the same one?’

‘Hey, Mr Mandelbrot!’ he said quietly. ‘Yes, it’s the same one. How you doin’?’ He asked the question as a matter of form and without thinking. The old man had been readmitted but he was dying. Lamont could see that. It was a different room from the one on the ninth floor the old man was originally in. That, and the old man’s health, were all that had changed.

‘You find your wife yet?’

‘We weren’t married but –’

‘Your daughter?’

‘Not yet.’

Henryk Mandelbrot wanted to test him to see what he remembered of the chapters of his life but Lamont had to make his rounds and wasn’t able to stop.

‘I remember it, Mr Mandelbrot. How could I ever forget it?’

‘All of it?’

‘I think so.’

‘So we’ll see.’

‘I can’t stop now. I’ll come see you at the end of my shift.’

‘Don’t take too long. You know I’m dying.’

‘No you’re not,’ Lamont Williams said perfunctorily, as a matter of course.

‘You’ll see; that’s what I’m here for.’

‘I’ll come back at the end of my shift.’

He was true to his word and when he came back at the end of his day he noticed that the patient looked even thinner, not merely than he had been in the other room, but thinner than earlier in the day; thinner, weaker and more vulnerable.

‘So we have to continue where we left off before I got interrupted.’

‘Interrupted?’

‘A few months of life … in Great Neck … It interrupted us. You have to tell me what you remember.’

Lamont Williams smiled. With the exception of a few minor details, which Mr Mandelbrot wasted no time correcting, Lamont had remembered everything the patient had told him.

‘That’s all you told me. You got to stick around ‘cause I don’t know how the story ends.’