The Street Sweeper (75 page)

‘He talks about the war all the time. And he
has
talked about taking part in the liberation of a concentration camp.’

It was safe for her to tell her grandfather about the historian’s interest. Adam wasn’t going to go cold on this. He promised. Adam assured her that he would interview the captain after he had recovered from surgery, as soon as Ayesha Washington said he was ready.

‘Just the prospect of being interviewed will be enough to guarantee he pulls through. You see, no one ever wants to talk to him … not about that stuff.’

*

Ayesha Washington thought again of the man who had confronted her more than once on York Avenue outside Sloan-Kettering. She had to admit that she now did remember seeing that man, the street sweeper, visiting her former patient Henryk Mandelbrot. And he did seem to know a lot about him, certainly more than she’d known about him. Was it a con? If it was, it was certainly an elaborate one, and a highly unusual one. But what if he was telling the truth?

This man, who now swept the streets, had once worked at the hospital. If he had befriended the old man, swapped stories with him, if he had visited him after hours he would have been comforting the patient in his own time, time he wasn’t being paid for. Maybe the old man
had
given him the candelabrum. If their relationship had been as the former Building Services worker had described it, why couldn’t that have happened? And if it had happened, what a tremendous injustice it was for him to be accused of theft and fired because of it. But she wasn’t a lawyer, a private investigator, a police officer or an ethicist. She worked
at the hospital but not in Human Resources. She had her own life. She had her own problems. Who had time for this kind of thing?

She asked herself this and then wondered what she meant by ‘this kind of thing’. She concluded a few seconds later that what she had really meant was ‘justice’ of some kind. So what she had, in fact, asked herself was ‘who had time for justice?’ and the fact that she had articulated this question, even if only privately to herself, jolted her. She caught a vague, elongated momentary glimpse of herself walking past a reflecting surface and, not wanting to be the sort of person who asked herself that question, reached into her pocket and took out the diary with Adam Zignelik’s name and number in it.

What did she owe the street sweeper? She happened to have in her pocket the name and number of a Columbia historian who it might be said owed her something. A call, a quick call made on a whim, who had time for these things?

Adam Zignelik had given her the number to his mobile phone because he didn’t want either of them dwelling on the fact that in truth his association with the History Department at Columbia was ending. She dialled his number and instead of answering with his name he just said, not recognising the number, ‘Hello.’

‘Is this Dr Zignelik?’ Ayesha Washington asked.

‘Yes, who’s this?’

‘Hi, Dr Zignelik. I’m sorry to bother you. It’s Ayesha Washington.’

‘Ayesha, hi. Is everything okay with your grandfather?’

‘Oh sure, he’s fine. We’re still going ahead with the surgery. Actually, he’s really excited to meet with you.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh yeah, it’s kind of distracting him from the surgery so it’s … it’s good for his morale.’

‘Oh that’s great.’ A beat or two passed as he waited to find out why she was calling.

‘Actually, Dr Zignelik.’

‘Listen, if I can call you Ayesha, you have to call me Adam.’

‘Sure. Adam, I’m calling … This is going to sound weird but I might have the sudden need for a historian. I mean … I don’t even know if
this is your area but there’s something, I don’t know if I could check this out myself but –’

‘What’s up?’

‘Do you have a minute?’

‘Sure.’

‘There’s a guy …’ She let out a breath. ‘God, where do I begin? Okay, I had a patient who died … an old man … And he was a Holocaust survivor.’

Over the phone she told him all she knew of the purported relationship between her late patient and the one-time Building Services employee, a man who now worked as part of the cleaning crew of the John Doe Fund’s Ready, Willing and Able team. She told him that the man had been fired by the hospital for the alleged theft of the old man’s
menorah
and that the man persists in saying that it had been a gift and that it wasn’t theft. He claimed that he and the patient had become friends over a period of months and as proof of their friendship he offers quite astoundingly specific details of the old man’s life story. If he’s now working with the John Doe Fund it means he’s either homeless or an ex-con, possibly both. She’d checked with the hospital and it had tried this man as a Building Services employee as part of a pilot program. If it was true that the
menorah
had been a gift and that this man in fairly desperate circumstances had been wrongly accused and in a sense convicted and punished, it would be a grave injustice. Adam had to agree.

‘The credibility of the claim by the former employee that he and the patient had become friends,’ Ayesha Washington went on, ‘ultimately rests on the authenticity of his account of the conversations he insists they had. What I thought was that perhaps I could ask you for an expert opinion as to whether the detailed knowledge of the Holocaust he apparently gained from them is historically accurate.’

‘I understand,’ Adam replied. ‘But this is the thing. Although my area is twentieth-century political history, I’ve tended to specialise in civil rights history. It’s true that I have lately, without any conscious decision on my part, developed a professional interest in the Holocaust. It’s
connected with my interest in the armed services experiences of people like your grandfather. But I have to tell you, I’m not really an expert, not yet, anyway.’

‘Sure, I’m sorry, Adam. It’s pretty crazy and I don’t want to waste your time –’

‘No, you misunderstand me. I’ll do it. I’ll listen to him. I really owe you, of course I’ll do it. I’m just offering the caveat that there are plenty of people you could find who are more expert in this area than me. But what I do have going for me is that I owe you. And historians still make house calls. Where do you want me to go to meet this guy? I’ll tell you if I don’t feel qualified to attest to the accuracy of the man’s account of your patient’s story. I can always recommend other people more expert in the field.’

‘Adam, I already felt silly enough getting
you
involved in this, and
we’ve
already met.’

‘I assure you, it’s not a problem. You’re right, if he has intimate knowledge of the old man’s story then it does make it more likely they were friends, which makes it more likely he didn’t steal the
menorah
and shouldn’t have been fired.’

‘Thanks for this. I felt silly but I thought I had to do something –’

‘Ayesha, I owe you. So don’t think twice.’

She explained that she often saw the man, the street sweeper, on York Avenue near the hospital. She would look out for him and try to make an arrangement with him or at least get some kind of contact details for him. A few days later the Mayor of East 67th and York saw the young oncologist for the first time
initiate
a conversation with the street sweeper.

Some two weeks later, in the late afternoon when the sun had almost disappeared, an oncologist, a historian and a street sweeper crammed around a tiny table in the Fresh Food Kitchen on 68th Street to talk in depth about the war-time experiences of Henryk Mandelbrot. No one can accurately describe the effect on Adam Zignelik of hearing this African American street sweeper, whose broom and cart rested against the window of the eatery, describe life in the
Sonderkommando
. Sensing the importance of the opportunity, Lamont Williams told Ayesha Washington and Adam Zignelik everything he could remember and he
remembered a lot. The old man had written it all down in Yiddish in a notebook but all Lamont had was his memory of Mandelbrot’s story. When he was finished Adam Zignelik was not immediately able to speak. ‘Did you say the old man had made a written record of this?’

‘That’s what he said but … I mean … I never saw it. Anyway, it wouldn’t be in English. Might be Yiddish, might be Polish. Mr Mandelbrot spoke a lot of languages but Yiddish was his first.’

‘Did you see these notes?’

‘No, he never brought them into the hospital. But his people would have found ’em. He said he’d put ’em where they’d find them after he died. So they should have found ’em by now.’

Adam rubbed his face with the palms of his hands. Then he spoke slowly and explained to both of them how it was only in the last six months that his work had taken him anywhere near this material but, from what he knew, it was almost impossible to account for Lamont’s knowledge other than by the man who had lived it having told him. He said that although he did not consider himself a real expert he felt confident enough to say that relatively few people on earth knew the details Lamont knew about the
Sonderkommando
, the work they did and the uprising they carried off.

*

Adam Zignelik was sitting home alone in his Morningside Heights apartment on a Saturday in late winter surrounded by the boxes that contained his career and going through copies of the papers of the Chicago psychologist, Henry Border, when the thought occurred to him that the great advance of the second half of the twentieth century was storage. To a large extent he had packed the boxes from his office at Columbia in such a way that each box contained a topic, a category of his own work or of history more generally that was of professional interest to him. Often a box also acted as a kind of time capsule recording what he had been doing during a given span of his professional life. The boxes physically closest to where he was sitting at the time, the thought occurred to him, contained information pertaining to Border, the 1946 interviews,
and Adam’s own interview with the woman, Hannah, and the role she and her sister, Estusia Weiss, and Border’s wife, Rosa Rabinowicz, played in the plot to smuggle gunpowder to the men of the
Sonderkommando
resistance. But of even greater significance, if the notes kept by the recently deceased cancer patient, the friend of the street sweeper, were anywhere near as detailed as the account given by the street sweeper himself, Adam would also have a first-hand written account of life in the
Sonderkommando
in Auschwitz and of the
Sonderkommando
uprising there. In addition to all that, there was the issue of the role of black troops in the liberation of Dachau to follow up. As soon as the grandfather of the oncologist, Ayesha Washington, had recovered from hip surgery, he would have a first-hand account of that too.

What is memory? It is the storage, the retention and the recall of the constituents, gross and nuanced, of information. How is it called upon? A certain protein in the brain, an enzyme, acts upon one neuron after another in rapid sequence as if to light them up in such a way as to paint a picture or spell a word, as if to cause an arpeggio of cellular stores of data to suddenly ring out some long-stored melody in your mind and you remember her face, her voice, her laugh, the way she moved, something she said, her views and tastes, until you remember the way her eyes widened with the pre-rational wonder of a child when watching a wildlife documentary or the way they move slowly downwards when her frustration with someone she loves starts to leak sympathy. When she is gone, that cascade of cellular data is all you have. Each neuron holds some pixel, some datum, and if even one is lost, the sequence is interrupted. Then you have started to forget.

How do we fight to preserve each tiny datum? Everyone tries different things, different strategies which we call on until we are distracted by events or overwhelmed by weakness or infirmity. Adam kept a comb in his bathroom mirror cabinet.

Again Adam was distracted, this time by noise coming from somewhere in the building. Before he could decide whether to search for the source of the noise or try to put up with it and return to his work, his intercom buzzed. He carefully put the copy of the page from Border’s papers he was holding back on his desk and went over to answer it.
On the weekends it was as likely as not to be someone looking for a neighbour who had pressed his apartment’s buzzer by mistake.

‘Hello,’ Adam said, expecting to be asked for someone else followed by an enquiry as to whether he was sure he wasn’t speaking from the apartment the visitor had intended to call.

‘Adam?’ It was Sonia. He held the receiver to his chest so she wouldn’t hear him exhale.

‘Adam, it’s me, Sonia.’

‘Hi, sweetie, what’s up?’

‘Would it be a bad time for me to come up? I know I’m meant to call first but I was out and I left my cell at home.’

‘Sure, come on up.’

‘You’re not entertaining?’

‘I’m not even entertaining myself.’

‘Okay, coming up! You can go in,’ he heard her saying as he returned the receiver to its vertical cradle on the wall and he thought, Oh great! Not only is she still coming uninvited, now she’s letting random passers-by into the building. Was he too soft on her? he wondered. The problem was that whenever he saw her, he could never be stern enough for long enough to show her he was serious about teaching her anything and instead would be consumed by an overwhelming urge to be the ‘good cop’ even though there was never any ‘bad cop’ around. By the time the knock at the door came he was already looking forward to the hug she was going to give him when he opened the door. But it wasn’t Sonia. It was Diana.

‘Hi, I’m sorry to –’

‘Hey! Come in!’

She was embarrassed. ‘It’s not a bad time?’

‘No, not at all. Where’s Sonia?’

‘She’s gone.’

‘What?’

‘This was a ruse, her idea, to get me to come and visit you. I’d come uptown to have lunch with the McCrays and … sure it’s not inconvenient? I don’t think I’ve ever done anything like –’

‘It’s not a bad time. Please come in. It’s so good to see you. Everything okay?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Really?’