The Street Sweeper

  Lamont’s thoughts took him back for a moment to Danny Ehrlich’s kitchen and Mrs Ehrlich’s admiration of the toy before he shook himself and was suddenly re-deposited back in Dan Ehrlich’s office, the office of the Head of Human Resources, some thirty years later. Under the terms of the pilot program for ex-prisoners the hospital was entitled to terminate its employment of and association with any given ex-prisoner without warning, written or otherwise, without explanation, indeed without just cause, up until the expiration of the six-month probation period. At the expiration of six months, the ex-prisoner was to be subject to the same rights and entitlements as any other employee of the hospital. Henryk Mandelbrot had died some two weeks shy of the expiration of six months from the day Lamont Williams had begun work in Building Services.

  ‘The family of the deceased patient –’

  ‘Mr Mandelbrot.’

  ‘Ah … yeah, the Mandelbrots were particularly upset about the missing –’

  ‘Mr Ehrlich, he gave it to me.’

  ‘I told them that was your position but they –’

  ‘Mr Ehrlich, it’s not my position. It’s my candleholder. He gave it to me as a gift. We were friends. I used to go there after my shift. I –’

  ‘Mr Williams, they wanted to press charges.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘They wanted you charged.’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Theft, I suppose.’

  ‘I can’t be charged with –’

  ‘Mr Williams, I didn’t let on that you were ever in prison. I didn’t even give them your name. They wanted the item back and I told them we didn’t have it.’

  ‘Where’d you say it was?’

  ‘I told them the truth – that I didn’t know where it was. They said that they’d seen a janitor hanging around the patient’s room and –’

  ‘They said I stole it?’

  ‘They can’t identify you but the hospital is liable for –’

  ‘I have it.’

  ‘Mr Williams, to avoid further unpleasantness and any possible negative press the hospital is going to reimburse the family for an agreed value of the item but –’

  ‘I still have it.’

  ‘It’s too late to do –’

  ‘He gave it to me and I still have it.’

  ‘Mr Williams, the hospital has kept your identity from the Mandelbrot family and that wasn’t easy but we’re going to have to let you go. We won’t be reporting the allegation of theft to the Department of Correctional Services. We’ll just say that things didn’t quite work out but there’s no way we can continue to employ you. I’m sorry but it’s just too –’

  ‘This is bullshit, man!’

  ‘Lamont, what the fuck do you want? It was the best I could do.’

  The two men looked at each other with an intensity they’d not been able to muster since before the incident with the Shogun Warrior action figure some thirty years earlier.

  ‘Lamont, I’m trying to help you make the best of a bad –’

  ‘It’s a menorah.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The item … it’s called a menorah, Danny. He told me ‘bout it. Got to do with the Maccabees.’

  *

  Adam Zignelik wondered if it was his imagination or was he now regularly recognised by the bar staff at the Chi bar in the Chicago Sheraton? He had arrived in Chicago the previous day and had spent all of the day making copies of as many of Border’s papers as time permitted to take back with him to New York. Certainly by then the staff of the Galvin Library at IIT knew well who he was. Today he was to be meeting Wayne Rosenthal, Henry Border’s former student who had for so long refused to meet him. One day, Adam promised himself, he would visit Chicago and actually stay at the Sheraton where they were meeting but today was not that day and he took a cab there from the place he usually stayed and had nicknamed for himself ‘the truck stop’.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind, Dr Zignelik, but I would prefer it if I wasn’t recorded. I’m happy for you to take notes but –’

  ‘No, that’s fine. Absolutely. And it’s Adam by the way.’

  ‘Thank you … Adam. Well, feel free to call me Wayne.’

  Dressed conservatively in a jacket and tie and carrying a leather satchel, Wayne Rosenthal was an intelligent-looking man of about eighty with perfectly trimmed silver hair. He immediately picked which of the people sitting on their own in the bar was Adam Zignelik, and they shook hands. The retired psychologist draped his overcoat over his chair, sat down at a table and volunteered that he was to call his granddaughter – it was she who had brought him there – when he wished to be picked up. Adam discerned that the man before him, Dr Wayne Rosenthal, possessed all his mental faculties but he suspected that the reference to being picked up at the end of their time together was more to calm himself than to answer a question Adam hadn’t asked and whose answer he didn’t really need to know. In order to relax him Adam, playing amateur psychologist, thought to begin by outlining what he already knew about Border’s work and about his life and who he had already interviewed.

  ‘Yes, well, Arch and the others – was it Amy you spoke to? She’s a lovely person – they didn’t quite have the kind of relationship with Dr Border that I had.’ He paused to take a sip of tonic water.

  ‘I’ve never really … I’ve never really discussed Dr Border with my family, not even with my late wife. It just … There wasn’t any point. You see, it was personal with us and not just with us. He had a daughter.’

  ‘Elly.’

  ‘Yes, Elly. I don’t know what the others told you.’

  ‘Well, without meaning to embarrass you, they intimated that there might have been feelings between you and Elly.’

  Wayne Rosenthal picked up his glass and held it in both hands and sat forward. ‘There’s nobody this can hurt now. I was deeply in love with her. I hadn’t met my wife yet and yes, Elly and I … we had plans.’

  Wayne Rosenthal took Adam to the day of Evie Harmon’s party, when late in the afternoon, just by chance, he came across the uncategorised wire recording that contained Hannah Weiss’ account of her sister Estusia and Ala and Rosa’s smuggling of gunpowder to the men in the Sonderkommando resistance and of the uprising itself.

  ‘He had to have been at least as angry with himself as he was with me,’ Wayne Rosenthal said, sitting in the bar of the Chicago Sheraton and looking out ahead of him.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ Adam asked.

  ‘Well, when you think about it, he almost got away with hiding the spool.’

  ‘I don’t get you.’

  ‘I was the only person, other than him, who understood Yiddish, who knew how to work Marv Cadden’s wire recorder and who had access to the spools. There was no one else. It was only me. And he had taken the trouble of removing it from the other piles. No one else would have had the chutzpah to go about his office the way I did. I mean … in my mind … I thought he was going to be my father-in-law. Hell, I thought I was helping him do really … incredibly important work.

  ‘I mean, you have to imagine it. This was half a dozen or so years after the war. I was so in love with Elly. We were due to be going to a party and I’m in her father’s office. I’m alone and I put on this wire recording. She’d met my parents. You know? And then … then I hear this woman’s story. I hadn’t intended to keep listening to the whole interview. I only wanted to know which pile to put it in.’

  He took another sip of his drink before continuing.

  ‘Every interview on those wires … they were all harrowing and people didn’t know these things then, not in that kind of detail. And you were hearing from the mouths of those who’d lived it. But this one, this one was something else again. The woman was clearly trying to control herself.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, he’d made her angry by getting her to stick to his regimen for what was to be the first of two interviews and by the time she got to the second one … she felt it was
a chance to save, in some sense, her sister, to save her memory at least. She started to tell the whole thing; how they’d been approached by the woman … by Rosa … she wasn’t much older than Elly was when I found the wire.’

  ‘When did you suspect that Rosa might have been Border’s wife?’

  Completely thrown, Wayne Rosenthal sat back in his chair.

  ‘How do you know about that?’ he asked in astonishment before answering his own question. ‘Amy … Amy Muirden told you, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was putting it all together in my mind all the way from his office to the house where we were all supposed to leave together for the party.’

  In spite of the more than fifty years that had passed, Adam could see that Wayne Rosenthal was still very deeply affected by what had happened. It was clear in the way he recounted the events. It was likely, Adam speculated, that he had never discussed them with anyone else.

  The favourite student had pieced things together and when he had put his hypothesis to his mentor, Border had refused to comment directly. Instead he insisted that Wayne Rosenthal never touch the wire recording again and simply banned him from seeing Elly, effective immediately. In an impetuous act of will, Border tried to prevent Elly finding out that he had abandoned her mother by simply forbidding her from seeing the only other person who knew, and forbidding him from contacting her.

  Border had taken Elly aside that night at the Harmons’ party and, without offering any explanation, he had from that moment on forbidden her from having any contact with Wayne. She begged him to explain why but he wouldn’t. To her the evening suddenly became a kind of nightmare. Her father was behaving irrationally, Wayne was refusing to talk to her for fear of Border making a scene in public and she, younger than all the other guests, was expected to behave with her usual grace. Unable to keep up the pretence for very long, she broke down crying and sought comfort in the company of Russell Ford and his mother, Callie Pearson, who were helping out with the serving of drinks and hors d’oeuvres. For all that Russell knew her well and wanted to be of comfort, it was not only that he had to work, but instinctively he knew to flee any place where he might be caught alone with a crying white girl. Even Callie whispered to her that whatever the matter was, it was going to have to wait till they got home.

  ‘You don’t be doin’ no one no favours you be off cryin’ with the “help”.’

  Elly stood shattered, bewildered, tear-stained and utterly alone among all the people she loved. Her father had brought her from Poland to the United States in just such a fit of will as had created this circumstance that evening at Evie Harmon’s party.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell her? It must have been pretty traumatic for her,’ Adam asked Wayne Rosenthal.

  ‘As I understand it, it was incredibly traumatic for her.’

  ‘As you understand it?’

  ‘I think she suffered some kind of breakdown after this.’

  ‘What, did you never speak to her again?’

  ‘No, I did.’

  ‘But you didn’t tell her why all this had happened?’

  ‘Dr Border intimated to her that he knew something about me and that it was best for her if he didn’t tell her what it was, but that for her own sake, we shouldn’t see each other any more.’

  ‘Didn’t she ask you what you’d done?’

  ‘She did. I told her I hadn’t done anything and that she should ask her father why he was forbidding us from seeing each other.’

  ‘But didn’t you tell her the truth, the real reason her father had broken you two up?’

  The retired psychologist sat back in his chair for a moment. A cocktail waitress enquired as to whether either of them wanted another drink but neither of them did. Wayne Rosenthal stretched slightly and then he leaned back in.

  ‘I’ve thought about this many times over the years. I don’t think I can defend it but … perhaps I can explain it. Perhaps not. We were young, even I was still in my early twenties. I looked up to the man and I’d been shaken by what I’d learned about him and his wife. I think I hoped that he would think it over and sooner or later relent. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just rationalising my moral cowardice. It was hard to be in contact in those days if you were young, lived at home and your parents were watching you.

  ‘Like I said, she had some kind of breakdown in the immediate aftermath of the whole thing and within a year … everything had changed.’

  ‘What had changed?’

  ‘Well, she’d gone off to New York for college. The plan had been for us to be together while she was at college but by that time … I’d met the woman who was to be my wife.’

  ‘So you never told her what you knew about her mother, about her role in the revolt in Auschwitz, her heroism?’

  ‘Once she’d moved away and … and I’d met my wife, I don’t actually remember which came first but … well, I thought … You see, the urgency had been taken out of it and I told myself that one day I’d track her down and tell her. I thought maybe she’d move back to Chicago.’

  ‘And did she?’

  ‘No, as far as I know she stayed in New York, had some job for a while in something to do with civil rights, something like the NAACP, and then eventually she became a teacher.’

  ‘The NAACP?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘In New York?’

  ‘Yeah, but it can’t have been for long because I know for a fact that she was teaching at a school in Brooklyn around the time her father died and also for a while there afterwards. What was its name? I should remember it ‘cause it was in the news in the late 1960s and she was still there then … as late as ‘68. She was involved in some kind of union business. That’s how I tracked her down, through the United Federation of Teachers. What was the school? Oh yeah! Ocean Hill-Brownsville. I made a note of it ‘cause I’d meant to track her down after Dr Border died.

  ‘See, I’d decided that I would wait until after he’d died to tell her and that way, not rob her of her father … or him of his daughter. The only family they had was each other.’

  ‘So you waited.’

  ‘I waited. I read in an IIT newsletter that Dr Border had died and that’s when I thought I’d track her down and tell her. Well, it wasn’t that easy. I had a family, children and everything by then.’

  ‘But you found her.’

  ‘Yes, I found her, but by then I wasn’t sure it was morally right to tell her. I mean she’d lost her father, the only parent she’d ever known, a man who loved her more than anything else, which is where the whole trouble started, and here I was with the capacity to take him away from her again. I wasn’t sure that was the right thing to do. She had no one, she was an orphan.’

  ‘An orphan?’

  ‘Well, that’s what I thought at the time. How old can you be and still be an orphan?’

  ‘Sooner or later we’re all orphans,’ Adam said to himself.

  ‘I guess that’s right. She lived in Greenwich Village. Maybe she was bohemian or some kind of hippy or something, I don’t know. However she lived, it seems she was dedicated to the things she believed in … from what I learned. I just hope she wasn’t alone … when she died.’

  ‘She died?’

  ‘Some time not long after the Ocean Hill-Brownsville union thing.’

  ‘How’d she die?’

  ‘I asked a guy from the union when I was trying to track her down in the late ‘60s …’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘The union guy didn’t say?’

  ‘He wouldn’t say. I suspect he knew.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, he seemed to know a lot about her, at least professionally. Seems she’d been in the teachers’ union a while, got quite involved, quite high up. Have you heard of the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin?’

  ‘Sure. I knew him. I mean, I met him a few times when I was a kid. My father knew him well. Why?’

  ‘Apparentl
y, they were friends. The union guy said he’d been something of a mentor to her.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what he said.’

  Adam wondered if she’d ever met his father. How would he ever know? What did it matter? How tantalisingly small the world was, he thought, and then his thoughts returned to the man opposite him.

  ‘But he didn’t tell you how she died?’

  ‘No, I asked him but he said he didn’t know. It was the late ‘60s. She was still … so young.’

  ‘And she never knew about her mother?’

  ‘Not as far as I know,’ said the elderly psychologist, now staring into space.

  Adam explained that he’d tracked down the interviewee, Hannah Weiss, sister of Estusia.

  ‘She’s still alive?’

  ‘Yes, still alive and living in an aged care facility not far from where I grew up in Melbourne.’

  ‘Australia?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Did you tell her the personal significance of her testimony to Dr Border?’

  ‘Yes, I did, but I don’t know that it counted for much with her and I had to admit that I had neither heard the recording of her interview nor read the transcript of it. No one’s come across it yet.’

  ‘Well, you couldn’t have read it because he never got around to transcribing it. And you won’t find the wire spool either.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I never gave it back to him,’ Wayne Rosenthal said, and then reaching into his leather satchel the retired psychologist pulled out a plastic bag and added, ‘It’s in here. You may as well have it. I didn’t know who to leave it to anyway.’

  ‘That’s the interview with Hannah Weiss?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘That’s where she tells the story of the women who smuggled the gunpowder from the munitions factory, the uprising and the execution of the women?’