The Street Sweeper (14 page)

‘Not necessarily,’ she said quietly. ‘It might be a contemporary story about people living now but in another society, a contemporary society with other … 
different
values.’

‘Okay, yes. But I’m a professor of history at Columbia University. I’m a student of history. I teach history. Whatever that is, it has something to do with the past. So I ask again, is this story true, untrue, likely to be true, unlikely to be true or is not enough known?’

With her eyes lowered to Adam Zignelik’s shoes, the woman with a straight jet-black hair spoke again. ‘Columbia makes mistakes,’ she said.

Not today, don’t do this to me today, Adam thought.

*

Everyone makes mistakes. Diana was slow to answer when the moving man from Craig’s List buzzed the intercom. She was holding the black-and-white photograph of Adam as a toddler in quilted overalls. She wanted to take it with her. She had looked at it over the last eight years, seen it every day and thought that if she and Adam ever had a son he might look like this toddler in the quilted overalls. She hoped he would. She wanted to be able to go back and hold him, squeeze him, pick up this little boy and protect him from all that was coming, so much of which she knew about. Adam and Diana were each other’s historians. Their familiarity with each other’s lives transcended their respective arrivals in them. In addition to being each other’s historian, they were each other’s best friend and, in a way, they were each other’s guardian.

Diana held the photo in her hand. She could hear the man with the moving van, wheeling his trolley towards the front door of the apartment. She wanted to take the photograph. It wasn’t really hers. Everything had been theirs. Only Adam had been hers. She looked around the living room.

For years they had read the weekend papers together sprawled on the floor in that room or lying on the couch listening to WNYC. There was
a knock at the door. It was the man with the van. He had come for the boxes. This was a huge mistake.

*

Columbia makes mistakes, the student said. Yes, but sometimes Columbia can correct its mistakes. He was an asset in which it had invested unwisely. Adam had just been thinking there was a chance, a slight one, he could make it through the class without imploding, dissolving, expiring or unravelling until the honey-skinned woman with straight jet-black hair – where is she from? – until she reminded everyone and especially him that Columbia makes mistakes. Like everyone, Columbia makes mistakes: discuss. You will never again hold anyone the way you have held Diana: discuss.

‘After the death of his father and then of his infant child, the young man was on a quest that was to last the rest of his life, a quest to rid himself of what he called “the shackles of lust”. Okay, I’m going to go through the categories again and as I do ask each of you to write down your opinion on a scrap of paper. We will collect the scraps and see how many of you place the story into the various categories. Is the story true, untrue, likely to be true, not likely to be true or is not enough known for you to say?’

The students wrote their opinions on scraps of paper and Adam had one of them collect the scraps and deliver them to him at the front of the room. As this was happening he concentrated on his breathing. He could no longer remember the point of tabulating the students’ opinions and then telling them the results. He couldn’t hold on to the point of anything. If it was to demonstrate that the majority can be wrong, he knew that even
they
probably already knew that. He was just trying to make it through the lecture. If they left this class knowing only that Columbia made mistakes and that the majority can be wrong, who was it going to hurt? It wasn’t what he was meant to be teaching them, not exactly, but he figured that in the gap between what he taught them and what he was meant to teach them was perhaps the most useful lesson of all: disappointment. In this way he was able to kid himself that he wasn’t
being irresponsible. Deep down though, he knew that he was just killing time until the time when he didn’t care that that was all he was doing.

He put the scraps of paper into their various categories and announced with surprise that one of the students had, in fact, got the answer right.

‘One of you has been brave enough to get off the fence and ought to be rewarded for this bravery. This student, and there is only one of you, has simply written “true”. The story
is
true. Could that student please raise his or her hand?’

It was the honey-skinned woman with the jet-black straight hair. Everyone looked at her but instead of appearing proud to have been the only person to get it right, her discomfort at the attention was consistent with being singled out as the only person to have got it wrong. Who was this woman? Adam wondered. Was she foreign-born? She didn’t appear to have an accent. What was her ethnicity? Was she incredibly beautiful or was she actually quite ugly? She was so far from plain but any seemingly definitive conclusion as to her attractiveness could be rendered completely unreliable by the slightest tilt of her head, movement of her eyes, shift in the disposition of her lips, or even by a change in the tension and extension of her neck. She was completely striking and yet it was to Adam as though she had appeared in the class for the first time.

‘You said the story was true. You’re right. There were others who said it was
likely
to be true but you didn’t hedge your bets. What made you say it was true?’

‘I put the last bit of information together with everything else you’d already said and I think I know who the young man was.’

‘You gathered from the few facts you had that I was talking about a real historical figure?’

‘Yes.’

‘This is part of what the historian does, an important part. With the facts she knew were solid underneath her, she built a bridge into the unknown. Who do you think the young man in the story is?’

‘I think it’s Gandhi.’

‘Wow! I was
indeed
talking about Gandhi. We don’t tend to think of him as a very young man but this was long before he won an Oscar for his portrayal of Ben Kingsley.’ No one even smiled. Adam concentrated
on his breathing. ‘We don’t tend to think of him as lustful. In fact, we don’t tend to think of him much at all. Let’s, for a moment or two, think of him. Think of this guy, Gandhi.

‘In the middle of the most violent century in the erratic, haunting, tragic, occasionally beautiful and frequently astounding history of our species, this physically timid, skinny, shiny-headed man, who made a point of getting around in drab spun cloth, galvanised millions of disparate, mostly uneducated people and became the spiritual father of the world’s largest democracy. He did it by devising and then practising what we now call the techniques of non-violent civil disobedience. Would this have happened, would he have been the same or a sufficiently similar man without the earlier shame that led him for the rest of his life to want to rid himself of what he called the “shackles of lust”?

‘Perhaps this is really a question better asked of sociologists or anthropologists. Or is it really perhaps a question for psychologists? Should they try to answer it first? Is this
ever
a question for us, for historians? When is it
our
business? What
is
our business anyway? It’s history, isn’t it? That’s what we do, right? What
is
history, anyway? What is history? Let’s spend a little time thinking about this. Not much. Don’t worry, it won’t take long. When you look back on your life, blink and you’ll miss this bit. But let’s consider it now, just before you take that long subway ride all the way downtown. You know the one I mean. This will take less time than it will take you to stop halfway at Staples, to choose the right cartridge for your printer to print off your resume and covering letter, less time than it will take to deliver them and get that job on Wall Street where you can pay off your otherwise crippling student loans in less time than it will take us here today to consider, “What is history?”

‘Okay, let’s go another round. Picture this. In Poland during the Hitler years, a group of German men gathered together and sang Negro spirituals.’ At this the students laughed again. ‘With the facts you know are solid underneath you, build a bridge to the unknown. Is this true, untrue, likely to be true, unlikely to be true or is there not enough known to you to say?’

A young man shot up his hand. ‘It’s untrue.’ Another student, a woman, said, ‘It’s
likely
to be untrue.’

Adam asked, ‘Is it braver to get off the fence or to hedge your bets after bravery has already been conspicuously praised, I wonder? Why is it untrue?’

The student continued. ‘A few reasons. The Nazis were ambivalent at best, if not hostile, to religion. Their racial doctrines regarded African Americans as inferior and definitely not a group with a culture to celebrate and, anyway, they wouldn’t have known any Negro spirituals.’

‘I wouldn’t disagree with any of what you just said. Does anything change if I add some information? Listen. In Poland during the Hitler years, a group of German men gathered together and sang Negro spirituals in the town of Zdroje. It’s a town on the banks of the Oder River. In Poland it’s known as the
Odra
.’ Nobody said anything.

‘Okay,’ said Adam, ‘I’m guessing a map of that part of Europe is not appearing in anyone’s head right now. When were the Hitler years?’

‘From 1933 to 1945,’ said the student who had decided the story was untrue.

‘And when and how did World War II start in Europe?’

‘Germany invaded Poland,’ the student shot back.

‘I didn’t say these German men were singing Negro spirituals in Zdroje
during
the war. Does that help? There were six pre-war years, a bit more, before the invasion of Poland for these men to sing the hymns in. The river’s name is
Oder
in German, but
Odra
in Polish. What does that suggest?’

‘The same river runs through both countries?’

‘It does suggest that. Doesn’t prove it but it does
suggest
it. What we call Paris, the French call
Paree
. Doesn’t mean it’s also in New York but I like the way you’re thinking. If the river runs through both countries then it might be near the border of each country. The town or region within the town known as Zdroje was also known in German as Finkenwalde.’

‘That makes it more likely this area is near the German–Polish border so maybe it was part of Germany before the war,’ a student volunteered without raising his arm.

‘Maybe it does. And if it does, what then?’ Adam asked and got another student’s answer.

‘Then it’s still unlikely to be true because of Nazi ideology with respect to religion and race. No self-respecting Nazi would be singing Negro spirituals, even before the war.’

‘He’s right,’ Adam said. ‘It is unlikely to be true. Sadly, it was terribly unlikely. But I didn’t say that the singers were Nazis. They were Germans, German men. And it
was
true. In the years 1935 to 1937 as Nazism gripped Germany, re-militarised it and as the rest of Europe looked on anxiously, if you went to that part of the town of Stettin known as Finkenwalde in what is now Zdroje, you could have heard a group of German men singing “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” in English.

‘They were being taught the words, the music and the style in which it should be sung by a man who had learned it about a mile from where we are now on West 138 Street. The German singers in Finkenwalde were members of a religious seminary that had been started by a German who had visited New York in 1930, although it was the Far East that really called out to him. He had always wanted to visit India because of his interest in the teachings of Gandhi. But instead he came here. I guess it was easier. What did he see in the New York of 1930? The Rockefeller Center hadn’t been built, the Empire State Building was
being
built, he wasn’t able to get a drink without breaking the law because of prohibition and the rate of unemployment was much higher here than it was even in Germany at that time. He was a student on a teaching fellowship just over there on Broadway at the Union Theological Seminary. He met the American-born, ethnically German theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who wrote extensively on the need for Christians to work actively for social improvement. He devoured American literature and American philosophy and tried to absorb as much of the place as he could. He enjoyed taking excursions around the city and wrote, “If one really tried tasting New York to the full, it would practically be the death of one.” He took a tour of Harlem. It was still the era of the Harlem Renaissance and this white German cleric started reading contemporary African American literature and publications put out by the NAACP.

‘A black student also enrolled at the Union Theological Seminary with whom he became a close friend took him around Harlem and gave him a first-hand look at life there where 170,000 African Americans per
square mile were trying to live. It was through this friendship that this white German man became a regular attendee of the Abyssinian Baptist Church of Adam Clayton Powell, junior
and
senior, on West 138 Street, which was where he heard “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”.

‘He was terribly affected by the manner in which the congregation there worshipped. He’d never seen anything like it. The passion with which these people seemed to love their God and their religion contrasted sharply with the patterns of austere worship of the congregations he knew at home. He bought gramophone recordings of the spirituals, took them with him back to Germany and later, in even more difficult times, he taught them to the theology students under his supervision in Finkenwalde. By the way, some of you will have met Professor Charles McCray, chair of the department. Well, his father, William McCray, knew the man who showed this white German cleric around Harlem in 1930.’

*

Approximately once a week, sometimes more, William McCray would come to his son’s office at Fayerweather Hall on the Columbia campus. It was always at the end of the day. They would talk for a while about politics, economics, history, the state of the world, before going back to Charles’ home to have dinner with Charles’ wife Michelle and their daughter Sonia. William, a veteran of both World War II and the civil rights movement, was now in his eighties but he lived on his own in an apartment not far from Columbia and therefore not far from Charles and his family. Charles and Michelle worried about him living on his own but he valued his independence; indeed, he was proud of it.