The Street Sweeper (19 page)

‘Why can’t history tell us what’s going to happen next? It’s because it deals with people and they are, as much as if not more than most animals, unpredictable. They can’t even be relied upon to do what they
themselves
did previously in similar circumstances, or to do what is obviously in their own interest. People are unpredictable, individually and collectively, ordinary people and powerful leaders.

‘How do you explain the following?’ Adam continued. ‘When Joseph Stalin was informed in advance of the precise date of the planned German invasion of the USSR in 1941, he ignored it, feeling certain there wouldn’t be any German attack without Hitler first issuing some
kind of ultimatum. The reports he was sent detailing the date of the German attack were rejected as “doubtful and misleading information”. Did Stalin, that monstrously paranoid, brutal megalomaniac suddenly trust Hitler? No, of course not. This was a man who had been tempered in the flames of a place and time charged with suspicion, with factions within factions, with secrecy and espionage, and with betrayal and murder, a man whose suspicion, once awakened, could not be put back to sleep, a man who, according to his own daughter, “saw enemies everywhere. It had reached the point of being pathological …” No, he didn’t trust Hitler. He just trusted the organs of his own intelligence services even less. And so fearful of Stalin was everybody around him that nobody would contradict him. Even once the German attack had started Stalin thought that perhaps certain German generals were acting on their own without Hitler’s knowledge or approval. Even when his own generals sent back reports of the invasion and of Russian troop losses he didn’t order the Red Army to fight back. He had to wait until Berlin had confirmed that it really was at war with Russia.

‘Who in their right mind would have predicted a response like this from Stalin? People are unpredictable individually let alone collectively, too unpredictable for history to be able to tell us what’s going to happen next. There are now some six billion of us. Each of us has 100 billion neurons, each neuron has a thousand or more synapses and all of this gives rise to our own individual consciousness, to our own emotions and thoughts, and to the actions these determine. Don’t ever let anyone fault history for being unable to predict the future when the natural sciences have trouble getting tomorrow’s weather right.’

*

A young girl, a light-skinned black girl aged between seven and nine, her hair in braids tied tight with ribbons, struggled to stay upright on a crowded bus in Manhattan. As she stood there, engulfed by the odour of the squash of people, she heard snatches of conversation, many of them one side of mobile phone dialogues. ‘Well, at least I got my resumé done before work … so that’s good,’ a young man said. Two older
men she could barely see were talking loudly enough for others to hear. ‘… Just takes votes away from Hillary … like Nader,’ to which the other man replied, ‘What’re you, an idiot? What’re you talking about? It’s the primaries.’ A woman spoke into her mobile phone. ‘She said there weren’t any appointments till November … November! … I don’t know … and the freakin’ bus isn’t moving.’ The little girl listened to every word as the bus trip dragged on. Her school bag was weighing her down. At times when her view of the passing street names was obstructed she referred to a map of her route in her head. She thought she might be the smallest person on the bus. It was getting late.

*

Lamont Williams stood in the doorway.

‘Mr Mandelbrot, I was here before. I just wanted to –’

‘I know who you are,’ Mr Mandelbrot said to Lamont Williams.

‘I just wanted to say … I’m sorry … you know … I’m sorry about before.’

‘What are you talking about? What are you saying sorry about?’

‘I had to rush off like that. I didn’t … I didn’t mean to … like … show you … disrespect.’

‘You had to work.’

‘Yeah, but it’s more than that … for me. See, I’m … new here. I only just started. I’m kinda part of a program.’

‘A program?’

‘See, I’m on probation here, Mr Mandelbrot.’

‘Probation?’ Mr Mandelbrot propped himself up in bed and as he did the sleeve of his left arm was pushed up towards the old man’s elbow. This was when Lamont Williams saw a series of small bluish-green numbers tattooed on the patient’s arm.

*

‘So, with the unpredictability of human beings,’ Adam Zignelik continued, ‘with all these caveats, qualifications and limitations, what’s the use
of history? There are a few and none of them are unimportant. While history can’t tell us exactly what’s going to happen next, it can suggest certain things we should or should not do the next time something similar happens again. That history hasn’t been used in this way more often is not the fault of history. Either we
fail
to see that it
is
something similar to that which has happened before, or we don’t even know what happened before because we don’t know any history or else our vision of the present is so clouded by our national, ethnic, racial, political, religious or even personal mythologies that we’re unable to recognise even the shape of the outline of the suggestions history is providing.

‘History can provide comfort in difficult or even turbulent and traumatic times. It shows us what our species has been through before and that we survived. It can help to know we’ve made it through more than one dark age. And history is vitally important because perhaps as much as, if not more than biology, the past owns us and however much we think we can, we cannot escape it. If you only knew how close you are to people who seem so far from you … it would astonish you.

‘Also, it’s a way of honouring those who came before us. We can tell their stories. Wouldn’t you want someone to tell your story? Ultimately, it’s the best proof there is that we mattered. And what else is life from the time you were born but a struggle to matter, at least to someone?’

‘Sweetheart,’ he heard Diana whisper, ‘you’re meant to be talking to your students. You’re talking to yourself. There’ll be time for that.’

*

Holding his satchel by its handle, Adam Zignelik put the key inside the front door of his apartment but was afraid to turn it, afraid to open the door to his own home. He didn’t know how he would be when he opened it and saw how the place looked without Diana or any of her things. There was so much he didn’t know. He didn’t know that on 23 June 1940, the day Hitler entered Paris, Barbara Wertheim married Dr Lester Tuchman in New York City. When Dr Tuchman looked about him at the state of the world he saw nothing to recommend it as a place for bringing up children. But the new Mrs Tuchman met his argument
with her own. It was wrong, she argued, to wait for things to improve because it might mean waiting forever. If they were ever going to have children they should have them now and to hell with Hitler. Her view prevailed and they had three daughters. Adam didn’t know any of this and there was no one to tell him. Both his parents were dead and he had no siblings. So, notwithstanding his admiration for Barbara Tuchman, this aspect of her life was unknown to him and therefore incapable of inspiring him to take a chance and have a child with Diana irrespective of what was to happen to him professionally. Armed with this ignorance, he stood, almost forty, with the key in the front door of his apartment, afraid to go inside and see how it looked without Diana.

Eventually, he turned the key and went in. Inside it was far worse than he had imagined it would be. The absence of the walls of boxes revealed a greater, more gaping absence. He had done this. He had caused it. The bookshelves looked like bomb craters. He flung his briefcase on the couch. He could still smell her. How long would that last? How long would he want it to last? He went to the pantry, poured himself a Scotch as fast as he could and began telling her about his day.

‘I did the “true, untrue, likely to be true, unlikely to be true” one today. I took them from Gandhi to Bonhoeffer, Adam Clayton Powell Jr, Jean Lasserre, Blaskowitz, Hitler, Zhukov, Konev and Stalin. And guess what? Somebody guessed Gandhi! Really! A woman, I think she might be subcontinental, ethnically anyway. I’m guessing. She looks older than most of the others. I have to go to Charles’ and Michelle’s. Do you think I should change? I don’t have to change, do I? They won’t even notice what I’m wearing. We’ll be so busy talking about you.’

He arrived at Charles’ and Michelle’s apartment slightly late and slightly drunk but no one noticed. Nor did anyone other than Sonia mention Diana that evening. Everyone there had earlier come up with their own private explanation for her absence and, thinking they knew the reason and that it was pleasantly trivial, they didn’t check with Adam for confirmation. They were in any case too preoccupied, too thrown, too shaken by other news. Adam joined in this conversation and because of the primacy and immediacy of it he didn’t even have to discuss his stalled career with Charles. When Sonia, about to go to bed, quietly
asked him to say ‘Hi’ to Diana for her, Adam briefly shut his eyes and nodded once. She went to hug him as she said good night and, holding her in his arms slightly longer than usual, his torso moved as though in spasm and he thought he might be about to break down.

*

Earlier that day Professor Charles McCray had sat at his desk in his office in Fayerweather Hall on the Columbia campus talking to his father. They were just about to leave to go to Charles’ home to have dinner with Michelle, Sonia and Adam when the phone rang. Charles let it ring out. It rang again and this time Charles took the call.

‘Hello, Charles McCray. What? What? No, I don’t know anything about it,’ he said to the person on the other end of the line. ‘Well, I haven’t checked my email in a little while … okay, let me check it now.’

Charles put down the phone without saying goodbye to the caller, and without any apology to his father checked his email. Numerous emails had come in since he had last checked. They were all on the same topic and reading the first one was enough to tell him what had happened. The others merely confirmed it. What he read strained credulity. The distress it delivered had the immediacy of a long past hurt recalled by a scent or odour. His pain battled with his need to hide it from his father, and the battleground was his face. He was angry. He wasn’t going to be able to keep this from his father. It shouldn’t be kept from him. Probably he should be the one to tell him but he was completely unprepared for this and didn’t know how to tell him. The news could literally kill him.

*

‘I’m on probation here at Sloan-Kettering as part of a … sort of … what they call a program.’

‘A program, what kind of program?’ Lamont swallowed. He felt he wasn’t making much sense and, anyway, what was he doing there visiting a patient he didn’t know? He didn’t really know anyone there, not even his co-workers. He didn’t want to lose his job. The point of his life now was
to get to a position where he could try to find his daughter, if not that day then one day soon. There would be many steps to take and he’d take them one day at a time as he had now for years. But right now it was time to go home. This was another day and he’d made it safely through to the end. Things were okay. So get out, go home, he thought to himself. But when he saw the numbers tattooed on the old man’s arm he couldn’t move. The numbers held him there where he stood. Lamont had seen tattoos of all kinds in prison but never anything like this. It wasn’t decorative, it was functional. This looked like the old man had been catalogued, as though he woke up every day wearing a primitive kind of bar-code waiting to be scanned, as though the man had been the product of an assembly line.

‘It’s a … like a pilot program. See … I … I done time, Mr Mandelbrot. I was –’

‘Time?’

‘Yeah, I was … I was in prison. So this is … This job … They’re kinda giving me another chance here and I –’

‘Did you do something wrong, Mr Lamont?’

‘They
said
I did …’ Lamont Williams’ words hung in the air of the cancer patient’s room. ‘But I didn’t.’

They looked at each other for a moment without speaking. The old man’s eyes seemed more alive than the rest of him. Not old, not sick, they vigorously took in all of the visitor from Building Services, sized him up, measured him and his words, swallowed what they saw and then fed them back to a sick old man who some weeks earlier had been mistakenly left on York Avenue to get some air while everyone around him tried to smoke away their particular anxieties. He had been cold, coughing, ignored and alone on the street when he first came into contact with the man who now stood before him. This man had taken a risk for him. Now he caught the man trying not to look at the number on his forearm. He had invited him to come back and he
had
. Neither of them fully understood why. Someone, some people had said that this man had done something wrong. He said he hadn’t. He wasn’t believed and he went inside for six years. Then he came out and had six months to make it on his own. They’d be watching him. This was the system and he was one of the lucky ones. They both were.

‘A program … I understand a program,’ Mr Mandelbrot said.

*

‘What’s wrong?’ William McCray asked his son. Charles was going to have to tell his father. He had no choice but to tell him but he decided to wait till he got him home and made him a drink. He was going to have to be quick on his feet and make something up to distract his father’s attention from the truth on the way home. He knew his father had had a nose for the truth all his life so it would be a mistake to say something too fanciful. He had to think fast. But he was having trouble coping with his own distress. As they walked from the campus to the apartment everything seemed a little surreal. He waved to some colleagues in the distance. There were some students walking down the street in the same direction as Charles and his father. If they were to strike up a conversation with them it might distract his father for at least some of the way home. But then the students might want to talk to Charles about the very thing he was trying to keep from him till they got home. The students had just acknowledged him with a wave. They were catching up. Any second they would be within speaking distance. If Charles was able to recognise them he wondered if he might be able to pre-empt the conversation, steer it towards a topic of his choosing. He looked at his old father walking steadily, determinedly. The students were getting closer. Charles couldn’t place them precisely enough to ask a sensible question. However this unfolded was going to be out of his hands. ‘Good night, Professor.’ ‘Good night,’ he answered uncertainly. The students walked past them. As soon as they got home Charles checked
The New York Times
online. Michelle and Sonia greeted William. Soon Adam Zignelik would arrive. But first Charles sat his father down in a room alone.