The Street Sweeper (22 page)

‘Now you know how Charlie must feel.’

‘Because he’s
your
son?’

‘No, I didn’t mean that. Not exactly.’

‘Because he’s black?’

‘Sure. He’s the first African American chair of the department. He’s watching people looking at him and he’s wondering if they’re thinking he’s really earned it or if it’s just that it’s time. Are they thinking that he’s the lucky one, the black man who happened to be there when the liberals’ guilt or shame got too much?’

‘He’s said that to you?’

‘Not in so many words.’

‘Really? With complete justification, he’s a pretty confident academic. William, I’d be very surprised if he said that in
any
words.’

‘Adam, he doesn’t have to say it.’ William took a sip of his coffee and turned his gaze briefly outside and up to the spires.

‘Adam, I hope you won’t mind, I don’t think it will surprise you but Charlie and I
have
talked about you. I do know a little about your professional situation. Actually, it’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about … as well as about you and Diana. After all, your personal situation and your professional situation are connected. Now look, I know that your research has stopped. Charlie told me. I think he’s let you down –’

‘Oh no! William, there’s nothing he can do. He’s been a great friend and –’

‘Adam, I may have something for you.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that I think I have a topic for you, something important, something that needs to be written about.’

‘But it’s … William, you’re kind even to give it some thought but … No, it’s too late for me.’

‘Adam, you’re much too young to know how much time you’ve got left.’

‘No, I mean the committee meets soon. They won’t, they … they
can’t
give me tenure and –’

‘You’re a historian, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I’ve got something you might want to consider researching. I didn’t say anything about tenure. I didn’t say anything about Columbia, did I? Someone will pay if you do good work. You think you’re in a difficult position? As I understand it you
are
in a difficult position. But I would have thought that in your life you’d studied and written enough about people in difficult positions to be ashamed to throw in the towel so easily. Are you really going to tell me you won’t even hear me out? There’ll always be time to quit, I promise you.’

Adam Zignelik took the old man’s hands in his hands for a moment and squeezed.

‘You’re somethin’ else, you know that?’

‘I
know
what
I
am. We’re talking about you. What kind of man are you?’

‘All right, councillor, I’m listening.’

*

Lamont Williams talked very little at work, even to his colleagues in Building Services. Most of the time as he made his rounds, however far his thoughts might have roamed, he kept them to himself. He often thought of his daughter as he collected the garbage, mopped the hallways and swept the floors. Where was she? Was she at school? What was she learning? But now he was thinking about cancer. It was all around him. Sometimes it went for children. In every room at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center there was a patient who had some kind of cancer. There had to have been a time, he thought, when they didn’t have it. Then the moment came when they were told that they had it and everything was changed for them. The moment of the telling would become something the patient would never forget. It was the moment at which a wall descended with the speed and terror of the blade of the guillotine to instantly divide time in two – the time he had been well, and the time his life was on notice. Where do you go with the news? Where do you take it? Do you take it home? In each room was a patient with his or her own set of answers. It reminded him of the time he was sentenced.
The moment he was convicted everything changed. Even after he was arrested with his childhood friend Michael and another younger man he barely knew, there had been the possibility that his version of events would be believed and he would be found ‘not guilty’ of armed robbery. He’d had that hope. But the moment he heard the word ‘guilty’ a wall appeared in his life dividing his days forever between the days he only suspected he might not be believed and the day his suspicion proved to be warranted and he was deprived of his liberty.

He was thinking about this as he collected the garbage and reached the room of a patient with whom he had, in a short space of time, become fascinated. This old man, with his unusual way of talking, seemed to have singled out Lamont as no one else in the institution had. The man was an odd mix of humour and tired, almost sad, resignation. Many of their respective words were lost on the other yet he felt in a way strangely understood by this odd old white man. Visiting and listening to the man was somehow calming. It was critically important for Lamont not to get distracted during his shift but at the end of the day, before going home, it was a huge relief to have this man take him away from concerns about money, about the security of his job, about the way the day had gone and whether the way his supervisor had looked at him bode good or ill or nothing at all for him.

The old man looked at everything, including Lamont, unlike the way any other people Lamont had ever encountered did. It was as though the old man didn’t live in the real world of traffic on crowded streets, buses, subway stations, police, lawyers, courts, upstate penitentiaries, social workers, welfare, television, advertising, bodegas and supermarkets. Even the medical staff didn’t seem to genuinely permeate this man’s world. From what Lamont could see, it was as though the man was humouring them. He tolerated them. He played with them even though, surely, Lamont reasoned, he needed them. With his wispy hair and frail body the man floated through all this or perhaps above all of it, like someone in a fantasy. If, sitting on a bus for instance, Lamont’s mind turned to the man, he appeared almost mythical, no more real than a creature of Ray Harryhausen’s making he remembered from childhood. But the old man in the bed in the ward was certainly real. And though his cancer
was real too, he never seemed afraid. More than anything he had said to Lamont up to then, this was what was most seductive about time spent in this man’s company. No one else Lamont had spoken to since leaving prison had seemed so intoxicatingly unafraid.

When he came again the old patient was being visited by the tall young black woman he’d seen in Mr Mandelbrot’s room before, the seemingly no-nonsense young oncologist, Dr Washington. He knocked once on the door just to announce his presence and, without making eye contact with either of them, went straight for the garbage. There were some candy wrappers in the bin. The bin was too far from the bed for the wrappers to belong to the old man and, he reasoned, the strictly business young oncologist was unlikely to be eating candy with him so Lamont interpreted the signs as suggesting the old man had had at least one visitor. The tentative conclusion pleased him. He didn’t like to think of the old man as lonely and the realisation of this made him smile to himself. He was, himself, often lonely. He tried to creep out of the room without drawing attention to himself. What kind of cancer did the old man have?

‘There he is!’ he heard Mr Mandelbrot say. ‘He doesn’t visit me when you’re around.’

Lamont Williams turned back to face them with the smallest hint of a smile before urging his trolley on down the corridor away from the old man’s room.

*

‘In 1948,’ William McCray told Adam Zignelik, ‘President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9948 declaring that from then on there would be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services regardless of race, colour, religion or national origin. You would know this and you’d know that he did it about three years too late for me and for men like me who fought in World War II. There were young black men in Europe and in Asia fighting for a country that segregated them from the majority of their countrymen even as they fought the same enemy for the same country. We were fighting for values
fundamental to the very essence of what it means to be a human being. I want to say we were fighting for freedom but now, when I talk about freedom in this context I’m not talking about it as a concept debased by virtue of its appropriation by conservative economic and political ideologues over the last twenty or thirty years. I’m not talking about freedom to ignore Jim Crow laws or freedom to ignore the separation of Church and State or freedom from government intervention in the alleviation of chronic poverty or freedom to carry semi-automatic weapons around your neighbourhood or freedom to incite racial hatred under cover of the First Amendment.’ Adam loved this man. He was forever fighting the good fight. William barely took time to draw breath before continuing.

‘I’m talking about the inalienable freedom to live as a citizen of a country with rights equal to those of all other citizens of that country. In some cases I’m talking about the very first freedom: the freedom just to live. This is what we were fighting for.

‘We started off doing menial chores; cleaning, cooking, lifting, hauling, delivering equipment, driving and waiting on white officers. But as the needs of the armed forces grew they were forced to confront their own prejudice. They badly needed men to fight the Nazis. They had access to a pool of healthy strong young men but they’d always considered these men inferior, inherently inferior. But now Hitler was calling, and the needs of the war demanded that black men be permitted to fight, and fight we did.

‘When we got the chance, hell, did we fight! In towns right across Europe we fought the Nazis; sometimes it was street-to-street combat. We fought them hard and close, street by street. But when the streets were liberated and under Allied control, the liberating black soldiers were banned from them, forbidden to use those same streets we had just taken. We saw our friends maimed or killed taking those streets, maimed and killed taking German prisoners of war. Some of us were put under the command of vicious white – often southern – officers. It was thought that these men knew how to get the best out of coloured men. They even had us sit behind the German POWs at the USO shows. We were fighting and dying every day but you never see us in the war movies
just like you didn’t see us in the newsreels. Our own grandchildren barely know what we did.

‘Adam, somebody’s got to tell them. Somebody’s got to tell people what we did. You see, when we got home a lot of us couldn’t let things go back to the way they were before the war. We just couldn’t after what we’d been through, after what we’d done. A lot of the impetus for the civil rights movement came from these returned soldiers and I don’t think people know this.’

‘No, you’re right, there hasn’t been all that much written about it, not that aspect.’

‘You want to trace the steps of certain individuals from their war experience to their work in the movement after the war. Nobody’s done that, have they?’

‘No, I don’t think anyone
has
done that. But, William, that doesn’t mean
I
should be the one.’

‘I don’t want to hear that. There isn’t time. These are old men we’re talking about and already there aren’t many of them left.’

‘Look, you’re right, it’s very important work, but you should probably talk to Charlie about getting somebody else because –’ The old man took Adam Zignelik surprisingly firmly by the wrist and changed his tone to one of force.

‘I’m talking to
you
. Listen to me; I got a friend in Boston, a black man, a veteran of the civil rights movement and a veteran of the Second World War. Now you want to talk to him and don’t tell me you don’t. You didn’t know what to write about. That’s what stopped you. You split up from Diana. Well, this man was in the outfit that liberated Dachau. Do you know what he saw? Do you know what he thought when he saw it and do you know what he did when he came home with those thoughts? What does a man do with those thoughts? I think you want to talk to him. Don’t you look at me and tell me you don’t want to tell the story of a man like that.’

*

What kind of cancer did the old man have? The question stayed with Lamont throughout the day. He wondered how he could find out. Since
starting work there he’d learned that some days a patient you had seen just the day before could, without any announcement, suddenly no longer be there the next morning and the thought had arisen that this could happen to his strange old new friend, Mr Mandelbrot. He imagined it happening and imagined it too well. He felt a sadness at the prospect of the old man’s passing that he hadn’t expected. At the end of the day, when he had completed all his duties, he quietly made his way back to the old man’s room. Mr Mandelbrot was there and alone.

‘Mr Lamont, come in. You don’t want to take any chances. You have to take chances in this life. Come in, come in.’

‘Hey, Mr Mandelbrot. How you doin’?’

‘You are not someone who takes chances in life. Sit down.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You won’t come in when she’s here.’

‘Who?’

‘You know who.’

‘The doctor?’

‘You don’t come in when she’s here. There’s space in this room for two opinions but you don’t come in. What are you so afraid of?’

‘I don’t get you, Mr Mandelbrot.’

‘She might be a doctor but she’s still a woman. The man has to take the chance, even these days. You’re the man, Mr Lamont. You got to take chances.’

Lamont smiled. ‘You still takin’ chances, are you, Mr Mandelbrot?’

‘Let me tell you, I’ve taken chances all my life, many chances. If I hadn’t been someone to take chances I wouldn’t be lucky enough to have cancer here. You don’t know me. I know more about you than you know about me.’

‘Prob’ly. If you’re feelin’ up to it you can tell me about you, before I have to go home.’

‘Wouldn’t you like to go home with Dr Washington?’

‘Now we’re talking about you.’

‘Are you married, Mr Lamont? No ring what I can see.’

‘We’re talkin’ about you, I thought.’

‘You want to hear about me?’