The Street Sweeper (28 page)

‘You have to talk to Eileen Miller, the Dean of Psychology. You have to examine the other papers. You have to stay longer,’ Diana whispered. But Adam was due to fly back to New York the next morning. The lights might be left on over night but most of the eight million people who lived there would be trying to get some sleep. Many of them wouldn’t sleep. Some of them couldn’t. They would do what they thought they had to do to get to the next day. One of them was up talking to himself under the strip light in the kitchen of his grandmother’s Co-op City apartment in the Bronx. Not one of them would know if Adam Zignelik changed his flight.

‘You have to stay longer,’ Diana whispered to Adam Zignelik. ‘You know you do.’

*

Lamont Williams’ grandmother woke in the middle of the night to check on a sound, a dull sound. She looked over at the digital clock and saw that it was 2.47 am. She had wanted a good night’s sleep. Her granddaughter was to be taking her out to lunch in the next few days. She always looked forward to these lunches and wanted to be well rested for it but something was keeping her up. The sound she heard was the muffled voice of a man talking to himself out loud. It was her grandson. He was speaking quietly, at times in a particular rhythm, single words
most of which she could not make out, and what she could make out she couldn’t understand, words that seemed to be from a language she hadn’t known he spoke. He said them as though they were an incantation of some kind. His grandmother put on her robe and opened the door of her bedroom to better hear what it was her grandson was saying to himself in the middle of the night. Was she going to need help with him? Maybe she could finally prevail upon Michelle to help her with him. He was out now. He had a job; he’d paid his debt to society. What in hell was he saying? It was best to know the worst as soon as possible, however much it might hurt. You lessen the hurt that way. Had he learned a new language in prison? That would be a good sign. Was that even possible? Was it some kind of relaxation technique? Even that would be good. Please let that be it, she said to herself.

‘He was born 15 December 1922 in the town of Olkusz. His father was a butcher,’ Lamont Williams said, sipping a teacup of Seneca frozen apple juice.

Whose father was a butcher? Who was born in 1922? his grandmother wondered. She heard him take a few sips more and put the cup down again.

‘Ol-kusz. Zab-ko-vitz-ay. Dab-rov-a Gorn-itch-a.
Volksdeutsche
. Sos-nov-ietz. Sosnowiec.’

Was he using drugs now? she wondered. Was he high? What on earth was he saying? She made her way as silently as she could down the hall past the shrine of family photographs, which included one of her then two-and-a-half-year-old great-granddaughter, and continued to listen as he whispered to himself above the hum of the strip light and the refrigerator.

‘Dab-rov-a Gorn-itch-a … Dabrowa Gornicza.’

It was just after 3 am in Co-op City, the Bronx. Lamont Williams, the new guy, still on probation in Building Services, kind of quiet, a nervous guy, was sitting in his grandmother’s kitchen under the strip light talking softly to himself. Lightly he rubbed two fingers from his right hand over his left forearm. His grandmother pulled her robe shut tight with one hand in the darkened hallway and tried to listen to her grandson. What was going to happen to him? He spoke in a curious whisper. She thought to pray that she might understand him.

‘Sos-nov-ietz. Sosnowiec. SS
Shutzstaffel
. Ausch-vitz. Auschwitz.’

T
HE WAITER HELD OUT HER CHAIR FOR HER
and, once she was seated, pushed it back in towards the table. Then he did the same for Michelle. This only ever happened to her when she was taken out by her granddaughter. Doubtless, she speculated, watching the waiter push in Michelle’s chair, it happened to Michelle all the time. This discrepancy in their experience didn’t bother her. On the contrary, watching the waiter lavish attention on her granddaughter filled her with pride. Michelle could have been an actress or a model, her grandmother used to tell her. But Michelle was never interested in drawing attention to herself. When people complimented her on her looks it would embarrass her. It was not an attribute she had worked hard to achieve like good grades, which she got but which never garnered her anywhere near the same praise.

At college the men who were most likely to ask her out were vacuous and shallow, uninterested in the person she really was and what she thought about things, and she thought a lot about most things. They were either arrogant jocks or else delusional desperadoes who had no idea of the way the world saw them. Sensitive men, she had always felt, were intimidated by her looks, thinking that rejection was so likely that, as rich as the prize might be, they were too flawed, too certain to fail, to do anything but admire from a distance. Men like these pursued women just slightly prettier than plain and then married whichever of them they were next to when suddenly the music stopped to announce that graduate
school was over. A single guest at weddings, couples would admire her appearance almost excessively and, in so doing, embarrass her, never for a moment dreaming she might know loneliness every bit as well, every bit as sharp, as they ever had.

A bright student, she graduated with a Masters in social work because helping people had seemed like the best thing she could do with her life. She got a job doing just that, dispensing help to people in need and teaching others to do the same. She dressed down both for her colleagues and her ‘clients’ but still her appearance didn’t go unnoticed by either her male clients or her female clients, though not in the same way. She was well liked and highly regarded by her colleagues but even with them there had been problems that she had needed to overcome. The women, suspicious of her motives for working there, had to be won over since, for the most part, had they looked like Michelle they would not have been social workers earning a relative pittance. Michelle’s male colleagues weren’t susceptible to this kind of suspicion but they were vulnerable to moments of mistaking the friendliness of someone as attractive as Michelle for something more.

For at least the last year or so Michelle had wondered if she hadn’t chosen the wrong career. Nobody can be asked to display limitless compassion and especially not to people who so often didn’t even heed her advice. She had to stop herself from blaming them. When she had been a student it had been a lot easier to blame history, society and free market fundamentalism, the Federal Government, the City and racism. Now it could take all her strength not to shake some of her clients when they came back with the same problems again and again. She and her husband Charles would go to dinner parties in Westchester, Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope and dine with liberal academics, white and black, Hispanic and Asian, and she would envy their capacity to continue thinking exactly as she had as a student. Theory always trumped experience at these occasions and she envied the time they seemed to have to find peer-reviewed evidence to support their long-held views.

Despite all of this she worked on herself to exhibit kindness in all her dealings with people both professionally and in her private life. This was how she came to be taking her grandmother out to lunch one Saturday.
They had gone to a place the family had at times gone to on special occasions in the past. It was a steak restaurant in the city, downtown near Union Square, and this was one of many times the two of them had had one of their ‘special’ lunches there since those now distant occasions when Michelle had been a little girl.

‘Sonia didn’t want to come?’ Michelle’s grandmother asked tentatively.

‘Are you kidding, Grandma? She was desperate to come. I wouldn’t let her. She had soccer this morning and has to study for a test she’s got on Monday and then another one she’s got on Wednesday. No, she really wanted to see you and we even had words over it. She was especially mad at me for not letting her come since we got you a little present and it was her idea.’ The last time they had met downtown Michelle’s grandmother had left home without an umbrella and when it had rained suddenly but emphatically she’d had no choice but to go against her New Yorker’s instincts and buy the nearest cheap umbrella proffered by an African immigrant who had materialised on the street with the first drop of rain and was in a new line of work by the time the last drop hit the sidewalk. She had known that the umbrella was likely not to last very long and it hadn’t, succumbing to the wind on its very first outing. It was for that reason that before meeting her grandmother at the steak restaurant Michelle had stopped at a specialist umbrella store on East 45th Street and bought her a distinctive Guy de Jean umbrella with a shiny black wooden handle and a houndstooth-like design in charcoal grey topped by a wraparound frieze of Scottish terriers with bright red bow ties as a gift ostensibly from Sonia.

Michelle was all the more attuned to her grandmother’s financial circumstances since her cousin moved back in with her grandmother after his release from prison. She knew that her grandmother’s household expenditure would have suddenly risen dramatically without any corresponding increase in income. She wasn’t counting on Lamont being in a position to contribute anything despite, as her grandmother had told her with pride, his having got a job in Building Services at a hospital. But it was difficult to give her grandmother money without embarrassing her.

The best way would have been to slip a cheque or, even better, some cash inside her grandmother’s purse when she was distracted but this wasn’t practical and, in any event, Michelle had wanted her to know that there was extra money to help her through the week or through the month. To accomplish this she hit upon the idea of presenting her grandmother with a gift from Sonia accompanied by a card with some cash inside the envelope about which Michelle wouldn’t comment.

‘Oh, my goodness it’s beautiful!’ her grandmother said, examining the umbrella at the table in the restaurant. She leaned over to kiss her granddaughter. ‘You really shouldn’t have done this,’ she said opening the card from Sonia. It read, ‘Dear Nanny, I hope you like the umbrella. I wanted to give it to you myself since it was my idea but Mom wouldn’t let me ‘cos of my tests and soccer. Sorry she did this. Hope to see you soon. Love, Sonia.’ Then Michelle’s grandmother saw the cash that waited in the envelope behind the card.

‘Now before you say anything,’ Michelle pre-empted, ‘we know, Charlie and me, we know that things might’ve got a bit harder now that Lamont’s home and we just felt that, you know, since we could, we wanted to try to –’

‘’Chelle, he’s doin’ real well.’ She used the diminutive version of her name that her cousin had coined in their youth. It wasn’t lost on her granddaughter.

‘That’s good, Grandma.’

‘Real
well. They talkin’ ’bout givin’ him extra duties.’

‘That’s good.’

‘He’s still hoping to see his little girl but … I don’t want to crush his hopes ‘cause I think that maybe … maybe they help him get up in the morning.’ She looked out into the middle distance and then returned her gaze to the umbrella and then to Michelle.

‘Do you think he’ll find her? Maybe you … ain’t that the kind of thing … will you see him? At least
see
him.’ She took her granddaughter’s hand.

‘I will, Grandma.’

‘Really?’

‘Sure.’

‘You will?’

‘I will.’

‘When?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t right now.’

*

In 1945, immediately after the end of the war in Europe but before the war in the Pacific was over, before the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a civilian, a little-known professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology on Chicago’s south side by the name of Henry Border began tirelessly to make what seemed like an endless succession of grant applications in an attempt to get himself into the heart of Allied-occupied Europe. Why? Searching through the Galvin Library at IIT, Adam Zignelik found, from a 1947 university newsletter, that Border’s stated purpose was to gather data from ‘displaced persons’ to further his research into what Border, the psychologist, called the ‘Adjective–Verb Quotient’. Border’s at least tentative hypothesis was that people in ‘distress’ will use adjectives and verbs in a different ratio to each other than will people who are not in ‘distress’.

However valid or even however significant this hypothesis might or might not be, Adam had little difficulty imagining the psychologist Henry Border taking it seriously. This was, after all, Adam reasoned, the sort of research a psychologist might well undertake. Border, it seemed, even had some of his students look into the subject with him as part of the work on which they were assessed. But there were plenty of ‘distressed’ people in the US, in Chicago, even right there on the south side of Chicago where the Illinois Institute of Technology was situated, without his needing to go to all the trouble and expense of trying to get to Europe to find them.

From the numerous drafts of unsuccessful grant applications seeking financial assistance to get him to Europe and the fact that the 1947 IIT newsletter contained an article by Border himself in which he tells of having eventually managed to get himself there, it was clear that this trip was by then the most important professional goal he had set himself.
Adam found no record of Border having done any work on what had previously been his big project, the psychological museum, after early May 1945 and from May onward the only references to the psychological museum were in work Border had already done.

Clearly, Border’s plan to travel to Europe had hatched with the final defeat of Germany in very early May 1945. After that, at least professionally, there was no matter more important to him than getting to Europe to conduct field research on people in ‘distress’. These people were thick on the ground; there were literally millions of them. Indeed, it would have been hard to find people in Europe
not
in some kind of distress. By the early summer of 1945, as a consequence of the most brutal war in history, there were something of the order of seven million civilians in Western Europe, travelling or temporarily housed somewhere other than where they wanted to be. Swelling the roads or the makeshift under-resourced camps dotted throughout Western Europe there were Poles, Germans, Russians, Slovaks, Jews, Slovenians, Italians, Frenchmen, Belgians, Greeks, Ukrainian Cossacks, Croatians, White Russians and many more besides. Were they all using adjectives and verbs in the same ratio? It wasn’t enough for Border to seek answers with respect to his ‘Adjective–Verb Quotient’ from ‘distressed’ people right there on the south side of Chicago. For some reason he had to go to Europe.