The Street Sweeper (35 page)

He made a lot of sounds but it wasn’t always clear what he was saying. The outstretched hand was contorted. At the other end of the car he’d been causing a few people to laugh but no one was laughing around him now. A dishevelled African American man, he looked to be in his early fifties. Sonia thought he had to have been around her father’s age. Discreetly she put her hand in one of her pockets to see if she had any change. She wondered as she did this whether giving him change would be the right thing to do or the smart thing. It might move him along faster or it might win her unwanted attention. Her mother would have known the right thing to do. He dragged his body past the people near Sonia, mumbling and slurring most of his words until they were too incoherent to be understood. He seemed to know on some level that no money would change hands without a story but he wasn’t able to get the story out. Sonia had reached into her pocket and was ready to give him something when he dragged his body past her and everyone else without stopping long enough for anyone to give him anything. Still mumbling, he made his way through the carriage door into the concertinaed section between that carriage and the next one. The train continued on its way uptown.

*

One night, early in the Chicago May of 1945, a man aged about sixty but who felt older, and whose manner was entirely of another time and place and whose heavy coat was of another season, walked alone on the city’s south side. He travelled from his home some ten miles away to this neighbourhood five days a week in order to get to work and, although he had at times worked late into the night, he was certainly not accustomed to being at work this late at night. His normal route home took him from his office in the Main Building at the Illinois Institute of Technology to the Elevated train station at 33rd and State streets. He was certainly not accustomed to being in the surrounding streets in the dark. With the bearing of a Europe that had vanished, less at this moment an immigrant and more a refugee, he kept glancing at a piece of paper in his hand and then up at the street signs, from one to the other again and again, looking for assurance that he was headed in the right direction.

There were a lot of people, men and women, old and young, passing him on the street. In passing them he caught snippets of conversation but understood none of it. All of the people he passed were black. It was their neighbourhood and when they looked at him what they saw was an oddity. So many people out at night, he thought, as he walked past the rib joints and funeral parlours, the storefront churches, pawn shops, bargain shoe stores and liquor stores. The people swirling all around him were of different ages but most were much younger than him. The men wore suits that can’t have been theirs when the suits first were sold some time in the previous decade. The women’s clothes were of more recent vintage, often obviously homemade. So many of them were recent arrivals to Chicago from the south. Many had arrived more recently than he had and to a casual onlooker not a few of them might have seemed lost but it felt to him that every man, woman and child belonged there more than he did.

When he got to the corner of 35th and State streets he went through a narrow entrance to a place whose name he had been given over the telephone a few days earlier. Not only had he never been there before, he had also never been to any place remotely like it before, and on taking a few steps inside, he felt that he was on another planet.

A tall and solidly built black man stood between the end of the hallway and the entrance to the room proper and pointed at a sign advertising the cover charge. ‘Whoa! You gotta pay to hear the music.’

‘I’m not here for the music. I’m here to meet someone.’

‘Don’t matter why you here, Dr Goldberg. You still gotta pay if you want to come in.’

‘I am Dr Border.’

‘What?’

‘I am Dr Border, Henry Border.’

‘I don’t care
who
you are, mister.’

‘I’m not Dr Goldberg. How did you know I was a doctor?’

‘You either a doctor or the landlord and either way, mister, you gotta pay if you want to come in. Look behind you there! See, I got people waitin’ to come in.’

Henry Border paid the man as he was asked and walked tentatively into a rectangular room, which was, in all other respects, unlike any he had ever been in. Several of his senses were assaulted simultaneously but it was perhaps the sound of the music, its volume and its style, that most immediately confronted him. It seemed to him louder than traffic, as loud as a steam engine when one got too close to it but, unlike a steam train, it never moved on. Its very intensity, its very proximity to the audience, seemed to be the point. Then there was its style; it pulsated, throbbed from the rudimentary stage with flattened thirds and sevenths within its chords making for a dissonant gathering of tonalities, played in four four time and all of it amplified against an incessant back beat from a kick drum. Along with the drum were a bass and an electrified guitar, which took turns with a harmonica, also amplified through a microphone, to wail with a piercing brashness.

The smoke of tobacco and reefers made a wall that kept reconstituting itself as soon as anyone broke through it; and people did break through it, some to get near the pool table at one corner of the room and especially near the furthermost wall where young men and women danced, all of them black, at least as far as Dr Border could see, but for this one young white woman dancing. Already perspiring because of the effect on him of the heat of the crowded room, the heat from the rapidly
moving bodies and from the fact that he was dressed in a suit and tie and an inappropriately thick coat that he wore buttoned up, he took the slip of paper out of his coat pocket and squinted in the dim light to read again the address he had written down. He thought that he could not possibly be in the right place despite the fact that the building’s address corresponded with that written on the paper in his own hand. He thought that the combined effect of the volume of the sound and the close atmosphere was going to lead him to pass out and he walked against the flow of ever more people coming in towards the entrance where the tall man he had paid in order to get in told him that he would have to pay again if he wanted to re-enter. Henry Border didn’t care and mumbled something about the doctor not being there. It was something the tall man would have ignored but for the fact that at the moment Border said it he started to buckle at the knees and the tall man was forced to prop him up if for no other reason than to prevent a blockage in the crowded narrow entrance hall.

‘Who ain’t here?’ he asked Henry Border.

‘I was coming to meet a colleague but he’s not here so I wish to leave,’ Border tried to say over the crowd noise and the music.

‘Who is it you want?’

‘Dr Cadden, Marvin Cadden.’

‘That’s Marvin right there,’ the tall man said, pointing at the white man on stage playing the harmonica. Henry Border turned around, squinted up at the stage against the far wall for a moment and then went right back in.

‘You are Dr Cadden?’ he said to the man when the musicians’ set was over.

‘Mister
Cadden. I have a masters but I don’t have a doctorate.’ They shook hands and Marvin Cadden led Border to a seat at one of the few unoccupied tables.

‘Mr Cadden,’ Henry Border began, looking around him before continuing, ‘I hadn’t expected … this. It’s part of your work?’

‘This? No, it’s music. I play with these guys, sometimes anyway.’

‘Music?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Are you good with this … ?’

‘The harmonica?’

‘Yes, the harmonica.’

‘Good enough for them to let me sit in sometimes.’

‘Mr Cadden, I came to see you about something connected to my research. It’s about the wire recorder that you have made. You invented this?’

‘Yes.’

‘And it works like you told me over the phone?’

‘Yes. You want to know if it can record voices, interviews. Sure it can. Dr Border, I don’t understand why you needed to come here to discuss this.’

‘Have I offended you in some way, Mr Cadden?’

‘No, not at all. Please … Can I buy you a drink?’

‘No, no thank you.’

‘Please, you have to let me buy you a drink. You can’t come here and not have at least one drink. It’s rude. People here will think you won’t drink with them.’

‘It’s rude?’

‘Sure. Let me buy you one drink. Beer?’

‘Will you allow me to pay for it and to buy you one?’

‘No, the first one’s on me. What’ll it be?’

‘Do you think they might have vodka?’

‘They’ve got bourbon or gin or beer. Can I get you bourbon?’

‘Thank you, Mr Cadden. It’s kind of you. Can I just tell you first about my project and how I thought you might be able to assist me, before we drink?’

‘You want to record interviews with DPs?’

‘Yes.’

‘In Europe?’

‘Yes, that’s the plan.’

‘How will you get into Europe?’

‘I am already under way with applications. It’s difficult but I don’t need to trouble you with that part of it.’

‘Okay, sure. Look, I’m going to help you if I can but I have to ask you something. Why did you feel the need to come down here in the middle of the night to talk to me about this when we could have discussed this on campus during the day? Forgive me but you’re clearly not comfortable here.’

‘Mr Cadden, I think I might be more comfortable discussing my project with you here than I would be on campus.’

‘Why?’

Henry Border shifted slightly on his chair from one side to the other and then leaned in over the table, causing Marvin Cadden to lean in as well in order to hear Border’s quiet voice above the surrounding din.

‘Mr Cadden, I am a psychologist and my interest here is to interview displaced persons to investigate their speech patterns, the way people use language when they have experienced trauma. But it’s not just any displaced persons I want to speak with. It’s Jews. These people were the most targeted victims of the Nazis.’

‘I see.’

‘Perhaps you have read something about what they have been through in Europe under the Nazis?’

‘Yes, I have. But I still don’t understand why you need to come down here at night to talk to me about it when you said you live uptown.’

‘Mr Cadden, I am a European Jew, born in Poland. In all my grant applications for this project and also in my attempts to get to Europe I have said that I wish to speak to displaced persons but I never specified in any of the paperwork that the displaced persons I wish to speak to are Jews.’

‘You thought it would count against you? This is not Europe, Dr Border. This is America.’

‘I know America is not Europe. I came here already qualified. I had studied at Jagiellonian University in Krakow and then in Germany, in Leipzig under Wilhelm Wundt, a man considered the father of experimental psychology. I made this known when I applied twice to get into the doctoral program at the University of Chicago and was rejected. I made it known again when I tried once at Northwestern and was rejected. I tried again at Northwestern, only this time I made it a point
on the application to tell them I was Episcopalian. Now I have a PhD from Northwestern University. Only one variable changed in the four applications. But this is not Europe, I know.’

‘Are you Episcopalian?’

‘Technically now I am. But I thought that if I were going to ask you for your help with the technology you have invented and if we were, at least for a time, going to work together just enough so you could teach me how to operate the equipment, if you are going to let me take one of your machines with me all the way to the DP camps – well, I thought you should know more precisely what are my intentions with this work.’

Marvin Cadden shook his head. ‘I would be surprised if your difficulties getting funding for the project would be increased if people knew the DPs you’re interested in are Jewish.’

‘Mr Cadden, three years ago a poll was conducted in this country. You may have heard something about this. A group of Americans were asked about a series of national or ethnic groups. They were asked about each group, are they “as good as we are in all important respects”, “not as good as we are” or “definitely inferior”? The category of Jewish immigrants came in tenth. Germans came in significantly higher and this country was at war with them. Germans had been fighting and killing the sons of the people being questioned. But this is not Europe, I know.’

‘What about these people?’ Marvin Cadden asked, gesturing to include the people around him.

‘The black Americans?’

‘Yeah, where were
they
ranked?’

‘They were not even an option. This is not Europe.’

‘Dr Border –’

‘Mr Cadden, I am a scientist, like you. But I am a psychologist; I do not work with machines. I work in a very new science, the science of the human mind. The mind, Mr Cadden, exists inside the brain but is not the brain. You could dissect an infinite number of human brains and still you would never find the mind, not one, not ever. This is psychology. People don’t know much about it. They are sceptical about it. Some are even fearful of it. Our progress within this science, it is slow and small. Now, with all this in mind, how would it be if I come along and tell
them: hello, I am a Jew and I want your help to study Jews? Can you imagine? My project would have even less chance than it has now. With all due respect, Mr Cadden, this is perhaps something you might understand better if you were a Jew.’

‘Dr Border, how do you know I’m not?’ Marvin Cadden responded.

Taken aback for a moment, Border looked up to see the one white woman in the club, the one he’d seen earlier, dancing, come over to them. Sixty-two years later this woman spoke over the phone from Chicago to Adam Zignelik, who was back in New York.

‘That was where we met,’ the widow of Marvin Cadden told Adam over the phone from Chicago.

‘So he became an Episcopalian to improve his chances of getting into Northwestern?’

‘That’s what he told Marvin. Look, it worked. He got his PhD from Northwestern, right? Anyway, he thought that’s what had made the difference.’