The Street Sweeper (36 page)

‘Sure. It’s funny though. I mean, I understand why he might’ve thought he needed to do that and perhaps he did. But in going through his papers I found a receipt for a donation he made to a Baptist church, the Pilgrim Baptist Church.’

‘Oh, that’s a black church on the south side, near IIT,’ Marvin Cadden’s widow said.

‘Yes, I found that out.’

‘Well, that was probably ‘cause of Callie.’

‘Who was Callie?’

‘Callie was his housekeeper. She was black. He met her through us, through Marvin, from people Marvin played with. You see, when Border did finally get permission to go to Europe he needed someone to take care of his daughter. He couldn’t leave her on her own. I don’t know exactly how old she was at the time but she was quite young. It wasn’t just the wire recorder Marvin helped him with. Marvin found him Callie through his contacts at the club where they’d first met. She needed the work, lived at the Mecca. She was probably trying to raise money for the church and that would be how Border came to make the donation. Of course I’m guessing. I don’t know this. It was such a long time ago. You
see, Marvin might have been important to Henry Border but Border wasn’t important to Marvin’s career.’

‘Sure. What’s the Mecca?’

‘The Mecca Flats. Dr Zignelik, if the south side of Chicago is a world within Chicago, on the south side the Mecca was a whole other world again.’

The light was flashing on his answering machine when Adam Zignelik looked at it later and though he didn’t know who was calling him he didn’t want to listen to the message. He stood there for a moment just watching it blink.

‘Is this because you think it’s me or because you think it isn’t me?’ he heard Diana whisper.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Which would be harder?’ she asked him.

‘Depends what you’d say.’

‘Looks like you’ll never know,’ she said as the answering machine blinked on, oblivious to the anxiety it was capable of provoking. Finally after staring at it and hovering above it he let his finger press ‘play’. It was a woman’s voice, a familiar one, and it cut through him before he’d had a chance to listen to its words or even to place the voice. But the fourth word was her name.

‘Hey. Adam, it’s Michelle. How you doing? Hope it’s not too late but Charlie said that William said you might be in Chicago. Is that right? Gone to follow something up? Sounds interesting. Anyway, I wondered if you wanted to catch up some time soon. We haven’t seen you for a while. You could come for dinner but … also, I was kind of thinking … Am I going to run out of time? Better speak much faster. Okay. Let me know if you want to meet for coffee some time. As
well
as dinner I mean, not
instead
. Talk soon. Hope Chicago’s good. Call –.’ Then the machine whistled and then clicked to indicate that it had granted Michelle as much time as she was going to get.

‘She’s going to want to talk about you, about us. She’s going to tell me how you’re doing, isn’t she?’

‘How do you want me to be doing?’

‘Well, if she says you’re doing well I won’t believe her.’

‘And if she convinces you?’

‘I’ll feel terrible.’

‘And if I’m not doing well?’

‘I’ll feel worse.’

‘So coffee with Michelle has now become something you dread, one more example of collateral damage from the stupidest thing you’ve ever done in your life?’

‘Why does she want to have coffee? We’ve never met for coffee before, not just the two of us.’

‘Well, Charlie’s probably working or taking care of Sonia or seeing his father so he can’t come and you banished me to a far better life, so I can’t come.’

‘At least see the logic in the decision.’

‘Adam, I never could. You’re trying to turn your fear of the future, your panic about parenthood and professional failure into something noble that you’ve done for me. I never bought it.’

‘Diana, it’s possible at the one time both to be afraid
and
to act nobly for another person. Come on! Look at where I’ve come from. You know what my father was like. You know what my childhood was like.’

‘I know exactly where you’ve come from. I rubbed your back and held you after nightmares. I’m the one who took the black-and-white photo of the little boy in quilted overalls. I took him with me even as you were kicking me out. You have to follow up this man Border and write on him and his work. It could be your salvation.’

‘Are you saying that if I had something to work on, to write on, if I had some hope of professional viability, we could get together again … try to have a child?’

‘No, I’ve always said that something to write about is not something you should need for that, but if you do need it, I’m saying Henry Border’s just given it to you.’

‘But I can’t know that yet. Look, there’s incredible stuff there but it’s for someone else, experts in the area. I don’t know if I’ve really got anything that
I
should be following up with Border. I can’t tell you to come back just because I’ve got a hunch or rather because I have these moments where I imagine that
you’ve
got a hunch that I’ve found something to write about.’

‘Follow Border! Hang on to him and don’t let him go.’

‘And if he leads nowhere? What then?’

‘Then ask Michelle what to do with the raisins.’

*

It was the end of the day and Lamont Williams sat down in a chair, tired but ready.

‘How you doin’ today?’ he asked.

‘You got your grandmother a nice umbrella, yes?’ the old man asked in turn as his answer.

‘Yeah.’

‘A good one?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Very nice. Is there any water left in that thing? If yes, give it here please. You want? No? Sure? All right. Now, where are we?’

‘You’d just got there.’

‘Got where?’

‘Auschwitz,’ Lamont Williams reminded him. ‘Most of the Jews got there by train but you didn’t get there by train.’

‘No, I didn’t. Almost everybody else did from all over Europe but I was on a truck. You remember!’ he said, impressed. ‘Good. You have to remember.’

*

Adam Zignelik thought of the Pilgrim Baptist Church and remembered why it had sounded so familiar to him. This was the Chicago landmark, the one-time south side Kehilath Anshe Ma’ariv synagogue. It had become the Pilgrim Baptist Church in 1922. It was in this guise that it became the birthplace of gospel music under the musical directorship of Thomas A. Dorsey and was, in 1946, where some 2500 people made their way inside while outside thousands lined the surrounding streets, all of them there to pay their respects at the funeral of Jack Johnson, the first African American heavyweight champion of the world, the man
who defeated every great white hope they could throw at him and a lot more besides. The Staples Singers, Mahalia Jackson and Aretha Franklin had all sung there. Martin Luther King had preached there at the height of the civil rights struggle. That was the Pilgrim Baptist Church to which Henry Border had made a donation in 1946. Now Adam remembered. He kept hearing Border’s voice at the conclusion of the last wire recording at the point where the woman had finished the story of the loss of her daughter. It had sounded as though the man’s voice was held up by only the hum and the crackle of the recording, as though without that surface noise to support it, the voice would not ever have made it on to the wire. And this was the way it sounded in Adam’s mind as it followed him around his Morningside Heights apartment in the middle of the night in the city of orphans.

‘What we have heard from this woman … is the story we have heard from everybody … I’m concluding my project in Germany … I want to thank the UNRRA, Jack Thompson from
The Chicago Tribune
 … and … I can’t speak. I don’t remember the names … now … because I’m too emotional … this woman’s report. I’m concluding this project. The automobile is waiting. I am going to Frankfurt. Who will sit in judgement over all this? And who is going to judge my work? … Who is going to judge … me? IIT wire recording. Leaving tonight for Paris. This project is concluded.’

*

A lot of people were in attendance at the Workmen’s Circle cemetery in the very late winter of 1982 when they buried Jake Zignelik following his sudden heart attack; more black folks than Jews as far as William McCray could tell. This might have been surprising to a casual onlooker at a Jewish cemetery, especially because by then relations between African Americans and Jews had passed what some might have called their golden age. But anyone who had really known Jake Zignelik would not have been so surprised. At the time of his death he was still director-counsel of the LDF and he had socialised with African Americans as much as if not more than with Jews or with anybody else. The
frozen ground made it hard for his son to navigate the shovel around the soil to begin the process of covering the plain pine wood coffin dictated by Jewish tradition. William McCray stood near the grave and watched the stick of a kid, Jake’s son, Adam, trying to keep himself composed long enough to get a few shovels’ worth of soil on to the coffin. The kid was sixteen and had just got off a plane from Australia. The cemetery was crowded but the kid, Jake’s only child, knew hardly anyone and when he heard the first ‘thud’ of hard earth hit the coffin William McCray thought he might be about to buckle at the knees and collapse in the grave on top of his father’s coffin.

That’s when William’s son, Charles, who had been standing at the graveside beside his father, caught Adam and hugged him, held him very tight. This was Charles’ first Jewish funeral but it hadn’t been the first for William and, later, Charles asked his father whether Jake had died with so little money that he couldn’t afford more than the most rudimentary pine box for a coffin, a coffin so lacking in ornamentation that the best that could be said for it was that it was fit for its service. William explained that while Jake didn’t die a wealthy man by any means, it wasn’t impecuniousness that explained the pine box coffin. It was Jewish tradition, he explained, that all people, irrespective of their wealth or status or achievements, should leave the world as equals before their Creator.

William McCray found himself thinking about Jake’s funeral as he walked on the grounds of Columbia University. He made his way past the library towards Fayerweather Hall where his son was Chair of History and it wasn’t until he was seated outside his son’s office that he retraced the route by which his memory had arrived at Jake’s funeral. Usually at this time he met his son for a cup of coffee, a chat and, depending on the weather and on how he was feeling, maybe a walk. Today though he had a medical appointment and, as medical appointments always did these days, it focused his mind on his own mortality. Additionally, he’d heard from Charles that Adam had been to Chicago to follow up some information from his veteran friend in Boston that he, William, had passed on to him. Perhaps Charlie knew what had come of it. What was going to happen to Adam? He should never have let Diana go. These were the
paths taken by William’s mind that afternoon to arrive at Jake Zignelik’s funeral. He could still hear that skinny kid trying to get through
Kaddish
, the mourner’s prayer.

‘Hello, Mr McCray,’ said the young woman warmly who was either his son’s secretary or his personal assistant, as they now called them, or else she was a secretary all the department could call on. Who the hell knew what she did when she wasn’t greeting him cheerfully?

‘Lovely to see you. How are you today, Mr McCray?’

‘Fine, thank you, and you?’ William could never remember her name.

‘Your son has just stepped out of the office but he isn’t far,’ she said before whispering, ‘I think he’s gone to the bathroom but he won’t be long,’ before adding more audibly, ‘He’s locked the office and he has his coat on.’

‘His coat?’ William enquired.

‘Oh, I always have to remind him to take his coat. Did you?’

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘When he’s going out,’ she explained.

‘He’s going out?’

‘You have a medical appointment today, don’t you, sir?’

‘I do.’

‘Downtown isn’t it? He asked me to cancel his appointments. He’s going with you.’

It was night again. In Co-op City, the Bronx, Lamont Williams’ grandmother looked over with a discomfort she would have found difficult to articulate at a large and sturdy-looking umbrella with a shiny black handle. Then she looked over at her grandson who was reading the paper. She hoped her granddaughter would never ask to see the umbrella she had bought for her and given her at the steak restaurant off Union Square. At least, she contented herself, she hadn’t lost the envelope that contained Sonia’s card. Putting the money from its envelope in her purse, she looked over at her grandson and hoped with all her might, to the point of mouthing a brief impromptu prayer, that he was going to be all right. He noticed her looking at him. He saw her lips moving without any sound coming out and he asked, ‘You okay, Grandma? Can I get you something?’

*

Many hours later that night, a few miles south across the Harlem River in his Morningside Heights apartment, Adam Zignelik was unable to sleep. He could not quieten his mind. Deciding to take a sleeping pill, he went into the bathroom and, opening the mirror cabinet, saw Diana’s comb, the comb she had left that held strands of her hair. He picked it up, looked at it, and gripped it tight till the skin on the palm of his hand was white and indented. He didn’t want to put it down. He didn’t see why he ever should put it down. Looking at it there in his hand and at his face in the mirror, he was overwhelmed by a wave of self-loathing, panic and a sense of loss that, in staccato bursts, flushed the air from his lungs till the moisture in his sleep-starved eyes formed a vitreous glaze that mercifully blurred his reflection in the mirror. Everything else, though, everything else in his life, every regret, every flaw, every mistake he’d ever made was clear, all 3 am-sharp, and he gripped the comb still tighter. Where were the sleeping pills?

‘Did you take them?’

Diana’s reply was drowned out by Henry Border’s anguish through the crackle and hum Marvin Cadden hadn’t yet been able to eradicate. ‘Who will sit in judgement over all this … And who is going to judge my work? … Who is going to judge – ?’