The Street Sweeper (48 page)

‘We could get through both,’ Michelle heard Sonia suggest.

‘
To Be or Not To Be
, is it the original or the remake?’ Michelle asked.

‘It’s the original; Lubitsch. We’re having a Lubitsch festival here.’

‘We could do both,’ Sonia advocated again.

‘I don’t know, Sonia, we haven’t even had dinner yet,’ Adam countered.

‘I haven’t had dinner either,’ said Michelle.

‘You want to come over?’

‘Are you making dinner?’ Michelle asked.

‘Well, the finely honed selection of take-out menus
are
mine, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Could we watch
To Be or Not To Be?’
Michelle asked.

‘Let me check on that. Sonia!’

‘Yeah,’ Sonia answered.

‘Your mum would like to come over and watch
To Be or Not To Be
with us.’

‘We could do both.’

‘You sure I won’t be cramping her style?’ Michelle asked.

‘Your mum wants to know if she’d be cramping your style.’

‘I like how you say “mum”. Makes her sound like she’s the Queen or something.’

‘She’s not cramping anybody’s style, is she?’

‘Why am I hearing silence?’ Michelle asked.

‘She’s having an adolescent moment.’

‘She can come,’ Sonia answered. ‘But tell her we’ve already decided we’re watching
both
movies. They’re educational. I mean, they’re black and white for God’s sake!’

‘Heard from Adam?’ William McCray asked his son Charles at their weekly meeting in Charles’ office in the Fayerweather Building at Columbia.

‘A little, not much. He seems to be very busy with this research project he’s got going in Chicago. Spends a lot of time there.’

‘Oh, I know all about that. He’s uncovered recordings of some kind from Holocaust survivors. I led him to it, well, indirectly. He’s looking for the evidence my friend spoke of, evidence of black troops at the liberation of Dachau.’

‘I don’t think he is, Dad.’

‘Oh I
know
he is.’

‘No, I think it’s gone beyond that. He’s looking into the life of the man who made those recordings.’

‘Maybe, but he’s still on the trail of the evidence –’

‘That might be where it started but –’

‘Is it really so important to you that he
doesn’t
find it?’ William snapped. They sat there, neither of them believing what William had just said. How had it come to this?

Charles McCray went home that night and opened the door to a silent apartment, silent because it was empty. On the kitchen table lay a note from his wife Michelle. She was having dinner and watching a movie at Adam Zignelik’s place. Beneath the note was a note from his daughter Sonia. She was there too. Charles stood there looking at the notes. Then he looked around the room. There was no doubt about it. He was the only one there.

*

The little girl, Elise, not much more than a baby, had finally gone to sleep and, although it was only early afternoon, Rosa Broder, born Rosa
Rabinowicz, was already tired. Just attending to her daughter and the cooking and cleaning, on top of repeated nights with little sleep, had made her feel like taking a nap too. She had taken off her house slippers and her clothes and had put on her robe when she heard a knock at the front door. He husband was not due home for hours and she wasn’t expecting anyone. She thought it was probably somebody trying to hawk their wares door-to-door. If she just ignored the knock for long enough the salesman would think there was no one home and move on to the next door. But the knocking continued. She waited for it to stop, which it did, but then after a very short break it began again. This was no ordinary hawker. She went to the door and looked through the peephole. She couldn’t believe what she saw. Standing outside the front door of her Warsaw apartment was Noah Lewental. She hadn’t seen him since she left Ciechanow. Nor had there been any contact between them.

Nervously, she looked at him as he stood there, now a little older, looking at her front door then turning around to face the foyer and the stairs as though expecting something of interest to appear there, and then turning back to her door again. Just an inch or two of wood separated them. He wouldn’t have realised that. He knew it was her apartment. He didn’t know she was there. But why did he stay there knocking? Why didn’t he just leave? Perhaps a neighbour downstairs had assured him that Mrs Broder was at home with the little one; a little girl she was.

‘Mrs Broder has a daughter?’

‘Yes, a little girl, Elise.’

She had thought of him from time to time since she’d left Ciechanow, often, in the early days. Sometimes it was in anger, sometimes in sorrow. Sometimes she had even been angry at herself for not having been more accommodating with respect to his urges. As a married woman now she had accustomed herself to satisfying another man’s needs. Where would the tragedy have been in learning earlier to satisfy someone she’d loved since girlhood? She’d thought these thoughts in the middle of the night as her husband Chaim Broder lay beside her, sometimes asleep, sometimes pretending to be asleep so as not to invade the privacy of her regret. What did she regret? Broder didn’t know all of it but he knew she probably regretted marrying so hastily and marrying a much older man. His
adoration of her hadn’t diminished. But he was not oblivious to his wife’s true feelings. He could accept that she didn’t have the
same
feeling for him that he had for her but not too easily that she barely had any at all.

By day he fought the intellectual dissatisfaction delivered by his job, by the lack of opportunities to study further, by his inability to work as a psychologist. By night he lived with the knowledge that if his wife kissed him, if she held him, if she permitted him to touch her and to take her in bed, it was her loneliness and poverty that had delivered her to him. It was these thoughts, these feelings, that day after day chipped away at his sense of self.

Rosa looked through the peephole at the man she should have married and memories of other times flooded back. Noah should have been able to wait. He should have understood. He should have resisted simple Ada. Suddenly he turned away and started to walk towards the stairs. He was leaving. Without understanding why, she opened the door. Had he heard the door open over the sounds of his footsteps? Should she call to him before it was too late? She wouldn’t be able to chase after him. Her daughter was asleep in the next room. Where was he going – back to Ciechanow, back to Ada? Why had he come? He stopped and stood still at the top of the stairs.

‘Noah … Is that you?’

He turned around on the top stair, leaned on the banister and said sadly, ‘I knew you were home.’

She asked him in and took his coat. They just stood there and stared at each other. Gathering herself together, she invited him to sit down and asked him whether he’d like a cup of tea.

‘You’ll have to speak quietly. My daughter’s asleep.’

‘I’d heard you have a daughter. How old is she now?’

‘She’s two, almost two and a half.’

‘How are you?’ he asked.

‘How am I? I’m fine, I’m well.’

‘Good,’ he said uncomfortably.

‘How old is
your
 … child … now?’ she asked.

‘Oh,’ he said even more uncomfortably. ‘You didn’t hear? Ada … um … She lost the child. It wasn’t born alive.’

‘Noah, I’m sorry. How is … Ada?’

‘About the baby?’

‘Yes.’

‘She’s the same. Very quickly, almost immediately, she went back to being the same strange girl she ever was. You see, she thinks the baby’s not dead.’

‘What?’

‘She thinks it’s not with us now but it will be. She says we’ll see it soon and that eventually we’ll see it along with her parents, her real parents, the ones who were killed in the pogrom in Luban when she was a baby. She’s not a bad person but she’s …’

‘Simple?’ offered Rosa.

‘And she’s crazy. I think it probably helps her.’

‘You don’t have a baby,’ Rosa said almost to herself. ‘So everything … the whole thing was for nothing. You needn’t have married her.’

‘No, I needn’t have.’ They looked at each other. Both so young, and both already so bruised.

‘Rosa … I don’t know how she could have known I was the father. I only ever … 
saw
her once. There were others who visited her many times and who –’

‘Noah, I
know
 … how many boys went there. We all knew. Perhaps Ada isn’t so simple after all?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She chose the one, perhaps the only one, who would admit what he’d done and marry her,’ Rosa said, not with anger but with resignation and sadness.

‘I wasn’t so good, so strong, so moral. Rosa, I’d have lied as quickly as the rest of them to cover up what I’d done and get on with my life, go ahead with my … with our plans.

‘It was my father who got me to admit that I could have been responsible and it was my father who got me to marry her and live with the consequences.’

‘Did he say anything about me, your father?’

‘Yes, he said I would be giving you the chance to find an honourable man.’ At that Noah looked around the apartment. ‘And is he, your husband, an honourable man?’

‘He is unquestionably an honourable man,’ she answered. Noah had known her since childhood and the way she said this, coupled with all she did not say, told him everything she’d meant.

‘Why have you come to Warsaw?’

‘There’s no work in Ciechanow. I’ve come here looking for work, or else to train for something. I heard there’s work for electricians.’

‘And if you find it?’

‘If I find it I’ll leave Ciechanow … move here.’

‘And your wife?’

‘Ada can be Ada anywhere. Rosa, I ruined both our lives.’

‘I’m not angry at you, not any more.’

‘No? Well, I am. Every day I punish myself … and then God adds some too.’ Noah looked around the apartment and said quietly, ‘An honourable man.’

Whether he was speculating on the character of her husband or commenting ironically on his own character, Rosa didn’t know, but something about this last remark made her close her eyes and when she opened them again crushed tears stained her cheeks. Seeing them, he went over to hug her. Brushing her tears away with the back of his hand he then broadened the scope of his attention to sweeping away the hair from her eyes to the side of her face and behind her ears. Then he kissed her gently on the top of her head and with equal softness on her temple all the while continuing to stroke her hair. She didn’t move when he kissed her softly on the lips except to surprise him when she opened her mouth. It was as though kissing him passionately in this Warsaw apartment while her daughter slept in the next room was the most natural thing in the world to her. And while it was not the most natural thing in the world, she moved to it as though, natural or not, it was the thing she most wanted.

They stood kissing and when he pulled her robe off her shoulders he saw her breasts for only the third time and for the first time in the light. Kneeling, he took her robe off entirely and let it fall at her feet on the floor. She stood there completely naked, still with tears in her eyes, and let his mouth wander all over her body. The little girl Elise stayed asleep in her parents’ bedroom and Noah led the girl’s mother to the couch.
He entered her for the first time ever just as he had wanted to years before when then, as now, it had been forbidden, though for different reasons. How much time did they have before the world closed in on them? They were not to know.

It was twelve minutes later when Chaim Broder, sent home early from the school where he taught by a migraine, turned the lock in the front door quietly and unexpectedly and saw them just moments before Rosa saw him. He was to always remember the scene, and even more vividly than the sight, the sound of his wife’s moaning before she saw him from the corner of her eye. She sat up and instinctively tried to shield her husband from their nakedness with a blanket that lay at one end of the couch, a movement that led Noah Lewental to turn around and see the back of Chaim Broder’s head as Broder, without saying a word, made his way back briskly towards the front door. He opened the door, walked out and closed it without slamming it, returning some four hours later. Noah dressed hurriedly and left, leaving Rosa to pace the apartment sobbing, sometimes with hysterical gasps of breath and sometimes in silence. When the child awoke Rosa sang her little songs in a vain attempt to hide her distress while she fed her.

Ten days later the little girl Elise was gone. Her father had taken her and a small collection of their things without Rosa’s knowledge or permission on a long journey that would deliver them both ultimately to Chicago. His anger would eventually subside but never the pain or the sneaking suspicion that he was in some way, through some potent cocktail of failure, responsible for what he had found in his home that migrainous afternoon. This sense of comprehensive failure clung to him wherever he went and with every change of clothes and every change of season in Chicago, Illinois, where he was known, mainly to his students, as Henry Border.

*

To phone her or not to phone her?’ That was the question that Adam Zignelik was toying with. Finally, things were beginning to go well for him, at least professionally, Adam told himself. His work was looking
promising. In Chicago, Sahera Shukri, Dean of Libraries at IIT’s Galvin Library, and members of her staff were, of their own volition, digitally storing Henry Border’s transcripts of the wire recordings he had brought back from the DP camps of Europe in 1946. The contents of the transcripts, the voices, followed these staff around, into their homes, their cars and into their sleep and some had to report after a while that they were unable to continue. Waiting for Adam in Yiddish and other languages were wire recordings that Border had never got to translate or transcribe. There were people to interview and people to search for in the hope of interviewing them. In addition to Arch Sanasarian, at least two of Border’s postgraduate students, two who had worked on the ‘Adjective–Verb Quotient’, Amy Muirden and the reputedly much-loved Wayne Rosenthal, were still alive. There might have been others too. Adam wasn’t sure where the work was going to take him but there was no doubting that it was the bona fide work of a genuine historian and it was buoying him. If any of Border’s interviewees were in Dachau when the war finished their transcripts might even mention being liberated by black American troops just as William McCray’s friend from Boston had said. Nothing like this had been on the horizon when Diana had pulled shut the door to the Morningside Heights apartment that had been theirs.