The Street Sweeper (74 page)

To walk up and down the six flights was a major achievement for a man in Henry Border’s condition but he tried to make himself do it once a day, each day after his daughter had left for work. Maybe there was a café he could sit in. But Greenwich Village in 1960 was not for him with its stream of tourists desperate for a peek into the carnival that was the bohemian street world, the cafés and noisy coffee shops where it was said marijuana and heroin was sold by dubious types amid mention of Ginsburg, Kerouac and Baldwin. You didn’t need to strain your ear to hear evidence of the folk revival and you could watch ‘free love’ for free if you knew where to look in Washington Square Park. But none of it meant anything to him as more and more of his life took place in his head. He would sit alone in his daughter’s dingy apartment and remember. He thought of his parents and his siblings, all gone, and he thought of the slip of a girl he had married, Rosa Rabinowicz, whom he felt he had deserted twice over.

To make it down, out and back again was getting harder and harder for him and, anyway, his work was still the most important thing to him. Each day he would sit in the kitchen and continue to transcribe the wire recordings he had made in the DP camps of Europe in the summer of 1946. Barely anyone had been interested in them but it had now become something akin to a religious ritual with him.

Eventually he had to give up his daily attempts to go out altogether. His health would no longer permit it. Distracted by his work, he failed to realise that he would never again go for a walk. It was a restriction that was in part mitigated by the capture of another man around the time of the capture of Francis Gary Powers, the pilot of the U2 spy plane.

In May of 1960
Obersturmbannführer
Adolf Eichmann of the SS, the administrator of what the Nazis had called ‘The Final Solution of the
Jewish Problem’, was captured by the
Mossad
on Garibaldi Street, Buenos Aires, kidnapped and taken to Jerusalem. Now it seemed to Border, fourteen years after his expedition to the DP camps, that the world might be interested in the voices of Eichmann’s victims. The Eichmann trial began eleven months later but by then Henry Border was in such bad health he had difficulty making it to the bathroom and back on his own. He really needed a full-time nurse, someone to be in attendance at all times, but his daughter Elly did not earn anywhere near enough to provide this kind of attention. All she could do was to serve him as well as she could before and after teaching at school and on weekends.

During the working day she was forced to leave him on his own. She would leave food for him and something to drink. If he wanted his window open or closed in the morning she would open or close it before heading off to work and it would stay that way all day, irrespective of any change in the weather, until she came home. To try to block out some of the noise from MacDougal Street and to keep him company during the day, she bought him a brand new Admiral television set and installed it in his room where he could watch it from his bed.

There had not been many women in his life. Only one had he asked to marry and she had said ‘yes’. She’d said it immediately and he thought of her more than ever now. He thought of her hair, of her eyes and of her smile. His daughter carried all of these features out into the world each day. He thought of how he had abandoned her and of what had happened to her subsequently. Why had it taken that ultimate demonstration of Rosa’s unhappiness to propel him to leave Europe? If he had left sooner he would have taken her with him.

How much control do we have over what is remembered and when? He could never completely erase from his mind the image of that man on top of his wife on their couch when, having carried his migraine across the streets of Warsaw, he’d opened the door. It justified nothing. Alone now in his bed in Elly’s apartment on the sixth floor, with his eyes closed, he saw them again. Why now? Why still? He opened his eyes slightly to see the jug of water that his daughter had left for him.

‘What is your full name?’ he heard a voice ask. ‘Who is it?’ Henry Border asked from his bed. Was there someone there with him in the
room? He couldn’t see them. Was that Elise? He hadn’t heard anyone come in. Was someone there? There was no one there.

Again Henry Border heard a strange voice from his bed. ‘Who is it?’ he said but perhaps his own voice had not carried. However loud his question had been, the voice did not answer him but carried on speaking as though to someone else. Henry Border was irrelevant. The voice didn’t care to answer Border but continued speaking regardless. It told a story but Border couldn’t place it.

‘She begged him to shoot her but he wouldn’t.
“Jüdische Schlampe!”
he said. Then he kicked her hard in the mouth with his boot and she spat out her teeth in order not to choke on them.’ Border shuddered when he heard this. Why was he hearing such voices? He screwed his eyes shut and tears came out, leaving a trail on the otherwise dry skin on his cheeks.

‘I would have done anything for you, Rosa,’ mumbled Henry Border feverishly. ‘I would have done anything for you. So how did it happen that I let them beat you? How did it happen that I let them hang you?’ Rosa Rabinowicz gave no answer, none that he could hear over the wheezing sounds he was making.

‘What is your full name?’ Henry Border heard a voice ask. ‘Who is it?’ he asked the voice. Still there was no answer. When was his daughter due home? What time was it now?

‘I know what happened. Rosa, I know it all,’ Border whispered. ‘I can’t say anything. You want to blame me? You can. I never remarried. I lived alone. I tried to tell … what happened but they didn’t want to hear. No, not what happened to
you
. It’s true. I never said a word about what they did to you, but Rosa … she’s all I had. You were gone. It would have made no difference to you but for
me
 … she was all I had. Rosa, it was wrong. Everything I did was wrong. But she lives and breathes. Do you know? That I took her away was wrong. But that’s why she’s alive. Tell me you agree.’ His mouth was dry. She didn’t answer but the voice did. He heard a man’s voice answering someone else’s question. Henry Border didn’t know where he was any more. He found it hard to breathe.

‘We were in the ghetto. There were four families sleeping in one room in makeshift beds or bunks one on top of the other. It was night.’

‘And what happened that particular night?’

‘They knocked on the door and then kicked it in and walked into the room where four couples were sleeping.’

‘Who did this?’

‘The SS. There were four of them, all of them armed. They …’

‘What is your full name?’

‘Rosa? Who’s there? Who keeps asking these questions? And who is answering them?’ Henry Border called out. No one answered. Perhaps no one could hear him over the sounds of MacDougal Street. Perhaps he only thought he was calling out. But the voice he heard, though slightly muffled like one of his wire recordings, was as real as anything he had ever heard. It was a man’s voice and it spoke again.

‘He used to wear a long coat and gloves. But he wore only one glove, the other glove he used to hold in his hand. He would come to see the pits, the new pits that were dug when the ovens couldn’t cope. Yes, I saw Eichmann many times in Auschwitz-Birkenau,’ said the voice from the new Admiral television set Henry Border’s daughter had bought him. Adolf Eichmann was on trial and the world had tuned in. Finally, it was listening.

‘Rosa?’

‘Please tell the court where you were born.’

‘I was born in Ciechanow, Poland.’

‘Where exactly is Ciechanow?’

‘It’s a little over thirty kilometres from the Polish border with East Germany.’

‘How many Jews were in Ciechanow at the start of the war?’

‘About six thousand.’

‘How many were transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau?’

‘From the ghetto, all of them.’

‘So how many came from the ghetto to Auschwitz-Birkenau?’

‘Six thousand minus those who died in the ghetto.’

‘Do you know how many Ciechanow Jews are alive today?’

‘As it happens, I am president of the Ciechanow
Landsmannschaft
so I do know this.’

‘And how many Ciechanow Jews are alive today?’

‘There are seventy-two men … and ten women.’

‘What is your full name?’ asked the presiding judge in Jerusalem.

‘Rosa?’ Henry Border tried to call out.

The breaths were loud, fast and shallow from the bed on the sixth floor walk-up. No one heard them, no one at all. Children squealed as they rode their bikes down on MacDougal Street. A baby cried in the apartment next door. Upstairs two people argued in three languages. From a parked car’s radio out on the street came Hank Ballard and the Midnighters’ ‘Let’s Go, Let’s Go, Let’s Go’. Elly Border had left the window open that morning before she went to work but her father was no longer warm.

‘What is your full name?’ asked the presiding judge in Jerusalem.

Hank Ballard sang from down on MacDougal Street, ‘There’s a thrill upon the hill. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.’ The wind teased the chiffon curtain. Longing to be out of there and free of the heaviness of this man, free of the illness that had confined him to bed, free of the guilt-sodden memories and hallucinations that churned with the real and ongoing lives of other people, it was tethered to the curtain rod and so it danced a prisoner’s dance. It flapped helplessly a few times at the sixth-floor window and then gave up. By that time nothing in the room stirred, nothing but the vibrations in the air that were the voices coming from the television set where Adolf Eichmann was on trial. Henry Border, once Chaim Broder, no longer moved at all, as far away in Jerusalem the question was asked, ‘What is your full name?’

‘Noah Lewental,’ the witness answered.

*

‘Hello, is this Dr Ayesha Washington?’ Adam Zignelik asked over the phone in his Morningside Heights apartment.

‘Yes, who’s this?’

‘Dr Washington, I’m Dr Zignelik, Adam Zignelik. I’m a historian … from the History Department at Columbia University.’ Adam told himself that there might be time later to clarify the true extent of his relationship with the History Department at Columbia, a relationship
that was now itself history. Technically, within a minute of his first phone call, Adam had lied to her. But he’d called her at work, she sounded busy and since she might well become very important to him, he drew upon the name of the institution he’d worked at before it had found him wanting.

Adam had discovered that the 71st Infantry Division of the US Third Army, to which the black 761st Tank Battalion was at least at that time attached, had not been far from Dachau concentration camp in southern Germany around 29 April 1945, the time the camp had been liberated. Eventually he had been able to match the name remembered by one of Henry Border’s interviewees with the name of an African American captain in the 761st Tank Battalion. The captain’s name was James Washington. Adam Zignelik, now a freelance historian, was hoping that the woman on the other end of the phone speaking from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center was the captain’s relative.

‘I’m sorry to be taking up your time, especially in the middle of a work day, but to cut a long story short my research has led me to a World War II veteran named James Washington and I wondered whether you are related to him at all.’

‘James Washington?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s my grandfather.’

‘Your grandfather?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are we talking about Captain James Washington of the 761st Tank Battalion?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

It’s rare that relief and excitement can co-exist. Usually one so overpowers the other that we are aware of experiencing only one of them at any one time. Excitement permits a nervousness, even if joyous, that might be said to be the very antithesis of relief. Nonetheless, for a very brief moment, Adam Zignelik experienced them both and was aware of it. Whatever it might or might not be worth, his instincts, skill and perseverance had led him to a relative of the captain mentioned by Henry Border’s DP in the 1946 interview. But when he heard Dr Ayesha
Washington say that not only was Captain James Washington of the 761st Tank Battalion her grandfather, but that he was still alive, it was excitement alone that he experienced. At best, he’d thought, there might be some written record of the man’s combat experiences, contemporaneous or otherwise. That the man might still be alive was more than he’d allowed himself to hope for. And he certainly hadn’t expected the enthusiasm he encountered from his granddaughter, the oncologist Ayesha Washington.

‘This will mean the world to him,’ she said, ‘Just your interest … He hasn’t been well and I think this will really … You want to talk to him, right?’

‘I do but … can I ask you about his cognitive capacity, his memory, his –’

‘He’s sharp as a tack. I have to watch what I say around him, he remembers everything.’

‘’Cause you said he’s not been well and I just wondered –’

‘It’s his hip,’ she shot back. ‘He needs surgery. It’s important, frankly it’s serious, but his mind is as good as it ever was. And he has a fine mind, Dr Zignelik.’

She made no attempt to hide her enthusiasm in a way that Adam could not have known she reserved for situations she considered of tremendous personal importance. Her professional demeanour permitted no hint of this kind of near exuberance. It was as though she was selling her grandfather to the historian. Nor could she have known the professional importance of her grandfather, the captain, to the man on the other end of the line. They agreed to meet before she’d mention Adam’s interest to her grandfather. She was concerned to avoid dashing the old man’s undoubted elation at the prospect of talking about his war-time experiences to a historian should anything go amiss. To accommodate her as much as possible, Adam told her he would be happy to meet her at her workplace during her lunch hour.

She seldom took a whole hour off for lunch but agreed immediately and, some short time later, the two of them met in person at the tiny Fresh Food Kitchen on 68th Street. There, over the din made by the overworked staff and the busy lunch crowd, Adam explained the possible
importance to his work of her grandfather. He told her that he had unearthed a 1946 interview with a Holocaust survivor, which referred to being liberated by black troops and to an officer named Washington. Ayesha Washington had been very close to her grandfather all her life. Not only was he immensely proud of her, but she was all he had now. She, on her part, personally oversaw any medical treatment he needed, his financial needs and his living circumstances.