The Street Sweeper

by Elliot Perlman

  *

  Eileen Miller set up an appointment for Adam with someone from the Electrical Engineering Department who not only had met Cadden several times but also could show him through the remains of Cadden’s laboratory there and then. He could even show Adam a wire recorder of the type that Border had used. Since Cadden was the archetypal engineer, it was explained to Adam, he was constantly cannibalising his earlier work for later models so it couldn’t be said definitively that the wire recorder Adam would be shown was the precise one Border had taken to the DP camps of Europe in the summer of 1946.

  ‘Well, this is it or certainly one like it,’ Arturo Suarez, the academic from Electrical Engineering explained. Adam looked at it.

  ‘Do you mind if I pick it up?’

  ‘No, so long as you’re careful. Might be a good idea to stand with it over the table so it won’t have too big a drop if you slip. But don’t let it slip.’ Adam held it. It was heavy, heavier in his arms than he had expected. He tried to imagine a man close to sixty dragging it in and out of DP camps immediately after the war.

  ‘You know, prob’ly still works,’ Arturo Suarez said with quiet admiration.

  ‘How exactly does it work?’ Adam asked.

  ‘Okay, let me tell you the whole thing, from the beginning. You want to put it down there for a moment?’ Arturo Suarez asked him. Adam gently placed it down. Eileen Miller had been right to predict the enthusiasm that the Electrical Engineers had for Cadden. Arturo Suarez continued.

  ‘So Marvin Cadden, born right here in Chicago, was tinkering with things in his parents’ house from the time he was five, you believe that? He’s in his early twenties when he gets to studying electrical engineering at the Armour Institute of Technology, which is what we were called before we were IIT. Well, bear in mind that he could have done anything; I mean anything, he was that kind of guy. You know? But it turns out that his cousin is some kind of opera singer or somethin’. I mean, I don’t know if he was any good as an opera singer but he was trainin’ to become an opera singer and Marvin was close to his cousin and the whole thing was Marv wanted to give his cousin a chance to hear what he sounded like – as an opera singer, I mean – a chance for his cousin to hear himself sing. So he remembers something he learned here about Poulsen’s idea. Valdemar Poulsen? You may not know of Poulsen, but no matter.

  ‘So Poulsen had come up with what he called a telegraphphone wherein he recorded sounds magnetically. Never been done before. Marvin Cadden had learned about this and wanted to do somethin’ similar for his cousin, the opera singer.

  ‘He tried using piano wire. He was able to record a range of sounds by converting them into a range of magnetic fields and to use these to induce a range of degrees of magnetisation in a travelling wire. And by reversing the procedure, he was able to reproduce the original sounds. He found, however, that the wire would twist during the process and distort the sound on playback. That’s when Marv revolutionised sound recording forever. To avoid the distortion due to the wire twisting, he came up with a magnetic recording head, see? By surrounding the wire with this recording head, but without them touching, he was able to induce the degree of magnetisation appropriate to a particular sound uniformly around the circumference of the cross-section of the wire passing through the head at that time. That was his idea and it worked. This was genius. The guy was still in his twenties.

  ‘I don’t know what happened to the opera singer cousin but Marvin got a position at Armour and started taking out patents and he was off and running. During the war the Navy used his technology to train submarine pilots. It was ‘cause of Marvin’s work they were able to simulate the sounds made during depth charge attacks. In this way the crew in the sub could acclimatise, could get accustomed to operating with the pressure of that sound, the noise of being attacked. The US Army used his work too. They used the Model 50 to spook the enemy with decoy attacks, attacks that existed only aurally. It was his equipment, Marv’s equipment developed right here, that blasted out the prerecorded sounds of an infantry attack, high volume, on D-Day during the landing. Confused the enemy and saved lives. The guy was a hero and a genius innovator.

  ‘And it didn’t stop after the war, either. After the war he turned his attention away from wire and on to tape. All the magnetic tapes and magnetic coatings, magnetic sound for motion pictures, multi-track tape-recording, high-frequency bias, you know, of the kind that reduces the signal to noise ratio; that’s all Marvin. By the time he died he had something like 500 patents to his name and they’d get licensed to companies like GE, 3M and Eastman Kodak. Sony made a packet out of Marv but he never really saw any of it.’

  ‘When did he die?’

  ‘I wanna say … mid-’90s, I think about 1995. I can check for you if it’s important. His widow is still alive.’

  ‘What kind of man was he?’

  ‘Friendly, regular guy, one of nature’s gentlemen. He was very … what do you say? Unassuming, no airs or graces. Liked a joke, always smiling.’

  ‘Did you meet him?’

  ‘Sure, I was just an undergraduate comin’ up but everybody knew about him and if you wanted to meet him you could and anybody who had any interest in electrical engineering wanted to meet him. He was approachable. He used to play harmonica, I mean really play. He was a virtuoso with that. Played every week in one of a couple of bars. He was doin’ it for years. People asked him to tour, he was that good, show tunes as well as blues. Black guys asked him to play with them. Really! He could’ve made a living off of that.’

  ‘Did he play with them, black musicians?’

  ‘I don’t know. If I had to guess I would say no.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘People didn’t tend to mix so much in those days. So I’m told.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he ever mentioned anything at all about the psychologist, Henry Border.’

  Arturo Suarez shook his head. ‘No, never.’

  When Adam had finished looking at Marvin Cadden’s wire recorder, Arturo Suarez, the electrical engineer, escorted him back to the School of Psychology inside the Life Sciences building. Everyone at IIT was being quite unexpectedly helpful. Adam thought about this and wondered if it was because of his connection to Columbia. When he permitted himself to think that this was the reason, he felt a fraud. Would these people be so helpful if they knew the true state of his career?

  Adam Zignelik was to be meeting up with Eileen Miller again but his visit to the Electrical Engineering Department had taken longer than he’d expected and now she was unavailable, teaching or at a meeting. Adam wondered if he hadn’t pushed his luck. Perhaps she’d done enough and was due back in her own world. But she’d left instructions for a staff member to show Adam to the reading room where Border’s materials were kept. Now he was alone there with some more boxes and his own voice telling him to quit, insisting he stop pretending he had something valuable to contribute. He told himself he should just hand Border’s transcripts over to experts, Holocaust historians, to nod once politely when these experts thanked him, to pack up his office at Columbia and start looking for another job. Somebody would eventually go through all of the transcripts. Sooner or later they’d all be digitised and it would be easy enough to see then whether there was any mention of African American soldiers participating in the liberation of Dachau.

  As for Border, the man himself, what did it matter if he had been Jewish? It might well have been his religion or his ethnicity that accounted for the motivation of this little mid-western psychologist becoming one of the pioneers of oral history but what did his motivation matter? One of Adam’s inner voices told him it was enough for Adam to have found the transcripts. But another voice countered that this was something that could have been done by anyone who’d cared to look. This voice told him there were two good reasons no one had cared to look before him. First, because everyone else had real work to do and, second, because Border was, in himself, of no interest to anybody. So what should he do now? he asked himself,
as he sat there in the reading room alone, just the way he sat in most places. You’ll look at some unread, barely published papers on arcane aspects of psychology to do with the word choice of trauma victims before catching a cab to the airport where you’ll buy more peanuts to throw around the cabin of the plane on your way home to an empty apartment that you’ll soon have to give up.

  ‘Why can’t you look at this man’s papers,’ Diana whispered, ‘without looking at yourself looking at them?’

  A draught seemed to be coming from the storeroom that was off the reading room and Adam got up to close the door. Maybe I could get sick while I’m here, Adam thought to himself.

  There was a tiny window in the storeroom that looked on to an expanse of grass outside. Adam stepped over a crate covered by some kind of sheet to check whether the tiny window could be more tightly closed but he realised it was too high for him to reach and he’d have to make do by just closing the storeroom door. That was the best he was going to be able to do. Careful not to knock over either of the two ladders, the bucket, the mop or the broom stored there, Adam bumped his shin against the covered crate and swore. The crate had cut him.

  When he got back to New York he would have a bruise as a souvenir of this storeroom off the reading room in the School of Psychology inside the Life Sciences building at IIT. The sheet covering the crate was itself covered with a layer of dust about as thick as the sheet itself. Adam thought he might sneeze. Though the dust wouldn’t follow him back to New York, he felt it was best to get out of this miserable storeroom as soon as possible. He was closing the door when he thought to go back in.

  It was probably cleaning materials or carpenters’ equipment but since this was the room that had housed the remaining boxes of Border’s papers, he thought perhaps he should at least lift the dust-caked sheet that someone had once draped over the offending crate before he left.

  He took hold of a corner of the sheet and slowly lifted it off. By the time it was a third of the way off the crate Adam had the first inkling of what the contents might be. There were white plastic cylinders, thin in the middle and expanded at each rim. At first glance there had to have been easily over a hundred of them.

  ‘Oh, Jesus!’ Adam said out loud. These were the spools of wire given to him by Marvin Cadden that Henry Border had taken to DP camps in Europe in the summer of 1946 to record people who would now be called Holocaust survivors. Adam looked at the spools. All around him was silence. Inside the crate there were people waiting to get out, people who had experienced unimaginable events, the remnants of communities that had been silenced through annihilation. Inside the crate there were voices. This was as close as anyone had ever got to interviewing these people at length while the trauma was being occasioned to them. Civilian Germans had not stopped it, the other Axis powers and their citizenry had not stopped it, nor had the Allied governments, their armies or their citizenry stopped it. The Jews of Europe had tried desperately to tell the world what was happening to them but their voices went essentially unheard until they were completely silenced, all except voices such as those of the few just-freed survivors on the spools of wire in this crate in the storeroom off the reading room in the School of Psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

  At first Adam didn’t know what to do. He wanted to shout, to tell someone, but he didn’t know who to tell and, anyway, he needed to confirm that he was right about the contents of the crate. He picked up one of the spools and looked at it. It was numbered. How could he confirm its contents? He hunched over, placed the dusty sheet back over the entire aperture of the crate and dragged the thing out of the storeroom and into the reading room. He picked up the phone on the desk there and made an internal call to Arturo Suarez, the electrical engineer. At first he couldn’t reach him. The calls were being caught by a departmental answering machine. In a garbled message Adam left both the extension of the phone in the reading room and his mobile phone number. He put the phone down. The room was quiet. Adam was almost too frightened to peek under the dusty sheet again in case he’d dreamed the whole thing or in case, in shifting the crate, he’d somehow been responsible for ruining the wire recordings.

  Having paced the hall outside the reading room for no reason whatsoever, he took to calling Arturo Suarez every sixty seconds. Suarez might have gone for the day, he might have been teaching, he might have been at a meeting or he might have had a heart attack and died. Adam didn’t know what else to do while waiting for Suarez to call him back other than call him. In one of the sixty-second breaks Arturo Suarez called him back. It took Adam, who could barely contain himself, about five minutes to explain to Suarez the possible significance of the wire on the spools. Could Suarez bring the wire recorder he had shown him to the reading room of the School of Psychology as soon as possible? Adam thought he was probably going to miss his plane. Had it not been for a teaching obligation he wouldn’t have cared. Arturo Suarez took a little over twenty minutes from the time they got off the phone to carefully bring around to the Psychology reading room Marvin Cadden’s wire recorder. He was out of breath and mildly perspiring when he got there and he had to agree that the wire spools had every chance of being what Adam hoped they were.

  The wire was as thin as nylon thread but much more fragile. Adam didn’t want to unwind it but it needed to be partially unwound before it could be threaded into the machine.

  ‘I can’t do it. I don’t trust my fingers,’ Adam said.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Arturo Suarez volunteered, taking a spool from Adam that Adam had chosen at random. Adam watched him plug the wire recorder into the wall and then begin to thread the wire with the delicacy of a surgeon.

  The first sound they heard was a crackling sound, which became the sound of a crowd of people talking, a set of voices of different tones and shades and volumes melding into a wall of languages. Then came a solitary ‘shoosh’, which was quickly joined by so many others that the chorus of them overpowered the wall of language and then all was quiet but for some hiss and crackling. Then Adam heard a solitary voice. The sound it made was a song, a lullaby familiar to him, and it shocked him to be catapulted back to his own childhood. This was the last thing he expected, to hear a fragment of his own childhood.

  As a little boy growing up in Melbourne he had heard his grandparents sing this song to him many times when they babysat while his mother was out. When he grew a bit older his mother found a place that would transfer the song from the 78 record his grandparents had it on to a cassette when 78s were superseded by LPs. Now he listened to it in the reading room of the School of Psychology of IIT on the south side of Chicago. He listened and was astonished at how immediately he lost his professional distance. With both Adam and Arturo staring at the wire recorder, Adam felt his eyes well up and they listened to the lone voice of a young man sing amid the crackling sound. Adam thought of himself as a child, of his Polish Jewish grandparents, of his mother who never remarried and then of the young man singing in a DP camp. What had been done to this young man just before he sang into the machine Marvin Cadden had taught Border to use? He wondered if Border, assuming he had been a Jew, had been able to hold on to his professional detachment better than he had. What was Border thinking when the thin voice of this thin young man, new to manhood, new to liberty, sang for him as it now did for Adam Zignelik?

  Shlof mayn kind, shlof keseyder,

  Zingen vel ich dir a lid.

  Az du mayn kind vest elter veren

  Vestu visn an untersheid.

  Az du mayn kind vest elter veren

  Vestu vern mit laytn glaych

  Damolst estu gevoyre veren

  Vos heyst orim un vos heyst raych.

  ‘What’s he singing? Do you know what language that is?’ Arturo Suarez asked Adam.

  ‘It’s Yiddish. It’s a lullaby. The singer is telling the child to sleep. “Sleep, my child, sleep peacefully”.’

  This was it, Adam thought. These were Border’s wire recordings. He had found them. Oth
er than Border himself, Arturo Suarez and Adam Zignelik might well have been the first people to hear this since it was recorded. Adam was going to miss his plane but he couldn’t leave the room. He looked at his watch.

  ‘You’re going to have to teach me how to thread the wire.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t trust your fingers?’

  ‘I don’t. But you have to teach me anyway. First, if you don’t mind, I’m going to need to get a later flight, if I can.’

  Arturo Suarez needed to make a call himself. He needed to call his wife to explain that he would be home a bit late. It took Adam longer than it should have to change his flight and it cost him more than it should have. But now that he had a later flight he was free to learn how to thread Henry Border’s 1946 wire into Marvin Cadden’s wire recorder. There had to be more than a hundred hours of interviews to listen to. He was going to start then and there.

  *

  Late one afternoon before even the earliest of the dinner guests had arrived, two waiters in waistcoats and bow ties were preparing the tables from the floor plan as the first of their duties on their shift in a venerable downtown Manhattan steak restaurant just off Union Square. One of them was setting tables with glasses and cutlery and the other was running a vacuum cleaner under the tables his colleague hadn’t yet reached. Preoccupied alternately with work-related and more personal thoughts, with the pressure of the time remaining before the first guests were due to arrive, and distracted by the noise of the vacuum cleaner, they didn’t notice Lamont Williams, fresh from his shift at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, walk past the unattended greeting station at the front of the restaurant and stand in the middle of the dining room.

  How many years had it been since he had been there? The most recent time he had been there was almost a decade earlier on his first date with a young woman with whom he had had a daughter. His thoughts went around the room to the different tables at which he’d sat at different times, all as the two waiters and then others he vaguely heard but couldn’t see went about their business.