The Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman Page A

mob.’
    ‘Which one’s right?’
    ‘I don’t know. Maybe someone knows. Maybe it’s one of those things … one of those things people don’t know.’
    ‘Why don’t people know? Why are there two versions of the ending? Does that mean that one of the versions is wrong?’
    ‘I don’t know. That’s what historians do, that’s for historians. They take raw material and piece together the stories that make up history for the rest of us.’
    ‘What do you mean, “raw material”?’
    ‘Whatever they can find, eyewitness statements, police statements, newspaper reports – anything they can find. You want to see where it happened?’
    ‘The Colored Orphan Asylum?’
    ‘It’s only a block away. You can probably see where it was from here. It’s 43rd and 5th. Look, just there, that corner, you see? We’ll go there but then we’ll have to get a cab.’
    The cab would take them to the airport where Jake Zignelik would say goodbye to his son Adam and put him on the long flight back to his mother. But before that the father dragged the son who dragged his suitcase to the corner of 43rd and 5th where the Colored Orphan Asylum had once stood. Young Adam craned his neck and looked up. He was looking in the air for furniture that might be thrown out of a window by people wanting to kill children, children who had already lost their parents. It had happened right there. It was no fairytale, not even a dark one with hidden meanings known only to grown-ups, known only to students of history, some sinister tale not really meant for children, a tale that had crossed the Atlantic from the thick forests of Europe. No, this was something that had happened right there on the corner of 43rd Street and 5th Avenue. It was New York where the Colored Orphan Asylum had been attacked. It was New York where a ten-year-old black girl had been killed when furniture pushed out of the window fell on her as she was fleeing the mob that had invaded the orphanage she’d been sent to after she was abandoned. This was the same New York his dad worked and lived in.
    More than the Empire State Building or the Chrysler Building, the Statue of Liberty, Broadway or Times Square, this was the New York young Adam thought about when he got home to his mother. This was the New York he took with him on the plane. New York was the city where the orphans were attacked. Irrespective of whether Jake Zignelik thought he had turned the exercise of separation, first from his wife, thenfrom his son, into an art, irrespective of the delis with wise-cracking old waiters who knew everything, irrespective of his dad’s doting lady friends with their intoxicating perfume and cigarette cases that snapped shut with a crisp sound you wanted to try to emulate, pretty ladies who ran their fingers through a little boy’s hair with the genuine but transient affection of someone temporarily engaging with a cat they were visiting, irrespective of shows he didn’t always understand and museums and art galleries that were interesting up to the point where the back of his legs hurt, irrespective of the parks and
the
park, Central Park, and irrespective of kindly William McCray and his son Charles, who took care of Adam from time to time when their fathers had important work to do, New York was first and foremost to young Adam Zignelik the city with the Colored Orphan Asylum. This was the place of the orphans. Do you know about them, he would say, do you know what happened at the Colored Orphan Asylum? New York was the city of orphans.
    ‘What was her name?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘What was the little girl’s name?’ Adam asked his father in the cab on the way to the airport, looking out the window at late 1970s Queens.
    ‘Which little girl?’
    ‘The little girl who was killed by the furniture the mob threw out the window at the Colored Orphan Asylum?’
    ‘You know, I don’t know.’
    ‘Do people know?’
    ‘I don’t know that either.’
    ‘But if the other