Clifford's Blues (12 page)

Thurs., Sept. 10, 1936

When it was slow in the canteen I slipped over to Werner's block and we exchanged news. He'd heard about the band and asked me to keep my eyes and ears open, to get hold of the
Muenchner Illustrierte Presse
and the
Muenchner Nachristen
whenever I could and bring them to camp. Those are the newspaper and magazine that cover most of Bavaria. He pointed to a detail marching across the 'Platz. “They're going out to clear away the mess the fire made,” he said. “Then they'll start building another house. Hohenberg's office has allotted a day crew and a night crew to finish up in a hurry.” He smiled. I asked what was funny. He said, “Everything the day crew does, the night crew will partly undo. After all,” he said, shrugging, “these prisoners aren't carpenters, not most of them anyway.” So they went, in step, and singing, and when the way seemed clear, after I'd gone back to check on the canteen, I slipped over to the
Revier
.

I don't know why I did that. I had the feeling that being in the band, under the control of both Dieter Lange and Bernhardt, nothing could happen to me. Like those bad jokers back home who “belonged” to powerful white folks. I wanted to see Menno, just see him, that was all. I didn't recognize the man who seemed to be the block leader, but I asked for Dr. Nyassa. He looked me up and down. Then I saw in his eyes that he knew who I was. How many colored people were there in Dachau? He's that one, his eyes seemed to say. Still watching me, he called, “Nyassa, come here!” Dr. Nyassa rounded a corner. He looked evil, but when he saw me his face lit up. I gathered he didn't get along with the block leader. No sign of Menno. The block leader pointed to me and went back to his charts. “Come,” Dr. Nyassa said, and I followed him to the room where we'd first talked. I could see the canteen from the window. He asked about the fire, about the Olympic Games, Jesse Owens. I asked if his wife had visited and he said she'd been forbidden to do so. But he's gotten some letters from her. She was not going to France or England or America; she was going to wait for him. Dr. Nyassa shook his head. “I don't understand what's happening, even now,” he said. I told him he wasn't the only one. “You know, we belonged to the
Schwartz-Weiss Verein
back in Berlin,” he said, “about four hundred black people, half of them Americans.” I knew about them. Some had come to hear me play; they all lived in the East End and just about all the men had married German women, or German men had married the colored women, and some of the colored married colored. “Now this,” he said.

“But you're a German citizen,” I said.

“I'm not.” Now he smiled. “But I'm not what
you
are,” he added.

“Well, then, where's Becker?” I said.

“Out on detail. The swamps.”

Oh, God, I thought. “Doesn't he work here anymore?”

Dr. Nyassa said, “Oh, yes. He works the night shift.” Dr. Nyassa paused. “It was nothing he did this time, Pepperidge. It's just the
SS
. They don't like him. They'd like to kill him, but we're shorthanded, and that ass up front only reads charts. He's not a medical person.”

So Menno was on detail during the day, and working the night shift here. How long could he last?

Friday, September 11, 1936

The truck picked us all up at the
Jourhaus
. Everyone had just come off some detail and was hungry; there hadn't been time to eat supper. There was already some coolness in the air. Around this place it always gets cold in a hurry, even in the summer. I'll never get used to it. I looked around. Ernst, Oskar, Moritz, Teodor, Alex, Fritz, Franz, and Sam. Two
SS
men on either side at the back of the truck, and two at the front end, plus two in the cab with the driver. Almost as many of them as us, and they all had guns. They smelled fresh-cleaned, and I guessed they'd have their minds at least as much on the girls as on us. They didn't stop us from talking or smoking. They even passed us cigarettes. When we complained about being hungry, they said there was lots of food there for us. We just had to be patient.

The sun was starting to set when we got on the main road. I always wondered how that looked to people who weren't in Dachau, the sun setting all red and gold, down near Bregenz, for example, on the frontier to freedom in Switzerland, 150 kilometers away, they say. The longest buck-and-a-half in the world. The ride to The Nest in the dusk was like sliding through a tunnel without light except for the flare of a match or the red dot of a lighted cigarette. Through the rolled-back canvas door cover, we could see the streetlights and bright shop windows slide back past us, hear the bells ringing on the trams, the car horns, the voices of people talking, without a care in the world, as far as we knew. I wondered if Oskar or Franz or Sam or maybe even Teodor was thinking in the darkness of bowling over the guards and jumping out. Somehow, I couldn't picture Fritz or Moritz or Ernst doing that. I thought about it the way you think about being in a moving picture. Well, there'd be many more rides, so there was plenty of time, if any of us wanted to do it. And then I thought, They know what we're thinking. They're just waiting. Of course. It was normal to think of escape. And it was just as normal for the
SS
to shoot us if we tried. There were guards who just waited for a
Haftling
to make a break.

Teodor and Sam had helped me with the scores. I learned a lot from them and from Fritz and Ernst. It was terrific, learning music the way you learned numbers, sort of. I'd play the number, they'd write it down. They were almost lost on the solos, when a joker was out there all by himself, playing next to the melody. So I'd hum the riffs (even then they were different from the playing) and they'd write them down, too. First time I ever ran across shit like that. Really sounded like a genuine white band.

When we finally got there it was dark. The guards led us into the kitchen and damned if there weren't some other prisoners there to serve us. Beer and wine, too. But I didn't have to say anything about drinking too much. No one was going to mess up this job. When we were full, we went to the dressing room and got into those tuxedos. We could see car lights whipping across the windows, hear cars running over the dirt driveway, hear men and women laughing and talking. The windows were open. The sounds and the cool night air came in. Until that time we were not a band. I thought that while everyone was loosening up, running through scales or a melody, or tightening up a solo. The prisoners who'd served us came in to listen. They were from the camp, too. They kept up the buildings and the grounds, registered the
SS
and the women into the rooms. And there would be nursery workers, too, they said, in another nine months. We laughed at that. Then Bernhardt came in; he was in his dress uniform. He pulled me aside and shoved a bottle of cognac into my hand. I took one lick at it and gave it back. He drank from the bottle without wiping the mouth. All the sounds from outside and now inside were like a regular
hummmmm
. I was getting excited, and when I looked around, I could see everybody else was, too.

“First,” Bernhardt said, “the anthem.”

I knew that. We'd gone over that before. “Then what do you have?” he asked. I was pretty proud of what we'd put together. Yeah, of course we'd play
“Deutschland Über Alles,”
but I had some shit following that would make that dick-licker a memory. I ran down the list and Bernhardt slapped me on the back and offered the cognac again. Europeans had this notion that colored players got drunk as hell and then played like hell. But I took the bottle, tipped it up, and drank not a drop. Shit, you don't say no to a man like Bernhardt.

The guys settled in the bandboxes, lined up the scores. The club was lit with some blue-gray light that seemed almost like fog. We could see them, hear them, smell them, out there. It was almost for real, almost like being free and opening at some club, the cigarette smoke curling up into the spots; the hooch, the beer, the wine; the perfume and the cologne; the flowers and the night air creeping through some of the open windows. The Cliff was on. There was a quick, sharp sound, like everybody sucking in their breath at the same time. The lights came on and we stood to play
“Deutschland.”
I remained at the piano. Then the people were whispering:
“Aussehen! Eine Neger!”
We hit the first note and everyone rose, but they sure didn't take their eyes off me! There did not seem to be, as I glanced around, one
Fraulein
who was what you'd call a knockout. It wasn't so bad. There was applause and then that scuffling around when people sit down and move their chairs. But before they were down good, Teodor jumped up and started playing “The Bugle Call Rag”:

De-de-liddle-liddle-de

de-de-liddle-liddle-de

da-da-da-da-da-da-daaadaa

Fritz came in: zoom-de-zoom. Then Alex: zeem-de-zeem. Then Oskar: whee-de-whee. And we all jumped in, rounded the melody, and everyone took a solo. These went slow; didn't have that fire you have to have when you're out there by yourself snatching at every tune you ever heard and bringing it in on key. For a minute the audience just sat there, and I thought, Oh, shit, and then they clapped and shouted and got up, eased up near the bandstand. I called out, “A-one, a-two, a-one, two, three, fo—” And we cut loose with “Three Blind Mice” at a good, stiff, marching beat. I saw Bernhardt marching around the floor, and soon couples were following him and before long all those uniforms and dresses were moving to Franz's boom-boom-boom, ba-boom-ba-boom-ba-boom. Me and Sam and Franz laid into the beat; the others came together on the melody. Man, it looked like one of those parades in Berlin we get to see when they show newsreels in camp. We wound down the piece to much applause. “Cliff Pepperidge and His Wittelsbachers!” from Bernhardt. I stood and bowed and let the boys join me. I looked at Sam. His number. Oskar and Alex did the intro and Sam just walked on into “I'm Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover,” way up on the strings like his git was a banjo. The rest of us would do a plooey! or dooleoodedoo to back him up. As we ripped along, singing (all songs had to be in German) and playing, I noticed a tall, good-looking, very blond
Oberleutnant
standing just outside the spots near the bandstand. He was stiff and proper in his all-black
SS
uniform and white shirt and Nazi armband, and I couldn't tell if he liked the music or not, or whether he had anything to do with The Nest. He just stood there. Something in his face reminded me of cynical musicians who'd heard and played everything. A couple of girls got up to dance; they were as big as baby elephants, but surprisingly graceful. We could see they were self-conscious—but determined. They were going to whirl their blond hair and roll their big hips and bounce their tits. Show off their stuff to these
SS
. They hadn't done more than a half a minute of swirling, dipping, and twisting before the floor filled with people trying to do everything from a fast two-step to a camel walk. Before they could sit down at the end of the number, we swung into the “Vienna Woods” waltz; Bernhardt said we should have a waltz or two. Me, Moritz, and Fritz headed out in three-quarter time. I could hear Franz counting: “One, two, three, one, two, three,” as he pedaled, Boom, brush, brush, Boom, brush, brush. I don't know how he got the brushes or where, and I didn't ask. Alex and Oskar backed the melody, soft, and Teodor laid off. They loved it. You could see it in their dancing. Every
SS
man was a soldier from a hundred years ago, and every
Fraulein
was a princess; they whirled around, erect, barely touching the floor, some of them, the good dancers who knew what they were doing. And even the dancers who had to count and watch their feet knew what they were supposed to do, even if they weren't doing it right. Time to slow down. My number. I called it “La Vie New York.” It was basically the rhythm section with me doing a solo (why else be a bandleader?) and Sam and Franz backing. There were spaces for Teodor: boodle-lee-dee, ba-tha-n-da-daa; and Ernst with the clarinet: wheedle-lee-whee, bee-dee-doo-bee. Good thing Duke, Cootie, and Barney Bigard weren't around. A clean steal, and on the floor they were into a white folks' slow drag; I mean, they weren't all scrunched up into each other the way colored people would be back home on a blues piece like that, but close enough. Must be a bitch, trying to be Siegfried and Hans or Kriemhild and Anna. (My colonel had told me the story, how Wagner wrote the opera, which ended in knee-deep blood.)

I swear I didn't know an accordion could sound so mellow, so
right
, until Alex did “Falling in Love Again,” with some harmony from Oskar. And they were getting closer together on the floor. I saw Dieter Lange and Annaliese, Bernhardt and Lily, and even Winkelmann and his wife dancing. Some kind of chaperones, I supposed. Then we ended the first set and went to the dressing room, after we grabbed a bunch of sandwiches. Everyone was feeling fine, even friendly. Moritz told me how well I played. We all exchanged cigarettes and laughed over the beer that Bernhardt had brought in. He told us how great we were. He whispered to me, “The women love you!” Behind him came Dieter Lange and Anna and the Winkelmanns. You wouldn't have thought we were prisoners.

The second set went as well as the first, maybe better. We started with “Strike Up the Band,” so everyone could march again, then did “Ma Cherie” for a little French flavor, got a request to repeat “Falling in Love Again,” “St. James Infirmary,” “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” “It Had to Be You,” “I'll See You in My Dreams,” “The Blue Danube,” and me singing “Good Night, Sweetheart,” to close down. All in German. It should have been plain to everybody after that that they were supposed to go somewhere and fuck.

It was cold on the ride back. The streets were empty, the lights low or out. We passed around a couple of bottles of peppermint schnapps the guards let us have, and we had plenty of cigarettes. We talked as if the guards were not sitting there with rifles over their knees. It was like we'd suddenly discovered each other. We talked about how great the solos were and how steady the rhythm section was; and it had been, after the third or fourth number in the first set. The timing hadn't been bad at all. So we talked and drank and smoked all the way back to camp. Of course, the big thing had been playing before an audience. None of us had ever been allowed out so late. The feeling was good. But once we got inside the “outer camp,” where the
SS
lived with their servants, like me and Gitzig, it was so quiet it made me nervous. Every sound had an echo. I was the only one who wasn't living inside the camp proper, where it's always
Mutze ab, Mutze zu
, cap off, cap on. The rest lived inside, members of the camp band that played when the prisoners went out to work and returned. Or they played at the “concerts” the guards made the prisoners attend. They played when people were marched off to the Prisoner Company. It's a wonder they weren't forced to play when people had to shit.