Clifford's Blues (18 page)

I like for Willy to ask questions because they make me think about things I put out of my mind. Then I ask questions, talk to Werner and the other Reds and Dr. Nyassa and Gitzig. Oh! Gitzig got him some. Down at the Puff. Bernhardt, it seems, decided to let him go once a month. Gitzig looks forward to it, but I know he'd rather deliver milk closer to home. (Gitzig is also coming into camp once in a while to work in the Political Office.) While they haven't given him “Prisoner Foreman” markings, Dr. Nyassa now seems to be in charge of Infirmary Two. He's pretty free again with the medicinal brandy. That evil-looking block leader in One has nothing to do with Dr. Nyassa now, but both, along with the helpers, report to doctors—doctors who are very blasé about patients, whether they have colds or fractured skulls.

It's the time of year nobody likes. It's the time of the snow commandos and the worst time for roll calls, especially the evening ones. The snow commandos are the prisoners detailed to clear the snow from the entire camp, not with shovels, but with boards nailed to planks. Snow is as forbidden to exist in camp as flower beds are forced to be in camp. Flower beds. In this hellhole. I watch the snow commandos shovel from the canteen window; shovel, while the prisoner foremen and detail leaders and the
SS
holler and scream, kick, hit, and beat them. But the snow gets cleared and then everything is ice and frozen mud. Clothes freeze on the prisoners, become as stiff as the boards they shovel with. Their eyes water with the cold, and their noses run—but, at least at five o'clock, they can quit and march to their blocks singing to the music the band plays (some of my boys playing).

The
Strafappell
is punishment for every prisoner in the camp if even one man doesn't answer the roll call. Some prisoners are too tired to move. They hide and sleep. Some have tried to escape. Others are too sick. But for any roll call, the prisoner has to be in his place on the Appellplatz. If not, then 6, 999 other prisoners stand
Strafappell
until the prisoner clerks can present to the roll-call officer a tally that shows all prisoners present and accounted for. I watch the roll calls from the canteen window. In warm weather even the
Strafappell
isn't bad; sometimes the sunsets can almost make a man forget that he's standing at attention, his hands along the seams of his pants, his cap tucked under his arm. Of course, people fall out on the ground, or get sick standing up, or even, as I've heard but never seen, die right there and keel over. Winter makes it worse. I look out the window and thank God for Dieter Lange. Seven thousand men standing like posts pounded into the ground, the winter night wrapped around the outsides of the searchlights. When things go well, roll call takes an hour and a half; when things do not go well—
Strafappell
can last all night with the lights on, the dogs barking, the guards shouting and cursing, the prisoners answering weakly or falling out, freezing, turning blue. And for the men who caused the
Strafappell
, there is pure, distilled hatred and maybe a beating in the shower, maybe even an “accidental” killing—a push from the top of the quarry stone, a push into the sewer or marsh, a falling tree, a gravel-filled wagon run over a foot or hand, and so on. For one man, or two or even three, cannot be allowed to make thousands suffer. That is how the
SS
keeps order, by placing the responsibility for keeping order upon the prisoners themselves.

I'm always afraid there will come that night when they call me out and stand me in a place to be counted just like the others, like so many heads of cattle or sharecroppers needed to pick cotton. Cross my fingers. Knock on wood. Turn three times. Call on the Loas. Pray.

Monday, January 24, 1938

On Saturday I watched a group of prisoners move a pile of frozen gravel from the far end of the 'Platz. Yesterday another group, the Punishment Company, which works even on Sunday, was putting it right back when the whistle and sirens began to sound. “Roll call for Jehovah's Witnesses. Roll call! All Bible students! Roll call!”

They came out of their blocks shivering in the cold, sliding on the snow and ice and frozen mud, their purple triangles crinkling on their knees and chests as they approached the Dancing Ground, where leashed dogs and hollering guards surrounded and pushed them into formation. I know the other prisoners were relieved they weren't being called out, too. Especially the Jews and the freaks. Everyone in the canteen who was not a Witness crowded to the windows, yet tried to stay out of sight; wanted to see but not be seen, because who knew what an
SS
guard might take a notion to do?

I saw Menno!

He looked
bad
. His eyes had that narrow, crafty look every other Protective Custody prisoner in Dachau has. Dr. Nyassa tells me they are still working his behind off in
Revier
One and on various labor details as well. He was shaking with the cold. I studied him as if he were a stranger. The kind of joker I wouldn't want to meet in an alleyway after the last set. I couldn't even remember our making love; that seemed to have happened a long time ago. He might have been younger than me, but I knew I now looked younger. This place can age you in no time flat, no time at all, and faster if you've really done the hard time. When the Witnesses were in formation and the roll taken, over the loudspeaker the roll-call officer shouted:

“On this German Christian Sunday we offer you nonbelievers an opportunity to pledge allegiance to the State, after which your sentences will be reconsidered, with release a probability. You will repeat after me. I, say your name!” (We heard the dissonance of 1,500 names being called out.) “Born, give your birth date!” (Again that ragged, splattering sound, this time of numbers.) “In, the town, the town!” (The sound was like a thousand different birds squawking at once.)
“One!
I acknowledge that the International Association of Jehovah's Witnesses advocates a false doctrine using their religious activities as a pretext in their subversive aims.
Two!
I have therefore totally rejected this organization and have freed myself emotionally from the sect.
Three!
I hereby undertake never again to work for the International Association of Jehovah's Witnesses. I shall report any persons who approach me with the false doctrine of Jehovah's Witnesses or those who in any way display sympathy for them. Should I receive any Jehovah's Witness literature, I shall surrender it immediately to the nearest police station.”

“Police station?” they were saying in the canteen. “That means they'll be freed! You think they'll agree? Bet? How much? How many cigarettes?”

“
Four!
I shall in the future observe the laws of the nation especially in the event of war, when I shall take up arms to defend my Fatherland and strive to become a wholehearted member of the national community.
Five!
I have been informed that I must expect a further term of Protective Custody if I fail to observe the present opportunity made today.” The ranks remained still, straight, and stiff. They can get out! I thought. Go free! And once out, keep truckin' and never look back.

“Those accepting the opportunity presented by the Fuhrer … two steps forward!”

I know they were dying to look at each other, to read each other's eyes, to see how strong was the faith. But the ranks stayed the same—for three or four seconds, the balloons of breath drifting above them. Then they broke. There was a man who stepped forward and hung his head; and then two, three, four others, and others followed until fully half the Witnesses had taken the two steps forward, among them Menno Becker. Almost at once, the guards and dogs closed in, dividing the two groups, herding those who'd accepted to the east side of the 'Platz and those who hadn't to the west.

I went into the back room and left the running of the canteen to Baum. In the front the customers were murmuring, “War, did you hear him? ‘In the event of war,' he said. Oh, shit. Then they
are
serious with this
Lebensraum
.…” I was thinking, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland … And after those, what? Who?

Thursday, February 10, 1938

The morgue is in
Revier
One, in the back. It's where they keep the bodies before examination. Then they take them to the crematorium and burn them in the incinerator and pot the ashes for sending home. I never had anything to do with morgues. But yesterday Dr. Nyassa came into the canteen and asked me to come with him. There was something he wanted to show me. There isn't much heat in the blocks, only a small stove in each barrack living room. The stove is smaller in the canteen, but when you have to go out in the snow and wind, you grow to appreciate what little heat you do get. And we just had to cross the Lagerstrasse. Dr. Nyassa wasn't very talkative. He was bundled up. His nose and eyes were running from the cold, which had turned his skin more gray than black, and he seemed frozen in the blues. We went through the ward—there're always more patients in the winter; everyone's sick from the cold—and into the back. When it's this cold, they don't turn on the machinery that keeps the bodies cold; they don't need it.

It was dim in there, and very still. The windows were iced over. Dr. Nyassa reached up and pulled the light string. Bodies lay in rows on the floor, each fixed in position as if molded in plaster, with just enough space to walk between them. In spite of the cold, there was a heavy smell, like you get when you walk into a butcher's freezer. “Here,” he said. We'd reached a corner where the smell seemed to have collected. Menno. Menno, without a stitch of clothes on. I could hardly tell it was him, his face was so beat up and swollen. His head was twice its normal size. I looked at his body. There were long purple welts on it, from his head down to his ankles, each raised so high I couldn't believe it. His whatchacallit was black, blue, and purple, big as a salami, frozen blood still on what was left of it. I began to shake. What would they do to
me
if they found out, if I had no protection? Dr. Nyassa said, “When they get mad at you fellows, they do anything. He's not the first.” He lifted his foot and pointed it toward Menno's crotch. “They are animals,
animals
. They wouldn't do this to a pig.”

“I thought they were letting him go,” I said.

Dr. Nyassa turned me and gently pushed me out. “They were never going to let him go, Pepperidge. Make an example of him. He had hard time coming. He was doing hard time,” he said. “They were supposed to take his body to the oven so nobody would see this, which is what they usually do. But something must've come up, so they put him here until tonight. Your friend Werner got word from someone who heard it all in the Bunker last night. Worst thing they'd ever heard coming out of that place.”

Dr. Nyassa said, “God help us. I live in fear that because I put my penis in a white woman, wife or not, they'll take it off, and yet, you know, even with that fear I keep going to those farm girls at the Puff.”

I returned to the canteen. It was starting to snow hard. Baum could tell something was wrong, and he didn't bother me. I stared out the window and thought of voodoo revenge. But I didn't have any eggs to tie to Menno's hands, and there was no coffin to put him face down in, and I sure didn't have and couldn't get seven red candles for the bottom end of his coffin or nine white ones for the head. I couldn't spend the two days and nights called for to do these things. And there would be no burial, with fresh-turned dirt on which I could throw broken eggshells. Even New Orleans voodoo took a whipping from the Nazis. So I stared out the window and could not cry. “God loves you, brother,” Menno had said the very first time we met, and I thought, He's got a damned funny way of showing it. Even you must be surprised, Menno.

Monday, Mar. 14, 1938

Gitzig told me last week that it looked as though he might be going off on a brief trip soon, out into the world for a spell. But that was all he said, and I figured he was full of shit and was feeling his oats because he was moving in and out of the camp, doing his private work for Bernhardt, and managing to get some pussy now and again. But I guess he knew what he was talking about because yesterday was the “Joining.” I should have known something was going on because there was a strange atmosphere in The Nest when we played Friday and Saturday. We got requests for marches and the old German songs. A kind of excitement about something nobody really knows, only guesses at. Hitler is supposed to march into Vienna today. Hitler's going to Austria and Dieter Lange is going crazy trying to figure out canteen supplies for the 80,000 Austrians who will be coming to the camps in Germany or going to camps already planned in Austria. “Sure, we can make money,” I heard him tell Anna, “but will all this planning never end, and how can I stop all this infernal stealing? Most of the goddamn
SS
ought to be wearing green or black triangles.”

I told Baum to question his wife very carefully about the mail from Holland. He said she said nothing had come. So I asked Baum: “Is she destroying the letters? Did you tell her to destroy them and say nothing had come? Did you tell her to destroy my letters?”

“Ah, no, Pepperidge. Please believe. No. You think I want trouble? Maybe your friend just doesn't write anymore. Maybe he went away. Maybe he's sick. I would never tell my wife to do as you just said, never.”

Willy Lewis owes me two letters, so I decided not to write until I hear from him. The
SS
might be smelling something, so it's best to leave it be for now. If he writes, he'll probably talk about Austria. After that conversation with Baum, I learned that a lot of people aren't getting mail anymore—Dr. Nyassa, Werner, and others. But the prisoners who get fine packages from home have no trouble. Of course, they have to divvy up with the guards and the “seniors” who run the blocks and the camp and details. But the big thing is Austria. The Reds are about the only prisoners who aren't happy. Maybe the Witnesses, too, but for different reasons. Everybody else is strutting around like mugs. The English did nothing, the Russians did nothing, and the French did nothing. Well, the Germans weren't shitting on
their
doorsteps.