Clifford's Blues (24 page)

Anna surprises me with her temper, her sex, her drinking. And her English. Only rarely now does she ask me to explain a word she may hear over the radio during a
BBC
broadcast. She loves to read about Hollywood movie stars in American magazines, especially Marlene Dietrich who became a
U.S.
citizen last year. “German movies,” she says, “are all about being a good German, not romance, you know.” She's come a long way from
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, and I did it. Everybody looks down on me, but I taught her English; everybody laughs at me, but they love my singing and playing; everybody despises me for being a faggot, but everybody wants to do it to me or have me do it to them. I wish I could lay this burden down, but on clear days when we can just see the mountains to the south, I remind myself how close I came, so I wait, just as Dieter Lange and Anna wait. When they're together they talk about “afterward.” When Dieter Lange's with me, “afterward” is without Anna. I think Anna, too, thinks about “afterward” without him. Me, when I think “afterward” it's without either of them. Everybody's waiting for something, yet I don't think anybody can help believing that things are just beginning.

Thursday, Dec. 29, 1938

Of course, we've had Christmas: big dances at The Nest, and even a party here, for the first time in a long while. I'll remember that party, because there were a couple of doctors who came; one was the man who was doing the tests on Dr. Nyassa. Recognized him right away.

Ursula Winkelmann and her husband have been feted all over the
SS
compound. Her pad is off! The baby is here! I can't imagine what this Winkelmann is like that he went along. There are a bunch of strange saps in the
SS
! Ursula went to Momma's a few days before the “baby” was expected, and when she returned to the compound, she had this baby all wrapped in pink. And her and Anna have been cooing over that little bastard like it was really her own! (Will she pad out four times for the bronze Honor Cross of German Motherhood, or six times for the silver, or eight times for the gold?) Who knows about this? Me, Anna, Dieter Lange, Ursula, naturally, and her husband, and maybe two or three people at
Lebensborn
.

There's a big Christmas tree in the room where the piano is. I love the smell of it, and the decorations and lights and candles. The Winkelmanns, the Bernhardts, the Langes, and me sang Christmas carols, me playing the piano, last Thursday. Bernhardt gave me a carton of Players and a bottle of Scotch and patted me on the back as if to say, “Everything's all right now,” but it isn't. I've often wondered if he watched while they cut off Ulrich's and Maria's heads. (Or could he have done it himself?) Dieter Lange gave me some socks and handkerchiefs, but he had already slipped me a bit of that darling white powder. He once said, “If that fat-assed faggot Goering can use it, why can't we?” Anna gave me a book that bored me after the first page. I put it away.

I spent Christmas alone with a goose, which I didn't eat but left in the oven for Anna and Dieter Lange, some liquor, which I drank, and the piano, which I didn't play. I don't mind when I'm by myself, which is something most prisoners never get to enjoy; you're alone if they put you in the Bunker, but that's hell. This is more like heaven. You relax when you're alone; you don't have to be watching what you do or say, or watching, period. I sat at the piano. The truth is, I'm not happy like I used to be with the music. I haven't found my real self in it since May. Just ricky-tick, tinky-tank stuff. My fingers don't play what I think I hear. I can't seem to make music out of the way I feel. I keep thinking there's got to be a new kind of music to explain this shit I'm in, because music expresses every kind of experience one can imagine, but I can't pump it out of myself, and that makes me afraid; if I don't have my music, really don't have it, then I don't have anything. It's bad not to have anything. You wind up doing what Dr. Nyassa did. Please, God. Help me.

Monday, January 9, 1939

Typhoid epidemic.

Typhoid, and everybody's scared, so The Nest has been without inperson music for a couple of weeks, to make sure none of us brings to it what's been knocking off prisoners in the blocks. The doctors and nurses from the
Reviers
have been giving shots and medicine day and night. Inmates lined up in the cold. Rivers of snot, shit, and saliva. Prisoners working on the sewers. Clean! Clean! the guards shout. Wash! Cleanliness is next to godliness. Wash! Don't drink from here! Don't drink from there! Smoke—black, oily, smelly—boiling out of the crematorium. In the
SS
compound, where the sewer system is good—except where some prisoners may have sabotaged it—everyone is boiling water; everyone is checking for the red spots and the runny bowels, waiting for the weariness that doesn't end. There's not a lot of running from bed to bed right now out here, let me tell you. Over in camp, those that're well have to help those who aren't, and prisoners are being switched from their regular details to the mess, cleanup, and crematorium details. If this is with less than a good heart, it is nevertheless good insurance; you never know when you might get sick and need help. From one end of the camp to the other, the smell of shit and burning bodies seems to have frozen right in the air.

When we're not boiling water and scrubbing the house from top to bottom, me and Anna are smearing alcohol and disinfectant over everything. The house smells like a vat of chlorine, and I'm sure every house out here smells just the same. I think the smell of vinegar and dill is better. Dieter Lange is off on another trip, but one I think he went to, instead of being sent on. Maybe he's hoping Anna will get sick and kick the bucket, maybe that I will, too. Anna needs me to help clean, and the canteen's closed, anyway. Anna's as strong as one of her father's plough horses, and I'm in pretty good shape myself. Nobody's visiting these days, either. Afraid of catching something. (Which is why Anna hasn't been fucking with me. She's afraid she might catch something from me, and I'm afraid I could catch something from her. I'd punch her in the jaw if she tried anything funny right now.)

Well. All this gives me time at the piano, and that's good because I don't have to go over scores. Instead, I'm trying to think up new music and find new ways to make it work, like planting the rhythm in space instead of leaving it alone. It's nice, playing while Anna sews upstairs or sleeps. (Sometimes when she comes down she says, “That was nice. What was it?” Or, “That sounded like glass breaking in the middle of winter. What was
that
supposed to be?”) Being alone gives me a chance to think about things, too, like when I told Werner about Ulrich and Maria. He just shook his head, and asked if Maria had given her last name or where she was from. I told him I didn't know. Then he wanted the exact date, which I gave him. I still think he's writing things down for later. Funny how we all think there will be a “later.” He told me that some of the colored men had died, some more had come in, and all were put in the same block with the Jews. All had been sterilized, he told me, by X-ray; two, he believed, had been castrated. The thought of that made me shiver. He said they just slit the sacks and take out the nuts, sew up the sacks, and you sing alto instead of like Paul Robeson—unless they.… Then he asked if I understood all that was going on. Before I could answer, he started to give me a lesson in civics. Another one.

Things were very bad in France, he said, where fascist Frenchmen were exerting more and more power, which the working people could hold in check for just so long. (I wondered if there weren't fascists everywhere; there seemed to be a lot of them in Germany, so I thought it'd be only natural for them to be all over.) When the French and English backed down over Czechoslovakia, a lot of French officers resigned, and so did some people in the British parliament. Werner called the French “shits who can't be trusted”; they managed to drag the Americans into their front in the last war because they couldn't handle it themselves, but that's the way they are, he said, good in the kitchen, superb in bed, and cowards on the battlefield. I asked him, “Even the workers?” and he stopped short for a second, and then went on like he hadn't heard me. Werner was mad that day, last week, the first of the new year. What a way to start it.

I feel most sorry for the gangs that have to clean up the snow and ice. They slip and slide with their boards fastened together, their shoes wrapped in rags if they have no arctics, and most don't, their bodies bulging with old sweaters and pants, two or even three jackets, rags wrapped around their heads to protect them from the cold. They know the only way to keep warm is to move, so they have this little dance: slip-slide step-step shuffle, shuffle-step-step slide-slip, then shovel-lift-throw, and start all over again. They are the only ones who hear the music; it's like watching a dance chorus in a movie without sound.

Wednesday, February 8, 1939

It's so cold we've put up the porcelain stove in the living room. It burns wood we have brought to the back, where I split it. We don't get as much coal as we used to, and when we do get it, it's soft coal, coke, and doesn't heat as well as the hard. The porcelain stove works just fine, but I hate taking out the ashes. Ashes make dust that I have to wipe up. The one good thing about winter, Dieter Lange says, is that he doesn't have to buy ice or worry if I'm going to forget to empty the pan under the icebox. We have cold boxes attached to the kitchen windows. Whatever we put in the boxes freezes like rocks. The cream is pushed out of the bottles of milk we set out there. Sometimes the bottles crack. The meat looks like the parts of bodies I hear the
SS
doctors are dissecting. Of course, that may just be jailhouse gossip, of which there is an awful lot in camp. For example, Huebner was telling me about an
ASO
who came in fighting with the guards all the way from Frankfurt because he claimed his idiot kid had been taken away and killed. Threw him in the Bunker right away and proceeded to whip his ass every hour on the hour, twenty-five strokes, and still he fought. One day the prisoners near him didn't hear him anymore, and a detail came in to wash out his cell. Where did he go? Up the chimney, they say. The Reds are still snooping around because, as Werner said, “A man can come in here and be crazy, but
nobody
can be
that
crazy without good reason.” Nobody knows the man's name. Werner believes almost everything; I wonder how it is that he's not crazy, too. You got to shut out some of this shit and believe it's jailhouse gossip in order not to go nuts.

Monday, March 6, 1939

General mobilization. The German government is talking war with Czechoslovakia, the rumor says. Mad because the Czechs haven't rolled over and given up like the British and French want them to. The English are calling up people, and in camp, Jesus Christ, there are prisoners who want to volunteer to go to war. Can't be the “later” everyone's been hoping for, war. Well, they've been talking about it coming for a long time. I'd imagine if The Nest was open, and it will be next week Bernhardt says, there'd be the same old saddle-up, flag-waving, give-me-some-pussy-because-I'm-going-to-war bullshit.

The second day the canteen was open after the epidemic was over, a colored boy came in wearing the black triangle of the asocials. Actually, he was just on the dark side of high-yellow. I didn't know this until Lappus called me from the office and said a young colored prisoner wanted to talk to me; that was when I met him. “You're Mr. Pepperidge?” he asked. He spoke first in German and then repeated in English. His English was okay. And it wasn't British English, either. Before I could answer—and I wanted to answer quickly because no prisoner called another “mister,” and I didn't want him to be laughed at—he said his own name was Pierre Braun. I said hello in English and led him away from the customers, who were not buying as much as talking about the possibility of war with Czechoslovakia. It stinks in the canteen in winter, and everyone tries to get as close to the little stove as possible. Five feet away from it there's no warmth at all because of the bodies packed around it. Pierre looked about fifteen. He could have been my son. He was a skinny kid with big eyes that I thought must once have been very bright. He had a tic on the left side of his face. His hands were long and thin. There was something about him that made me want to put my arm around his shoulder. To comfort him. To stop the tic. To bring brightness back into his eyes. He seemed very sad.

“Well?” I said. He kept looking at me. Like a kid, too.

“Somebody told me you were an American.” In this place that could be anybody. Oh, Christ, I'm thinking. How come he knows American English? I'm curious to know how he got here, who he is.

So I say, “Yeah, that's right.”

He holds out his hand again and I take it, and we shake for a second time while he's telling me, “My father's American, too. He was an American soldier. My mother's German—from Mullheim—the Rhineland. I got my father's English from her. And I studied it, so if we ever went to America …” I drop his hand. He cocks his head and looks at me, a question in his eyes. He sees I know. “You know about the Rhineland Bastards then?”

I pat his shoulder. “They, they …?”

He nods his head. “Yes. They did that to me and sent me here. It's happening not only to black Rhinelanders, you know.” I don't know why, but we're whispering.

“I'm sorry,” I say. “What can I do for you?” He hunches his shoulders.

“Just tell me about America when you can.” After a minute he adds, “My father never came back. He never sent for us. My mother was mad.” And here it is.

“How old are you, Pierre?” I ask him. He tells me fourteen. I ask where he works and he tells me the disinfection hut. That's near the north wall. The epidemic must have been hell for him. Then he has to go. I tell him, “Stop in any time except Saturday. We'll talk about America.” He grabs my hand once more and shakes it and thanks me.