Clifford's Blues (26 page)

When I finish, I tell him, “Press your hand on it, right between those two things at the top.” He's wondering what it is, and I say, “Go ahead. It's colored American magic. It'll protect you from anything bad.” He's got a stupid look on his face. “Pierre. Do it!” He bends to his knees and presses the earth right between the sideways crosses at the top of the sign for Loa Aizan, who protects whoever wears the sign from evil spirits. Pierre looks at me sort of funny, like what's going on with this guy, then he goes to the hut and I start up the street. I march right up into Werner's block. Being a block leader doesn't seem to be such a bad job at all. I mean, Werner doesn't have to rush out of bed, bolt down his food, and march off to work and back singing as loud as he can. Not bad at all, just looking after things and seeing the others behave, and collecting information. He must see something on my face because he looks edgy. I don't even say hello. I tell him to tell everybody, especially that goddamn Hohenberg, to leave that Braun kid alone if they want to stay healthy. Werner's looking at me like I've gone nuts. Then he grins. Then he laughs, pats me on the shoulder and says he'll tell them, don't worry, he'll tell them.

Monday, April 17, 1939

Another April, another bunch of baby bastards, the same old
SS
all dressed up, the girls who look the same as all the others, the same looks at each other (“I'm
really
off to war now, honey, so …”), the same thinning out of people just past the middle of the second set. Only thing different was we were playing more slow drags because this shit in Czechoslovakia was serious business, Bernhardt said last Friday. He showed up with Anna. His own wife's sick a lot with that baby she's carrying. Sure ought to be used to it by now; been carrying seven months. Bernhardt, he don't need excuses for anything he does. Anyway, Dieter Lange's away clearing up accounts at the other camps. He's now going to be responsible for just the ones in Bavaria and Linz, and Mauthausen in Austria. That may come to thirty or forty small and large camps, I heard him say to Anna, if all the plans are put into operation. Last month, though, he had to get rid of seven prisoners at other camps because they were dipping in the till. I guess the same way he got rid of Baum. I wondered then just how many camps there were going to be when these crazy Germans got finished. Sure, everybody's glad the epidemic is over and that the mess in Czechoslovakia doesn't look
too
bad for now. But I guess before long there'll be some Czechs in the camp, just like there are some Austrians (and they still ain't stopped coming). On the stand, we've played the numbers so often we can just let our minds fly out of the Pussy Palace. Moritz was sounding better, more like himself, but still a little off. I was more worried about myself, because I knew I'd worn out my vocals. I wasn't with them anymore, and I knew I was right when I'd catch somebody in the band looking at me and then look away quick just when I thought I was faking up a storm. Well, they'd become pretty good musicians.

That was last weekend.

This past weekend, Moritz wasn't in the truck when it stopped to pick me up. I asked where he was, sick? Moritz hadn't ever been sick. Nobody answered me right away. The guards smiled at each other, but said nothing. Franz, while lighting a cigarette, drew a finger across his throat, blew out the smoke, and turned to watch the road. We could talk while we dressed. We were always alone then. Somebody at The Nest had squealed on Moritz's leather boy. They took him to the Bunker. They had Moritz stand alone on the Dancing Ground after the evening roll call. This was Thursday night. (I hadn't gone to the camp Friday morning, because Anna got a bug up her ass about spring cleaning, so I hadn't heard anything—not that you always will.) Then they marched him into the Bunker, got his violin, and made him play while he marched. “Marched to his own tune, straight up,” Teodor said, chewing a sandwich. He snorted. “He knew it was the end for him, crippled for life, or dead. He's marching across the Appellplatz and he breaks out with this
‘Air.'”
For a minute I thought he meant a fart. But he meant a
tune
. Then, he said, Moritz started a dancing march, bouncing to his own music.

I asked what the hell he was playing, and then Fritz broke in. “They say he was playing some Jew shit—
‘Hava Nagila'
—and the guards began to beat at his legs, but he kept on playing and marching, even when they started on his body and his head.” (All stories like this are pieced together. One prisoner sees this happen, another sees that happen, and others see what they see, and eventually the story gets put together.)

I asked if the tune meant anything to make them beat him up. Alex said, “Let's rejoice.”

Danko said in a voice that sounded like he'd run a hundred miles, “From Palestine.” The Reds finished the story, put the final touches on it because the prisoners clean up all the messes, and those that belong to Werner's gang report to him. It seems that Moritz's leather boy was already naked on the whipping block. They gave Moritz the whip. By now they'd smashed his violin. He threw down the whip. They took the leather boy off the block and strapped Moritz to it. The leather boy didn't throw down the whip. He flogged Moritz to death, although twenty-five strokes is supposed to be the limit—for small things, like leaving camp without authorization, saying rotten things about the government, or keeping certain articles or tools. For a couple of prisoner queers, all the rules went out the window. Then the guards flogged the leather boy to death. Werner's people said it was a mess. So I had another bad weekend at The Nest. It was so bad that Bernhardt wanted to know what was wrong. I told him we needed new material, and he said okay. Then he took Anna by the arm and led her out of the hall, I suppose to the cottage he uses back on the far side of
Lebensborn
.

Sunday, April 30, 1939

Earlier I was upstairs with Dieter Lange and Anna listening to some records. No doubt that jazz music is changing. They'd been calling it “swing,” but it's still jazz. Wonder how come they call Benny Goodman the “King of Swing?” He could be a “Duke” or a “Count,” but not a king. Dieter Lange's got just about everything Fats Waller ever did, and Billie Holiday, too. I enjoy playing the records when Anna and Dieter Lange aren't around, so I can relax and think about the way the music's being played. When they're around, Dieter Lange's always saying, “That's jumping!” or “That's swinging!” What a pain in the ass. I've never liked people who couldn't blow a halfway decent fart, but who run off at the mouth about this musician or that one, or what's being done with the music and what isn't. Sometimes, whether they're home or not, if I hear something in the music, I'll try to work it out on the piano my own way.

The Germans just kicked another few thousand out, over into Poland. That would be like kicking black people out of New York and Philadelphia and Chicago and sending them to Mississippi. Who the fuck would want to go to Poland? The Jews are not allowed to take whatever they have left with them, and once there, they can't leave, and they have to live in certain places. How do they live? Their jobs were here, in Germany. Dieter Lange says Hitler told everybody how it was going to be in his book,
Mein Kampf
, but nobody believed him. I listen to the prisoners talking about the Jews—and they don't mind my being there—as if I would naturally agree with them. Ha! With these bastards? They never ask me what I think, and I never tell them. I'm not dumb. They
hate
Jews, nearly all the prisoners, even many of the Reds. “The Jews controlled the banks until Hitler took them back. They control the banks of the world.” Really? I think. I never thought of it one way or the other. Some of the Jews I knew were gangsters or ran pawnshops. “The Jews took over our schools, the theater, wrote all the books, and squeezed all the Germans out of the retail business,” the prisoners tell each other. I didn't know anything about that, not having spent all that much time in school back home, and certainly none in Europe. And I didn't read that many books; never have. In Germany, and I guess everywhere else, you can't tell a Christian from a Jew in a store or anywhere else. On Saturdays it was true that you saw Jews going to their church, but the very next day you saw Christians going to theirs. In Berlin show business, I knew Jews and Christians and couldn't tell—shit, didn't give a damn—which was which. As far as I knew, one club owner was as bad as another. Theater was something I didn't know about. So when the prisoners talked about the Jews just taking over everything, I wondered how come the Christians were too lazy to write the books, do well in the retail business, run the banks and schools and other things? It was all a bunch of bullshit, what they were saying, and I knew it, and down deep they did, too. They just wanted to get rid of the Jews to make themselves feel more important. I could see that from where I stood in the pecking order back home. I got tired of all those stupid white people thinking they were more important or better than me. If the Christians have it in so much for the Jews who “stole everything,” why are they bringing in Gypsies as fast as they can? Gypsies don't write shit, as far as I know, and not only don't they own any banks, they don't even use the motherfuckers; and they don't want to have much to do with anyone who isn't a Gypsy. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. The world runs on it the way a car runs on gasoline.

I thought about this business and what it would be like back home if white people in the Congress passed a law that would do to colored people what German laws are doing to the Jews. I mean, if the laws were
everywhere
back home, not just the South and some small towns around the country. Would we just pick up and march into prisons? Would we say, “Yazzuh, boss,” and march off to another Poland? All twelve million of us? How could we ever hide, pass for white, unless we damn near were? (I guess after all this time there's got to be a few million who've slipped over the line.) Who would send us money to help get away and to where? Probably Africa, but I don't know anything about no damned Africa, and wouldn't want to go there, running around with a bone in my nose, or a plate in my lips, like in all the pictures. Who would hold conferences to figure out a way to save us? Conferences didn't save those Jews, and my guess is, push come to shove, white people would prefer Jews to colored people, anyhow. Sometimes when I pass a bunch of Jews and hear quiet, secret laughing, or under-the-breath singing—not those work songs but something harder and deeper—it reminds me of colored men on the chain gangs that you pass on the roads in the South, and I know that the Boss-man, the Cap'n-suh, German or American, hadn't yet managed to completely kill the spirit.

Last week Pierre told me that when he got out—when
we
got out—he wanted to go to New York. I asked about his mother, and he just hunched up his shoulders and let them fall down. He's mad, I think, because she can't write to him. And she let them carry him off without a fight. Says he couldn't live in Germany anymore after what's happened to him, and when I told him again that America wasn't a bed of roses, either, he said he'd take his chances, that it's better than this. I agree.

Pierre has a fine, well-shaped head. He's always close-shaven, working in the disinfection hut. Other prisoners can have a little hair on their heads, but not enough to make a nest for lice. The gas Pierre and the other prisoners use to clean clothing and spray prisoners is very strong, he told me. Sometimes he has to go outside no matter how hard it's raining or how cold it is. The good thing, he says, is that he's sure no bug in the world wants to be bothered with him. He still has that tic. Pierre seems glad to see me, but to get to him is like moving between two worlds. I can see what his is like, but he can't understand mine because I haven't told him all about it, of course. I mean Dieter Lange or Anna. I did tell him about the club for the
SS
—that's where I get the sandwiches and other things I can sometimes give him. He wanted me to explain jazz music and I told him there is no explaining it; it just is.

Pierre likes to play “Suppose.” “Suppose we get out of here.” (He always says “we.”) “Maybe next week. What would we do?”

“First,” I say, “supposing we had money, we'd get the first train out of Dachau to France, Paris.”

He smiles.

“Then we'd find rooms in Montmartre. There are a lot of clubs there where they play jazz. And I have friends there, Freddie Johnson and Ruby Mae Richards, and I think there'd be a guy there who played in my band at the
SS
club. We'd have fun in Paris.”

“And then?” He's waiting for the America part, but I'm not in a big hurry to get to it.

I say, “I also have a friend in Amsterdam, and I know some recording people in Madrid, but maybe we'd go to London, so you can see that, too.”

“I would like that,” Pierre says.

“Then we'd take a ship, a Cunarder.”

“Do they let colored people on those ships?”

“Yes, and not the back of the ship, either. They're great big things. You wonder how they can float.”

“I'd be afraid,” Pierre says, but his eyes sparkle.

I think about “Suppose” down in my room. The next time we play it, the ship will be coming into New York harbor.

I heard footsteps upstairs. They were Dieter Lange's. “Cleef? Cleef, I'm coming down. We should have a drink.” He was on my stairs now. “It's been a couple of weeks, Cleef. Anna stayed to help Ursula with the baby.” Clump, he came, clomp, he came, until he was at my door, in his pants and undershirt, holding a bottle of schnapps.

I hate Dieter Lange. Sometimes I wonder how I can hate him so much and still be alive. I think I hate him enough to drop dead from it. I wouldn't hesitate one second to kill him, kill him in ways even the
SS
couldn't begin to imagine. Thing about it is he knows I love living a helluva lot more than I hate him. I've had these thoughts before, I know, but I can't get rid of them. They keep going round and round in my head like a trapped rat trying to find a way out. I think sometimes when we're together, me and Dieter Lange, that I should just
kill
him. To hell with what comes next. I could. It wouldn't be hard. He's got all puffy and soft, and so deep in shit that he's scared of everything. He can only relax with me. The power he has over most other people is shit. We both understand that. It wouldn't be at all hard to kill him, but then what? Even if I could do it without laying a hand on him—gather some of his hair and make a potion, get a black rooster (from where?) and vinegar (plenty of that around here), write down his name seven times, split a fish and fill it with black pepper, sew up the fish with black thread and hang it in the yard, chop up bits of his or Anna's hair real fine and put it in his food so that his stomach gets tangled up and he dies; or grind up glass in his food so it feels like no more than a bit of gravel or dirt, like you find in spinach or lettuce, and let him slowly bleed to death; or make a doll of him out of his clothes and hair and fingernails, say the words, and stick him with pins—then what? I'd never be allowed to stay in the house alone with Anna. Would Bernhardt take me in, me, his exotic, one-and-only jazz
Neger?
Hell, no. Because Dieter Lange's his fall guy. Every Nazi has a fall guy between himself and disaster. We called them front men or beards back home.