Clifford's Blues (28 page)

“Study? For what?”

“I want to be an engineer,” he says.

I think of The Cooper Union downtown. I don't know if they take colored, but we can find out. If they don't, we'll find a place in New York that does, that's all. I tell him I think that is a good idea, since it might take a long time to find his real father. Germany, I tell him, is small compared to the United States, which is three thousand miles wide and two thousand miles long. He can't believe how big it is. Then I tell him Russia is even bigger. I've seen the maps. I love to see his eyes widen when I tell him things like that. I can see he is impressed by how much I know and how much traveling I've done. It makes me feel good.

Then he says, “I don't understand something.”

“What?”

“Why you, an American, are still here.”

A drizzle starts, and gray clouds, big rolling balls in the sky, seem to slow and open up. The drizzle grows to rain. Pierre waits. I don't know where to start. I play “Suppose” with him so questions like this won't come up. “You'd better go in now, Pierre. We can talk about this another time. Not now.”

“You never want to talk about it.”

“That's because I told you already what I am. It's against their law—if they catch you. Besides, it's boring, Pierre. Very boring after six years.”

“Six years! Will I be here that long, Mr. Pepperidge?”

I could cry. “I don't know. I really don't think so. Maybe the war will change all that.” We stack the tools. The other prisoners are going to their alternate tasks without a wasted motion. “If the war really comes and Germany loses, we can all go home.”

“But I thought,” he says in a small voice, “you and I would go to your home together.”

The rain is coming down steadily now, cold German rain. I say, “Yes, yes. But we'd tell your mother first.”

“No!” he says.

Sunday, September 3, 1939

The band didn't play at The Nest this past weekend. Germany was on full alert and the army had been positioned on the Polish borders. The week before, everyone in the compound was at the camp loudspeakers. The “black” radios in camp were probably running all the time as well. Last Thursday Hitler broadcast his peace terms to Poland, but the very next day, at 5:30 in the morning, he said over the radio that Germany had invaded Poland thirty-five minutes earlier because the Poles had attacked a German radio station on the border at Gleiwitz and at several other locations, too.

This morning, because France and Britain have a treaty with Poland, they said they are at war with Germany. Today, the
SS
guards wore full battle outfits and looked meaner. Groups of prisoners strolled down to the
Priesterblock;
others crowded into the canteen, but I couldn't tell how they felt about the war. Some, like me, must have hoped that it would bring them freedom; some, as before, must've wanted to join up and gain freedom that way; others were as quiet and still as the weather, which was gray and sticky, even with the wind that came off the mountains now and again, carrying sharp drops of rain. To piss on Austria and Czechoslovakia is one thing, but France and England make it a different crap game altogether. The world won't stand for Germany filling these camps with Frenchmen and Englishmen the way it let them fill with Jews, Gypsies, Austrians, Czechs, and now, I suppose, Poles, and that might save us. I hope to God it does.

Sunday, Sept. 10, 1939

We've been listening to the radio, naturally. Sometimes at night, Dieter Lange hooks up the shortwave he got from somewhere, and hopes it doesn't interfere with the camp radios in the offices. We listen for short periods and then he shuts it off. We catch the English broadcasts—there's nothing we can make out coming from France. Anna translates the English for him. If she doesn't understand she turns to me. I throw out something. The British have mobilized; so have the French. Dieter Lange is not happy, but Anna tells him the situation could make them rich, very rich. He tells her that then she'd only want more. She always wants more. Then she tries to calm him down. I know he wants out; he's never been in anything this big. It scares him.

It was strange at The Nest this week. Every guy in uniform was exuberant. No mistake, though, there's a shit storm coming.

Today in camp Pierre asked me what the war would do to our plans. I told him I didn't know. I was pretty annoyed, because here I am trying to get him some kind of job out of the winter snow and cold (they'll be starting the garden harvest next month) and he is thinking about a future that may never be, now that the war's come. I'd run out of patience with him, and was about to draw him up short, when he said he was being assigned to help build a greenhouse so there'd be fresh vegetables for the officers, and he would work in it. He showed me the assignment slip. I was so ashamed of myself and so filled with relief I said, “Whenever this mess is over, we'll do just what we've planned.”

“Thanks, You Guys,” I whispered.

Thursday, Sept. 29, 1939

So much has happened that my head is swimming. It's like being drunk. Poland is smashed. The Russians seem to be working with the Germans; they're taking over part of Poland, too. And Poland is knocked out the way Joe Louis knocked out Schmeling.

After dinner last night there was a knock on the door and who's there but Bernhardt, carrying a small box and all spiffed up in a uniform so new I could smell it. He and Dieter Lange and Anna joked and drank coffee and ate cake. I finished in the kitchen and went down to my room. I was there a half hour before Dieter Lange called me up. Anna was not there, but I could hear her moving around upstairs. I stood across from them and waited. It looked like something bad. I couldn't really tell because Dieter Lange's face showed no expression, and Bernhardt's was the same as always, fixed with a little smile.

“Now we're at war,” he said. “Berlin says all bands not within camp boundaries must be German military bands, or those whose members are German civilians selected by the
Reichmusik Direktor
himself, Heinz Baldauf.” He sighed. “Cliff Pepperidge and His Wittelsbachers are no more. Immediately.”

I'm sure Bernhardt thought he was saying it lightly, but it came across like doom cracking through the house. Germans do not have a light touch. I glanced at Dieter Lange, who looked at me briefly, then his eyes seemed busy looking for something in the room. “Your musicians have been notified and will just settle back into the general prison population, which in fact they never left.” His smile widened a little. “Your good life will continue here with the Langes and the canteen. Can't beat that, eh? And I won't have to worry about subversive elements at The Nest trying to spirit you away. Times will change and maybe we can go back to the old routine, eh?” He crossed one leg over the other, his boots reflecting a high shine. “We will have bands with the best musicians in Europe, won't we, Lange?”

“Yes, Colonel, and perhaps we can even invite the great bands from America to entertain in the Reich.”

Bernhardt nodded and then said, “But first, we will hear those musicians in France—Johnson, Lewis, the gajo, Django Reinhardt.”

“Naturally,” Dieter Lange said.

“I have a special task for you,” Bernhardt said to me, uncrossing his legs. “I have spoken to Lange about it and advised him to do the same. The labels on all my records must be changed.”

He pointed to the box he'd placed on the table next to his chair. “It's filled with labels from German record companies—Brunswick, Electric, Telefunken, Imperial, Gramophone. Remove all the old labels. For example, if you have an Ellington record with ‘Mood Indigo' on one side and ‘Black, Brown and Beige' on the other, you substitute Brocksieper's ‘Tea for Two' and ‘Polka Polka.' But make a chart so I'll know when I pick up a Wagner, I'll really have Benny Moten, something like that,
nicht wahr?
” Before that business with Ulrich, Bernhardt and me had an easy relationship. He joked and I laughed; he rubbed my head and I smiled; he said the music was great and I smiled a bigger smile. But I always behaved like he was the crook running the club, and he knew it. Since Ulrich's death, I'd behaved with him like a whipped dog, and he knew that, too. It was supposed to be that way. I told him I understood with a “Sir,” and he said he'd have the records brought over tomorrow.

I went back to my room, already missing The Nest. I'd miss our time in the kitchen, the good food there, the workers, the girls who came in their best dresses for the Friday and Saturday dances. I was already missing the hungry and sometimes loving way they looked at the young
Siegfrieds
in their dress uniforms, missing the smell of flowers in the spring and summer, the clean wind through the opened windows, the sight of civilians on the streets we drove through, the shop windows, the parks, even the crying babies. And the rehearsals when we played anything, tried anything, before we got down to the numbers we'd actually play that night. And I would certainly miss the tuxedos, white shirts, and shining black shoes. For a few hours they had helped us to believe we were not really what we were—prisoners without hope of release. What would happen to Danko? The Gypsies were suffering more than the Jews or the men in the Prisoner Company. Alex—what would happen to him? And Fritz, who had learned to whip the cello like a bull fiddle? Where is Franz to play his licks on the drums now? Who would now appreciate Ernst's flute playing? And would Oskar only play his harmonica in a corner of Block 13 when he wasn't on some detail that would smash his spirit? And Teodor, what music would he write now and who for? No need to worry about Moritz and that sweet violin, or about Sam, who was long gone in another direction. A band leader looked after his musicians, even though he might not like them. They'd looked to me for direction, ideas, and what Mr. Wooding called “execution.” But this is a different time, a different place, and it's every swinging ass on his own.

Now I'm back to one benefactor, Dieter Lange, or maybe two, with Anna. But Dieter Lange is afraid and Anna is unpredictable.

I am lucky, still. The Polish prisoners and civilians are entering camp now. They're like the new boy on the block; the guards must beat them up, show them who's boss. Everyone in camp breathes easier because they are beating up the new guys, but that will last only a little while. Then the guards will be back beating everyone's ass, as usual. The Polish boys they call “doll boys,”
Pieple
. Poor kids. Some of those bastards have already buggered them; I've seen a couple of kids who walked as though they were riding a horse, it hurt them so bad.

I was in bed and couldn't sleep, listening to the trains rumbling out to the factories and warehouses. Sounds carry far in this place. Sometimes you know the trains are bringing prisoners, or taking them out. I was thinking this when I heard Dieter Lange coming downstairs. I was surprised. He wanted me to come up to the kitchen and make some coffee, which meant he wanted to talk. I didn't know if it had to do with Bernhardt's visit or not.

He sat at the table with his head in his hands. It was three o'clock and the fall darkness was so close it felt like a suit of clothes. When the coffee was ready, he signed for me to sit down at the other end of the table. He reached over and patted my hand. “Don't look so worried,” he said. “I couldn't sleep. You hear the trains?”

I said I had.

He slurped his coffee.

“Too bad about The Nest. You liked it?”

“Sometimes.” We'd talked about this before. I said, “What's the matter? What's bothering you?”

Dieter Lange pushed his cup aside. “I'm not getting the promotion,” he said. “They're giving them all to the
Waffen
SS
, not the
Allgemein
SS
. The war.”

I looked at him over my coffee and listened to the small sounds in the house: floors creaking, wind against the windows, dogs barking far away outside. So the armed
SS
, not the general
SS
, would get all the breaks. That ought to put all the camp guards in their places, but it probably won't. “Now you don't have so much responsibility,” I said. “Isn't that good?”

He half smiled. “That's good, yes, but the promotion … well, it might have given us more protection, you understand.” He rubbed his face, and the bristles of his beard gave off a rasping sound. “But you're right,” he said. “Too much responsibility isn't a good thing here. Already I'm going crazy, moving the pieces.” His hands were flat down on the table, fingers spread. Dieter Lange looked at them. It was cold in the house. He sighed. “The Poles are coming in, you know.” His voice fell to a muttering. “The Poles come in and to Mauthausen we send the Pinks, and to Hartheim in Linz in invalid vans we send the crazy
ASOS
. We send the Jews to Poland, and if they have room at the subcamps, we send them there, all to make room here. Around and around it goes, from camp to camp to camp.”

Dieter Lange was feeling sorry for himself. “That's not your worry,” I said, and it wasn't. “That's the camp commander's headache.”

He raised both hands and let them fall back to the table. “You know I must have some idea of the numbers so I can stock the canteens in my jurisdiction, Cleef. You know that.” There were tears in his eyes. “First Germans, Jews or not, then Austrians, now Poles, and it's too late for there not to be Belgians, French, and whoever else gets in the way. Round and round and round,” he said softly, “and Anna doesn't understand the strain.”

I leaned across the table and spoke quietly to him. “Dieter, Dieter Lange. If you don't get hold of yourself, Anna will have it all. You'll be in the booby hatch and Anna will have the money and take all the stuff to her father's farm. If you keep showing this weakness, she'll tell Bernhardt to get rid of you, of
us
. I told you before, you got yourself and me into this mess, and you've got to get us out. The only way to do that now is to do what you have been doing, and stop all this goddamn whining. Are you a man or a fucking faggot?” I stood up. “I'm going to bed. You woke me up so I can listen to this crap? C'mon. Get hold of yourself.”