Clifford's Blues (30 page)

Sunday, Dec. 24, 1939

It's early. Dieter Lange and Anna aren't up yet. It's so early that I don't even have to check the furnace. I can tell it doesn't need shaking or stoking right now, so I'm writing. It's so quiet, it sounds like the pencil is making a lot of noise.

Last night, long after dinner, Dieter Lange called me up and sat me down at the kitchen table and we had a couple of drinks. He was already high; he'd gone in the afternoon with Anna to an
SS
party. She was upstairs sleeping it off, but he wanted to go walking in the snow. Nothing I wanted to do, but he insisted and was starting to get mean about it. So we bundled up. He wanted to go to the camp. It was snowing soft, slow, great big flakes. “I want you to appreciate how lucky you are, Cleef. You've been in a funk lately. Maybe you're sick again? You don't think so? Well, I hope not.” We plodded on through the snow that was quickly replacing all that the snow commandos had removed earlier. Ahead, the lights of the camp seemed filled with dots as snowflakes flew down past them. Dieter Lange exchanged greetings with the guards on duty at the
Jourhaus
gate. They joked about the weather,
lustig Weihnachtened
one another. The guards even patted me on the back and offered me a drink from the same bottle they were drinking from. I was feeling better than I had when we left the house. It all looked quite pretty. Neat and regular, squared, arranged, like those little toy villages the kids settle in cotton under the Christmas tree. Peace on earth, good will to men. I saw a group of prisoners standing at attention on the Dancing Ground, stiff as icicles, the snow building on their caps and shoulders, creeping up around their shoes. What had they done? “See that?” Dieter Lange said. “You could be one of those. Look, look at those barracks, those blocks, and think of those poor bastards in them trying to keep warm. Tonight, whatever they find that burns they can put into the stoves. And tomorrow night—” he broke off as we turned down the 'Strasse and Gypsy singing drifted up the street in a sad, soft language I didn't understand. But I understood the tone, like you can't hear blues and not know that there is sadness up front, or tucked in between smarty-pants lyrics. Dieter Lange stopped, so I stopped. We listened. And in a dot of light reflected by a snowflake, I saw, or thought I did, a small flash that could have been a tear on his face.

Then we started to move again, into a frightened, whispered swell of sound from the other blocks:
Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht
… And I almost said, “Let's go to 24,” but I didn't. Pierre had my gifts, and I couldn't trust this weeping, juiced-up, shit-packer. How can you ever trust people, really, who cannot, deep down, hear you because they're so busy listening to themselves? Dear God, right then I wanted to trust somebody. But Dieter Lange was not that person. We walked and Dieter Lange sniffled; he kept saying, “See, you have it not so bad.” And, “Cleef, maybe, next Christmas …! Maybe.” We tramped back up the 'Strasse, back through the guardhouse gate, and home. When I was downstairs, I thought of the camp all soft under the new snow, the way it always looked under new snow, like frosted gingerbread, as though it could not be what it really was. And I knew, as I always had known, that when Dieter Lange woke up, he, too, would be the same. How could one drunken walk through camp on a Christmas Eve change anything? I just hoped I wouldn't have to fight him off the booty later on.

Wednesday, January 3, 1940

“What can be the matter with my little Cleefie?” Anna said. She'd tried to come down the steps quietly, but I knew it was her. What was she doing down here? Dieter Lange hadn't gone out. She pushed open my door and stood there in a rumpled silk slip through which the light from upstairs outlined her thick body. “Cleefie?” I had a more than passing acquaintance with that tone in her voice. I said nothing. I was nervous. They'd been recovering from a New Year's Eve party, then a New Year's Day of eating and drinking and running upstairs for a couple of hours, then running down and back up. Feeding, fucking, and drinking.

I know what is going to happen, and I say, “No.” Anna is close to my bed, reaching down for my wrist.

“Come,” she says.

They are bored with each other, I think, but it's never been this bad. Do they think if they pound and probe each other long enough and hard enough they will forget they hate and fear each other? Is that what they've been trying to do these last two days?

“Yes. Oh, yes. Dieter sent me. He has some very fine cocaine for you, and we can all celebrate the New Year. Come, Cleefie.”

She grips my wrist in a hand that feels like damp warm dough. “We will make you well.” From upstairs Dieter Lange's voice booms down the stairwell, “Come, Cleef!”

“No,” I whisper, but Anna has pulled me half out of bed with one hand and is yanking at my dick with the other. “No. No!” The blankets are off. She pulls me to my feet, laughing softly, the way hunters do when they lift a rabbit or bird they've shot. She crushes the silk of her slip between our bodies. She smells sour through her tired perfume. I think then that I will take a walk, go away, not be with them, not be the plaything they can bend, stick, lick, and suck.

In the “Greeting Room” of the
Jourhaus
the guards are beating the prisoners who have just arrived, teaching them the “Saxon Greetings,” hands behind the head, leaving the body an open invitation to violence. I stroll around, spitting in the faces of the guards. They do not notice. I climb upstairs to the room where I met Count Walther von Hausberger and later Ruby Mae. Reckse sits behind the desk; his feet are on it. He's asleep. I take his pistol and shoot him, but there is no sound and he remains as before. I go back down and open the files and rip the papers and let them fall like snowflakes; somehow the pieces never reach the floor.

The Bunker is dark and cold, a long square tunnel. It smells of blood that hasn't been cleaned up; it's a slaughterhouse, more fit for animals than men. I float down the corridor. The doors to the cells are three feet from the floor; they are like pens for animals. Down the corridor I go, seeing behind the bars wounded, beaten men who look as though they should be hanging from hooks. I answer a scream with a gentle “Sshhhh …” but the scream does not stop. It seems to urge forth other screams and moans. Three guards drag a prisoner out to the courtyard. They joke with each other: “This one will be like grape jam in the morning.” I will the guards to die. They do not. The wooden doors bang open and they enter the courtyard. I make the sign of Loa Aizan, but He says, “Shit, Clifford. It's too late for that joker.”

“Come on now, Cleef. That's a good boy. This is very fine stuff. That's it, a quick little snort. Zooom, eh? This foolish talk of being a plaything.…”

In the
Wirtschaftsgebaude
. The Records Office. Labor Office. Political Office (Bernhardt and Gitzig). Storerooms. Showers. Kitchen. Camp Police Office. I start fires. I rip papers. I let the showers run. I reassign Pierre to me. I assassinate Bernhardt. (How can I harm Gitzig?) In the kitchen. I see monstrous rats in the thin red water of the great cooking pots. I throw real meat and then turnips, cabbage, and potatoes from the ice room into the pots, which hang on hooks before a row of fires that look like the entrance to hell. More meat! All the small fires come together in a big one. I imagine that the flames can be seen all the way into downtown Dachau. How I love the smell!

Across the way, on the wind-ripped Dancing Ground, I urge the twenty men standing at attention, held like actors in the floodlights, to return to their blocks before they freeze to death. I kick the dogs and their guards. “Thank you, Pepperidge,” the prisoners say (everyone knows me), but they don't move. I enter the canteen and find Pepperidge in his little cubbyhole of an office. He sits on a box writing under the light of a coal oil lamp. “What is it we're writing?” I ask.

“A very long letter.” He doesn't pause; he doesn't look up. He is thin. That makes him look taller than he really is. He has a squeezed, tender face, and eyes with very long lashes that darken the room with the belligerent sadness of having known too much. The stinking kerosene smoke mixes with the vapor of his breath. I look at him and I want to cry. I want to put my arm about him and make that hawk/wren look the gaze of doves.

“To whom are we writing?”

Now he looks up, raps his teeth with the stub of the pencil. His fingers are like slender brown worms that have dried in the sun. “I do not know,” he says. “Maybe God.”

“I see,” I say, but he's returned to his feverish scratching.

We are a tangle of bodies emitting stink and liquids. I am hurting, therefore I want to hurt; even while crying, I want to hurt, then to wound; even more, to kill. I try to kill her as he's hurting me, but Anna doesn't mind; the slow, terrible frenzy in my head freezes with the realization that she is to pain what sugar is to flies. “Stop that goddamn crying!”

The Infirmary is quiet now, except for the whimpering that dares not grow to a moan. The duty orderly drinks Dr. Nyassa's brandy. I piss in his cup and stir it with my finger. The orderly ignores me, swallows and swallows with great loud gulps. I draw syringes to full with morphine and inject the worst-looking patients. It's the least I can do, but they continue to whimper in both buildings. I check the morgue and find no one I know. There are more bodies these days. They'll have to make more room.

Werner and Bader sit in the Red block and are not talking, not even listening to the radio. All the Reds have been down in the mouth lately. I would like to be friends with Werner again, but that business will always be there between us. What I don't understand is if the Reds can be so good at organizing and running things in here, why didn't they do it out there a long time ago? Then maybe none of us would be here. We have all been captured by the politics of ourselves. The Nazis have let us know what we're really like. They are men and women, too, just like us. But they have dared, with terrible success, to take politics beyond the thin invisible line of whatever morality men think they have won over the beasts of the field. This must be what the Reds are pondering in the charged silence of their block. I sit there in the emptiness between the two men and finally ride the silence of the other, brooding Reds out to Prisoner Block 7.

I enter with both fear and admiration. In the center of our hell, many of the prisoners—the Pinks, the Reds, the Purples, the Golds, even some of the Greens, Blacks, and Browns—have said in word and deed, “Fuck Hitler,” for personal reasons or larger ones. Who knows? Who cares? They lie in their chains, the presumption of something larger than individual manhood, a pride as fierce as their hatred of their captors, stilling the expressions of pain that must reside in their swollen limbs and crushed flesh.
(“I
am the baddest motherfucker in this place.”) There is order and quiet here that transcends even that in the political block. These punishment prisoners await the next scheme, the next murder of an
SS
guard, the next slaughter of each other, the march to the gallows to music.

“Gentlemen,” I say.

“Fuck off, nigger.” This in bored voices.

“I would like to play some music for you.” I conjure up a piano and await their permission.

“Fuck your music. Get out!” They rattle their chains, hawk up snot, and hurl it at me with the precision of marksmen.

“I am”—the word is clumsy in my mouth—“a comrade.”

The block is filled with real and mouth-made sounds of breaking wind. They bounce their chains on their wooden planks; the sound grows to an ugly basso crescendo and I leave. It may be a very good thing that they are chained up.

In Block 15 are the Jews with their stars; starred because their second triangle—red or green or black or pink—is inverted over the first gold one to make the six points of David's star. They are made to suffer so much. A few of them pray in Yiddish or Hebrew. The others cannot wait for God's good intercession; they know they have to look out for themselves. I see that some have the blank look of men who realize, too late, that this experience is one they could have avoided had they believed what they saw going on. They are exhausted, these men. Working the quarry and the gravel pit in winter is consignment to death; anywhere they work is consignment to death. The slightest untoward word, look, movement, from one of them is reason enough for even the most reserved guard to kill him on the spot or slowly, as his mood takes him, without fear of reprimand from his superiors. With a few exceptions, other prisoners, equally doomed, ease their slides to hell by being as vicious as the guards. The Jews are the niggers of Dachau and in all the other camps where they are found.

I dump an armload of challah onto a bunk; I set down a huge vat of matzoh-ball soup, far better than Aschinger's pea soup, and call them to eat. No one hears me. I tell them another conference has been called at Evian, and this time all the nations in the world will, after arranging their freedom, accept them without quibble and stake them to a new start. They will be as many as the sands on a thousand beaches. No one moves. The observant among them sit quietly, already bent in subservience to the Messiah, for all this is His will, His doing, and the purpose will later be made clear. The others discuss the prisoners who are secret Jews who will have nothing to do with them. Some say, “Good for them.” Others call them traitors. But no one will give them away; no one will trade a name for another day of life. Pierre's name hasn't come up. They look at him and know for an absolute certainty that he can't be one of them. He is a Negro, or part of one. Loa Aizan must be smiling.

Pierre lays in his upper bunk in Block 24. His face seems a different, unwholesome color, like slate that dogs have shit on.

“You have finished engineering school and tried to find your real father but haven't, and now you're ready to marry your girlfriend—and no, she's not blond. Where would you like to live? 555 Edgecombe Avenue? Why not? The top floor, of course, where you have a marvelous view.”