Clifford's Blues (31 page)

In his sleep Pierre seems to smile. He hears.

“You work downtown and ride the
‘A'
train there and back. Your wife is a teacher. Yes, there are a few colored teachers in Harlem. She, too, has gone to college, you see. You are very happy and hardly ever think about Germany or your mother and real father anymore. Me? I just keep on playing. It's too much fuss having your own band, though. Running around getting those jokers together for the road or just making them be on time for work in New York. And somebody's always complaining about the money, and how the uniforms wear out so fast because they're so cheap. So I play for somebody else. Maybe Teddy Wilson has left Benny Goodman. I
know
Teddy made good geets with Goodman. Geets? That's money, son. No, no, I don't live with you. I live down on '37th Street, where I think you and me thought about living once, remember? Nah, young people don't need no old folks soaking up their space. But you and your wife come to see me and I have dinner with you all every Sunday when you come home from church. Usually fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, string beans, biscuits, lemonade, and strawberry shortcake for dessert. Your wife is a very good cook.” I pass Pierre the platter of chicken. He crunches into a thigh. The sound is like music. “Then you know what happens? Ahh
HHH
! you guessed it. You bigged her. You're going to be a father and that'll make me a grandfather! Hotdamn, Pierre, hotdamn!”

Pierre now looks very tired, like maybe he's having a bad dream. I tell him it's going to be all right, that he's not going to die from those X-rays they gave him. He can't die.

“Why not let him sleep with us?” Anna whines. I picture her waking and wanting to jump at the Woodside again.

Dieter Lange is half asleep, but he says again, “Go, Cleef.” To Anna he snarls through his drunkenness, “You want someone to come to the house and find him up
here?
Stupid woman! No! You like doing it with him, eh? Well, no! And that's it! Go, Cleef. Give him the last of the cocaine.”

“Well, at least he ain't all queer like you,” she whines. Anna is drunker than a hundred skunks, but I'm at the door, aching front and back; then I'm diving downstairs to draw water for a hot, or at least warm, bath, but “ain't all queer” lingers in my aching head. Country girl. Didn't know shit when they first met, except that those farm animals always climb on from the back, and maybe she thought that's where the action was. And got to like it. Wouldn't be the first, man or woman. And Dieter Lange made her believe that doing it in the hump was the only way to do it, until she tangled with Bernhardt who showed her the front-way bliss. Please, let me remember this when I wake up.

It's good that Block 24 is right next door to 26, where the priests and ministers are. Where I met Menno. I can hear Loa Aizan chuckling: “Fools. So what did your God do for you?” He shouts over my shoulder. But they all seem to be thinking or talking softly and seriously. About the rabbits they're caring for, or the garden in good weather, or the other easy jobs they hold, or how to get Commandant Loritz to allow them to have a chapel, or how to get those colleagues who'd not been brought here to push their congregations to send more packages, or how to conduct an ordination in secret, with monstrance, crozier, oils, silk mitre, and so on. They are also concerned about measures they can take to secretly get their rations at camp and packages from home so they will not have to share with other prisoners. They need their strength to minister to the inmates. Should they post guards at the door to discourage the hungry? Loa Aizan is grinning. He must know that many of these are honorable men who have spoken out against the National Socialists. But then he lets me know that places like Dachau make honor regrettable. These men thought it would be rewarded, like in the movies. Instead, they were brought here, where honor is a burden. They are like everyone else who is here, Loa Aizan whispers. They want to survive, to live.

“All ye who are heavily laden …” I start. I stop because these men are pleased that it is the Polish priests, arriving now in great enough numbers to be segregated in 28, next door, who will be taught how to build the new crematorium, replace the wooden one with stone. German humor. They do not see that, I can tell. “This time,” the men of God are saying, “the crematorium will last.” I think, They are always reconstructing death, these Germans, even their priests, who anoint the constant journey to it with oil and wrap it in the linen of consoling words.

The bodies are stacked outside where the weather is as efficient as a hospital morgue. The chimney exhales its thick, black, oily smoke; the fuel source is endless. The
Sonderkommando
detail here need never worry about warmth. These ovens, made for baking bread and stoked with coke, give off constant heat, and the prisoners have come to enjoy it. The bodies outside are naked. The clothes have been removed and washed and sprayed and stacked, ready for the new prisoners. The stacks of bodies remind me of the photos of the Great War, with the dead piled sky-high along row upon row of trenches. They didn't pull gold-filled teeth during the Great War; they do here. The bodies are brought in and dumped to the floor where two men pry apart the jaws; one takes pliers, rips out the gold teeth, and dumps them into a bucket. Then another group hauls the body to the oven, where yet another has already pulled out the “sled.” They deposit the body into it and slide it inside the oven, into the leaping, curling flames that attack it with the speed of a nest of frightened snakes. The oven door is closed. A prisoner shakes the grate with a long metal rod. Body ashes, mixed with snapping, sputtering sparks, tumble down into the pit. The ashes are shoveled out; the finest of them into the urns, which are haphazardly affixed with names and numbers; the heaviest of the charred bone fragments, including the skulls that may have cracked with the heat, are pounded into smaller bits and wheeled outside in barrows. This bone and ash will be used to make smooth the Appellplatz, the Lagerstrasse, the east and west roads, the paths to everywhere, and to fertilize the gardens that will bloom again in spring.

How efficient this gruesome assembly line is. The prisoners work in silence, exclaiming only if a tooth is difficult to pull or when fire snatches at the hair of a body before it is pushed farther into the oven. I think of Albrecht Dürer's
Apocalypse
and of
Hansel und Gretel
. All right, witches, here is your oven. What is there for me to say in this place? The decay that brings the worms takes too long; the
Sonderkommandos
only hasten decomposition, for, as Dieter Lange said, “The pieces have to be moved.” This is the last movement.

The water is warm enough. I sit and let the juices that have dried on my skin come loose and slide into the water. The Langes' snores rumble down through the house like small trains rocking over a trestle. The compound is between sleep and wakefulness. It is close to the hour when the guards change watch. A truck whines down to the
SS
barracks.

Four floors and a basement for the enlisted men of the
SS
. Where there was nothing when I first came, there is now this great edifice to house our tormentors, a parade ground, and an arched walkway. Here they hang up their whips, clubs, and guns, those instruments of power, without which they are just like us; and here they kick off their boots, remove their long coats and jackets, and loosen their tunics, symbols, like armor, of power. Here they shower and play snap-ass with their towels; they play cards, farts, and the radio. Here they must think over the day (or night) and consider the weak and troublesome. Here they must plan, these men of Himmler, the guardians of the state, the manner in which their victims should be dispatched. Rules are nothing.
They
make and are the rules, and they know the prisoners know that. In these plain rooms they scheme to get to know the officers' wives or daughters or sisters better; how to get into town to sleep with girls (or, often enough, with each other); how to visit the cabarets in Munich. They wonder how well the war will go, though there's been little action so far. Some have vowed to seek transfers into the fighting
SS
; some have not, because here the prisoners can't shoot back.

I hear them talk. I listen to their thoughts rustling from room to room down the narrow halls. Our keepers are very plain people who believe strongly that the law is the law, and it is their law—police law—which is always designed to serve the big people, never the little people. All these men (one for every 150 prisoners, the same for all the other
SS
at all the other camps) and their families—how is it that all of Germany does not know? How is it that an entire nation slumbers so easily?

I clean the tub and creep down to my room. There will be no early risers this morning.

Monday, Feb. 12, 1940

Winter fits the camp like death. The wood details trudge out and back; the snow commandos do their frozen dances. The cold makes the eyes water and then freeze as the tear leaves the socket. The uniforms grow stiff on prisoners who have never stopped moving and sweating. For all the dogs about, their turds never remain longer than it takes the nearest prisoner to clean them up, sometimes with their bare hands. The dogs sit on their haunches and seem to be smiling; the guards laugh. The entire camp seems to have one single, all-consuming drive—to stay warm.

Werner intrudes, enters my tiny office in the canteen with the vague apologetic motion of a debtor; there is something urgent in his manner.

“Your friend,” Werner says without further ritual.

I think for a moment.

“The boy, Braun,” he says. Werner is impatient. I wait. “He just barely made roll call this morning. We had to prop him up. I don't think he's going to make it tonight.”

I have not had the chance to see Pierre in over two weeks. He was weak then, and the prisoners who work with him in the greenhouse were doing his share of the work. We didn't talk much. Talk seemed to tire him, so we didn't even do a line or two of “Suppose.” I had nothing to give him.

“Of course,” Werner says with a shrug, “there's nothing anyone can do. It's plain the boy's dying. Perhaps it might have been best to let him go to Hartheim with the others.”

“Ah,” I say. “I wondered how it was he didn't.”

Werner shrugs. “We got Hohenberg's people to mark him
DIKAL
—not to be shipped to another camp.”

“For me?” I ask. Werner turns aside. I examine what is not quite my surprise. One is always discovering something new in camp.

“For you both,” he says. More briskly, he says, “You want to see him? Better do it now.” He speaks like a man paying off a debt.

It takes me a few seconds, but I say, finally, “I can't,” and Werner leaves. Then I start crying, but I tell myself that it's more for me than Pierre; he can't get into that place I've closed off. No one can, anymore. “Suppose” was for him, but it allowed me to think of possibilities, gave me my anchor back, and, after all, death in this place is catching.

The day passes slowly. I will linger in camp until evening roll call. Uhlmer, Lappus, and Huebner move about preoccupied by the rumored shifting of prisoners from Dachau and the
Selektion
. Jews will go to Poland as usual; Witnesses to who knows where. Huebner is still not saying what he will do when the
Bibelforschers
roll call—more consistently rumored now—will be made. It's been a long time since the last one. I still think he will refuse the offer of the state. He has been like a real Christian who, lost, stops in a jook joint to ask for directions. If they empty some of the blocks, it can only be to refill them. Who's next?

In winter the daylight speeds by, on its way to a longer night. The details march in singing to the music of the band, to
Rosamunde
, the air above them filled with vapor from their breath that trails out behind them. Some moan with the soreness of their throats and they try to muffle the slick slide of mucous that chokes them and produces the wracking coughs. They begin filling the 'Platz, as orderly as soldiers. I watch from the window as the roll-call officer speeds his people through the frozen ranks. I cannot see the place where Block 24 gathers. The prisoners stand like dirty blue-striped icicles. The roll-call clerks,
SS
, and block leaders, check off the numbers. The floodlights become brighter in the galloping darkness. The band falls silent. The prisoner clerks on the roll-call detail move from squad to squad where numbers are checked. With the sun gone, the wind hurtles through the Dancing Ground and the prayer of every man is almost written in fire in the blackness above them: Let everyone be present and accounted for.

The counters are back to the
SS
Stadie
. Now I see why he looked so familiar; he is Karlsohn, and he is dressed for combat. He struts over to the roll-call officer, salutes, presents the papers the prisoner clerks have given him. The officer, too, is in war dress, as is a squad of soldiers. This, of course, is just in case they have to pursue a prisoner. A small truck, its exhaust uncurling white ribbons, idles nearby. Every roll call, everything is prepared for the
Hasenjaged
, the
SS
chase for escaped prisoners, the rabbit hunt. The officer barks at Karlsohn, and Karlsohn returns the salute, whirls away shouting at his squad. They leap into the truck and it shoots off into the 'Strasse. Twenty thousand men remain motionless under the lights. Their prayers haven't been answered. Someone is missing.

We wait for the shots, but none come. I can see the men in the rear ranks closest to my window. They are shivering. The light from the moon, which is rising fast, glistens on the snot running from their noses. The evening meal will be late. I return to my office and unpack a box of canned snails and a box of Mahorca tobacco and some Yugoslavian cigarettes, Dravas. I arrange the little packets of salt and pepper Anna has put up for sale. The camp food has no seasoning and the salt and pepper are luxuries the men buy, or trade their socks for, or bread, or whatever else of value they have. The floodlights are still on, the prisoners still in ranks, I see, when I peek out the window again. The sirens haven't gone off, which means the prisoner is presumed to be inside the camp. I can feel the hate in those still, frozen forms. Whoever is missing, though recovered tonight, might be found dead in his block in the morning, hanging from a beam in the shower. What melody can one find in such a sight? Which chords to use? The silence is frozen in place out there, and two hours have passed. Dieter Lange will be sending out for me soon; he doesn't know I stayed. But now is not the time to close up and cross the 'Platz to the house.