Clifford's Blues (35 page)

I ask Pacholegg what he does at the
Himmelwagen
tests.

“What can I do?” he asks me. “I strap them in. I take notes. I clean up after, me and the other clerks and nurses. The
TP
s make a mess, you understand. After a while, you don't mind so much death, you know.”

You wouldn't think it, so slight a man, so scared-looking and quiet, like something under a rock you've just kicked over. He's one prisoner who doesn't mind having his hair cut so short all the time, because he's afraid of lice.

Monday, Dec. 8, 1941

Balamabama! Whoampabam! It sounded like an explosion going off on the steps leading down to my room, or a fight. I couldn't imagine what was going on. I almost did the number right in my underwear. I jumped up. First thing I thought was they had caught up with Dieter Lange and we were all going to the Bunker and maybe worse. Oh, that noise was flying down the stairs and my door flew open and Dieter Lange pulled my light string before I could. Anna was hunched up right under him. “Cleef! The Japanese bombed the American Navy in Hawaii! Come up and we'll listen to the radio some more. C'mon.”

Upstairs Anna made some coffee. It was after midnight. Dieter Lange said the first reports had come in hours ago, but nobody believed them. “I thought when they said
Tagesbericht!
it had something to do with that
BBC
report of the big Russian counterattack,” he said.

“Do you know exactly where is Pearl Harbor?” Anna asked me, and I said no. I only knew Hawaii was somewhere out beyond California; it's where the ukulele comes from. I put some wood in the stove. Dieter Lange looked worried one minute and confused the next. I wasn't sure what I felt. Why would the Japanese attack America?

“So, Dieter,” Anna said. “What does it mean? Is it good or bad? Japan is—”

Dieter Lange interrupted her. “Japan is a German ally. Like Italy.” He shook his head and got up to pace. “No good. The Americans will come in now.” He stopped pacing. “Maybe good. End the war. We all go back to civilian life. Cleef goes home. We are all fine, after a while. So.”

“But there will be much more fighting, Dieter. It won't be so easy to go back to civilian life.” Anna now seemed puzzled.

“And if the
U.S.
is in,” I said, “then I'm an enemy alien—”

“Things will be the same as now,” Dieter Lange said quite simply. “Exactly the same. You've been here so long under the
PC
warrant, I'm sure they won't change your status, so forget that.”

We sat sipping the coffee and listening to the radio. Dieter Lange kept working the knobs, but there was nothing more. I thought of Pierre and smelled the sea and the rusty, stale odor of the wet steel of ocean liners. Inside, I think I smiled; inside, I thought I saw in both their faces, another shade of fear. And I was glad, the way you are when you know something, finally, is settled; the way you know that, when you play one note, another precise note must be played for the first one to make sense.

Wednesday, January 14, 1942

I am back. Hope left me. Just got up and hauled ass. Then the blues came stomping in like Dieter Lange drunk and looking for the booty. I just gave up. Beat. Tired of being a witness, a slave for the Germans; of the Langes, of the years, of the war, the whole fucking, stinking war; of the dying, of holding on to the best of the worst that has been my life. I never had the blues so long and so hard. Something was going on inside. Going on far away, down a long road overhung with big dark trees, something like a little kid you can barely see, he's so far away. When I was feeling most blue, I could just see this child, and I guess I reached out, grabbed him, and held on until he grew bigger and closer and finally climbed back inside me. Here I am again.

I am always a big hit in the lingerie. For Dieter Lange and then Anna and Ursula. I looked better in it than any of them would have. It felt good, too. Anna and Ursula made up some new games for us.

I have seen a few more colored men in camp. It's the strangest thing to notice a colored face sticking out among all the white ones. Stuck smack in the middle of all this white craziness. I don't want to feel sorry for them. Sorry requires energy, giving up a little of yourself, whatever you can spare; maybe that's what happened to me before; maybe it even makes you weak, I don't know. But even strong white men are niggers here—until a colored face appears—and then, except for the Jews and Gypsies, no one else is a nigger anymore. Even so, the prisoners play the awful game with each other. Some of the latrine signs read:
Nur für Polen; Nur für Französen; Nur für Ukrainishen
, and so on. Might just as well be For Whites Only like back home. Anyway, these colored guys don't look American to me. Something about them, some way they walk and gesture, some way they stare back at me. I feel no pull toward them, as I did with Dr. Nyassa and Pierre, but they weren't Americans either; they were more than that and maybe, to them, I was, too. Shit. I know the only reason those men are here is because they're colored. The only reason. Even so, it's hard to keep up with anyone except the older inmates who haven't been sent East. I know it's important to have friends in a place like this, but I'm past that. A friend is just a piece to be moved or destroyed, and one way or another, they take you with them, or bits of you.

Some of the Blacks and Greens have been allowed to volunteer for the Russian front, even while the Russian soldiers keep staggering into camp. The
SS
used to laugh at prisoners who wanted to volunteer to fight. Things must not be going so good in the East. I heard from Bader that the people in Dachau town have been complaining about the sight of the Russian soldiers straggling through the streets, so trains will now be used to bring them directly into camp. Bader now has Hohenberg's job and makes up the details that work for the civilian companies in the factories just outside the camp. I'm happy for him because I once heard he was going East. Bader's a good source for news.

With the furnace going and windows closed in the winter, the smell in the cellar seems to be getting worse. I asked Dieter Lange to look around the storeroom and he said he had; nothing was spoiled. He didn't know what the smell was. Leave him alone, he said. Mind my own business. So what if I have to sleep down there? That's the way he went running off at the mouth, but I know what it is now.

While Dieter Lange and Anna were shopping in Munich, I opened the lock and pushed inside his storage space. It seemed to me that even the dried meat that was hanging there smelled awful. I found the place that smelled quite by accident. I'd gone through cartons and boxes and metal containers of crackers and biscuits. One more to check. It didn't lift easily, and I thought, Uh-huh! I left it in its place and moved stuff from around it. Whew! I was growing afraid to open the tin when I'd cleared the area. I thought there might be a head in it or some other part of a body. I was shaking I was so nervous. When I shook the tin, there was a rattling sound, so then I knew there wasn't a head. Why did I think that? In this place with these people, why not? Yet I didn't want to think that Dieter Lange was so much like the rest of them. But what was in the tin that smelled so bad? I pried off the lid and turned away from the stink that shot out. I tipped the tin toward the light and the rattle became like stepping on deep-laid gravel. I held my breath and looked inside, but I couldn't tell right off what was making the sound. I picked up a wood file and dipped it inside and brought out two or three dull-looking pieces of metal. I took them in my hand and looked at them; one was solid, the others hollow with ragged little wires on them. I rubbed them on my clothes. They got a little brighter, a little more … gold. I dropped them as soon as I realized what they were and what remained in the foot-high tin. Gold teeth! My first impulse was to jump, but something, I don't know what, made that impossible. I just sat there, petrified. After a while, I picked them up and put them back inside the tin, then, with the file, I reached in and stirred the teeth, the bits of rotten flesh and bone. This was all that was left of 5,000 people? Ten thousand? I got up and went to my room and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke all around. Then I had another one. When I was finished with that one, I got some chlorine powder and poured it in the tin and shook it up and replaced the lid. A colored musician with a mouth full of gold or a diamond stuck in a tooth, like Jelly Roll Morton, wouldn't have lasted long in this place. I put everything back and locked up the storage space. I could see Dieter Lange (and maybe his new partners) melting down gold teeth and fillings and stashing the brick away until it became safe to take it out. For a second I saw that little boy way down the road, but I made him come back where he belonged.

From now on there will be more free time in camp. Improve morale, get more work out of the slaves. That's the word. And there is the whorehouse, sanctioned by Himmler himself. That's to improve morale, too, even if it doesn't hold down the spread of the clap and syph. This new place is bigger than the old Puff.

Radio London says the Russians claim they have trapped and are killing the soldiers of fourteen German and Rumanian divisions. Goebbels said on the radio, “What does not kill us makes us stronger.”

There is something about news like this that gives me a feeling like warm sun you can't see because of the fog.

“So, Pacholegg,” I say when I see him and another Infirmary detail in a corner of the canteen where they are smoking and avoiding the other prisoners who come in. (Or maybe it's the other way around.)

“So?” he says and turns away. I think this is because he doesn't want the others to hear him talk about the work they are doing in the big black tank over there. Kohler, who has that same look in his eyes that Pacholegg has, looks the other way; Kohler has already told me about the other experiments. The more they are forbidden to talk about these nasty things, it seems, the more eager they are to do so—if they can do it without getting caught, of course. So Kohler doesn't know that Pacholegg talks and Pacholegg doesn't know that Kohler talks. And then there's Neff.

I shrug and continue marking down the prices of the carvings the prisoners made for Christmas for the
SS
. If these don't move within a week, back in storage they go until next Christmas. I pause right there. Who knows? There might not be a next Christmas in Dachau. Then, revenge. That's why everyone wants names, and that's why names and deeds are forbidden to be discussed. To hell with that. We all want revenge. It is like strong, hot soup with a tumbler of cognac thrown in.

We know what needs to be known. Rascher and his decompression chamber, Schilling and his malaria research for the Afrika Korps in North Africa—for this the Test Persons get inoculated with a serum, then they are shot to see if their blood has coagulated.

Neff, another Rascher orderly, works with the doctor on a second air force experiment, which makes it look like Hitler still imagines the Third Reich running from the Atlantic to the Urals, and from the Arctic to the equator. (Maps have appeared in camp and are marked, then whisked away again.) Neff's work is on Arctic weather. Rascher wants to determine how much cold people can stand. “At first we just put people naked out in the cold behind the fence and splash water on them every hour,” Neff says with a shrug. “The test is nothing. Not controlled. We take temperatures at the start and at the end; then, if they're not dead, we revive the
TP
s with warm baths.” He pauses. “But now we've got a big vat and a bunch of Russian
TP
s.”

“Why don't you shut up?” Pacholegg says.

“Why don't you make me?” Neff answers.

They're up snarling and straining like dogs. I retreat to my cubbyhole. An old Red pushes between them, pats them on the shoulders, and shoves them off in different directions.

Something's going around. I hear it whispered:
Sonnenaufgang
. It's from the Reds and it means victory is coming over the German army and fascism. Maybe that's why everybody's so touchy. Hope. The possibility. A future where there wasn't anything before. Don't mess up, but start remembering the names.

Dieter Lange tells me that Goebbels and Baldauf have formed a big swing band, Charlie and His Orchestra, to play over Berlin Radio. For the morale of the military. Freddie Brocksieper plays drums. They play Gershwin, Dorsey, and Miller—and change the titles of the numbers. The
Zazou Junge
, the kid jitterbugs, are still raising hell in Hamburg, between visits by the British fliers who also like to say hello to Essen, Bremen, and Berlin, of course, as well as a few other places. Me and Dieter Lange listen to Charlie on the radio. Pooo … They've written in most of the ad libs. The music's got as much swing as a wet firecracker. Not nearly as swinging as we were at the Pussy Palace.

Sunday, March 1, 1942

There are men in this place whose faces make you want to run away from them. But you can't. You're afraid to ask them what's wrong. You don't want to know more than you already do. But you
do
. You want to know if things are worse than you know they are or maybe a little bit better. You sometimes believe you know everything that's going on but the camp with its blocks, factories, officers' compound,
SS
barracks, and outside work areas are far too large now. Before, you could never know anything for sure; now it's impossible.

Herbertshausen is now a
Schiessplatz
, too, but I never heard of it until Werner and Bader took me on a walk around the 'Platz yesterday. I knew there had to be some reason for it, because you don't walk around the 'Platz in March unless the sun has made a mistake and come out. And for the past few days the sky has been gray, spitting snow and rain sometimes. It's so gray that you begin to think that God's doing something up there He doesn't want you to see, or that maybe Loa Aizan has closed up and gone off on a binge. The only thing above that's not gray is that curling smudge of black from the crematorium; when the weather's like this, it flattens out over the camp and the smell drills through everything.