Clifford's Blues (37 page)

The fertilizer truck has just left a small pile of gray ash for mixing in the soil. The past couple years I haven't been so squeamish about shoveling it. Now I just whisper to it, “Who were you?” Or “Who were you guys?”

I've begun the spring cleaning, taking time out to lay in my bed and look at old magazines when the Langes aren't around. Anna's down in the dumps. I talk to her in English, but she's not interested anymore. So I say, “Inefay ithway emay. Uckfay ooyay. Itchbay.” She doesn't know if she should smile or get mad; I smile so she should know what I said was harmless. She's got something on her mind besides the war, the big-shot partners, and all the scheming and hustling.

Dieter Lange was right, of course; I will not be moving my rusty-dusty from Dachau to any other camp. He visited Laufen and Tittmoning. Says they are filled with people who are naturalized citizens of the
U.S.
, Canada, England, and South American countries. He found an American Negro in Tittmoning, a painter. There are a few colored men there. Dieter Lange pulled out a piece of paper and read, “Josef Nassy. From New York. He had been living in Brussels when the war caught up with him. The commandant over there likes him. Helps him get his painting stuff.”

“Oh?” I said.

“No, no,” Dieter Lange said. “He's married to a Belgian woman.”

“You're married, too.”

“Shut up, Cleef. Don't be smart with me.”

I shut up and wondered what kind of life this Nassy was having. Dieter Lange explained that the men in those camps had problems with their passports or were resident aliens when the Germans took over. “But their status is being honored,” Dieter Lange said. “There are even Jews there who aren't headed for—you know—the East.”

There was something like a little hole in our talk then. I knew there was stuff he'd heard about what was happening in the East, besides the war, and he knew there were things I'd heard. The prisoners weren't the only “pieces.” The
SS
guards, too, were moved from camp to camp as the need arose, or as some, especially the officers, felt their careers could be improved in another camp. Rumor said the new camps in the East offered the fastest chance for promotion, and jokers like Eichmann, Loritz, Remmele, Zill, Hoess, Koegel, and others had gone far up the ranks when they went to them. Maybe Dieter Lange was like me in this case. I'd heard a lot of stories about what the Germans did and were doing, but the stories coming in on the grapevines through prisoners being transferred from camp to camp were the kind that, if you believed, you also had to know the train had gone off the track carrying you with it.

Dieter Lange shook his head. I wasn't going to say anything unless he did. Something like this was so dark and bloody that whatever words you used to describe it were just the introduction to a composition that could never be finished. Dieter Lange shook his head again. He said he didn't understand why Winkelmann wanted to go East. But Winkelmann was old for a captain. In the East he might get ahead fast, if nothing happened to him first.

Sunday, May 17, 1942

The Winkelmanns have left. Dieter Lange said he told Winkelmann not to let himself get caught by the Russians because they were doing to the Germans what the Germans were doing to them. Winkelmann said don't worry; he wasn't going to the front, but to a camp in Poland called Auschwitz, a big place with many smaller camps attached to it. There were important things going on there that should warrant quick promotion, Winkelmann said. Dieter Lange said he just grunted when Winkelmann told him that. When Dieter Lange, Winkelmann, and some others went into Munich for a farewell party, Anna, Ursula, and me had one of our own. Now I think I will miss Ursula. With her around I learned things I never knew, couldn't even imagine.

Fri. July 17, 1942

Goebbels had said that he was going to get even with the British for bombing Germany by punishing the Jews. There can't be a person in Germany who doesn't know what's already being done. Radio London said Americans bombed German bases in Holland on the Fourth of July. To which Dieter Lange said, “Hmmm, hmmm.” It's more dangerous than ever to listen to London, but naturally, Radio Berlin is saying only good things or that things are not as bad as we may hear. You have to listen to the outside to know what's really going on.

Haven't seen any of the colored prisoners in a while. Dead or transferred?

New camp rule: Only German prisoners can beat other German prisoners. Well. All the camp police are German. The block leaders, seniors, secretaries, capos, and so on are mostly all German, too. Like Uhlmer in the canteen. He's handling all the whorehouse passes for Dieter Lange—but I still handle the money at the end of the day. Next in line come the Austrians, then the Poles, who could make good Germans
(Eindeutschungfähig)
. Same old shit. Everybody sticks together except colored people, and they don't because everybody else makes sure, one way or the other, that they can't.

Anna started moping around after Ursula and her husband left. Feeling sorry for herself, I guess. Also, she's back exploring the joys of the wine closet, and I don't mean just the wine.

Sunday, August 23, 1942

It was very pleasant today. Everyone strolling around the camp,
spazierganger
. Here and there church services, the Catholics, the Protestants. Why not? There are 2,000 priests in this place. How many ministers I don't know. The priests and ministers both are called by the
SS
Kuttenscheisser
—robed shitheads. (Prisoners with dysentery are called shitters—
Scheisser
.)

On days like this the Russians walk around and whisper about
Der Rasche Gang des Onkel Josef
, while they hunt down and exchange
Kippen
, cigarette butts. That means Stalin's Red Army is beating the shit out of the Germans.

There are a couple of places in camp called
Interessengebiet
, where the prisoners go to barter. Cigarettes and tobacco are the main forms of exchange. I don't know who decides the rate of exchange or how or why. It does no good to argue that last week the rate was lower. When the food hits rock bottom—like now—with turnip and beet tops and dandelion greens and one piece of bread served day after day after day, the canteen does good business—if the inmates have money, of course. Then there're the bartering places for those who don't. Today the
Valuta
is:

1 loaf of bread = 30–50 cigarettes

1 dead cat
(Katze)
= 20 cigarettes

1 small dog
(Hund) =
30 cigarettes

portion of soup = 5–6 cigarettes

suspenders = 3 cigarettes

1 slice of a sausage = 1–2 cigarettes

Blocks 15 and 17 are being cleaned out again, which only means that Jews are going East to make room for more Jews coming from the West—France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg.

Thursday, Nov. 26, 1942, Thanksgiving Day back home

Oh-oh! Oh, boy!

I just got my paper out of Dieter Lange's storage because he's going to clean out everything that's not in cans or jars. Just in time, too. He's now moved all the boxes and canned goods out to Anna's father's farm. I think they plan to bury stuff, including the gold teeth.

He's keeping the dried meat because there are food shortages in camp, and this time they're bad. They seem to be bad everywhere. A train transport from Danzig rolled into camp with 600 prisoners, Poles and Russians. There had been 900 when it started out. A ten-day trip. No food. Six corpses chewed down to the bone. Bad? It's worse than that. And Dieter Lange has heard that scrip will replace money in the camp. That word came from his big shots, he said. “Who the hell can use paper play money?” he said.

There are other things going on. In July the Americans had bombed Holland. Eighteen days ago they landed in North Africa! And the Russians have surrounded the German army at Stalingrad and are killing the soldiers and starting an attack of their own! Hitler said on the radio: “We knew the fate that awaits us if we lost, and for this reason we have not the remotest idea of a compromise. We have always had the Jews as internal enemies and now we have them as external ones.” Got news for that joker. It ain't only Jews lookin' for his ass; it's the whole damned world. So what does the great leader do in return? Why, he takes over the rest of France.

And Anna drinks.

And Dieter Lange drinks. They drink and talk, him and Anna, about the idea they had while in Paris.

“We would go to France and from there to Portugal. Spain was out. Franco might have sent us back, but Portugal is neutral. Now France is out. We would have had Anna's father send us whatever he could make on the sale of things, you know.…”

“No,” I say. “I don't know. What was supposed to happen to me?”

I drink, too, and get so mad my blood bubbles like spit on a hot stove.

“That's why we didn't do it,” Anna says, the lying bitch.

“Yes,” Dieter Lange says. “That's why.”

Lies, all lies. I have the feeling that they want to climb on my good side and stay there. I think about the time off they gave me after hauling food during the last typhoid epidemic, the good word they put in for me with Dieter Lange's new partners. There is something more than sex now and music (which I'm not playing too much of) and watching Uhlmer and Lappus; it's my being American, colored but American, and maybe, if push comes to shove, I could put in a good word for them. Yeah, I would. In a pig's ass.

So I take myself another drink and hold up the glass in a toast to them for their kind thoughts and say, “Shit. I don't believe you. Shit.”

Sunday, Dec. 13, 1942

The Langes were quiet and hung over when I left them this morning to go to the canteen. The guards at the
Jourhaus
were kind of evil, but the camp hummed with the talk of the raid last night. Everybody wanted to know if anyone else knew more than they did. Prisoners who'd come from the French coast or Holland or Belgium or camps in the north were familiar with the sound and rejoiced in what it meant.

A siren had sounded. It was the first time a siren like that had ever gone off in the compound or the camp. I crept to the window above the coal bin and peered out. Pitch black. No streetlights. Nothing.

I had been lying in the dark, my mind just one big hole, not able to sleep, wrapped in the darkness that opened dark doors that led softly, quietly, to deeper darknesses, considering for the first time, really,
Freitod
, suicide, and also thinking from some other, strange, removed distance, how silly that was, to have such a thought, when it was looking like Hitler had got both his balls in a nutcracker. But you wanted the Russians to hurry, the English, the Americans; you wanted the Germans to fold and step up and take their punishment. The sirens kept howling, echoing in the darkness. Then they fell silent.

I heard a long, low rumble, like Loa Aizan or maybe God snoring, but there wasn't a space in the sound; it just kept getting fatter and fatter, louder and louder, closer and closer, mightier and mightier, and then I could hear little spaces in it the way you can in vibrations. I felt the earth and house shiver, heard the glass in the windows whine. Air raid! I thought. Air raid! They are coming! Where, where? Munich, yes, Munich. Blow the motherfucker to bits. Make dog meat of the people. Leave a hole a hundred miles deep where the city used to be.

Light began to slip into my darkness. The sound of the planes grew shorter and thinner, then thinner still, and weaker, and the night began to breathe again. The sirens didn't come back on for two hours.

So everyone wanted to talk about the raid.

“They're coming,” everyone seemed to say. “The
Kuhtreiber Luftwaffe
.” The American cowboy army air force. It was coming. For a moment nobody seemed to mind that all they were eating right then was carrot greens in warm salted water and sawdust bread.

Monday, Dec. 28, 1942

Dieter Lange said it himself: “The way things are going, the next Christmas we celebrate a little bit the American way for real, eh?” It was Christmas Eve. We had decorated the tree, eaten, opened presents, and were drinking and playing records.

“Why do you talk like that?” Anna asked. “You know what they could do to you if they heard.”

“You never minded before,” he said. “A fact is a fact unless it's too close to home, is that it?”

“So,” she said. “What do you and your Colonel and General Major plan to do about the situation? And does whatever you do include me?”

I was drinking pretty good myself, and I said to Dieter Lange, “She knows too much for it not to.”

“Who asked you, big mouth? You forget yourself.”

“So do you, you faggot,” I said. The Christmas tree smelled pretty and I felt reckless as I threw myself into the middle of this drunken, nasty storm. Once it was just me and Dieter Lange who were so dangerously tied together, then Bernhardt, who had the upper hand, and Anna who also had a hand up, then Ursula. Now it was just the three of us and those two ghosts of Dieter Lange's; but they did not create the presence, the unending threat, that Bernhardt had. I smirked at him.

“You nigger queen,” Dieter Lange said. He was growing red in the face. “Bitch.”

Anna laughed. “Sometimes.”

“You shut up, too.” He filled his glass again and drank half of the cognac it contained. Between him and Anna, it was going fast. “You know I could have you both killed like that!” He snapped his fingers.

Anna laughed again.

Dieter Lange slapped her.

The Americans are coming, I thought, and went over and knocked him on his ass.

Anna laughed once more.
“Meine Held,”
she said. “My hero. Be careful of the tree.”

Dieter Lange got to his feet and rushed me. I pushed him away. He looked puzzled. “Go to bed,” I said. “Don't beat up your wife at Christmastime.”