Clifford's Blues (38 page)

“Or any other time,” she said. “Let's put him to bed and we can stay and talk.”

“I don't want to talk,” I said. We started up the stairs with Dieter Lange.

“Du Dreckneger,”
Dieter Lange mumbled,
“hau ab.”

“You shit Nazi,” I said, “
You
fuck off.”

I pushed him onto his bed, then went to the attic. When I came back down, Anna saw what I was holding and she began to giggle. Dieter Lange saw, too, when we rushed into the bedroom, and he shouted, “No!” But when we jumped on him and began to pull off his clothes and put on the lingerie, he didn't struggle so hard, it seemed to me.

I pulled off my clothes and Anna pulled off hers. Dieter Lange said no again, but I don't think he meant it.

Thursday, January 7, 1943

He came in roaring and stomping like a tank, throwing his cap, coat, gloves, and scarf on the floor, ripping his arctics off and hurling them against the wall of the foyer. He grabbed off the wall the picture of Hitler everyone has in his house and threw that on the floor, breaking the glass. Himmler's picture was next. Dieter Lange stomped on it until the shattered glass sounded like grains of sand beneath his feet. He kicked the remains of both pictures from the doorway through the living room. He pounced on the piano and beat it with both fists. He kicked chairs and sent them bouncing. He picked up the poker and wound up to throw it through the window, but Anna jumped on his back and, as he was shrugging her off, he seemed to get hold of himself. I stayed in the kitchen where I was waiting to serve dinner. Right then my name was Wes, and not in that mess, whatever it was.

“Cognac, Cleef!”

I grabbed the bottle I'd uncorked for dinner, filled a glass, and gave it to Anna to give to him, the way you'd give the lion tamer a hunk of meat instead of giving it to the lion itself. Dieter Lange groaned and his eyes watered with anger.

Krieger brand goods are no more, not here. There are food shortages all over Germany, not just in the camps. The Colonel and the General Major, Dieter Lange said, grinding his teeth, had directed that all
KL
canteen goods be diverted to the civilian population. Therefore, commandeered were all the services, supplies, and equipment of all camp canteen provisioning units. Supplies provided by canteen officers as individual vendors would now be compensated at the rate of 50 percent per item. The present rate of production, however, was expected to continue. Supplies ready for distribution would be gathered at a new central warehouse in Munich. Because it was necessary to maintain high public morale, this would not be disclosed for the present, as in the directive concerning the use of human hair in mattresses.

Dieter Lange was imitating his General Major, I took it to be, reciting all this like a prissy Prussian.

“It's the scrip,” he said. “And the black market. They can check you too good with scrip. The black market, it's still real money—and good rates. They know what they're doing. It's people like me who're getting fucked and there's not a thing I can do.”

“Pass it on,” I said.

He was blubbering and snatching at his food like it was raw meat and he was a Doberman. Anna sat straight up and watched him carefully. I kept the table between me and him. “Just cut what you pay those women to cook and clean and pack those jars, and what you pay the guards. Tell them the same thing your partners told you. What can they do, what can they say?”

He rolled his eyes at me. I used to know about this kind of shit. A joker hires you for a date at one price. When you're finished, there's all this who-struck-john about the size of the house, or the house this or that, so it turns out that the money isn't anywhere near what you were told in the first place. What do you do? Don't take it, or take it and remember? You know the band leader got his before dividing the rest. So, yeah, pass it on. I've seen some bad fights over short money and two or three musical careers cut short, too. “They didn't tell you not to pass it on, did they?”

“I was going to do just that,” Dieter Lange said. He smiled for the first time since coming home.

“Then why were you so mad, Dieter?” Anna asked.

I turned to the sink so she wouldn't look at me.

“I didn't think they'd cheat me so soon and so much, but however you figure it, that's what they're doing. They took over the operation all right. After you've done everything and delivered the goods right into their hands.”

“War is hell,” I murmured.

“What?”

“I said that's right. They can go to hell.”

Dieter Lange passed the bottle around. “Listen. Everybody's getting ready.” He held up his hand and rubbed his thumb across the fingers. “Everybody.”

“Yes, and we've got ours, too, haven't we, Dieter?”

She was making sure, but he was slow to answer. “Yes, yes.” Anna smiled like someone with a pat hand you're not supposed to know about. Most of the stuff they had was somewhere on her father's farm—or better be.

“So,” she said, “let this go.”

But I said, “Everybody's getting ready for what?”

They both looked at me. I just wanted them to say it, that things weren't going so hot: that business with Hess almost two years ago, the air raids coming deeper and deeper into Germany, the Cologne raid by a thousand planes last May, the slaughter at Stalingrad, the landings in North Africa by the Americans. Hell, we all listened to the radio in the dark, spinning dials, picking up London. Anna never saw the congestion in camp, which now held five times as many prisoners as it was designed for; she didn't see the bodies piled up beside the morgue or in ditches near the train sidings or thrown against the four sides of the crematorium. She didn't know that a prisoner found with a single louse on him went to his death like the signs said:
Ein Laus Dein Tod!
Typhus was typhoid's shadow. She closed her ears and mind to the sounds of the trains clanking in, mostly at night, with more “pieces,” or clanking out for destinations in the East, the most recent being a load of Gypsies. Someone told me the guitar player Danko was among them. They let him keep his git so he could play for the rest of them on the trip. No one ever talks much about what they're doing to the Gypsies. I'd thought poor Danko was long dead. The place is as big as a city, and inmates hear last month's news only today.

“They allowed me to keep the name Krieger,” Dieter Lange finally said. “Who knows, maybe after, when all's calm again, I can really go into business with it.”

Yes, I thought, drinking along with them, so they can stick you with the rap when
Gotterdammerung
comes. No, they don't have to tell me why they think everyone's getting ready. I know. No Franz and Heller comedy here.

On average, we finish two bottles of cognac or something else just as strong every night when Dieter Lange is home.

Sunday, Jan. 31, 1943

Werner, who now seems less whipped, and Bader, Pacholegg, and Neff from the
Revier
, and some others, gathered in a corner of Block 1, where the Family is located. The Reds still want me to know things in case I get a break and get out. They never listen. That's not going to happen. Dieter Lange said so, and in this case I believe him. Still, they say, it's possible.

Pacholegg spoke first. The Schiller malaria experiments have been canceled, and anyway, it looks like the English and Americans are running the Afrika Korps out of Africa. The
TP
s who've not recovered well from the injections have vanished, and the others have returned to their blocks. The rule is that if the
TP
s survive the experiments in good shape, they're allowed to live; if not …

Neff says Rascher is in the final stages of the Arctic experiments. One Russian survived, but Himmler ordered him killed anyway. “We had a Jew, a Gypsy, and the Russian, who I don't think was Jewish. The usual stuff. The life jackets held them up. The water was 29° centigrade. We had gauges on their heads, stomachs, and in their assholes. People die quick when the head's chilled, the medulla and cerebellum. We always find up to a pint of blood in the cranium during the autopsy, or Rascher does.”

Neff's voice was soft and slow. His glance kept falling on me.

“These were turning blue quick. They held hands. Rascher said to make them stop, but their grips were too tight, like they were already frozen together. The Russian kept hollering, ‘Today us, tomorrow, you.' Rascher paid no attention. He expects such statements when people are dying. I had the feeling that holding hands made them last longer. And so did Rascher, but the Jew and the Gypsy went almost together. The Russian—all their names are locked in Rascher's files, as usual—after two and a half hours responded fully, but you know, there was damage inside. We begged Rascher to give him a shot. The Russian laughed. At three hours and fifteen minutes we pulled him out, covered him, and he came back all the way. What to do with him? Did the survivor rule apply to Russians? Rascher contacted Himmler's office directly. Himmler said the rule did not apply to Poles, Russians, or Jews. A
Kommando
from Herbertshausen told me they marched him out, all alone, and shot him, but not before he said again, ‘Today me, tomorrow, you.'”

I said, “I heard from another assistant there were women.”

Neff nodded. “They were used to keep the men warm. From Ravensbrueck. Rascher even had two men and two women fucking at zero degrees. Right after, their temperatures rose right back to normal.”

Bader said, “So every pilot who gets shot down in the North Sea is going to have a
Nutte
along to revive him?” He snorted.

“You watched?” Werner asked.

“Of course. We all did. We had to monitor the gauges. Listen, that's not as bad as decompression. Four hundred Arctic tests, maybe ninety died. The rest, mainly Russians and Jews, on Himmler's orders, were killed.”

Sometimes you can see men trying to remember. Those people of the Family who were there, got up and walked one by one to the window, lit cigarettes, if they had them, or mooched them from someone else—not without grumbling from the donor—and asked Neff and Pacholegg questions:

“Exactly how many Russians in the experiments?”

Neff and Pacholegg looked at each other.

Pacholegg said, “We work different shifts for different doctors. It's hard to say.”

Werner said, “Hundreds, surely. Thousands?”

Neff said, “Maybe two thousand, but that would include talk of the work of other doctors.”

“Which ones?” Bader asked.

“Well, in addition to Rascher, Schiller, and Deuschl—you know Rascher also developed the cyanide pill. For suicide or execution,” Neff said.

“Grawitz,” Pacholegg said. “He does stuff on infections.”

“Fahrenkamp. He works with Rascher,” Neff said. “And Dr. Blaha, he's a Czech, also does some things with Rascher. What, I don't know. But if you have a tattoo that's not a number and fall into his hands, it's too bad.”

“Finke and Holzloehner—”

“Siegfried Ruff,” Neff said, interrupting.

“How can all this be going on right under our noses?” Werner said.

“If we knew, what could we do about it?” one of the Family asked. “Nothing.”

I looked outside the window. The 'Platz was empty. Shit, it was cold out there. In winter, free time was time to sleep, on the floor, sitting in a corner, anywhere but the bunk, unless you had doctor's orders. The men walked around beating the rhythm of the doctors' names into their memories. They would have to remember a long time; how long, no one knew. I had only to remember until I could get here, now, with pencil and paper.

Neff and Pacholegg sat there after the Family had broken up. They smoked the cigarettes they'd been given with a leisurely sadness, pausing to look at them as though they might speak. I said, “You remember stuff like that, what you told us?”

Pacholegg shrugged. “I can't forget it.”

There was a space between us and the others, the space you feel between yourself and someone with a disease you could catch. These two, and others who worked with them, knew too much. They knew they were going to die, be bundled off to the Bunker or trucked out into the gray mist of a new day to Herbertshausen; no six-in-the-evening public hanging for them. They'd not been caught committing a crime like stealing food or trying to escape or fucking another inmate or getting fucked by one; but like so many of the
Sonderkommando
details, Neff, Pacholegg, and the other assistants were branded. Maybe that's what their cigarettes told them when they looked at them.

I said, “Like me. I think I can't forget things, either.”

“No,” Neff said. “You're a musician. You remember things. There's a difference. And that's why you're here. That's why we say things to you. You're an American.”

It is such a wonder to me, this “American” thing, the faith these jokers seem to have in them, the Americans, the respect, the hope that it will be the Americans, finally, who rescue them. (They would take the Russians, too, but only if they had to.) In the abstract, the American army cowboys, the Statue of Liberty, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Four Freedoms they talked about on the radio, have worked on the prisoners like a slow electric current through the forbidden foreign broadcasts, shocking them with possibilities. And to many of them, even those who once laughed at me, I am the symbol of all these things. Most of them don't know what America is really like, and probably wouldn't care as long as the truth didn't disturb the dream.

You learn something every day. The Prisoner Company was always for the toughest guys. Now the
PC
holds some of the Blacks who used to belong to the
Zazou
jitterbugs and to the Edelweiss Pirates; the Pirates ran away from conscription—but got caught. And also there are what are called the
Meuten
, anti-Nazi gangs touched with a little Red.