Clifford's Blues (7 page)

Friday, April 27, 1935

Now they've gone and done it. Really closed down the Witnesses. They've been banned from all civil service jobs, and they're still arresting the hell out of them. Menno will have a lot more company. Spring is finally starting to come. Poor bastards over in the camp must be happy as hell. Anna hasn't been able to find any more
Negerbuchen
to cry over. With good weather she won't be bothering me quite so much. Thank you, Jesus.

Monday, May 27, 1935

“I don't mind being here after all,” Gitzig said the other day when I slipped over to Bernhardt's house. “And neither should you.”

It seems that only men with proven Aryan ancestry can go into the services, even if conscripted. As for homos, new laws passed in January, and about to be changed for the worse, are going to make things even harder. The
SS
magazine we see around the homes,
Das Schwarze Korps
, says we should be executed. Dieter Lange, too? And the others? Ha, ha.

“What's it like, being a queer?” Gitzig asked. “C'mon. I think you are. Is it better that way, better than pulling the pecker when there aren't any women around, or even if there are?” He asks questions like these just to be asking, I think, because he still doesn't seem to pay any attention to my answers. I was talking and he was blowing snot into a bowl of fresh tapioca in the icebox. I could tell he was pleased with himself. “Just wait until it gets warmer,” he said, “and they start drinking iced tea and lemonade.”

Gitzig looks like his name, sharp-faced, like a rat. “Your Frau Lange,” he said. “What a patootie she is. I see her walking and I get a hard-on.” He gave me a look. “You sure better be queer.” He laughed and slapped me on the back. I told him I knew Bernhardt spent a lot of time away from home, even when he was on duty. How about
him
, Gitzig, and Frau Bernhardt? He laughed. “That bitch? She likes tapioca.” Gitzig is a Green, and I believe it. Slicker than shit. “Listen, I'd rather fuck you than her, and I'd rather stay here a thousand years without a woman than screw a faggot.” I told him time would tell, and that I'd never met a homosexual who would fuck him or let herself be fucked by him, ugly as he was. And he jumped hot. Said I was the
blackest
, ugliest thing he'd
ever
seen, and then he started to cry. I noticed that he put the highest note on
blackest
, so I changed my spiel a little. I told him, not only had I never met a homosexual who would fuck him or let herself be fucked by him, ugly as he was, I'd never met one who would even
look
at anyone as
white
as he was. (It's true. Three summers, and two bitter winters, and Gitzig never changed colors. He is
white
.) Well, he didn't mean it and I didn't mean it. While he was crying, he blew some more snot into the tapioca, and we laughed. I've seen lots of men who didn't look as good as Gitzig (if you like rats), but I don't think the rest of the world has; a lot of people must have spent a lot of time telling Gitzig he looks like the ass-end of a snake. Maybe that's what had made him a Green.

Gitzig is from Leipzig. He was, he said, a confidence man, a
Schwindler
. “In a city like Leipzig,” he said, “where everyone is or thinks he is so cultured, with all that history, it was easy. First, there are all the students, people searching for some truth in the universe. Small potatoes. Last resort, because students never have much of anything. Then there are the artists—the writers, painters, musicians and the like—most of them not better off than the students. Finally, there are the concert halls, the patrons, the money here, the money there, some of it honest, most of it crooked. There were a lot of patrons. Of the
Arts
,” he said, and I gathered that he was making fun of the whole business. “I did very well with them. I was always getting money out of them for some struggling artist who'd been wounded in the war and who, wounded or not, didn't even exist. I was a friend of these explosions of talent that would go unheard, unseen. What are friends for? Most of these patrons were old women. Do you have any idea how demanding old women can be of younger men, especially if the old women have money? Of course you don't. But let me tell you, Pepperidge—what kind of name is that for a black?—they go through friends of artists and sometimes the artists—phoney, naturally—like seaweed through a duck. And you have to invest so much in clothes, luncheons, dinners, proper talk—no fucks, no shits—not like we talk now, and, my friend, more often than you can imagine, sticking your dick into the next thing to a grave about to be filled.”

Gitzig seemed proud of whatever wool he'd pulled over anyone, but it sounded like he'd paid a pretty good price, because here he is. “I also leased concert halls and re-leased them at twice the price,” he said. “But the best thing for me was theater and concert hall tickets. I had a printer who made up duplicates of concert hall and theater tickets. Counterfeit tickets. This was the racket that got me, but I could have bought my way out if not for these fucking Nazis. The mayor and the chief of police of Leipzig arguing over the same seat. What fucking luck! Only the second time out on this thing. Shit, Pepperidge, I was almost as famous as the other Leipzigers, or people who'd visited it, Bach, Wagner, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Goethe, Schiller, Napoleon, and Blucher.”

But how did he manage to get assigned to Bernhardt? “I'm good with everything except the looks. Numbers and money especially. I'm as good with those as you are with your ass. You have to have something to help you through this shit, and all these officers have their own rackets going. They don't have to pretend too much. Open season, and he knows I can help him on the sneak.” The problem is, though, and Gitzig doesn't seem to know it, that once they discover you're good at something here, they want to keep you forever. I asked him what racket Bernhardt had, and Gitzig said he wasn't sure yet. “He works for Goering. Art, I think. You know, paintings and sculptures, shit like that. And coupon books. Lange's got a good racket with the camp canteens. Wish Bernhardt had that. Got a cigarette?”

Thursday, June 6, 1935

I hear them talking about Italy and Selassie and Mussolini and war. They seem to want something like this to happen, maybe because the same old thing goes on here day and night, night and day. But right now I'm getting far away from here, even out of Germany. Anna has found another book. I like this one. I don't know where she got it. It's in English. The few books that are in the canteen are all in German—the ones that aren't banned. I have been in Haiti lately because we're reading something called
Babouk
, about the slave trade and slavery. Maybe the Nazis don't think a book like this can do any harm. This Babouk reminds me of some of those tough guys back home. He's one bad jigaboo. Whipped not only the French, but those dicty
passé blancs
like we have back in Louisiana. Everything Napoleon sent, Babouk cut down, like a machete going through cane. I'd never heard about what happened in Haiti before. Today Anna stopped reading to ask me, after all this time, what I'd done to be sent here.

“I can't imagine you a criminal,” she said. She waited for me to speak.

“I sold cocaine,” I told her.

“That's all?” she asked.

I said it was.

“That's what Dieter said.”

Why wouldn't he? We had long ago agreed on that.

“He said he didn't know how long your sentence was. That's awful.”

I said that was just like Uncle Tom, but his sentence turned out to be for life. Anna just looked at me, as if making some awful connection.

She made me nervous just sitting there with the sun coming into the kitchen through the window behind her, probably thinking all kinds of things that missed the boat by a mile.

“But, you're so … your playing is so
sweet
,” she said and then sighed. “You must have had German girlfriends, no? How could you not have, a gentle person like yourself, Cleeford?”

I nodded. I had a great urge right then to tell her how very much I want to get out of here, how, if she would, she might help me. But there were certain things in her expression that made me afraid, and certain things I know about her that also stopped me. She is just a farm girl, slowly going to fat, who believes in the rules and in the people in charge; she believes in Dieter Lange and in Bernhardt. It's not a question of getting out with her help; it is a question of staying out of the blocks until something or someone far more important than Annaliese gets me away from here altogether. What I have to do is not get on her nerves. Same with Dieter Lange or anyone else who has the power to send me over there. So I said nothing. I thought of cooking smothered pork chops down-home style for dinner. Anna likes those. There are two kilos of pork chops in the icebox right now.

Tues., June 25, 1935

We had a midsummer party last Friday night. Fewer people than before. I didn't play any up-tempo stuff, just the slow jazz and every now and then Debussy. (“The windows will be open, Cleef, and the doors, so play nice slow jazz and a little classical. This has to be classy, you know, not like the parties we had at the other place,” Dieter Lange had said.) I also played some of the soft things that had been hanging on racks in my head. It was a nice night, with the sky clear and the moon out. I played “Stardust,” “After You've Gone,” “She's Funny That Way,” “You Made Me Love You,” “I Ain't Got Nobody,” “Basin Street Blues,” “Embraceable You,” and did the vocal on some. My own things had no title. The women were all wearing sharp-smelling perfume, a lot of gardenia. Seems like that's all they have around here.

Yesterday and today I had to go to the canteen. Details marching and singing; details working, raising dust, stinking of sweat and worse. I slipped by the Infirmary but didn't find Menno, and no one knew where he was. Werner heard I was in and came by the canteen. I gave him the soap, cigarettes, and can of fruit I'd brought inside my clothes. It's easier to smuggle goods in the winter because you wear more things. Werner thanked me and asked how I was doing. He asked if I remembered some of the things he'd said before and I said yes, but I wasn't sure what he meant.

“Well, then,” he said. “What do you hear over there? What do those shit
SS
people talk about?”

I said, “Ethiopia and the Italians and war.”

“We know that. I mean, things about
this
place. What is your friend Gitzig up to besides hiding things and growing things and saving radio parts? C'mon, think.”

I told him about Bernhardt's connection to Goering. He said that was good information, very good, but maybe for later. I said they wanted to kill all the queers and he laughed.

“What they used to call the German Disease. Maybe also the British Disease? And maybe, too, American?” He patted me on the back. “It's all right. A man can't help what he is. He just makes the best of it, like anyone else.” He told me that, since he and the others needed me out there, they'd take care of anyone Dieter Lange seemed to be interested in over here. He didn't think, though, I had real worries. After all, I was a rare bird, and while Dieter Lange might have a fling or two—just as I was having with Menno Becker—it wouldn't mean that I was out. “Don't worry,” he said. “We
organisieren
, things will work out; we don't,
kaput
.” Werner had heard nothing about his own sentence and nothing from his family. He seemed resigned to this but not to anything else.

Outside, the labor details trooped by, singing or calling cadence. The guards shouted and cursed. We watched as two large vans pulled up on the Appellplatz in front of the
Wirtschaftsgebaude
. Guards descended upon the vans, attacking the men who were tumbling out like store dummies. The men got themselves up and together in time to ward off the tornado of blows the guards were raining upon them. We heard the guards shouting: “Shits!” “Dogs!” “Turds!” “Pigs!” They shoved and kicked the men toward the steps. I could see in the prisoners' faces terror and total disbelief. The details of laborers still marched by singing or shouting “Left, right, left, right.”

“It's getting worse,” Werner said.

“Yes, of course. It has to get worse. I've heard there are more than 200,000 citizens in the camps already. Where will they stop?”

We watched in silence. The canteen was empty at that hour, which is why Dieter Lange sent me, to sweep up and stock the sad-assed shelves with his goods so he could rake in some of the moolah. Today what I brought is for Werner. On the next trip there will be some American cigarettes: Lucky Strikes in their green package with the red bull's-eye circle. I don't know where they came from, but the prisoners paid a lot for them. Dieter Lange usually sends them over, with other expensive stuff, when the men get their mail—the packages and letters with checks or reichsmarks. There was even wine or cognac for the rich ones whose families sent lots of money.

Werner sighed. Then he asked me if there wasn't any way I could get out of this. I told him that I was waiting to hear from Count von Hausberger. He wanted to know who that was. I told him a friend of Colonel Friedrich. “The
SA
colonel,” he said. He drew his finger across his throat—exactly the same way the count had—and said, “Well, I would not count” (and here he laughed) “on this one, understand?”

Then, just at that moment, we heard the door open with a bang and swing back with a lesser bang. Werner shouted at me, spit flying out of his mouth, his thick arm flung backward, “
Neger! Neger!
What's that you say?” And as he hit me, as I went down, I saw the look on his face. It sure didn't go with what he was doing to me. So I lay on the floor and looked up at him instead of at the person who came toward us with footsteps that sounded like thunder chasing thunder.