Clifford's Blues (32 page)

There comes then, sharply through the frigid night, like a single trembling note, the sound of the truck. It skids off the 'Strasse and onto the 'Platz, stops before the roll-call officer. Karlsohn jumps out, salutes. The squad lifts a long bundle, a rope trailing after, out of the truck and dumps it before the officer. It is a body. The rope seems to be trailing from its neck. I hear my heart beating in my ears; it is so strong and steady that I think it must last forever. Same steady beat, like a drummer who knows the number's going to be very long, with extra choruses. I know, though I cannot clearly see from my vantage point, that the body is Pierre's.

“Achtung!”
The roll-call officer roars angrily into the
PA
system. Men already at attention try to move their frozen bodies to a higher level of attention. “Caps off!” Twenty thousand men snatch at their heads, remove the battered striped berets. “Caps on!” Another storm of motion and the caps are on again.
“Absperren!”
The floodlights wink off. I hear the prisoners' footsteps pressing haphazardly over the creaking snow. In the moon-lightened darkness the men mill about to see who was brought in. They surround the body. There is sudden movement. Can they be kicking him? Him, who made them stand two hours in freezing cold, perhaps miss their evening meal, and go hungry to their blocks?

I turn out the canteen lights and slip on my jacket, and as I go carefully down the iced steps, Werner comes slowly toward me. “It's the boy,” he says. “He hanged himself in the back of the greenhouse.” Werner walks with me to the body. In the light falling across the front of the Dancing Ground from the
Wirtschaftsgebaude
, and in the moonlight, I see Pierre's face is frozen in a massive, final, twisted tic. The rope has disappeared halfway into the flesh of his neck. Spit and gobs of snot reflect bits of moonlight. I wipe it off with my sleeve. The prisoners would have spit on Jesus. And so would I.

“Well …” Werner says.

I say nothing. What's there to say?

“They'll be coming to take him to the morgue.” He sighs, turns, and walks toward his block. I kneel beside Pierre to finish wiping him off. Suddenly there is someone beside me. I look up. It isn't Werner. It's Willy Bader. He unties the rope, straightens Pierre's arms along his sides. I hear the creak and roll of the wagon and the stomp-warming feet of the men assigned to pull it. Bader waves them away when they are upon us. We move to the head. “I go with you,” is all he says. The
Koppeln
huddle together. “Where do you go?” they ask.

Bader glances at me and I tell him, “
Baracke
X. What's the point of the morgue?” Bader tells them what I've said. They tell Bader to bring the wagon back to the morgue, the
Totenkammer
. We lift Pierre and place him carefully into the wagon, then slip ourselves into the harnesses. We pull through the protesting snow. The wagon, the Moor-Express, is ten times heavier than Pierre. We struggle down the 'Strasse, then turn and go past the disinfection hut, the rabbit hutches, the gardens, the greenhouse, and through the gate to the crematorium. We are sweating when we arrive. Bader speaks in a low voice to the commandos, who look at me and nod. After, Bader guides me out, back to the wagon, and we pull it to the morgue. “Good night,” he says. I shake his hand.

Mon., April 15, 1940

The kids move unsteadily about the house, Lily's and Ursula's. But the war's really all people care about now that the army has taken Denmark and part of Norway. Already we're getting cases of sardines and Danish cookies; already Anna's got maps of Copenhagen to study. Goebbels is on the radio all the time now.

I am here in my clean uniform, serving coffee and cake, but I seem to be watching them from that secret place that's just mine, like a place at the bar between sets the bartender shoos people away from. “That's Cliff's spot, man.” I mean, I see them and they see me, but I am really far away, in my own spot, seeing them through mirrors. I can't say what I see, but it is something so bad it makes me sweat and think of the evil Loas: Agarou Tonnerre, Babako, Bakula-Baka, Ogoun Badagris, and Baron Samedi, who is the Loa all Loas do business with at the end. They will claim all these women and all their children forever and ever.

And I hear in these women's voices, behind their cooings and cluckings, the pretentious tones of plantation wives or jailers' wives. Miss Ursula, Miss Anna
(“Gott! Gott! Mein Gott!”)
, I've heard your wet sounds, your cocaine sighs, your schnapps-sick moans. Is an asylum any different? Here you are in your pretty print dresses, in your pretty pink-and-white houses, but your husbands wear black (death) uniforms and brown (shit) shirts.

This morning, as we waited for the garbage truck to come down the street, I saw Gitzig. He waved and came over. Up and down, calfactors were taking out the garbage or ladders to begin the spring cleaning—windows, porches, outside walls. Some were tending the flower beds to ready them for blooming. The air was warm and soft for April, and the sky was blue.

“You don't look so good,” Gitzig said.

I shrugged. What was there to say?

“This spring, it will go,” he said.

“The war? I thought it was going already.”

“Not the way it's going to go,” Gitzig said.

Of course, he wanted me to ask what was really going on, so he could tell me how much he knew and how he was involved in it. Instead I said, “That kid is starting to look more and more like you, Gitzig, lover man, Gitzig.”

He turned and looked up and down the street. “Do you really think so, Pepperidge?”

“So,” I said. “Blackjack. It
is
yours.”

“Sometimes,” he said, “when I'm with Bernhardt, I turn and catch him studying me. And I think, He knows. Lily wouldn't tell. He just knows.”

“Shit,” I said, “if he wants her to tell, he can make her. You know that. But the little fucker looks just like you.”

“It really shows through, Pepperidge?”

“To me, yes. From the first time I saw the kid. But I got different eyes than white people, you know.” I wanted to put him at his ease, but he was already nervous. He wasn't talking about no love now. “What're you doing these days, Gitzig? You haven't asked me to take anything to Werner lately.”

“That's because I heard you and Werner don't talk too much now. What happened? You want to tell me?”

Tell him Werner packed my coal in exchange for a favor for Pierre? Why? How could that help me? Maybe Werner's nature turned on him. Maybe that pussy at the Puff was just too worn out for him. Who knew, shit, who cared anymore? Yet I felt that since I knew Gitzig's secret, he wanted one of mine in return. In jail everything was up for
Valuta
, trade-price, exchange, barter.
Valuta
was also insurance: If you tell on me, I'll tell on you. That way, no
Verzinken
, no betrayal.

“Never mind, Pepperidge. I can guess. The Reds are just like everyone else.” Gitzig patted my shoulder. “It's okay. What am I doing? It's like being back in Leipzig, back in the business again. I've been working on ration books and foreign money—counterfeit—because Bernhardt has to get his. So all this is for Denmark and Norway, and already being put to good use there, you know. Soon, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France.” Gitzig offered me a Players. “I do good stuff, Pepperidge. Looks and feels like real. The Swiss eat it up. I can make Bernhardt rich, so what if his wife has my baby? He doesn't love her. He loves money. All these cock-suckers are like that. It's the money. So, more countries, ration books, and money; bet your bottom pfennig on that. I think I'll be around for a while. In the outside world, Bernhardt would be nothing next to me. All he is now, like the rest of his pig
SS-SD
-Gestapo, is a goddamn crook in a uniform.”

Gitzig was shuffling around like a boxer in his corner. A taste of the good life had changed him, put some fight in him and took out the rat. The good life and love. I didn't imagine that Gitzig had spent any time lately with Lily if Bernhardt suspected anything. Maybe that's what got him steaming. I hoped he wouldn't get reckless.

The garbage truck was not far away now, and Gitzig went back to the front of the Bernhardt house. The street was jumping and voices called out. Shit. It was spring and it was getting warmer, and you didn't have to split wood or bring in coal or coke and take out the ashes anymore, and the German army was crushing everything in front of it.

Sun., June 23, 1940

“Es blitz!”

“Blitz Schnell!”

“Blitzkrieg!”

It was on the radio two hours ago. The French have signed an armistice with Germany. The
“Blitz”
did it. Zing, whing, bam, boom, and it was the English into the sea, the Belgians, Dutch, and Luxembourgers on their knees in the middle of bomb-blasted cities, then
“Blitzkrieg!!”
around the Maginot Line and
voila!
France fell over as though it was a cow hit on the head with a sledgehammer.

Could all the food have gone to the army? There seems to be a shortage in camp. Which is good for Dieter Lange's new brand, Krieger. He had the labels printed in Munich. Not like these regular store labels that look so cheap. We pasted his labels on the outside of mayonnaise jars and put the stuff inside—cabbage soup, beet soup, turnip soup. The new label with the big blond warrior-Viking assures the prisoners that the stuff is okay, 100 percent Aryan. Have to be careful with the Krieger brand, though. It's not approved by the camp director's office, and it's not too tasty. But they move when there's a shortage of food, and as Dieter Lange says, our prices are right. Next, we're going to try chicken soup, but that's going to cost. Dieter Lange has to hire some women out on his father-in-law's farm to kill, clean, and cook the chickens. Women who can be trusted. Or who're just plain dumb. There's already the payoff to various guards in charge of the prisoners who move the stuff.

The details that march out to the civilian plants, though, eat okay. Can't have those prisoners falling out on the job in front of civilians while they're making guns and plane, truck, and tank parts.

Dieter Lange and Anna have been arguing all weekend. He has to go to Paris. He wants to see how many goods he can reroute from Les Halles to his canteens in the Bavarian camps. She wants to go with him. I can't imagine Anna walking along the Champs-Elysées.
Anna Lange?
All that money must be burning a hole in her pockets. Dieter Lange's, too. Of course, Anna won. She will go with him.

The Dancing Ground was filled with prisoners taking the sun earlier today, taking the sun and exchanging news about the war. Will England be next? How long will that take? Between a couple of the blocks a small group of prisoners listened to a flute player. The man was doing Bach, what else, and he made me think of Ernst. I watched the man lipping and breathing into that battered, tarnished instrument with such love I could have cried. Some of the prisoners did. Once I looked up and in one place the sky seemed bluer than anywhere else, like there was a hole in it. I watched the hole in the sky and listened to Bach. And for just one minute, things weren't so bad.

Huebner was not in the canteen today.

Thursday, July 11, 1940

They think I don't know. They talk in low voices around the table when I'm not in the kitchen, and when I'm there, they hardly talk at all. I could put the pieces together for them, but they still wouldn't know what's really going on, because they aren't supposed to. No one is.

Last Saturday, after two days in the Punishment Company, Gitzig was taken to the rifle range and shot dead—after they had made
Hackfleisch
out of him. On the range they tied him to a post and began shooting from his feet up.

Just before dawn Sunday morning, Lily Bernhardt, carrying her baby, was led to a cottage beyond the rail sheds and was strangled from a rafter. It was hot in the shed. They just tied a rope around her neck while she cried, drew it tight, and pulled it over a cross beam. In the blocks they did that very slowly. The prisoner sweated and the
SS
called the strangling a “sauna.” They placed the baby in Lily's arms and put a rope around its neck, too. Gitzig was buried, Lily and the baby cremated. Different places, different times, of course. That bothered me like a sticky piece of lint on a dark suit, because, maybe, Lily and Gitzig and their baby might have been the most natural, the most—somehow, in some way—honest accident to happen here. Lily, fragile, birdlike, and unloved, pushed out of the nest Bernhardt was crowding with his women (of which, besides Anna, there were many, as befitted his station), kept bumping into Gitzig and must have seen something no one else ever saw in him, and then things happened. How? When? Did Gitzig ever confess to adding ingredients to the iced tea and the tapioca? Later, how did she tell him the baby was his? But she must have told him. And then he told me. The fool was happy! What did she tell Bernhardt when he asked about that baby? What was his response? How patient a man he must have been. Having horns grown on his head by the ugliest prisoner Dachau must ever have seen only made him more reserved. It was money he was after, I guess, not prestige. Revenge must have been an orderly thing, scheduled in due time, when Gitzig had finished his cataloging, his engraving, had in fact finished his life, which he was realistic enough to have guessed, no doubt.

Ah, but there was the question of Lily's revenge. How many people stand up to an
SS
colonel with the kind of story she had to tell? Not to tell it was never her plan, I bet. Maybe it had nothing at all to do with poor Gitzig.

Colonel Fritz Bernhardt transferred to Lyon. All that the Langes know is that Bernhardt is there and Lily, the baby, and Gitzig the calfactor are gone. They do not have my grapevine. But they can guess. Dieter Lange hopes he is now safe from those nasty whims of Bernhardt's; Anna breathes a bit easier, too, even if she's still got the itch for him. Women seem to go for dangerous men like him.