Clifford's Blues (34 page)

For Dieter Lange the war in the East means problems, complications, the movement once again of the
Stücken
. But he's at least in a better mood since he and Anna returned from Paris. I imagined them there: Dieter Lange in his
SS
black or gray, his black boots and all that pigeon shit they wear on the collars, his cap, his figure tall and getting thick, his hair graying, his faded blue eyes trying to appear nonchalant instead of tired, cunning, and trapped, his stride slow and careful, not calling attention to itself; and Anna in a flowered dress, girdled, her face made ruddy with rouge and powder, those carefully watched haunches rolling against the restraints. How wonderful Paris must have seemed. I'm sure the French hated them.

Dieter Lange brought back news: Ruby Mae is supposed to be in Portugal. Willy Lewis got to Switzerland. Freddie Johnson is in a camp here in Germany. Josephine Baker is still in France. Django Rheinhardt is playing constantly. Bricktop's been gone since a month after Poland. We laughed because we knew that was the second time the Germans had sent her packing. So, I thought as he was giving me the news, he got around. Probably told Anna he had business. I wonder how she spent
her
time on this visit.

The “hot” stuff back home, Dieter Lange told me, was “Cotton Tail” and “Don't Get Around Much Anymore,” both Ellington pieces, and “Brazil” and “That Old Black Magic.” For a while, while Anna visited Ursula, we put the Eastern Front on the shelf and played the records he'd brought back and drank and talked of Paris and Berlin, which they'd visited on the way back. There are bomb shelters there now.

He ran up to the attic and came back with a sweet-smelling box. “For you,” he said, and opened it. Lingerie, dangerous-looking stuff, too.

“I never wore that,” I said. I fingered it; it was soft and smooth. It almost whispered.

He smiled, closed up the box. It was clear he was going to keep it hidden upstairs. “First time for everything,” he said.

I said, “Yeah, well, we'll see, won't we?”

He acted like he hadn't heard me.

Sunday, Aug. 3, 1941

I hear Hohenberg got caught with a
Junge
. In one of the storage rooms in the
Wirtschaftsgebaude
. Everything works until you get caught at it. Hohenberg had a group of Pinks who worked in his office, and everyone knew why, but enough got to be enough; Hohenberg got to have too much power, even for a German inmate. They say Karlsohn caught them. His name ought to be
Hurensohn
, whore's son. Caught them like salamanders riding each other in a pond. Well. I never thought much of Hohenberg after he tried to take advantage of Pierre. Even after he arranged for Pierre to work in the greenhouse I didn't like him, because Werner was the man who really arranged it. So Hohenberg has the usual six o'clock
Kalter Arsch
appointment tomorrow with the end of a rope. He will march out to the sad playing of the sorry-assed band to become another cold ass. Dead. They might as well order us to stop breathing as to stop fucking each other. They know that. It's just that this time Hohenberg is that periodic reminder.

If Uhlmer is supposed to be watching me, he doesn't have the time, any more than I have to watch him. The war in the East means work: more inventories to keep for the camp and for Dieter Lange; more timetables to move goods from his storage in Munich and his father-in-law's farm; more bribes to pay to guards, drivers, and people I don't even know about; more Krieger products to slip between the approved stuff. The new prisoners from France, Belgium, and Holland haven't yet grown used to prison food. What money they have they spend for our soups, the salt and pepper bags, the bootleg cookies and candies. When they run out of the packs of cigarettes, they buy the little bags of mixed tobacco and dried lettuce leaves we also sell. Uhlmer must be doing pretty well; his uniform's always clean and neat, and he always wears socks. But he could say the same for me or for Lappus, who, though not as well turned out as us, certainly doesn't dress like the average prisoner. Lappus is still nice to people. Uhlmer has been acting like a capo. He will, like Hohenberg, hang himself, and I will be more than happy to help.

More doctors have been sent here. The prisoners have built a foundation for something huge that was rolled up and set between Blocks 3 and 5, and the doctors are recruiting more prisoners to work in the
Reviers
. At first there were volunteers. I can't figure what was offered to make anyone here think that volunteering would be good for them. Nobody ever saw the volunteers again. The
SS
say they were sent home, just like they (the
SS
) said they'd be. But now everyone who comes into the canteen believes that as far as the doctors and that thing between the blocks are concerned, the air is getting thick, dangerous,
Dicke Luft
, especially with the rumors of what's going on with Jews in the East, where more and more of the older prisoners are being sent to work with engineers. Why are only Jews being sent East? Hi-de-hi. If it's only Jews, then it's got to be bad. Every prisoner goes the other way when he sees the clerks and doctors from the Infirmary strolling up and down the 'Strasse or the 'Platz.

“Wer ist an unserem Ungluck schuld?”
the Jewish capo shouts. “Who caused all our misery?” The guards watch, smiling, as the Jews march out to work, and later march back. The marching call is always the same. The marching Jews, in step, shout back
“Die Juden! Die Juden!”
(Left, right, left.) Sometimes I think I can hear a strange echo, when the answer could be “The Negro! The Negro!” Then the Jewish columns run into
SS
guards, whose day isn't complete until they shout
“Dir gefallt es hier? Was?”
The guards ask because the Jews have insisted on living. “Do you like it here?” In other words, “Aren't you dead yet? Damn you, die!” Then I think of a long broken column of men who are Negroes.

Everyone's saying the doctors working in that thing are doing experiments. Mostly on Jews, Gypsies, Pinks, and Blacks.

Sat., September 13, 1941

So it's taken longer than three weeks. It's not over in the East. So what? There's not a guard or prisoner who doesn't believe it soon will be. We saw the first Russian prisoners of war this past Monday. (No one knows why they were brought here, but everyone thinks it's not good for them that they have been.) They say they were marched all the way from Russia after the first battles. They sure looked like it. They didn't march, they staggered in, dirty, stinking, hungry, thirsty. The guards were hitting them and shouting, in Russian,
“Bistro! Bistro! Bistro!”
“Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” and the Russian soldiers, an ugly shit-colored mass drifting toward quarantine, were calling out to anyone, “Please give me bread, please give me bread,” saying “bread” in both Russian and German so no one would miss the meaning.
“Daj chieba, Brot, daj chieba, Brot.”

The prisoners who were on the Dancing Ground as the Russians passed, and who had with them a crust of bread, a cigarette butt, a half-rotten piece of fruit, passed these along as sneakily as they could. Some of them got caught and were hauled off to stand in chains against the
Jourhaus
wall until their own punishment could be selected.

I have to be more diligent about gathering writing paper. It seems to be getting scarce. Right now there's plenty of glazed paper the
SS
sometimes allows prisoners to have for their windows in the winter. Since it's just the end of summer, I managed to get a few rolls to store.

Dieter Lange came home late and woke me and Anna up and made us sit with him at the kitchen table. He slid some glasses to us and brought from a shelf a bottle of French cognac.

“Well, now we're in the shit,” he said.

It was about midnight, and through the window I could see the gray mist slowly rolling down the street, blotting out the streetlights every once in a while.

“What's the matter?” Anna asked.

Dieter Lange sighed. He had been drinking, a lot, before he came home. “We've got an
SS
Colonel and an
SS
General Major to deal with now. And it's best you don't know who they are. In fact, they warned me not to tell who they are.” He poured drinks for us. “They seem to know everything about us and about the business, your father included.” He sighed again.

“They want to—” Anna began.

“Improve things, Anna. That's what they say.” He stared at her while she twirled her glass on the enamel tabletop. I drank and pushed my glass over for more. Sounded like the way gangsters back home did business. Just muscled their way on in. And the gangsters in Berlin, back in the days when I wouldn't have looked twice at Dieter Lange, were just as bad. Maybe even worse.

Dieter Lange poured me half a glass and waited for Anna.

“Well …” she said. “Looks like they want to take over. Just how would it work? They're not going to turn us in? What do they want? How much? When?”

“Starting now,” he said. “What we have we keep. We put back in that souvenir shit, they get us some cheap beer and alcohol, which they will have cut and mixed, and since Himmler's about to make whorehouses in the
KL
s legal, we'll control the
Bordellschein
. We just tell them what we need and they'll see we get it.” Dieter Lange turned partly away from us. “They haven't decided how much money they want from us. They have to look at the figures first.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “There was nothing I could do. These are
Nacht und Nebel
people; they can make you disappear in the night and fog. They are also Ploetzenee Prison people, where they're invited to dinner after watching a few people lose their heads.”

“Let them have it all,” Anna said.

“That's not the way they want it,” Dieter Lange said.

“They need a front,” I said.

Anna said, “How do they know?”

Dieter Lange shrugged.

Bernhardt, I thought. Part of a big plan to squeeze money out of turnips; maybe like Krupp or Siemens, a great big European company store for all the slaves. I didn't mention this to Dieter Lange because, at least for the time being, he was, deep down, happy that he didn't have to move the “pieces” by himself or lay his head on the block. And maybe he was already planning to turn over Anna and her father, if push came to shove.

The radio announced that Kiev had fallen with the capture of two-thirds of a million Russian soldiers. I can't imagine such numbers. The
BBC
says only that the Russians have suffered heavy losses.

Did I tell you that they call that thing near Block 5 the
Himmelwagen?
A Dr. Rascher is doing research for the Luftwaffe on high flying. Pacholegg works for Rascher as a ward clerk. He's an Austrian Red who was in Poland before coming here. Ghosts dance in his eyes. Pacholegg says the rumors about that thing are true. I know just a little about this Rascher. He lives in the
SS
compound with his wife, Nina, and their three children, all of whom were “born” when she was in her forties. This I told Pacholegg. It is common knowledge among the
SS
wives, Anna says, because half of them don't want or can't have kids. So they kidnap them or make deals through
Lebensborn
. A lot of these bitches can't afford to point the finger at anyone else.

Pacholegg may let the ghosts dance in his eyes only when he talks to me, the way Gitzig used to, spilling out all his secrets. I don't know why people do this with me. Is it because I'm an American, even if a Negro? Or do they look at me and see a witness? How can they know? Anyway, the
Himmelwagen
is a decompression chamber. The
TP
s, as Pacholegg calls them, are strapped into a parachute harness. “They give them a helmet, sometimes, so they feel like a pilot. Then they vacuum the air out of the chamber.” Pacholegg talks in a plain, low voice without emotion, as though from memory. “Then the Test Persons die. Horribly. While we watch and take notes. The
TP
s beat and tear at themselves, you know, pound on the walls and shout and scream. The pressure on the ear drums must be terrible. And their lungs are ruptured, you know. At 30,000 feet of pressure, they last thirty minutes; it's clear that for only ten minutes are they functioning anywhere near normal.”

Pacholegg blinks, but the ghosts remain. “Once Rascher did an autopsy on a guy whose heart was still beating. He'd passed out from the pressure. That prick Rascher examined him quick, said he was almost dead, took him down, and cut him open. And watched the heart beat. I looked in there, too. It was like a wiggly little animal without skin.”

Pacholegg shudders. “Well, I've had it worse, you know, in the East, with Russian
POW
s, near Minsk.” He had been arrested in Vienna, then sent East to help build more camps. He says he knows nothing about the rumors of the shooting of thousands of Jews in Treblinka.

I light another cigarette for him, a real one, rich in dark tobacco, a French cigarette. Pacholegg tells how much the Germans hated the Russian soldiers for putting up such a fight, even as they were being defeated, and how the order came down to execute every Russian captured—as quietly as possible.

There was a large stone house in the woods—“a white birch forest,” says Pacholegg. It was an examination-interrogation center, they told the Russians. One by one the soldiers were led into a room—there were four rooms with high ceilings in the house. The soldiers were led forward to booths for questioning by German soldiers who asked the Russians their names, and as the Russians gave them, they were shot through the head by riflemen concealed in the ceiling. Each room was soundproof, so there were four at a time. Name? Bang! And ten minutes to clean up before the next group of four Russians came in for “questioning.”