Clifford's Blues (40 page)

Tuesday, January 11, 1944

Yesterday Dieter Lange took me up to the attic and pointed to one corner the farthest away from the stairs. “Tear up the floorboards from there when we need it,” he said.

I know they have been trading tinned goods and preserves for small bags of soft coal and bottles of coal oil for the stove they now have in their room. I have no heat in mine. The whole house smells of kerosene.

There is no more coal to sift for in the ashes from the furnace, and the ice on the windows is so thick you can't see outside. It takes a whole day to thaw out the food we have in the window box.

The piano keys play thick and sad, like they are pounding in deep snow.

The war, especially in the East, is sucking the life out of Germany with each blast of freezing wind rushing from the Alps.

The best-dressed, best-fed prisoners are those who work in the munitions factories adjacent to the camp. For the war effort. And these are the “Pearheads,” the
Birnkopfer
, the guys with the training to work the machines over there with the civilians.

Nothing has changed except there are more prisoners. From 180 men to a block there are now over a thousand—three, four, and sometimes six to a bunk, with three rows of bunks. There are 2,000 men in Block 30 alone.

In the canteen they talk of the bastards with dysentery who can't get to the bathrooms because they aren't working or because of curfew. They climb out the windows to shit on the rooftops. Neff has told me that some men are so weak that, to avoid punishment for messing themselves, they crap in their food bowls and then try to clean them out so they can eat from them. That's another cause of typhoid. And all the signs about louses don't help; that's why the typhus.

I used to think of the canteen as being like a barber shop back home, where jokers gathered to gossip, get news of people they knew, make a quick trade, or play the numbers. No numbers here, though, just “pieces,” and they have driven Dieter Lange crazy. He goes through the motions. The canteen is bleak, gray, and cold. Anything we get on the shelves lasts only a few minutes, if it can be eaten, but usually we're out of stock.

One day some inmates were gathered around the stove, in which there was no heat whatsoever. It just made them feel there was heat because what they surrounded was the stove. One of them had an old magazine. They were playing “Eat.” He opened the pages slowly, and when there was a picture of a steaming plate of food, beautiful cake, or something else to eat, the first one to jam his face into the page got to “eat” it. The pages became wet with spit. Uhlmer could not watch; Lappus was amused. Like me, they weren't starving, were merely a little bit hungry most of the time. And cold.

The Russians reached Poland almost two weeks ago. Oh! That sounds so good! I'll be glad when you're dead, you rascal, you.

Bader says that sonofabitch Karlsohn and other
SS
guards his age have been sent to the Eastern front. (Please, you Russians, don't miss!) They've been replaced by wounded or sick soldiers from there, and even some civilians from the town.

Waiting. We're all waiting, like for some lover to come, only he hasn't said exactly what time or what day; but you know he's coming because he's sent you little notes from North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and almost every day from Russia. Imagine—I'm forty-four and still looking for the best loving ever! Freedom!
Freiheit! Befreiung!
Liberation!

And across the 'Strasse the doctors still work, stacking the dead like logs, and we stare at them. They have nothing to do with us. They are just “pieces” lost in the shuffle.

Saturday, March 25, 1944

The
SS
replacement soldiers from the Eastern front have sometimes talked of troop trains being put on sidings so trainloads of Jews can be hurried to the camps there. When they're asked why, the soldiers, almost every time, say nothing and draw a finger across their throats.

There are some things I don't understand about this war, like how come the Germans are invading Hungary now. I thought they were aces, Germany and Hungary.

The Langes are having some terrible arguments. Anna wants to go live on the farm and Dieter Lange doesn't want her to leave him. Then he should come with her, she says, but she knows he can't. All that talk about afterward, when Germany won, he was going off on his own to do this, and she was going off alone to do that. Now they're afraid one will get to whatever they have stashed away before the other one can. The General Major and the Colonel aren't letting us get anything for the canteen, and Dieter Lange knows they've conned him good and he can't do one damn thing, though he tells me he's been trying to pry goods loose from the
ILAG
s like Laufen and Tittmoning. Wonder how those colored guys are doing there. I wonder if there are any more here. When there are, the other prisoners call them
Zulukaffer
. Since there are always new prisoners who don't know me, I am a
Zulukaffer
, too—but I am Dieter Lange's
Zulukaffer
.

I've been with Anna. She likes to dress up, put on lipstick and perfume now, and we dance to records. Acts like she's Brunhild. Cries in bed. Tries to get lost doing it, it seems to me. She's getting strange. She'll start a conversation and then break off to stare at something like it will remind her of what she wanted to say. I wait and wait until finally I have to say, “What?” or, “What were you going to say?” That makes her furious. I try to get her to speak English, but that's a waste of time.

And I've been with Dieter Lange. With both it's like maybe that time will be the last time. But Dieter Lange gets so drunk he's useless. He's so busy, busy, busy, brushing off this or that, complaining that things haven't been cleaned or the figures I give him don't look right or Anna doesn't put enough starch in his shirts. He's like a damned fussy old woman one minute and a drunken pig the next. They drive me crazy, the both of them.

They say Dr. Grawitz is doing new experiments with Gypsies. Pacholegg and Neff say that's true.

Nobody wants to ask what. Nobody wants to ask why, with all the talk of the Allies landing in France soon.

“Causing new kinds of infections, then trying to cure them,” Pacholegg says.

It's very muddy outside and the men are strapped to the rollers, crushing gravel into the mud. It is something to do.

“Seeing if people die drinking too much sea water,” Neff says.

Still nobody asks why.

Friday, April 14, 1944

The flower beds are being turned, the earth raked. Suppose the blooms turn out to be little bodies of prisoners, just swaying in the breeze.

During the winter we all noticed that the smoke from the crematorium
never
stopped coming out. It was like a factory, running all day and all night long. That many people dead, many more gone, yes, Another Man Done Gone, without so much as a good-bye or a prayer.

Anna has noticed that the wives with children seem to be vanishing, leaving. “Running like momma and baby rats together,” she says. If she had kids now, she could use them as a passport out of Dachau to the Black Forest. Or her father's farm.

Some of the women out here, and there must certainly be some, would have fallen out if they'd known about those eighty Jewish kids who came in last week from France. I heard it from Werner, who now seems to have found the old purpose to his life. The oldest kid, he said, was fifteen, the youngest eight, and they knew they were going to die because their parents had been killed in Buchenwald. They put the kids in Block 7, and a few days later they were transported to Hartheim, and probably were damned glad to go after spending time with some of those hard cases. Eighty kids, eighty small “pieces” Dieter Lange wouldn't have to worry about. Younger than Pierre.

You would think if a killer was told, “Stop killing, the cops are coming,” the killer would stop. But no. I think this place, Germany, is like a sanctified church, where the spirit takes hold of one person, then two, three, or four catch it, then the whole church, and nothing stops the dancing, singing, and crying until somebody falls out and cracks his head or everyone's just too exhausted to move any more. Sometimes, even the people who've fallen out still quiver and shake on the floor. Never liked sanctified churches. Always scared me.

Friday, May 26, 1944

They're coming, but it's taking forever. The days seem like weeks, the weeks like years. We've even gotten used to the bombers going and coming. They seem to have little to do with us except for the companies of
Himmelfahrtskommandos
that march to the trucks to dig bombs out of Munich's belly (while singing “Lili Marlene,” which they hope will get them some bread with marmalade, maybe a cup of tea or coffee from a civilian). We want the planes to come, not by the thousands, but by the hundreds of thousands—but every time they come, a mess of prisoners goes into Munich to die. Why the hell can't they bomb this place, bomb all the camps, destroy the factories and rails everywhere, since the prisoners are dying anyway?

My mind seems to be on the
Zukunft
. This year, God, this year. Loa Aizan, please, now. I'm forty-four, but I feel like ninety-four. Will I still be able to play? I know the music's changed. I can guess what the colored musicians are doing with the music from what I hear the German bands play on the radio. But how are they doing it? What keys are they playing in, what chord changes are they making, what times are they playing in? Colored folks fuck with white folks' music, turn it inside out like you do a worn-out collar. But will I be able to do that? Fingers gone all dumb, the piano my enemy, just sitting there all out of tune, daring me to take some licks at it. Mr. Wooding, wonder how he's doing, if he's got hold to what's going on. Instead of whining and carrying on when I was in touch with Willy Lewis, I should've been talking about music. I listen to “Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree,” “Dear Mom,” “The White Cliffs of Dover,” “Moonlight Becomes You,” “When the Lights Go on Again,” stuff like that and it all sounds soft and tender. Young and sweet. Slow-drag stupid. Stick your head out the door for a minute and smell those human steaks cooking and you know ain't nobody singing the right songs. Not for this shit.

Thinking like that brought me back to the piano and to some of the things I was doing before I had the band at
Lebensborn
, when I thought I heard all kinds of things where I hadn't heard them at all before. I didn't even ask if I could play. The Langes are always drunk anyway. They just sit there fussing, him saying she took too much of the hooch, or her saying he's drinking too fast. Just waiting for the news, just waiting to pick up Radio London or Armed Forces Radio on the shortwave. Dieter Lange got him a new set so he could catch it all, including a station called the Voice of America. Said, “Everybody out here has got one or if they haven't, they know where they can listen to one.” So they can know which way to jump, I think.

The first time in a while back on the box, when I wasn't feeling so sure of myself, I slid into “Yellow Dog Blues.” Playing was like sticking my fingers in Karo syrup, but the more I played, the more the piano loosened up, the more it became less spongy, kinda friendly, like it knew what I wanted to do. I tried on “Muskrat Ramble” and “Tiger Rag.” “I Ain't Got Nobody” seemed a natural since I knew that piece backward, forward, and sideways, and then some. I think Dieter Lange and Anna calmed down a little, because I didn't hear them fussing. I felt old-fashioned, but I just punched the keys and kicked the pedal into “I Surrender Dear,” and then feeling like to hell with it, jumped into “One O'Clock Jump” and “Moon Glow,” but damn, even
I
didn't know if it was going to land on its feet. It did. “Body and Soul,” and my skin grew a few goose pimples. That's a dark number with a lot of addresses on it. Then I did some of the things that came over Armed Forces Radio—“Gee Baby Ain't I Good to You,” done by a pianist I never heard of, Nat Cole, and Ellington's band (new one, I think), ripping with “Take the
‘A'
Train.” Then a really swinging band doing “Apple Honey.” Woody Herman, I think. Big,
big
band, lots of brass. They don't play too many colored bands, and the singers are white, too, folks named Crosby, Sinatra, Haymes, Como, Eberle, women like Jo Stafford, Helen Ward, and Helen Forrest. Not too many vocalists like Jimmy Rushing, the Ink Spots, Ella Fitzgerald, or Herb Jeffries. It's a special day when they play those singers.

I tried another number I'd heard, “This Time the Dream's on Me,” and just to give Anna and Dieter Lange a little something, I threw “Blue Skies” at them. It didn't take. Besides, it's not much anyway. Some of these white-boy tunes you just can't do anything with but let them die, because they aren't songs, just tunes. Russian white boys are different. On Sundays sometime you hear them singing in Blocks 6, 20, and 22, where most of them are segregated. (It's funny using that word with white people,
Absondern, Rassentrennung
.) If you could sing blues in Russian, those jokers got it. Maybe that's why I didn't like Russia when the band went there with Mr. Wooding—what those people suffered was too close for comfort. In the canteen the Russians are the only ones look like they don't want to kick my ass at first sight. But then, I got my stare when some of these jokers been pissed on all their lives walk in and right away pull that European-type cracker shit on me. Number one, they haven't ever had no colored man look at them like that in their life, and number two, they look at number 3003 on my jacket and figure I know something about staying alive, and I see them thinking, If
he
can do it, so can I. But they don't know the arrangement for that number. Well, sometimes I wonder about it myself. Anyway, the more I played, the better I felt and the better the piano sounded. To hell with anything else but that.