The man told me to sit down. He seemed to be looking for things in the craziest places—inside the lights, behind a picture of Hitler, under a table. He finally straightened up and told me he was Count Walther von Hausberger, which didn’t mean a damn thing to me. He had received word, he said, a few months ago from a friend who’d been stationed here. The count sat down and held his hands as though he had a piano in front of him. He moved his fingers, lifted his hands neatly, as if playing in concert, and raised his eyebrows, like he was asking a question. I nodded, yes. He’d heard from my colonel. Then he got up and dug a pencil and a small pad of paper out of a pocket. There was writing in English on the paper: The names of anyone in the U.S. or outside Germany who may assist in getting you out. While I thought, he talked. “Your German is quite good. But let’s speak English. They’re treating you well enough? I understand that you’re assigned to an officer’s quarters. Is there anything we can send you that’s allowed under the rules?” I told him I wanted to know the length of my sentence. He shrugged and said he didn’t know and no one else seemed to know, either. I was writing: Mr. Samuel Wooding, New York City. Mr. Langston Hughes, New York City. Francois Moreau, Pathe Studios and Polydor Studios, Paris. Carlos Bustamente, Parlaphone Studios, Madrid. Malcolm Bradford III, the U.S. Embassy, Berlin. Ada Smith, Paris. Mr. Paul Robeson, New York City. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Washington, DC. I gave him the list. I expected his sad little smile. “You have no better addresses?” I told him I didn’t. He said that Malcolm was no longer in Germany. He sighed as he folded up the list. “We will have to do what we can from Germany,” he said, if he could not contact the other people on the list. He would even, he said, through the American Red Cross, try to contact the President, but he didn’t think he could. I asked him for the paper and pencil. I asked about the colonel, and he dragged a finger across his throat. Then we went downstairs. Dieter Lange was still looking evil, but not as much as before, once he saw our faces. He made me stay in the guardroom until the count left. Then he made me walk back to the house through the wind, slush, and snow. But I knew the house would be warm as the blocks were not, because I took care of the stoves, brought in the wood and coal for them.
January 24, 1935
Major and Frau Lange (and me) are in a new, bigger house. It took a little while for it to come through after his promotion. The house is farther away from camp and so a little closer to Dachau—by two or three hundred feet. The cellar stairs don’t creak, but I will make them. The cellar is a great big space, about half of which Dieter Lange has blocked off with heavy wire and filled with shelves and storing cabinets. He keeps this space locked and carries the key with him. Even Anna doesn’t have one. They have had arguments about this arrangement. In the other house, things were stored everywhere—in the pantry, cabinets, the attic, in their bedroom under the bed, in china closets and armoires. Not even a can of turnips was ever stored in my old room, which was small to begin with, and I was grateful for that because they’d never run in looking for things and maybe find you, old diary, pushing out Adolph’s face. Dieter Lange still stores things in the attic, which is larger, but I think mostly clothes and records and account books, stuff like that. The cellar now looks like one great big store, except for a huge new coal bin. In my room, which I think was once the old coal bin, there are plenty of hiding places besides the big picture of Hitler. There are dozens of spaces in the ceiling of the cellar, between the supports and behind the great furnace pipes. Nice and warm down here, and the smell of the hams and sausages that hang in a corner of the storage space is comforting.
Upstairs the piano is in a room that is larger, but then the kitchen, living room, sitting room, and dining room are larger, too. We are still moving things (I’ve helped Anna with the color schemes), so we haven’t had a party yet. I don’t think we will have as many now. Dieter Lange was explaining to Anna that the higher you move up in rank, the stuffier the officers and their wives become, because they don’t want to take the chance of ruining a good thing, so they become more and more the keepers of Hitler’s ideals. Dieter Lange is going to have to be very careful about having me play Neger Musik. Looks like foxtrot and croontune time. Now I’ll be able to explore that tree I found on Christmas day, the one with all the bright new music on it.
Monday, March 18, 1935
Werner came into the canteen this morning. I sold him some Drummers. (They came from Dieter Lange’s storage, so he gets the money.) I also gave him some of my own cigarettes. Smoking is not supposed to be good for Germans now, the Nazis say, but they smoke anyway. “German women do not smoke” is a slogan no woman around here pays any attention to. Anna smokes like a furnace. (We are now working from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which she got in both German and English.) Werner says bad business is up. Everyone outside now has to own an employment book. Conscription has started. Everyone has to do service in the army. They want to build up twelve army corps, thirty-six divisions. Unemployed people are being assigned to jobs the government thinks are important to the Reich. Whole gangs of men have been assigned to work on the new Autobahns the Nazis are building from the middle of Germany to the borders of other countries.
Werner said he’d been waiting for me to show up at the canteen. I told him I’d been helping Dieter Lange move into the new house. Also, to keep from being sent to the blocks, I was doing a lot of fancy cooking for him and Annaliese. Smart, he said, and then told me Menno Becker was looking for me. He wasn’t busy just now, Werner said; he’d just left the Revier. He could tell Menno to come over, couldn’t he? It wasn’t too busy in the canteen. I hadn’t had a customer since he came in. Werner kind of smiled. He said, “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. It’s the only way to get around these bastards.” He didn’t wait for an answer; he left.
Five minutes later he returned with Menno. He pushed us both into the back. “Fifteen minutes,” he said. “I’ll take care of the front.” For one of those fifteen minutes Menno and I just looked at each other; for the other fourteen we made love as quietly as we could. There was nothing to say. We just hurried. When we were finished, Menno left quickly. Werner lingered. I felt he wanted something. I waited for him to ask for it. “Could you bring some wurst once in a while?”
Tuesday, March 19, 1935
Boy. Just thinking about yesterday gives me goose pimples. It was like we’d rehearsed meeting like that for a long time. And I know I had, but I didn’t know he had, too. So, now the thing is to—no. Just stay calm, Cliff, cool as a cucumber, Cliff. Don’t let The Cliff get excited and let things slip out of control. Wind up in the Bunker where that SS looney Eichmann is in charge. Easy, Clifford. You’re thirty-five, more a stewing than a frying chicken. But Menno is so young, so strong. And loving. As fast as it was, I remember his touch, his gentleness, the smoothness of his movements. I could tell by these that he likes me, maybe even loves me, if such a thing can be in a place like this.
Annaliese and I are still working on Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I’ve spent so much time explaining the colored talk to her. And Legree’s talk, too. She doesn’t seem to understand that people don’t talk that way anymore. Thank God we’re close to the end of the book. We just read the part where Uncle Tom dies. Anna cried. I have heard that most Germans cry when they get to this section. I don’t know why. “Who—who—who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” says Tom, and right away, boo-hoo, boohoo, boohoo. Christ has given this damned place up.
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 oth
er 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.
Clifford's Blues Page 5