Clifford's Blues

by John A. Williams

  “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.

  It was Karlsohn, a man I’ve seen from a distance, but whose reputation preceded him like wind before a storm. He was a bad man—of all the SS in Dachau, he was supposed to be the toughest. Karlsohn looked down at me and spat. “Lange’s Neger, huh?” Werner snapped to attention, and “Ja, ja, ja’s” were coming from him like machine-gun bullets. “Keep him in line or Lange or no Lange, I’ll kill the schmutzig Neger, understand?” More “Ja’s” from Werner. Karlsohn went behind the counter and helped himself to the remaining three packs of cigarettes. They were Drummers, so there was no great loss. I noticed this just before Karlsohn gave me a kick right in the ass. I felt it swelling as he turned, clapped Werner on the shoulder, and thundered back out of the canteen while I thought to myself, That’s the easiest 45 cents that sonofabitch probably ever made in his life. Werner stood stiff and straight as a pine tree until the door swung shut.

  He didn’t look at me as he bent to help me up. “You’re all right?” I told him yes. “You’re sure?” I wriggled out of his grip and told him again that I was all right. “You understand why?” I told him I did, but I couldn’t help thinking that this was not the same man who had helped me that first day. Werner started to leave, but stopped. “You’re sure you’re all right? Shall I try to find Becker for you?”

  I didn’t answer. I put something else in the space Karlsohn had made on the cigarette shelf and picked up the broom again. I glanced out the window. The vans had pulled away. The ’Platz was sizzling in the June sun, and I thought about the new men who would soon be knocked and pushed and kicked into the heat, wearing their lumpy, wrinkled gray uniforms. I heard the door open and close softly behind Werner, and I understood that some new chord changes had developed in the music. The Cliff has learned another lesson.

  Thursday, July 4, 1935

  Back in camp today. Putting up new shelves because Dieter Lange is supposed to be bringing back more goods from his recent trip to Frankfurt. Werner slipped in, smiling. He slapped me on the back and asked how I felt. I kept working and didn’t say anything. “Still mad, eh? Well, Pepperidge, let me tell you how things are changing around here: you know the SS is in complete charge now, under Himmler. No more pretending. The Nazis are going to take us to war. They are going to make Europe weep for beating us in the last war. Europe humiliated us. Shit, every nation that loses a war is humiliated. And it’s not only the Nazis. No rump party anywhere ever turned over a country without help, and the help usually comes from people who care more for profit than people or politics. Understand?”

  I said I did. Of course, we were both watching the windows and the door.

  “Why do you suppose they’re starting to fix up those ammunition factories over there? Why do you suppose people like me were the very first ones in Dachau and now in the other camps? People like you and the Greens were just the frosting on the cake. It was us they had to shut up first, understand? So, yes, the guards were always rough and nasty and crude and cruel. Last month, did you hear? Didn’t I tell you? Five prisoners were shot dead while trying to escape, Auf der Flucht erschossen. More and more each month. Out in the swamp. Why do you suppose they’re going to enlarge the SS barracks out there? Hohenberg—you know Hohenberg in the Labor Office? No? It’s simple, Pepperidge. More prisoners, more guards, but no jail ever has more guards than prisoners, so they must control them; they do that through—”

  “Fear,” I said. He was surprised.

  “So you do understand. And you know it’s going to get worse.” He sighed. “I’m sorry I hit you, but I’d do it again. And again. And again. Better me than Karlsohn or any of those other bastards. So, in a backward way, we resist. I brought you something.” From under his shirt he whipped out a brand new pair of BVDs. “Very soon, while you are still working, someone from the Infirmary is coming to see you,” he said. Oh, God, I thought, Menno. He saw the look on my face and told me it was not Menno. Menno is all right, he told me, but he’s not coming today. “It’s hard with those Bible students. They work them to death. But the next time you come in we’ll try to—you know. No, this man’s name is Nyassa and he is important to your Menno, for he’s a doctor scientist who also is a black man.”

  Werner left and I returned to the shelves. Then I heard the door open and glanced over my shoulder at the man coming toward me. I looked first at his triangle. It was one I hadn’t seen a lot, a black triangle. He was a Mischling, the color of a camel-hair coat, and his hair had been freshly cut. Maybe he’d been in camp a week. He stopped when he saw me. “Ach,” he said. He spoke in German. “So, you are the man Werner spoke about. Pepperidge, ja? Amerikan, ja?” He seemed high-falutin’ to me, looking at my green triangle, looking at me. I gave him a cigarette and we talked. He liked it that I spoke German. He was a “race defiler,” married to a German woman, as his father, from Tanganyika, had been. He was a biologist, he said, and he had worked with the famous Dr. Ernest Just from Howard University in America; did I know of him or his work? They had worked together in Italy and
in Germany. Dr. Just liked Europe, Nyassa said, but had to return to America. Nyassa smiled when he said Werner had told him that I played jazz music on the piano. “I like jazz music,” he said in English.

  Monday, July 29, 1935

  In the canteen today I met this Hohenberg from the Labor Office. He’s one of the inmates who oversees who gets which jobs and which blocks are assigned to the big details. I guess he is an important man, so it’s wise to stay on his good side. He was with Werner and some other barracks bosses. I worked on the stock while one or two watched the windows so they could see who was coming. Hohenberg was telling a story.

  They all talk more about sex in the summer than in winter. I guess the juices flow faster when it’s hot. “Well,” he said. “I’m happy I did so much fucking before I got here.” Hohenberg is a Red. We waited for him to continue. “I did a lot and I don’t mind telling you about it, as a matter of history, if you will, not entertainment. Rather like a study, though of course, there was pleasure, too, and some obligation, for these women, all of them, were not whores, you know, stick it in and bump-da-bump after you’ve paid your money. Then off you go. My first was a lass, quite nice in the ass, who came from Alsace. She was part French, part German. Leading up to it, she spoke French; when we did it, she groaned in German. Nothing fancy there, let me tell you. Pure bread and butter and a cup of hot coffee. Straight fucking. She was one of my father’s secretaries. I think he was fucking her, too. I didn’t ask, though. That was one of the nice things about being the socialist son of a small manufacturer. What? Ball bearings. Yes, and if you don’t think they’re important, you’re a fool. What would roll without them for long? So, she was my first, and I was twelve. Cute. Already able to quote Hegel and Marx and some of the others. Precocious. I traveled with my father on business all over Europe. He knew quite a few ladies and they in turn knew other, younger ladies. Men don’t teach men how to fuck.” (He’s sure right about that, I said to myself.)

  “It’s the ladies who teach you how to do it. Do you want to know how come I did so much fucking? My prick would not go down most times. It just didn’t. It hurt, but once I was fucking it was all right. I had to tell my father. He thought I was lucky and wished he had the same condition. He took me to doctors. They called it satyriasis. You know, like a satyr, half man and half goat. Just the sight of a decent-looking woman would send the thing quivering to attention. If I’d been raised differently, I probably would have been a rapist. What? Now? Oh, God, no.” (And a good thing, too, I thought.) “Since being here I’ve been beaten on the prick so much that the poor thing is even afraid to piss sometimes. But I’m not sorry; I’ve had more than my share. Italians, Greeks, French, Germans, Dutch and Irish, Danish and Polish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Indian, Spanish and Algerian, American and Brazilian, Tanganyikan—yes, black, like Pepperidge there—and Belgian, Russian and Czechoslovakian; Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Moslem, Hindu … I can’t remember whatever else. Those are the main ones.” Someone said he thought Hohenberg was supposed to have been out organizing strikes. “That, too,” he said. “But one didn’t organize twenty-four hours a day.” He stopped to take a cigarette from one of the others. “All men,” he said, inhaling deeply and blowing out the smoke in a straight blue stream, “wonder what it’d be like to fuck this kind of woman or that kind of woman, to have this kind of puss, but I tell you, God is great.

  “All men are built the same and so are the women. I found more socialism, more fundamental democracy, in fucking than I found in all the radical philosophies. Color, Pepperidge” (here he raised his voice and looked at me, and so did everyone else), “made no difference whatsoever. There were Catholic women, and still are, I suppose, who felt that the only sin in fucking was to get fucked where you’re not supposed to before marriage. Any place else is okay. And after marriage even that’s okay, and with a certain passion that Eskimos must have when they get to the tropics, understand?” (I’m not as old as Hohenberg, but I can say that lovers I had who were Protestants were not as vicious as Catholics. I don’t know why.) We all laughed, but we were still watching the windows.

  Then someone asked, in that voice they used back home when asking such questions, “Which, Hohenberg, was the best?”

  He said, “There is no such thing as best. I know you would like to hear that the Jewish ladies are best, but that’s not so, anymore than African ladies or Spanish ladies are best, or any other ladies. You were not listening to me. Fucking is basic. It is the one thing the richest and the poorest can do alike, the blackest and the whitest. The prick goes, or should go, in the same place and is received by that place. Do you know of people who fuck in the armpits? Tell me these people. Where do they live? What are they called?” (Amen, I thought, Amen.) “You would like to hear that black ladies are best? There were for me differences, but that did not make the ladies better or best, and I tell you that, blessed or cursed with my affliction, I searched with utmost diligence for the puss that would lay low that ailing prick of mine. More than the ladies, I remember the places where I had them—the country beside haystacks, in the Grünewald, a Schrebgarten, Freienwald” (he was, then, I thought, from Berlin), “beside Lake Como, in the sweet grass of the Transylvanian Alps, the plaster-and-fresh-croissant smell of a room in the Latin Quarter of Paris, the wind-squeezed compartment of the Milan-Berlin Express, the Bois de Boulogne—oh, I remember the places.”

  I could tell they were getting bored with him because he wasn’t really talking about fucking, so they started to leave, slipping out the door one at a time or in twos. Through the window I could see that they walked differently outside than they had in here. I guess we all did that. Then they were all gone, even Werner, and I was alone.

  The next time I looked up, at the sound of the door opening, Menno Becker was creeping across the floor. “I haven’t been able to get away,” he said. I told him I didn’t think he’d tried hard enough. He said they’d been watching him very closely. I asked why, had they caught him with someone else? He shook his head in very slow and soft movements. “There’re so many Witnesses coming in now, and all this is such a shock. Someone has to talk to them. I talk and they watch. They tell me if I’m not careful, I’ll be in the Prisoner Company with a target painted on my back.” He was motionless; the sun came in through the windows and shone on his face. The light seemed to gather right around him.

  I kept on working. I told him I had met Nyassa, and he said he was a nice man, but very sad, as he had a right to be. Menno worked with him, since Nyassa had scientific training and he’d had none. Not that Nyassa’s training was like a real doctor’s. I told him I’d missed him, just told him right out. Hadn’t Werner told him when I was in the canteen? He said he could do nothing at those times. I told him I was tired of hearing that, and what made him think his neck was more precious than mine? And he stood right there, like a cow about to be clubbed. Right then I felt I had the pat hand. It was almost like playing in a joint when you knew everyone was feeling good enough to get on the floor when you hit the chords for the opening of “Body and Soul” or “Stardust.” You made them get up and two-step, foxtrot, or whatever. You had power over them.

  All this time, from the corner of my eyes, I’d been watching the windows. Nothing moving. “C’mere,” I said, and I pulled him behind the counter and into the room where I stayed and let him know that I didn’t give a damn just then about Karlsohn or anyone else. The wooden building smelled of sap leaking out, and he smelled of sweat, and the dust outside had its smell, and whatever was growing just beyond this prison had a smell, and we did it with those sounds you think are quiet, but you remember them forever. And once it was over, all the badness was suddenly gone. I lost that earlier feeling that if Karlsohn had walked in, I’d have just kicked his ass and thrown him out on the ’Platz. Menno was shaking, I was shaking and rushing him out, and there were no nice words between us, nothing like the ease and wonderful sense of being so goddamn special that I’d last had with him. When the door clo
sed behind Menno I felt okay, I mean relieved and then, right away, I wanted to be with him again.

  Sunday, Aug. 11, 1935

  Dieter Lange sent me to the camp today to push the stock around. He just wanted me out of the way while he played one of his wild games with Anna. They’ve been doing that lately, and I’m glad, because it takes his mind off me. I’ve heard them running and jumping, whooping and hollering, screaming and laughing, and then it gets quiet. I guess I’ve become like a piece of furniture. They never used to carry on like that. Fat bitch.

  In the camp, after looking through the canteen and seeing nothing to do, I took a stroll around. Oh, shit. I headed right for the Infirmary. Menno wasn’t there. Nyassa told me he was down at the Priesterblock ministering to the new Witnesses. I sat down. Nyassa looked sad. There weren’t too many patients around. There never are in summer. It’s the winters that kill people. I asked how it was going and he said all right, but his wife would have to divorce him. Kids? He said no. It was tough enough in Germany for a black adult. Why have kids go through that, too? Me? Not married, no kids, I told him. Had I really been in Dachau three years, he wanted to know. I knew why he was asking, of course. He could see himself in here for three years or longer, too. He didn’t know his sentence.

  Then he started to talk fast, I mean up-tempo. He said he’d just written to his wife, telling her to go to America and wait until he got out. They all want to go to America. Me, too. I asked what made him think it would be better for him there than here. Told him that where I came from, if you even looked at a white woman, you’d be dancing at the end of a rope. He said he’d heard that, but didn’t believe it. Why? he wanted to know. I said that’s just the way things were. Wasn’t he in jail for being black and marrying a German woman?

  Ernest Just was involved with a German woman, he said, and would probably marry her and take her to America, Washington, DC. I said the man must be crazy. He said some people thought so, but he himself had found him to be a brilliant scientist. He was always struggling, though, to find money and places where he could do his work, which was difficult to do in America, but not so hard here. At least they did let him work right here in Germany at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, before he went to Naples. Nyassa was talking even faster, his eyes bucking bigger. And Just could have worked in France, too, if he’d wanted to, Dr. Nyassa said. “Brilliant!”