Clifford's Blues

by John A. Williams

  I feel most sorry for the gangs that have to clean up the snow and ice. They slip and slide with their boards fastened together, their shoes wrapped in rags if they have no arctics, and most don’t, their bodies bulging with old sweaters and pants, two or even three jackets, rags wrapped around their heads to protect them from the cold. They know the only way to keep warm is to move, so they have this little dance: slip-slide step-step shuffle, shuffle-step-step slide-slip, then shovel-lift-throw, and start all over again. They are the only ones who hear the music; it’s like watching a dance chorus in a movie without sound.

  Wednesday, February 8, 1939

  It’s so cold we’ve put up the porcelain stove in the living room. It burns wood we have brought to the back, where I split it. We don’t get as much coal as we used to, and when we do get it, it’s soft coal, coke, and doesn’t heat as well as the hard. The porcelain stove works just fine, but I hate taking out the ashes. Ashes make dust that I have to wipe up. The one good thing about winter, Dieter Lange says, is that he doesn’t have to buy ice or worry if I’m going to forget to empty the pan under the icebox. We have cold boxes attached to the kitchen windows. Whatever we put in the boxes freezes like rocks. The cream is pushed out of the bottles of milk we set out there. Sometimes the bottles crack. The meat looks like the parts of bodies I hear the SS doctors are dissecting. Of course, that may just be jailhouse gossip, of which there is an awful lot in camp. For example, Huebner was telling me about an ASO who came in fighting with the guards all the way from Frankfurt because he claimed his idiot kid had been taken away and killed. Threw him in the Bunker right away and proceeded to whip his ass every hour on the hour, twenty-five strokes, and still he fought. One day the prisoners near him didn’t hear him anymore, and a detail came in to wash out his cell. Where did he go? Up the chimney, they say. The Reds are still snooping around because, as Werner said, “A man can come in here and be crazy, but nobody can be that crazy without good reason.” Nobody knows the man’s name. Werner believes almost everything; I wonder how it is that he’s not crazy, too. You got to shut out some of this shit and believe it’s jailhouse gossip in order not to go nuts.

  Monday, March 6, 1939

  General mobilization. The German government is talking war with Czechoslovakia, the rumor says. Mad because the Czechs haven’t rolled over and given up like the British and French want them to. The English are calling up people, and in camp, Jesus Christ, there are prisoners who want to volunteer to go to war. Can’t be the “later” everyone’s been hoping for, war. Well, they’ve been talking about it coming for a long time. I’d imagine if The Nest was open, and it will be next week Bernhardt says, there’d be the same old saddle-up, flag-waving, give-me-some-pussy-because-I’m-going-to-war bullshit.

  The second day the canteen was open after the epidemic was over, a colored boy came in wearing the black triangle of the asocials. Actually, he was just on the dark side of high-yellow. I didn’t know this until Lappus called me from the office and said a young colored prisoner wanted to talk to me; that was when I met him. “You’re Mr. Pepperidge?” he asked. He spoke first in German and then repeated in English. His English was okay. And it wasn’t British English, either. Before I could answer—and I wanted to answer quickly because no prisoner called another “mister,” and I didn’t want him to be laughed at—he said his own name was Pierre Braun. I said hello in English and led him away from the customers, who were not buying as much as talking about the possibility of war with Czechoslovakia. It stinks in the canteen in winter, and everyone tries to get as close to the little stove as possible. Five feet away from it there’s no warmth at all because of the bodies packed around it. Pierre looked about fifteen. He could have been my son. He was a skinny kid with big eyes that I thought must once have been very bright. He had a tic on the left side of his face. His hands were long and thin. There was something about him that made me want to put my arm around his shoulder. To comfort him. To stop the tic. To bring brightness back into his eyes. He seemed very sad.

  “Well?” I said. He kept looking at me. Like a kid, too.

  “Somebody told me you were an American.” In this place that could be anybody. Oh, Christ, I’m thinking. How come he knows American English? I’m curious to know how he got here, who he is.

  So I say, “Yeah, that’s right.”

  He holds out his hand again and I take it, and we shake for a second time while he’s telling me, “My father’s American, too. He was an American soldier. My mother’s German—from Mullheim—the Rhineland. I got my father’s English from her. And I studied it, so if we ever went to America …” I drop his hand. He cocks his head and looks at me, a question in his eyes. He sees I know. “You know about the Rhineland Bastards then?”

  I pat his shoulder. “They, they …?”

  He nods his head. “Yes. They did that to me and sent me here. It’s happening not only to black Rhinelanders, you know.” I don’t know why, but we’re whispering.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “What can I do for you?” He hunches his shoulders.

  “Just tell me about America when you can.” After a minute he adds, “My father never came back. He never sent for us. My mother was mad.” And here it is.

  “How old are you, Pierre?” I ask him. He tells me fourteen. I ask where he works and he tells me the disinfection hut. That’s near the north wall. The epidemic must have been hell for him. Then he has to go. I tell him, “Stop in any time except Saturday. We’ll talk about America.” He grabs my hand once more and shakes it and thanks me.

  Huebner is about five years older than Pierre. I hadn’t thought about that before, how many young Witnesses there are here. I wonder what Huebner will do when the next Witness roll call takes place. Will he step forward and renounce the Witnesses, or stand in place? I think he’ll stand still, and I guess that’s why I like him.

  Thursday, March 16, 1939

  Gitzig came over Monday. Hadn’t seen him in a long time. Said Bernhardt was busy in Vienna and Lily was visiting relatives. He had the house to himself for a little while. He looked good: good clothes and shoes. He didn’t even seem to look as much like a rat as he used to—well, not quite as much. We talked about how big the SS compound had grown, and all the women and the babies. He said any SS man worth his salt was going to have a nice nest egg by the time all this was over. I asked what he meant by “by the time this is all over.” He told me the plan was to invade Czechoslovakia on Wednesday, since the Czechs were so slow to hand over the land Germany claimed. And later, they’d take the whole damn thing. “So,” he said, “that information I told you to take to Werner … a safe bet, eh? And don’t forget, Poland next. But I suppose by now they’ve got all their people out.” I told him I didn’t know. He had a problem, he said. “You remember those radio parts I told you about, how we ought to save everything? Well, I put together two.” Somehow I couldn’t imagine Gitzig the swindler being able to do that. “I got one complete radio in the camp,” he said, “and all but one tube of the second. It’s all wrapped.” I waited. “Take it to camp. Give it to Werner.”

  I was surprised. “Werner has a radio?”

  He laughed. “I know many things you don’t know I know. Werner knows how to use it.” He saw that I was not anxious to do that. “They don’t search you when you go through, Pepperidge, come on. There are people waiting for that tube.” I asked where he managed to get the parts and he said in his travels, and laughed again. “I’d have taken whole radios, but how in the hell could I get away with that? Bernhardt would have my ass in the Bunker like sixty just to start with.” Gitzig knew I was on my way to the canteen.

  “Right now?” I asked him.

  “The sooner the better,” he said. “They want to know what’s going on with Czechoslovakia.” (German troops went into Bohemia and Moravia yesterday.) I asked what would happen if they searched me this time at the guardhouse, and he said, “It’s your ass, I suppose. Even Bernhardt couldn’t save you. And they’d make you
tell them who you were carrying it to, who you got it from, and then they’d make Werner tell, and the game would be up.” He shrugged. “That’s the chance you take, Pepperidge. What do you say?” I said all right. He slapped me on the back. “That’s the spirit. This thing can’t last forever.” I told him I thought he only stole, swindled, or pissed in the tea, and he said he still stole and he was a better swindler than Bernhardt—who didn’t have to swindle or steal because he was a licensed ass-kicker and could do anything he damn well pleased—and besides, the whole business was a swindle with the fucking Nazis; he knew because it takes one to know one.

  Right now it was merely a matter of who was going to swindle who and for how long. He was hedging bets. I didn’t understand. This prick was in no position to make choices, just like the rest of us weren’t. But I said, “At my expense.”

  He hawked some snot and said, “Who the fuck you think carried in all those other parts?” I told him I was wondering what was making him so stark all of a sudden, and he said he had a family he wanted one day to be proud of him. He’d never mentioned family to me, and I told him so. Over his face came a slow smile. It actually made the ugly sonofabitch look handsome. “I’m going to have a child. I mean, a woman is going to have a child by me,” he said.

  “One of those country-girl whores,” I said.

  “No,” he said. He loved this woman and she wasn’t a whore. He was still smiling when he said, “I put my life into your hands, Pepperidge, but I’m so happy I have to tell someone!” He leaned very close and whispered, “A woman out here.” I jumped away from him like he had a nasty cottonmouth snake in his hand.

  “An SS wife?”

  He just grinned—shy-like—and nodded his head. I started to ask him if he was crazy. Then I realized that this stuff was probably happening all over the place. Shit, in a twisted kind of way it was happening to me. But the business had to have started with the woman. No calfactor would dare approach the wife, daughter, mother, cousin, aunt, or grandmother of an SS man. Talk about leaving this place in a hurry, that would give you the right ticket. Well, Gitzig and me were in the same boat, except in my boat beside Anna were Ursula and Dieter Lange. Maybe the husband never did enough homework. Maybe, after a while, being the wife of an SS officer was like having the clap or worse, and the women got sick of it. I took a good long look at Gitzig, who was still grinning. Had he wondered which side his goose would slowly be cooked on if the baby looked like him? I saw he hadn’t. I just shook my head. It was plain to see that Gitzig was in love, and that never allowed you to look over the consequences when your love came down on the wrong side of things. The sonofabitch had joined the human race. I took the tube in without trouble and gave it to Werner. It was like carrying in a can of sausage for him, no trouble at all.

  Thursday, March 30, 1939

  There were new tuxedos for us when we returned to the Pussy Palace. No doubt from the wardrobe shop of another Jew who’d managed to get out or who was in a camp somewhere. The tuxes are midnight blue, not black, and smell so new that there couldn’t be a single typhus germ trucking in the seams. After all those weeks in Dieter Lange’s house and the camp, it felt good to be back. One problem, though, and it’s Moritz. He’s got blues deeper than Duke’s “Mood Indigo,” blues deeper than the color of his tux. After the first set of our first night back last week, I pulled him into a corner. Bernhardt knew music, but he didn’t know music. I mean, he couldn’t tell when someone was off unless they were way off. But I could, and I knew Moritz was off. I’d heard him play that fiddle long enough to know. I knew it wasn’t his love life; he had some real Berlin Leder among the Lebensborn workers, and I was happy he was happy. It was something else. All this time, he finally told me, he was hoping to get himself bought out of camp, but somehow his family could never get the money together. Then, during Kristallnacht, some of his family vanished. It was the worst time ever for Jews, he told me, and something had changed in the way he was now treated in camp. When he marched out with the band to have an inmate punished, get a whipping, or to be hung on the Tree, the guards spat at him and kicked him and called him names—which they’d not routinely done before. It was like he was the one going to punishment. So he was afraid, and I couldn’t do anything to help him, and that’s what was wrong with his playing. Then he cried. And I held him. That was all I could do. He heaved up and down in my arms, his lousy perfume sneaking up my nose, until, slowly, he came to a stop and blew his nose on a rag.

  Tuesday, April 4, 1939

  I slipped down to the disinfection hut today with a pack of Drummers (I don’t think he smokes, but he can trade them), a bar of chocolate, and a can of sausage for Pierre Braun. I thought I might talk with him about America. Yesterday Anna gave me a three-year-old Saturday Evening Post. On the cover was a fat colored woman who looked like Aunt Jemima. She was bent over an open oven basting a turkey. She wore a head rag. Sitting close by on the floor was a long-headed little colored boy. Reminded me of my auntie’s house back home when I was a kid.

  I get to the hut without any trouble, look over at the garden, and I see Pierre there with Hohenberg. Hohenberg, with the stiff dick that never goes down. And the way he’s close to the kid, the look on his face, like he’s hungry for something, scares me and makes me mad at the same time. I don’t think about it twice. I just go over and tell Hohenberg to get the fuck away from the kid and leave him alone or I’ll kick his ass. The look on his face makes me know he’s up to no good. I can see the kid doesn’t know what’s going on. Maybe he’s never been approached before. Usually the prisoners stay away from disinfection hut workers for fear of catching something. Anyway, that’s the way I saw it: Hohenberg trying to take advantage of Pierre. I chase his ass right out of there. He knows I’d managed to take care of Baum; word gets around, or even if it doesn’t, the prisoners could guess at the sequence of events.

  I pick up two rakes and give Pierre one so we won’t be standing around doing nothing. That’s the quickest way to get the guards on your ass. I ask how he’s been, if his health is all right, if he’s heard from his mother. Everything is all right with him, but he’s not heard from his mother and won’t because it’s forbidden. He asks me why I was mad at Hohenberg, and I tell him the camp is filled with men who haven’t had a woman in years, so the prisoners turn a little bit queer with each other. Young prisoners they tried to make into women. They bring gifts and sweet-talk them; or they beat them up or blackmail them. They do all sorts of things. I tell him I have cigarettes and food for him, but I wasn’t trying to slick him into anything; tell him I am queer myself, so I know what’s going on. I am thinking he might draw back a bit when I tell him, but he doesn’t. He says he isn’t like that at all and just didn’t think about the way it is in camp, but now he understands. He asks how I got that way. All the time we’re raking dirt and mixing it with pig shit to fertilize it. Tell him I didn’t know, I just am, and had been in America. So I get the conversation around to that and I can tell he feels easier. I ask where his father had come from and he says St. Louis. Do I know it? I say I don’t, but I know a little something about Kansas City in the same state. A lot of very good musicians lived there. Did his daddy play any kind of music that he knew of? He doesn’t think so. Was St. Louis a nice place? I tell him no. A lot of colored people had been killed there in race riots. He wants to know what those are, and when I describe them he asks if I’d ever been in one. I laugh because if I knew one was on the way, I’d run. Do they have those everywhere in America? No, I tell him, but they have enough. It isn’t easy for colored people back there. His daddy made his mother believe all that stuff about democracy and every man being equal to the next. I tell him, though, that there are some pretty nice places. If a colored man knew the ropes, New Orleans was a fine place with lots of good spicy food. I think then of a steaming bowl of gumbo and nearly cry. And Philadelphia is all right, and New York and Chicago, I tell him. I can see him brightening up. They don’t do there what they are doing here
? he wants to know. Of course, I tell him no, and give him a scowl like a father would in answer to a silly question. Lots of colored people in those cities, I tell him.

  Harlem, he wants to know about. I rake for a minute, then tell him it is the place every colored person with gumption or get-up-and-go wants to be. Because of the tall buildings? He’d seen pictures. I laugh again. How can tall buildings help a man get along? I ask him. You know better than that, I say. It’s just that people do things in New York that they don’t or won’t or can’t do anywhere else. Like Berlin, then? I start to say that depended on what you wanted to do, but I say instead, a little. What are colored Americans like? he wants to know. I am a little sorry I’d started this, but at the same time, it feels good to tell him about things, like a daddy would. They’re like your father and they’re like me. They’re like Joe Louis—and I wait to see if he knows about him. He does. Pierre grins. And like Jesse Owens. He grins again. They’re poor and a very few—very few—are rich, but not rich like white people are rich. Do they work in factories and stores and on the trams and buses? I rake out a new furrow. No, I tell him, but both the men and the women work very hard for little pay. So then he wants to know how they earn enough money to save and get ahead (which is every European’s goal). I have to tell him that colored people don’t own any factories and damn few stores and running the trams, trains, and buses is what white people do, that and all the neat, clean jobs. Then I rake and don’t say anything more, because I’m thinking, Shit! How do we get by? Anyway, it’s time for me to get on back up the street to the canteen. “I have to go now,” I say. “We’ll talk again.” I collect his rake and set them against the fence and steer him back toward the disinfection hut. If the guard in the tower is watching, I know he’s thinking I probably outtalked Hohenberg to get me some booty. I slip the stuff from under my jacket down into his shirt. Then I think of something, and I say, “Wait a minute.” I need a little more help. I pick up a rake again and with the end of the handle draw this into the dirt: