Wed., May 31, 1939
“Well,” I’m saying to Pierre as we pretend to work the garden as part of the garden detail. “Well, the Cunarder would come into New York harbor, where we’d see the Statue of Liberty—”
“With the torch held high? I read about that,” Pierre says. His face brightens for a minute. Being out in the sunshine seems to make him feel better.
“Way, way high, Pierre. And then the ship would pull in beside all the other ships from all over the world, there in the Hudson River, the West Side, around 42nd Street. Then we’d go through customs, show our papers.”
“But I don’t have any papers, Mr. Pepperidge.”
I hadn’t thought about that, but I say, as we continue “Suppose,” “Don’t worry. In England we’d get a Nansen passport for refugees. They’d let us in, all right. I’m an American, and you’re—well—we’d get some adoption papers in England, too, so we could say you’re my boy. We could ask them to fix the papers that way.”
“Yes,” Pierre says, smiling, “I could be your son until I find my real father.”
“I’m sure we could do that,” I say.
“And then?”
“Then? Oh. After we finish customs, we’ll take a taxi to Harlem. That’s the section of New York where colored people live, remember?”
“No white people?”
“Here and there, yes. I don’t know about now, though. They may have all moved because white people don’t like to live near colored people. We’ll check in at a rooming house on 135th Street for a few days to get our bearings. Try to look up some old friends, play a few numbers and maybe hit—the numbers is like a lottery, you see, and we’d need some money because we’d want some sharp clothes. You can’t go around Harlem looking just any kind of trashy way, you know, especially if you’re a musician. When I was in Berlin, I heard about a lot of new clubs opening up in Harlem, so maybe it wouldn’t be too hard to find a band to play with.”
“All right,” Pierre says. “We’ve got new clothes. Do we go to church?”
“Church!”
He looks puzzled. “Yes, church.”
“I—well—if you want. There are some grand churches in Harlem.” He’s right, I think. We ought to go to church. “Are you Protestant or Catholic?” I ask.
His eyes twinkle and he leans close and whispers, “I think my mother is part Jewish.”
I look around to see if anyone heard. No. The other prisoners are busy. “Well,” I say. “I’ve heard there are black Jews in Harlem. They, the SS, they don’t—”
“No. I’m not a fool. I see what’s happening with the Jews.”
The tic that comes just then is fierce, like something has grabbed his face and is trying to twist it off. Pierre’s eyes are like those of someone looking from behind a glass door for help. Then it passes, and from the slump of his shoulders, I know “Suppose” is over for the day. I think of the other workers from the disinfection hut. They are all slow-moving dumbbells to me, shuffling, eyes drooped like drunks. It has to be that stuff they use. Sometimes you can smell it near the north wall sharper than the smell from the crematorium. Didn’t Loa Aizan understand that this was evil? I thought of Hohenberg; he was the only person I knew in the Labor Office. Could Gitzig do anything for me? I didn’t think so. Werner looked after his own, but demanded favors from everyone else.
“I … I never heard of black Jews …” Pierre says. He seems to be waiting, the way people wait for a sneeze to come. When the tic doesn’t come, he sighs and without a word, turns and walks to the disinfection hut, his arms almost motionless at his sides.
I went to Werner anyway. I told him Pierre was sick and needed to be, I thought, in the fresh air. I planted myself in front of him. He’d done me some favors, but I’d done him more because I was in a position to do so. The barracks was empty.
“The quarry?” he said. “Fresh air out there.”
“No!” I was surprised he’d said that.
“Swamp?” What was going on? He knew how frail Pierre was.
“Not the swamp, Werner, the garden. Can you do it? Will you do it?”
“That’s for old guys and the priests,” he said. He wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“But he needs to be out there to stay alive,” I said.
Werner walked to the window and held his hands behind his back. His silhouette was not as square and hard as when we first came here. There was a bending in his shoulders, and his white hair sprayed off glints of silver in the light. The block was empty and quiet. I studied his back and waited. It was all crap, this ritual, and I suddenly knew that’s what it was even though we had never gone through it before. The only other thing I’d ever asked for was to keep Hohenberg away from Pierre. Without turning around, Werner said, in a tone I’d never heard before, “I think we can work it out.”
I waited for him to turn, smile, and pat my shoulder. He turned. I could not see his face clearly with the light behind him.
“What’s in it for me?”
To give myself time to think I started to say “What?” But I’d heard him all right. In a voice that was low but with meaning as loud as a thunderbolt booming at my feet. All the sounds that I knew were outside seemed to burst right through the walls; all the smells of the place that it would never, ever, be rid of, even in midsummer, when the doors were open and the bedding was hung between the blocks for airing, became heavy, funky, bad, and I had the feeling that Loa Aizan was now at work.
I said, “Anything you want, Werner, that I can give you.” Every homosexual I ever knew believed that every other man down deep was also queer, for a minute, an hour, a lifetime. The situation varied. But I was surprised.
“In here, then,” Werner said, his voice squeezed, his movements jerky. I followed him from the living room into a corner of the dormitory away from the windows. He didn’t look at me. He didn’t have to. I knew his eyes were half-closed, hard, and hot. The first-timers, no matter how much you helped them, were brutal, in a hurry to begin, and in a bigger hurry to finish, because they were ashamed of themselves and despised you, even in the best situation, which this was not. Always they seemed to have lost what they never knew they had, except some idea of themselves as men, and always they put the blame for what they did on you.
“Do you have grease or something like that?” I asked.
He walked quickly to his bunk, rummaged through a bag and hurried back. “It’s pomade,” he said. He still didn’t look at me.
I took it and did what I had to do, then helped him. He was breathing hard, but wasn’t quite saluting. He was hot enough, but he was also afraid. Not of being caught, but of losing, he thought, a part of himself. I kneeled and took him until he was almost saluting the back of my throat. Then I taught him. “Oh, that hurts!” I said. Of course, that’s what he wanted to do, hurt me for what he was doing. He wasn’t, but it’s always wise to let them think they’ve done what they never admit they wanted to do in the first place. It didn’t take Werner long. I grabbed his cock, which was fading fast and squeezed as hard as I could. “This isn’t going to be a habit,” I told him. I kissed him full on the mouth, uncoiled my tongue inside. He made believe he was trying to get away, but something more within him than within me made him stop and submit with soft groans and wheezes. He knew then that he had not fucked me; I had fucked him. (And I did feel that I could have said “Now me” and he would have.) Between men and men and women and women and men and women there’s always that, and that is why, I suppose, there is the play-acting to make it look like something else. When I released him there were tears in his eyes; the hard gray of them was now just mist and fog. As I left, he was returning to the window in the living room, and I could see that his shoulders were bent more than ever.
That’s how Pierre got to work in the garden.
Thurs., August 24, 1939
Dieter Lange walks about the house humming. He is cheerful. He pinches Anna and she jumps and giggles and slaps him, not hard, on his back or che
st. He says he’s in line for another promotion, which means an even larger house, and that means more space for the goods that are now crammed tightly into the cellar bins, in the attic, and in the closets. His buddies gather and they huddle around the radio, listening to speeches and the news. It’s all about Poland. Poland this and Poland that. Danzig this and Danzig that. Who gives a damn about Poland? Too much like Russia for me. I did hear about a colored guy in Warsaw name of George Scott, who played drums and accordion. Don’t know if he’s still there, but if he is and I was him, I’d haul ass out of there on the first ship. The Germans mean to get Poland, just like Gitzig said, and no fooling about that. That means more goods for Dieter Lange. He thinks Polish hams are even better than German, Polish vodka better than Russian. The problem with Poland is England and France. But Dieter Lange’s friends don’t think they want to fight, since they didn’t fight over the Rhineland or Austria or Czechoslovakia. Why now? And anyway, the Germans were better trained. Look what they had done in Spain. The war was over down there, thanks to the German training and the German air force. What had the English done? Nothing. The French? Nothing but run up and down their Maginot Line, in which they’d hide if war came.
So Dieter Lange’s buddies drank coffee and schnapps and had me play while they sang marching songs. They seem very pleased that yesterday Germany and Russia signed a treaty, but in camp the Reds had a helluva fight because some of them said Russia had sold out. A bunch of Reds were taken away. Bernhardt said they were to be “canned goods,” whatever that means. I don’t think I want to know. Bernhardt said the commander of the camp had not yet been able to find the radios he knows the prisoners have somewhere. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have known what was going on. There is a kind of electricity around the compound and also in the camp.
My main concern is still Pierre’s health. I get him as much fresh fruit and good food as I can, as often as I can, hoping that will strengthen him. And I bring him the clean socks and underwear that Anna has given me. How much more can I pay anyone for a clean job for Pierre? And with what? Werner’s got two strikes, and I think he knows it. The first for knocking me down in front of Karlsohn and the second the way he made me pay for Pierre’s fresh air. Fresh air. Good Lord don’t charge nobody for fresh air, but Werner did. Something will work out. It’s got to.
In our “Suppose” game we now live on 137th Street. And I have a small band. We play in a little walk-down club on Seventh Avenue, the same street we stroll down on Sunday. I couldn’t give him the name of the club, of course, and he didn’t insist on one. (I hope they’re still strolling up and down Seventh Avenue.) We were going to go to a synagogue, but Pierre says, “I wouldn’t know what to do. We never went at home.” So, instead we go, all dressed up, to a Methodist church where the choir romps and people clap in time to the music. “I like that,” he says, because I’d sung “Let My People Go” for him, the way they do it in church, and “Amazing Grace,” which he knows in German. He hums that right along with me as we bend over the garden.
“But I need a job in New York,” Pierre says.
I want him to have a nice job, but something he can really do. I ask if he knows French, and he says he does. I can see him as a maître d’ at one of those snooty clubs in Harlem where they’re always trying to put on airs, like white folks. I can see him in white tie and tails. He is a good-looking kid and maybe he can meet a rich woman that way, too. I explain the job to him and he likes it; he wants to do it. Besides, it will leave him time to study.
“Study? For what?”
“I want to be an engineer,” he says.
I think of The Cooper Union downtown. I don’t know if they take colored, but we can find out. If they don’t, we’ll find a place in New York that does, that’s all. I tell him I think that is a good idea, since it might take a long time to find his real father. Germany, I tell him, is small compared to the United States, which is three thousand miles wide and two thousand miles long. He can’t believe how big it is. Then I tell him Russia is even bigger. I’ve seen the maps. I love to see his eyes widen when I tell him things like that. I can see he is impressed by how much I know and how much traveling I’ve done. It makes me feel good.
Then he says, “I don’t understand something.”
“What?”
“Why you, an American, are still here.”
A drizzle starts, and gray clouds, big rolling balls in the sky, seem to slow and open up. The drizzle grows to rain. Pierre waits. I don’t know where to start. I play “Suppose” with him so questions like this won’t come up. “You’d better go in now, Pierre. We can talk about this another time. Not now.”
“You never want to talk about it.”
“That’s because I told you already what I am. It’s against their law—if they catch you. Besides, it’s boring, Pierre. Very boring after six years.”
“Six years! Will I be here that long, Mr. Pepperidge?”
I could cry. “I don’t know. I really don’t think so. Maybe the war will change all that.” We stack the tools. The other prisoners are going to their alternate tasks without a wasted motion. “If the war really comes and Germany loses, we can all go home.”
“But I thought,” he says in a small voice, “you and I would go to your home together.”
The rain is coming down steadily now, cold German rain. I say, “Yes, yes. But we’d tell your mother first.”
“No!” he says.
Sunday, September 3, 1939
The band didn’t play at The Nest this past weekend. Germany was on full alert and the army had been positioned on the Polish borders. The week before, everyone in the compound was at the camp loudspeakers. The “black” radios in camp were probably running all the time as well. Last Thursday Hitler broadcast his peace terms to Poland, but the very next day, at 5:30 in the morning, he said over the radio that Germany had invaded Poland thirty-five minutes earlier because the Poles had attacked a German radio station on the border at Gleiwitz and at several other locations, too.
This morning, because France and Britain have a treaty with Poland, they said they are at war with Germany. Today, the SS guards wore full battle outfits and looked meaner. Groups of prisoners strolled down to the Priesterblock; others crowded into the canteen, but I couldn’t tell how they felt about the war. Some, like me, must have hoped that it would bring them freedom; some, as before, must’ve wanted to join up and gain freedom that way; others were as quiet and still as the weather, which was gray and sticky, even with the wind that came off the mountains now and again, carrying sharp drops of rain. To piss on Austria and Czechoslovakia is one thing, but France and England make it a different crap game altogether. The world won’t stand for Germany filling these camps with Frenchmen and Englishmen the way it let them fill with Jews, Gypsies, Austrians, Czechs, and now, I suppose, Poles, and that might save us. I hope to God it does.
Sunday, Sept. 10, 1939
We’ve been listening to the radio, naturally. Sometimes at night, Dieter Lange hooks up the shortwave he got from somewhere, and hopes it doesn’t interfere with the camp radios in the offices. We listen for short periods and then he shuts it off. We catch the English broadcasts—there’s nothing we can make out coming from France. Anna translates the English for him. If she doesn’t understand she turns to me. I throw out something. The British have mobilized; so have the French. Dieter Lange is not happy, but Anna tells him the situation could make them rich, very rich. He tells her that then she’d only want more. She always wants more. Then she tries to calm him down. I know he wants out; he’s never been in anything this big. It scares him.
It was strange at The Nest this week. Every guy in uniform was exuberant. No mistake, though, there’s a shit storm coming.
Today in camp Pierre asked me what the war would do to our plans. I told him I didn’t know. I was pretty annoyed, because here I am trying to get him some kind of job out of the winter snow and cold (they’ll be starting the garden harvest next month) and he is t
hinking about a future that may never be, now that the war’s come. I’d run out of patience with him, and was about to draw him up short, when he said he was being assigned to help build a greenhouse so there’d be fresh vegetables for the officers, and he would work in it. He showed me the assignment slip. I was so ashamed of myself and so filled with relief I said, “Whenever this mess is over, we’ll do just what we’ve planned.”
“Thanks, You Guys,” I whispered.
Thursday, Sept. 29, 1939
So much has happened that my head is swimming. It’s like being drunk. Poland is smashed. The Russians seem to be working with the Germans; they’re taking over part of Poland, too. And Poland is knocked out the way Joe Louis knocked out Schmeling.
After dinner last night there was a knock on the door and who’s there but Bernhardt, carrying a small box and all spiffed up in a uniform so new I could smell it. He and Dieter Lange and Anna joked and drank coffee and ate cake. I finished in the kitchen and went down to my room. I was there a half hour before Dieter Lange called me up. Anna was not there, but I could hear her moving around upstairs. I stood across from them and waited. It looked like something bad. I couldn’t really tell because Dieter Lange’s face showed no expression, and Bernhardt’s was the same as always, fixed with a little smile.
“Now we’re at war,” he said. “Berlin says all bands not within camp boundaries must be German military bands, or those whose members are German civilians selected by the Reichmusik Direktor himself, Heinz Baldauf.” He sighed. “Cliff Pepperidge and His Wittelsbachers are no more. Immediately.”
I’m sure Bernhardt thought he was saying it lightly, but it came across like doom cracking through the house. Germans do not have a light touch. I glanced at Dieter Lange, who looked at me briefly, then his eyes seemed busy looking for something in the room. “Your musicians have been notified and will just settle back into the general prison population, which in fact they never left.” His smile widened a little. “Your good life will continue here with the Langes and the canteen. Can’t beat that, eh? And I won’t have to worry about subversive elements at The Nest trying to spirit you away. Times will change and maybe we can go back to the old routine, eh?” He crossed one leg over the other, his boots reflecting a high shine. “We will have bands with the best musicians in Europe, won’t we, Lange?”
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