Clifford's Blues (23 page)

I jumped in my chair. To me that meant they cut off your dick. I said, “They cut—” He said no.

“They just fix it so you can't ever have children. I knew of this doctor. There's a whole program being run by people who were members of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Just and I knew many of them, like this Verschuer and Eugen Fischer.” Nyassa leaned closer and whispered, his sour breath spilling over, “That goddamn Fischer, back in 1913, did a study on the kids of German fathers and Namibian mothers,
‘Die Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardisierungsproblem beim Menschen,'
‘The Bastards of Reheboth and the Problem of Miscegenation in Man.' So these wretched Germans have been at it for a long time. Nineteenth-century science belonged to the Germans, so they go back with this quite a distance.…”

He leaned back in his chair, breathing heavily. I asked if he was all right, and he said no. He wondered what Just would think of all this. I asked him again what tests they were doing with him, and he said he didn't know, because they never told the truth, and anyway, they weren't going to do anything more to
him
. I felt so sorry for him that I wanted to tell about Ulrich and Maria and my ride through the night. “They have to kill me, one way or another,” he said. His voice was so low I could hardly hear him. “Whoever heard of a
Neger Biologisch?
Only those people from the
KWI
, and just a few of them. I can't exist, but I do. The solution is simple: I must
not
exist. I am a life without value, even here.” He got up slowly. “Well. I have bored and frightened you. Take this. My wife's last address. If you get out, just tell her it was too much. They've made me feel like a frog. It would have been good to hear you play, just once. Come. I'll walk out with you.”

We went out of the building, and all the while I felt like I was walking with one of those jokers back home who's on his way to a fight he knows he can't win, but he has to go.
Has
to go. I didn't know what to say. He walked me to the middle of the Lagerstrasse and shook my hand; his felt light, even though he tried to squeeze hard. There was no strength in it. He turned and walked, not back to his building but around it. “Wait!” I hollered. I followed because I knew what he was going to do. I suppose I could have stopped him. I didn't. He knew what he wanted, and who in the hell was I to get in his way? But he was, besides Werner and Gitzig and maybe a few others, the only person I could talk to in camp. Most certainly the only
colored
man. “Wait, Doctor!” I shouted after his thin, bent back. Sometimes the prisoners stopped a fight; I'd seen that happen many times, because a lot of people besides the fighters could get into trouble if the guards came. But if a prisoner was doing something all by himself, something that didn't bounce back on other people, you let him do it. It was the one thing a man could do, make the decision to walk on the forbidden grass strip, which Nyassa was now doing, even as the guard in the tower was shouting and swinging his machine gun toward him. Nyassa started to run; he moved like an old, crippled man. The gun chattered; prisoners stopped what they were doing if they were not in a column, and ran toward the sound. Dr. Nyassa jumped high in the air to clear the moat. I think he was hit a couple of times as he sailed through the air like a balled-up piece of paper, because something disturbed the smoothness of his flight. But still he flew and landed, without moving again, on the electrified barbed-wire fence, which bulged out, then back in, with Nyassa's fingers clutched tightly through it. The guard kept shooting. I thought of Revelation: “I was dead and now I am to live forever and ever, and I hold the keys of death and of the underworld. Now write down all that you see of present happenings and
things that are still to come
.”

Thursday, Aug. 18, 1938

There are now two more men who work with me in the canteen. Dieter Lange says before the year is over there will be 20,000 prisoners in Dachau, so more help is needed. I guess I should say I work with the two new men, since Dieter Lange told me it was now important that
Germans
seem to be in charge. One is Lappus, a Green, and the other is Huebner, a Witness. I check in the stock; they place it on the shelves and do most of the selling. I make sure the place is as clean as possible, but I also do the books for Dieter Lange to make sure these guys haven't got their hands in the till. But they make a nice balance; Huebner seems to be about as honest as a man can be. If Lappus has any desire to be another Baum, I don't think Huebner will let him.

There are exactly ten Africans in camp now. I've spoken to some of them. They aren't very friendly because they're scared. They've all had the operation that Dr. Nyassa had. Maybe they're more sad than unfriendly. Some I can't speak to because they don't speak anything but African. The guards call their speech “Chinese.” The Africans were part of an English circus that went bust in Germany. The German women thought them exotic, the Africans thought they were something hot, and boom! Before they knew it, they were enemies of the state, violators of the “blood and honor” laws out of Nuremberg. They all wear the black triangle on their knees and chests. I wrote down some things in German for them to learn. I know they need the German and, I think, down deep, they know they need it, too. Huebner is very good with them when they come into the canteen, which is not often.

If I am to bear witness like it says in Revelation, I have to say that what the Jews are going through is unbearable. Since I last wrote here, they've had to register whatever they own. Down to the toothbrush, the shoelaces. The Jews have had to register their businesses, no matter how small, and any Jew who has a police record, no matter how insignificant, is picked up. Can there be any Jews left? Have they been blind? By the first of the year they are to have their names changed officially to “Sarah” or “Israel.” That will be like having a different color skin. Did they think this wasn't real? And now, just yesterday, Werner tells me, in Evian, France, a conference ended. It was about the Jews and which countries would take them in from Germany and Austria: not a single country, including the United States; not a country, not one. And in they come. Not only here, but all over Germany where there are camps; the tailors are still busy making six-pointed gold stars and triangles.

Monday, October 3, 1938

Last Friday at The Nest I found Moritz in a closet playing
“Deutschland Über Alles.”
I was surprised at how sweet it sounded on the violin; it was very nice, and I told him so. He said it was by Haydn, from a piece he wrote for a string quartet. I said he must have been a patriotic cat. He laughed. Haydn, he told me, died in 1809, before Germany was a whole country or, he whispered, a
Reich
. During some of the rehearsal time now, we listen to the records that Dieter Lange and Bernhardt collect on their travels because, Dieter Lange says, “You can't get German Brunswick,
HMV
, Telefunken, Odeon, Imperial—they aren't recording jazz music anymore.”

All the labels are from America, Holland, France, Switzerland, Sweden, or England. Now we have the Benny Goodman band, quartet, and trio. I read in an old British paper that he has colored—Teddy Wilson, Lionel Hampton, Lester Young, Walter Page—playing with him. Also some new Lunceford and Ellington, Red Allen, Mildred Bailey, Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Barnet, Coleman Hawkins, Erskine Hawkins, Woody Herman, Billie Holiday, Santo Pecora, Louis Prima, Don Redman, Gene Sedric (from the Wooding band), Willie “The Lion” Smith, Art Tatum, and Jess Stacy.

After listening to Sedric's “The Joint Is Jumpin'” and “Off Time,” everybody in the band had something to say about The Nest “jumpin'” or not “jumpin'.” “Off Time” is interesting because, while the tempo is fast, you can cut it in half, but Germans don't know how to “Lindy,” so the side is more for learning for us than for anything we can cop and play. I can do a pretty good copy of Jimmy Rushing on “Shoe Shine Swing,” and, naturally, the people love to hear me do renditions of Louis Armstrong's “Pennies from Heaven” and “Confessin'.” In other words, the music keeps us from going crazy, because, with each passing day, it looks like the situation in Germany isn't going to get any better, but worse, as Ulrich said, as Werner said before him. Last week the British and the French agreed to let the Germans take part of Czechoslovakia. The problem is
when
. Old Gitzig was right.

Lily Bernhardt is pregnant. I'm surprised she's alive at all, with all that piss in the tea and snot in the pudding that Gitzig served her. Now that Gitzig spends more time in camp, and gets him a little now and then, I suppose he's not doing it anymore; too risky. Besides, he's getting plenty of pretty good stuff in Bernhardt's basement to keep account of, and, if I know Gitzig, he's managing something himself. He told me, “This stuff is shit. You should see what we got in the warehouse in Munich. Bernhardt has already made a lot, believe me.” He supposed Dieter Lange was doing okay, too, and he's right. His storeroom in the basement is crammed full; he's also been storing stuff in the attic, including two suitcases filled with reichsmarks and food from Anna's visits to her parents' farm. I guess there's a stash out there, too.

There are railroad tracks going into the camp now, and tracks to the factories and sheds just west. Details working there. Armaments, Werner tells me, what else? I keep saying there can't be a war, and Werner keeps looking at me, like I'm a dummy. “You know who the prisoners work for over in those sheds? Messerschmidt, Dornier,
BMW
, I.G. Farben …”

Of all the different groups in camp, the Reds remain the best organized; nobody fucks with them, and everybody does what they say. They know what's going on. They try to get their people into the important jobs, but the
SS
prefers the Greens and the Blacks; they seem to have a lot in common and they recognize each other, the way
we
do.

The good jobs are in the camp kitchens (which ensure a lot more, if not better, food, naturally), supply depot, laundry, bath house, property room, shoe repair shop, tailor shop (includes sock darning), carpentry shop, machine shop (in some of the rebuilt factories), lumber yard, infirmaries, library (they call it), photo shop, and paint shop. Also gardening and tending rabbits, serving in the
SS
houses, and, yes, playing in the camp band. The prisoners who work the details in the sheds have it easier than those who work in camp; they have contact with civilians, and the
SS
guards don't want to act like the shits they are when the civilians are around. Hohenberg and some of the others in the Labor Office do the best they can for the Reds, but they can only do so much. They also have some people in the Records Office. The camp police are prisoners who work under the
SS
; no one likes them, no one trusts them. Back home we called them stool pigeons.

Friday, Nov. 11, 1938

I've shut the door. I'm in this tiny room (the canteen has been partitioned off again) where I do the books. But now I'm writing to
you
. Those prisoners with the soft jobs, who have time on their hands and run in and out of here, are in the main section talking about the past two days, Wednesday and Thursday. I can hear their laughter and loud, boasting voices. I never had the experience, but I've heard about times like these. The crackers back home would say Moses did this and that, and old Moses would run because he knew if they caught him he'd hang. Moses could be the name of any colored man. Whether they caught him or not, the crackers would come into the colored neighborhoods and burn houses, beat up people, shit,
kill
them if they couldn't find Moses to kill instead. People ran to church or hid in the woods. People would
pray
the crackers would catch Moses and leave them alone;
they
hadn't done anything. It didn't matter to them that maybe Moses hadn't done anything, either. They just didn't want the crackers to burn their homes or to kill them. The one or two colored men who thought the people ought to fight back, quickly found themselves all alone.

The prisoners outside are talking about something like what happens back home, but instead of a lynch mob they're calling it
Kristallnacht
, the night of the broken glass. All of Germany was like the booby hatch, the ones who went nuts and the ones who watched them. They burned or tore up and looted almost 8,000 shops owned by Jews, killed 35 Jews, burned about 200 synagogues; some Jewish women were raped; nobody knows how many Jews were hurt. The papers say the Jews will be fined a billion marks for causing the disturbance.

Some say there was altogether 25 million marks worth of damage. And they are already making more room here in camp for guess who? Every Jew who can run is running, or packing up to leave. But to where?

Bernhardt's little
Einsatztrupp
, with Gitzig working the books, is already having a profitable time in Munich; they may even need another storehouse now. If Bernhardt's doing so well, I can't imagine how Goering's doing.

Anna and Dieter Lange think they're slick. I've heard them talking about how they got the doctor to sign her “can't have babies” paper. So they're getting away with it, not having kids at all. She's dumping the pad and claiming a miscarriage. A lot of times they talk right out in the open, like I was still a piece of furniture; some of the important stuff I hear through the furnace flues that come down from their room into the cellar. They talk about money all the time, where to put it. Anna thinks they should help her folks buy more land and livestock, little by little. Dieter Lange wants to make safe and secret investments, get the money to Switzerland, but he's afraid he might get caught. He's told me sometimes in his room, or down in mine, when Anna's out—when I learn the most important stuff—that he wishes all this business would settle down, maybe even that Hitler would get put out, so he could leave the
SS
and open a nice, fancy club in Berlin. Dieter Lange has done what he set out to do—make money. He used the
SS
to do it, but the
SS
is using him, too. He's got to be careful. So they make money on rake-offs, but can't do anything with it. Bernhardt's in the same fix, except he's a state security officer. Wouldn't be the first cop to have sticky fingers. He has valuables that Goering doesn't want or maybe doesn't even know about. Besides, Goering's a very busy man, according to the papers. No, never knew a cop who wasn't crooked in some way—stealing sex or goods or money. Saw too much of it working clubs back home and here in Germany where the uniform, the flag, the slogans, the marching, only cover it up. Sure, the German folk this, and the German folk that. Fuck the folk. These camps wouldn't be here if the folk didn't want them. And there'll be new camps in Czechoslovakia, because the Germans won't be happy with just the Sudetenland; they want the whole place.