Clifford's Blues (43 page)

Friday, February 16, 1945

The Allies bombed Dresden; the place is still burning. Thousands died, burned to a crisp. Fried. Baked. Barbequed. Good. Great.

Dear,
dear
God. Oh, Loa Aizan.

I think I have the syph. These sores on my butt.
In
my butt. That rotten sonofabitch. At dinner I told them. Dieter Lange said it's probably nothing. I cussed him out and asked who had he been fooling around with, anyway? He said nobody, but he lies. I can tell he's lying. Anna said Dieter Lange wasn't sleeping in her bed anymore. I said it was too late for that. Dieter Lange said he'd have someone come and look at me, and I said who could look at me and not know what had been going on all these years between us? He said the same doctor who'd done the
Lebensborn
papers for them. Anna wants an examination, too. I think Dieter Lange already had one and is on medication.

“Pears” are rolling now for reasons the guards never thought of two or three years ago. Yesterday the “pear” belonged to a man who got caught stealing a rag from another prisoner to replace his own, which he'd used to wipe his behind. After he used it, he washed it out. After three months it was worn out. He needed another. He stole one and his “pear” rolled. Twenty-five lashes used to be the punishment for petty theft.

Diary, could I become rich selling you piece by piece for toilet paper? Then could I buy some magic cure for this?

Sunday, February 25, 1945

I leave Lappus to run the canteen and I walk around the Dancing Ground and up and down the 'Strasse. It's cold and windy, but, like everyone else, I keep waiting for that good thing to happen. It's in the air. A fool couldn't help seeing it. The Family and the International Committee have gathered and have posted lookouts at the door of Block 1. The Blacks seem to have huddled closer to the
SS
guards, like the Greens. But the guards are mostly old men now and some are even civilians. It's plain they'd rather be somewhere else. The Family and the
IC
are just as concerned with maintaining the routine as the guards. No work today. Everyone is inside, out of the cold, wondering if the rumors of still another typhoid epidemic will turn out to be true. Maybe the rumor was started by one of the groups to keep the guards away from the blocks. Maybe not. Now there is always talk of a rebellion, of guns that are already in the hands of the
IC
or the Family, of knives and clubs, of battle positions.

The big problem is food, getting enough of it and sharing it to try to keep people alive until liberation. If I brought food in, it wouldn't last but a second. There are just too many starving jokers stumbling around here. In the old days when I brought food and things in for Werner or for Pierre or to trade, it was different—you didn't have to worry about 30,000 other people trying to snatch it out of your hand. I miss those old days, sometimes, when I felt I was a part of things, the
Widerstand
, the resistance, hauling around radio parts, passing on information from Gitzig to Werner. Now it's every man for himself.

I find no one to talk to. Besides, it's too cold to talk for long outside. I return to the canteen and take one of the sulfa pills Dieter Lange's doctor gave me. I suppose he gave them to him, too. What a shabby little man. He just pulled me apart and flashed a light up there and tskked. He's probably seen unimaginable things so often that he's used to them. He just said, “Yes, that's what you have, syphilis. Take these four times a day with water.” Then he left. I feel like a leper. I've never had a disease before, not even the clap.

When I get home, I take the piano stool and break it apart and make a fire in the stove. I take the plate of boiled potatoes Anna fixed for me and sit beside it. Dieter Lange is bent over the radio. I know Anna doesn't want me in the kitchen, and him neither. She sits on the other side of the stove, pulling her fingers and mumbling something about going home. My mind is a thing watching me trying to think. I feel so tired, so weak. When I finish writing this, I have to check my hiding place. Dieter Lange's bin is empty. Just a few sausages hang there with mold growing on them. They smell rotten. But maybe it's me I smell, or Anna, or Dieter Lange. It's hard to tell who or what is smelling these days.

Thursday, March 15, 1945

Now I believe what I've heard. Werner came into the canteen today with a woman
SS
guard. Oh, he seemed proud of her and she was giggling and carrying on, and they were touching each other. Well, what can I say? This close to the end and he's got an
SS
girlfriend? And he's been working with the International Committee and the Family? Seems to me he's got his dick on his mind instead of his thinking cap. But who am I to mark the changes in other people?

Anna tried to leave yesterday, but she was brought back because she fell down in the mud and couldn't get up. Drunk. Dieter Lange doesn't know what to do with her. All she needs to do is start screaming about two faggots with syphilis and there'll be a black “pear” and a blond “pear” rolling at six o'clock that night. Stupid bitch. Who would miss her if she turned up dead?

Sunday, April 1, 1945

Yesterday the sky was blue except for a few big white clouds. A bunch of American planes marked with white stars with red balls inside them and red tails, dove out of the sky with a noise that made the ground shake. They were heading toward Munich along the railroad tracks. They zoomed low and then high, turned sideways, went up, and came back again. They were sparkling silver. Then German planes appeared out of nowhere to chase them.

I was just outside the camp when the racket started, on my way home where I was thinking of burning the top of the piano for heat. All the
SS
and their runners in the
Jourhaus
ran out to see. The planes roared and whistled up and down the sky, then flattened out over the camp, making noise like rolling thunder, their guns yammering and pounding, their engines howling, until they flew out of sight over the horizon. Enlisted men,
SS
officers, wives, calfactors, civilians—we were all watching this business in the sky, the vanishing, the thundering, the climbing up into the clouds and diving down again. The machine guns sounded like drummers practicing on snares at the far end of a great big empty hall. All the sounds flew far away, but left the echo of a promise to return—a whine, a growl, something. And then an American plane came roaring out of the west behind the factories with a German plane right behind it. The German plane didn't sound like the American plane—more like a long, sharp whistle—and its guns went
Poom! Poom!
Tatttaaaattttaaaaat! The American swung up in the sky in a big loop and came down right behind the German. The American plane was skidding back and forth like a wounded bird, but man, the American sounded like he was doing the Mammy-Daddy roll on that German's ass and wasn't going to quit. Then he tried to pull up, but only skidded off to the north. Now the German was trying to climb up into one of the big clouds, but it seemed like he hit an invisible wall, and then smoke came rushing out of his tail. He started to nose over and then began a run down the sky, leaving smoke like a big pencil streak against the blue. Flames jumped out. I heard people groan. I heard myself shout “Get out!” Then, “Jump!!” At that moment it didn't matter that he was a German. People were shouting,
“Fallschirmspringen! Fallschirmspringen!”
Parachute!

Parachute! But the plane seemed to be drawn faster and faster to the ground. It went through a cloud and marked it with a black, whirling streamer. I almost turned away, and maybe what kept me from doing so was a sudden blossoming of white with the sun sparkling off it. The American! His plane had been hit, too, and he'd had to use his parachute. There was a faint explosion to the north, but everyone's attention was on the German plane whining through the air in a long steep angle that carried it out of sight behind the horizon east of the camp. There was a crumping sound. It shook the earth delicately. I thought, He's gone. Not up the chimney, but down the stack.

The American was drifting north of the camp, toward the rifle ranges. His plane had gone down, without smoke or fire. Two trucks filled with
SS
from the
Jourhaus
drove out of camp through the factory road and turned north. How great it would be to capture an American pilot! they said. Nobody I could notice was going to see about the German. There was nothing new about jokers being burned up around here.

The airplane fight gave us something to talk about at home, a chance to break the nasty stillness that had closed in on us. I could not burn the piano top. Just couldn't. Not even to spite them, to dare them to say something so I could curse them out. Anyway, the house wasn't quite so cold now, and really, since the compound guards brought her back that day, Anna hasn't treated us so much like lepers.

Dieter Lange was grumbling over a big bowl of soup with a little meat but mostly turnips and cabbage made thick with flour, that the Americans had shot down another secret weapon, the
Dusenjager
, the jet fighter that had crashed. “The buzz bombs only make Hitler feel good,” he said. “And the jet fighters can't protect us here. You saw. The American shot him right in the ass.”

“Isn't he talking bold these days?” Anna said.

“Everybody's talking these days,” he said, “and some are doing more than talking. You'll see.”

“And what does that mean, Major Lange, what does that mean?”

“It means not everyone is going to sit still and take the blame for things Hitler and Himmler and Goering and Goebbels ordered done. That's what it means.”

Anna slid a look toward me.

“You better take more time to cure your syphilis instead of trying to think up schemes,” she said to him. “Look where your scheming has got us.”

“Shut up, you tub of lard.”

“Oh, shut up yourself, you queer.”

I said, “Why don't you both shut up and listen to the radio.”

God. Every night it's like this. Dieter Lange hasn't been away on a trip because he's up to something. I know him. And, besides, now that Anna's tipped her hand with that running away, he's not going to let her out of his sight.

The sound of a car stopping quickly in front of the house made Dieter Lange unplug the cord to the shortwave radio, which he kept hidden in a closet. He pulled some clothes over the radio and closed the door and walked to the window. He was scared. And so was I. What was on Anna's face was not fear, more like she was expecting to have some of her problems solved.

Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! I said to myself, Oh, shit. Dieter Lange's face went white. The General Major and the Colonel and now us. Dieter Lange went from the window, whose curtain he hadn't even had time to push aside to look out, to the door, his face clouding up like he was going to cry. He managed to open the door and an
SS
sergeant saluted and shouted, “The
Jourhaus
duty officer, Captain Baugh, wishes the use of your black, Major, at once, please.”

Understanding that he wasn't to be led away to have his head chopped off, and also that there was a duty officer involved, Dieter Lange demanded to know for what purpose.

“To help, sir, with the American pilot who got shot down this afternoon.”

“Ah hah! You got him then?” Dieter Lange said.

“Yes, we did.”

“An American who doesn't speak English?”

“Oh, he speaks English. He's a black man like your black and speaks no German, of course.”

“Oh! Is that so? But you must have someone there who can translate.”

The sergeant came close to Dieter Lange and said, “Captain Haug would like to show how well we treat prisoners, even black ones.”

“And there aren't any in the camp?”

“Not worth showing, Major.”

“But what do you want my calfactor to do?”

“Just to make the pilot feel comfortable.”

An ugly grin spread over Dieter Lange's face. “Ah, the captain wants to get points with the cowboys for a little later on, eh?”

The sergeant grinned. “You said that. I didn't.”

“I'll join you,” Dieter Lange said.

The sergeant looked uncomfortable. “Captain Baugh said, in case you said that, there are already too many people in the interrogation room, sir.”

“Let him change clothes and take him then.”

I could not
imagine
it. A Negro riding one of those mighty machines, a Negro who'd shot down a German plane, a secret-weapon plane? Who'd floated through the sky to land safely out in the fields? What would they do to him? These thoughts and others raced around in my head as we sped to the gatehouse in the last light of day.

My third time. There'd been Count Walther von Hausberger, then Ruby Mae Richards, and now the pilot. Up the stairs again (which meant they hadn't beat him) and into the same room, which was filled with cigarette smoke and
SS
men.

Even in clean rags I must have looked a sight. He stared at me out of the cozy-looking, wool-lined leather jacket. His gun holster was empty. His wool-trimmed aviator cap sat cockily tilted to one side and a little back on his head. He looked like a boy, only a little older than Pierre but in good health. He was smoking and I think he was a little afraid; the smoking helped him to hide it. There was a little blood on his face and his left cheek was swollen, like he'd bumped it or been hit.

“You work with the translator. Make this man feel comfortable, eh?” Captain Baugh said. I guess it was Captain Baugh. “Who he is, where he's from. In a friendly fashion. See if he's hurt and needs a doctor.”

“Hello,” I said in English.

“Hello,” he said, squinting up, trying to figure what was going on.

“Can I please have a cigarette?” I asked the captain in German.