Clifford's Blues (42 page)

I daydream and dig up addresses. Dieter Lange sweats fear so you can smell it. Anna is sick and he won't help her; he wouldn't mind if she died. The doctor says her symptoms are of typhoid. I nurse her, wash her, clean her, feed her. There's no one else to do it. I put cold cloths on her head, check her temperature, and listen to her whining and crying and moaning. I check the redness of her spots, give her the sulfa pills and clear soup (like the prisoners get, but hers is made from something besides water and salt and turnip tops). Dieter Lange doesn't come near her. If it were safe to go check some other camp he'd have been long gone, but there's no point. The house smells of shit. Opening windows doesn't help.

What else doesn't help is Hitler. He offered peace, but Roosevelt, Churchill, and that bad-assed Joe Stalin already done said “Unconditional surrender.” I guess that means give it all up. What it also means is Germany has lost but just won't quit. How many times did I see bad jokers start fights in clubs, clearing out the tables, spilling drinks, making women scream and men holler, only to see Mr. Bad get his ass kicked, if not his face slashed? Nothing feels better than to see a bully get his. Must be human nature, to see Mr. Bad get his ass kicked good. Now it's Germany's turn.
Now
.

But I attend this
frau
, this farm girl, whose only discoveries in the world have been money and fucking. That's all. If she got religion, it was for one lousy stinking second. She lays there, the autumn air blowing with a slight chill through the windows I've opened; lays there watching me do things for her, her eyes filled with thanks, her fat little hands lingering on my arms and wrists. Anna has no friends. Ursula is gone and Lily Bernhardt, who kept her distance anyway, is dead. The sewing circle that made swastika flags broke up a long time ago. If there are still
Kaffeeklatsches
, she hasn't been invited to one in over a year, and she hasn't held any probably because no one would come. Anna Lange is a prisoner, too.

She tells me of her life before Dieter Lange, when she lived on her father's farm south of Esterhofen, not far from Dachau. An only child, like me. Her parents hated her because she was a girl, not a boy, and her mother couldn't have any more children. A boy would have been of more help. She took care of their small herd of cows, milked them, brought them in and out. She hitched the horses to the plow and drove them and walked in cowshit up to her knees. She helped care for the crops, planting, weeding, harvesting. When the harvest was in, read the magazines from Munich and Berlin and went to the movies.

Then came these
SA
and
SS
officers from Munich looking for a place to build a camp. Good Nazis. Dieter Lange kept coming back. Anna's father had voted for Hitler. He liked what the Nazis said they would do for Germany. Hindenburg had his turn and failed. Things would go better with Hitler in office. So how could he refuse Dieter Lange's request to marry her? And she, anyhow, was dying to get away; even the town of Dachau was bigger than Esterhofen, and Dachau was just a ways from the big city, Munich. Queer? She didn't know what queer was. She had no friends even then to talk to about such things. Not even in school, which none of the kids liked. She watched the animals until her folks chased her away (just like I thought). She got hot watching them and knew something should have been happening to her, too. So, then, Dieter Lange.

He wasn't very good-looking, but neither was she. He'd come from Berlin, though, and talked about the bright lights and the clubs and the entertainers, and he flattered her mother and father and made them feel that they had a son after all, one who was an officer, too. She knew they couldn't understand why he wanted her, but what could they say? What could they do? And since the camp would be for criminals, he would see that they got the help they needed to run the farm and make it prosperous. That he promised. And he kept his word.

He liked to fuck, Dieter Lange did, in the behind, which at first she thought was all right, though it didn't do much for her. She questioned him. He said that was the way all the Catholics did it to please the Pope and to not have children. In those days, who could afford to have kids, and she didn't want them anyway. There was too much life to be lived. Sometimes she got him to do it the other way, but not nearly enough, which was why, of course, she got involved with Bernhardt, who could do it half the night without coming up for air. And he had that reputation; he would fuck anything moving, the more unusual the better. He showed her lots of things. He teased her about how much she wanted to do it and wondered why Dieter Lange wasn't doing his work at home. Then she began to wonder. So that day she came home and I was fighting with Dieter Lange over the records I broke and that slap I gave him, she knew what was up. Finally. She was glad that she had helped to make me, as she'd told Dieter Lange, not all queer.

I told her, as she lay there (this was a couple of weeks ago, but she's still down—the typhoid takes nearly a month to break), that I never liked doing it with women. I didn't know why. I just didn't. Always? she wanted to know. Not
always
, I said. You know, when you get to that age. Why, that's what I meant, she said. Then she said, Oh, dear.

She then wanted to know how we had met, me and Dieter Lange, and I told her about Berlin back in the old days and how he was a small-time pimp and confidence man—and queer—who used to go to the clubs for one thing or another, and how he'd always send me drinks and try to talk to me. Berlin, I told her, was full of queers then, but they began to melt into the woodwork when the Nazis came in, even though so many Nazis were themselves freaks. I put it to her that she was queer and she smiled. You mean Ursula, she said, and I said Yes, Ursula. No, she said. She just liked doing something different. But you liked her, Anna said. You liked doing it to her. I know. I could tell. She had a nice behind, I said. Not like mine, which is a little bit too much, eh? she said.

“Get some sleep,” I say. “I have to go to the canteen.”

“Why doesn't Dieter come and help look after me?” she asks.

“He gets the medicine,” I say.

She cries herself to sleep.

Friday, Nov. 24, 1944

Back in the spring there was what I called a roundup. It was like a
Selektion
, only the
SS
were forming labor battalions to go work on the Western Front. Whatever they did wasn't enough, wasn't shit, because the Allies came anyway. Now they're forming another labor battalion. Somebody said they're doing this in all the camps. Nobody wants to go now. In the spring it was different. But now the whole American, British, Canadian, and French armies are fighting in Germany. Any
Haftling
who looks halfway healthy is going West, and those
Zinkers
and rats and hustlers and
SS
runners and everyone else who has managed to eat regularly and can carry a shovel—Uhlmer from the canteen included (Dieter Lange told me to choose between him and Lappus)—will get a taste of war. And that may be their last taste of anything, because the Germans will throw even their own kids, yes, little boys, into the fight to save the Reich. The prisoners ain't gonna be nothin' but sitting ducks.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving. We listened to all the Thanksgiving stuff on the radio. There was even an American football game broadcast from Italy.

Anna is able to get up for a little while at a time. If she were in the camp, she'd probably be dead by now.

Tuesday, December 26, 1944

A late Christmas present. Big bomber raid about a week ago. Bader says Elser (Eller?) was killed in the raid, but I don't see how, because they say he was in camp, not Munich. Maybe they just decided it was time to kill him. Elser was the guy who tried to kill Hitler two months after the war began.

The Germans got back into Belgium and, according to Radio Berlin, kicked the shit out of the Americans. That was another
Blitzkrieg
. Through the mountains. More German bullshit! It's
got
to be.

I write in my room. It is bitterly cold. There's only the little kerosene stove going up in their bedroom. Now Radio Berlin is saying “counterattack,
successful
counterattack.” The Allies are saying “heavy fighting, heavy fighting.” This would have been the Christmas every prisoner wanted, with liberation around the corner. Not now. Everyone's afraid the Germans have pulled another rabbit out of the hat, like the buzz bombs, that maybe they'll take back everything they've lost since June. Now we know where all those labor battalions went. Maybe Uhlmer will never come back, so it'll be just me and Lappus in the canteen, where what we have to sell isn't worth buying, not even with scrip.

The gas chamber that was being added to the crematorium is finished. Me and Bader slipped around the stacks of bodies with the help of one of the
Sonderkommandos
to see it. He was grumbling, because now there'd be more work to do and maybe not so many men to do it. The smell was a little bit more powerful than the stink of the dead lying all around; that wouldn't last. On the door, lettering read:

Zu:

Gaszeit:

Auf:

In:

Gas time:

Out:

Then a skull and crossbones and an arrow pointing to a handle. Under these was:

Versicht! Gas!

Lebensgefahr!

Nicht Offnen!

Danger! Gas!

Dangerous to life!

Don't open!

The place looked like a shower, with tiled floors and walls. Bader whispered, “So now a little bit fewer transports to Hartheim, eh?”

Tuesday, January 2, 1945

A few nights ago I heard a noise on the steps leading to my room. I knew it was Dieter Lange and I sat up to curse him out. He came through the door with a crash, carrying with him the rancid odors of sour sweat, bad breath, and liquor. He felt for me. I started to shout, and then there was a second of pain and nothing else. As soon as I woke I felt the pain in my face and I knew it was swollen. My pants had been torn off. My insides hurt so much I couldn't take a deep breath. The cocksucker had raped me.

I called him those things right to his face, yes, I did: you dirty, stinking, low-life sonofabitch, sneaky, no 'count German white trash, shiftless, chickenshit Kraut, pickle-sucking Nazi dummy, two-bit shitbag, motherfucking slimy …

Anna tried to shush me, but I told her to shut up.

You nasty, funky, trifling, shithead queer, dried-up old fruit, freak, sissy, you worn leather asshole …

I took his neck in my hands. Anna pulled at me and I shoved her away over the linoleum floor that was cracking with the cold. Dieter Lange was still drunk, his eyes half-closed. Slobber dribbled out of his mouth. He looked like he wanted me to kill him. What a start to the new year.

It wasn't any of my goddamn fault that his General Major and Colonel got caught in the big black market that covered Europe from Poland to France. The Munich paper was open on the kitchen table with their pictures in it. “That's them! That's them!” he'd cried when I staggered up the steps meaning to kill him, whatever else happened, just kill him deader than dead. And as he ran from room to room, me chasing him and trapping him in the kitchen, he said, “They're coming next for me!”

“You gonna be one dead Nazi when they find your ass!” I was throwing chairs and shoving the table, and I picked up the stove poker and swung at him with all my might. He jumped back out of the way and I hit a rack full of glasses that exploded into fragments. Anna screamed. “The Gestapo can have your stinking ass when I'm through with it, you pork-pushing, shit-packing punk!” He fell into a chair, and that's when I wrapped my hands around his neck. “Fuck me like I was some kind of pig …” I said, thinking how good it felt, having his neck in my hands, and in their embrace he tilted his head backward, as though to make more room for me to squeeze, but I hadn't started to do that yet.

Anna threw her arms around my waist and pulled, her feet making screeing and cracking noises on the broken glass. “But it's almost over, Cleef. Please, don't.”

That was true. The Americans had pushed the Germans back and were advancing, ready to cross the Rhine. I didn't stop because Anna asked me to; I stopped because she reminded me of what I already knew and because, if the Gestapo didn't come for Dieter Lange, if they stopped with the big shots—and everyone likes to hate big shots—then Dieter Lange would remain my ticket to survival. Not so if they got him—or I killed him. If he lived, I remained Dieter Lange's nigger; if not, I was a dead nigger. And with the Germans in retreat again—what the Poles called
Zirkus Plechovi
, the metal circus—the guards were scared, ready to kill, especially an American who didn't have a gun, like me, for example.

I stood a moment looking down at him, catching my breath. With a whimper, Anna tugged once more, as though she'd read my thoughts. I knew just then that whatever happened outside the house, no matter how Dieter Lange behaved toward me out there, or even Anna the rare times she went out, I, The Cliff, was the strongest person in that house. I drew back and slapped Dieter Lange out of his chair. “Bull rape me, will you? Because you're scared, you do that to me? Because your buddies got caught and you lose some money you knock me out and joog me like I was a corpse or something? What is
wrong
with you fucking people? Just how crazy are you, to make
everybody
in the world hate you? Come near me again …”

I told Anna to make me some coffee. She started, then paused over Dieter Lange. “Fuck him, bitch.
Coffee!
”

Sunday, January 28, 1945

I stared at Dieter Lange and Anna Lange last night when the
BBC
announced that the Russians had liberated Auschwitz and found—shit, what can I say? We'd heard the rumors for a long time and now knew them to be true. The Germans behaved as though they didn't have one single thing to do with Auschwitz, or even Dachau. I said, “Just wait till they find all the other camps.” Then they looked at me like they were seeing me for only the first or second time. Slowly, fear climbed up in their eyes. I watched it, thought of the way death, the cruelest kinds of death, and sex, the more unusual the better, seemed always to go together with people like the ones I was staring at. It was a luxury brought only by the prospect of Germany being ground under, thinking like that. I had lived in the middle of it for almost a dozen years, heard about the edges of it every day, and yet only news that this place was done for allowed me to think of how big and how evil it all was, the kind of evil they couldn't begin to imagine when preachers talked about it in church.