Clifford's Blues (44 page)

As I was lighting it the pilot asked, “What kind of camp is this? Are you an American? What outfit were you in? What do they want? I'm a prisoner of war, you know, and an officer.”

I said, “I know. Are you all right? Not hurt or anything from the parachute jump?”

“No. I'm okay,” the pilot said.

“They want to know who you are,” I said. Captain Baugh smiled approvingly.

“Captain Homer Harrison, Jr., serial number 628-93-47, Protestant. Blood type, O. That's it, mister, name, rank, and serial number. That's more than I'm required to give these cats. Who are you?”

Captain Baugh approached holding out his hand. “Captain Harrison.”

The pilot, suspicious, shook Baugh's hand briefly, then turned back to me.

“Clifford Pepperidge, from New York,” I said. “I'm not a soldier, I'm a prisoner.”

“What's that you're saying?” the captain asked loudly, moving toward us.

“I just told him I wasn't a soldier.” The translator verified this with a nod.

The young Negro pilot and I stared at each other. He said again, this time to the captain, “What kind of camp
is
this?”

The translator spoke rapidly to the captain. “Tell him it is a camp for criminals,” the captain said. Everyone stared at the pilot.

“Criminals?” the pilot said, looking at me. I didn't answer.

Then another officer leaned forward and spoke in German, “Where are you flying from? Since when does the American air force have black pilots?”

The translator spoke.

Harrison shook his head. “I told you,” he said. “Name, rank, and serial number. Blood type and religion were free. That's it. Nothing more.” To me he said, like they weren't in the room, “Where are we? How close to or far from Munich?”

“Dachau,” I said.

“How far from Munich?”

“About fifteen miles.”

“What does he say? What did you say, Pepper-ah?” the captain asked before the translator could speak.

“He wanted to know where he was and how far from Munich.” While they were talking, coming up with the next questions, I said to the pilot, “This is a concentration camp.” I saw that meant nothing to him.

“Why are there so many dead people just laying around? I saw them. Are those cemeteries out there where I came down?”

I said, “Yes.”

The translator rolled his eyes.

“What does he say?” Captain Baugh asked.

“Make way,” someone in the rear of the room said, and the bodies moved apart while an
SS
man leaned forward with a bottle of cognac, a glass, and a sandwich. The pilot looked at me. I looked at the captain, who nodded, and said, “Let him eat and have a drink. The Luftwaffe people will be here to take him to an officer's prisoner of war camp. I think they'll want to know just how he shot down one of our best planes. He doesn't have to be frightened. The war's almost over. Remind him he was treated well in Dachau and that Captain Hans Baugh was his interrogation officer.” The captain winked at me. “You understand.”

“Can I talk with him, Captain?”

“Why?” Captain Baugh seemed to be tired and resigned. “What about?”

“Because he's a colored man,” I said, because there really wasn't another reason.

“I think not. He doesn't need to know anything more about this place and I think you would tell him, no?”

I didn't answer. “But can I stay until they come for him?”

“No. He'll be all right, and even if that was not to be the case, it'd do no good your being here. That's all.” He told the sergeant who'd brought me to take me back.

The pilot was eating the sandwich and drinking, his eyes jumping from me to the captain. “What's all this about?” he asked.

“The German air force people are coming to talk to you about shooting down that plane—”

“That
ME
262?” His face broke into a great, beautiful smile. “You saw that? Messed
up
that cat, man. Another jet kill—”

The captain interrupted. “What's he talking about now?”

There was a look of wonder on the translator's face as he said, “About the plane he shot down. He shot down one before.”

A growl came from the men in the room.

To Harrison I said, “They won't let me stay with you till they come, so good luck. Uh—when will it be over?”

He looked sharply at me as though I'd turned suddenly into a spy. He drank and held my eyes and took a deep breath. “Okay. Aybemay ootay, eethray eeksway. Orefay at eethay ostmay. Ancay ooyay akeitmay?”

“Esyay,” I said. I didn't know I looked that bad, but I nodded and held out my hand. He shook it, then the sergeant took me away.

The Langes were waiting up for me with a piece of sausage and a big glass of schnapps. I told them all about it, answered what questions I could, even the one about when it would be over, and I laughed at them. I felt like Gabriel warming up on his horn. But I wasn't feeling so good. Had they poisoned me with the schnapps? I drifted downstairs and pulled the blanket over me and curled up. Just tired, I told myself. You hold yourself together for a thousand years with threads and strings of hope, and when somebody who should know tells you it's going to be all right soon, maybe the strings start breaking, pop, pop, pop.

Thursday, April 19, 1945

Yesterday in broad daylight, they made General Delestraint take off the uniform he insisted on wearing and shot him dead. On the 'Strasse near the Appellplatz. He thought … I don't know what he thought. But the Family and the International Committee, which have become Resistance Committees, or some jokers who belong to one or the other, or maybe both, say he was told he was going to have a shower and then join the honor prisoners in their Bunker. He must have known that was bullshit, if that's what they told him.

He was a rigid, proud little man. He once told me in the canteen when he wanted a pack of Bleus (which of course we didn't have), that the best soldiers he ever commanded were Senegalese during the Great War. (“They had no illusions. They knew they were in France to die for France.”) Thing is, after the
SS
shot him, they left his body there in the dirt for a couple of hours before they took it away.

I haven't been in camp since then. It's getting dangerous, and I still am not well. Neff tells me to get out and stay out because it looks like we've got typhus going around again. The
SS
and their camp police are like kids who must have a last taste of candy, except in this case, it's not candy, but killing; they can't seem to stop. “Let the
Kuhtreiber
come,” they say. “We'll show them the wild west. Bang! Bang! And we don't have to worry about Rosenvelt anymore since he died last week.” Roosevelt was a president I never even knew much about.

The prisoners are mainly confined to the blocks. There are too many of them for the
SS
to guard outside, with the few men they have left. And the
SS
are afraid of large details because some
SS
have been murdered. I think of a can of meat left too long in the sun, the way it can swell and then explode.

The airplanes with the red tails—how wonderful yet sad they make me feel, because I don't know what happened to Captain Harrison—fly over almost every day now. It's like being greeted by a neighbor from down the street or Loa Aizan looking things over.

Every prisoner with any sense knows, or thinks he knows, that the camps have been liberated in Poland, that Bergen-Belsen is free, and that Buchenwald was liberated ten days ago. The 3,000 prisoners the
SS
was trying not to be caught with there are all dead on the siding just outside the east wall of
this
camp, stinking like hell in the fifty boxcars that brought them here, says Bader. Bader's people do the count. Bader is busy these days, keeping peace and getting some kind of final tally on who is dead and who is alive, block by block. Resistance group people (who announce themselves as such) are coming out of the woodwork now. What or how Werner fits in, I do not know and don't care too much to know. Prisoners who have lived for months in holes beneath the blocks or in the eaves of the blocks have crept out.

Tuesday, April 24, 1945

Oh, Captain Harrison, your two weeks are up; now we have to work on the next two. Damn!

Nuremberg, Hessenthal, and a dozen camps to the north, including Flossenburg, have been liberated. Next stop, Berlin, where the Russians already are. The news comes in static bursts over the radio. Anna sits blubbering, her legs swollen, her feet puffing out of her shoes. Dieter Lange is in and out. “Yes, it's typhus,” he announces. “No point running to your father's farm,” he shouts at Anna. “The Americans will be there in another day or so, if not already.” She cries and holds out her arms to him. He spits.

The compound seems empty. No flower beds turned. Few cars and trucks. Few people out under the gray April sky that often opens and lets loose rain. I think at night the mothers and children go, in trucks if they can, on foot if they can't, hoping to get into the town and from there as far away from this place as possible.

We don't sleep, we doze in chairs, coming awake in the night when a truck or car glides down the street with slitted blackout lights. Alarms go on and off, crying down the night like children lost in the darkness. Even in the house, the smell of burning flesh invades through the cracks, and I think of the bodies that have been thrown every whichaway, like store dummies. Nobody cares. Nobody moves them. They are just there, from one end of the camp into the compound.

We have been hearing guns a long way off, soft as though they meant us no harm. Last night they seemed closer, a little louder, a lot meaner. Dieter Lange has been running back and forth to the
Jourhaus
for orders and news. Like the way he was in the old days, cutting a deal here, a hustle there. Evacuation orders, he says, are coming. The camp will be destroyed.

“What do you mean, ‘destroyed'?” I say. “How can you destroy the camp?”

He does not answer. He tries to look wise, like only he knows the secret.

Anna says it. “You mean
kill
all the prisoners, leave 30,000 bodies for the Americans to find? Is Commandant Aumeier crazy?”

Dieter Lange shrugs. “I have nothing to do with these things. I run the canteens, and that is all. You know that is all I've ever done.”

I laugh and nibble at my boiled potato. The house is silent and cold. No sense listening to the radio. I don't know about Dieter Lange and Anna, but I can almost see them coming, red tails blazing in the sun, tromping through German farms and along German roads. Out in the street the
SS
, the old men in and out of uniform, the kids, and the wounded troop by for the changing of the guard, singing the sad “Lili Marlene.” What must the prisoners be thinking to be still singing in the camp?

Saturday, April 28, 1945

It's hard to find paper. They're cleaning out everything in the camp, the compound, the factories. Everywhere. And running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Burning records. Every day there are fewer guards; they just seem to vanish. Probably burned their uniforms and slipped away in civilian clothes, which are priceless now. You'd think they were made of gold. They aren't even trying to feed the prisoners in the camp, Dieter Lange reports. They have to do for themselves for food—buy it, steal it, take it from somebody else. Bodies are stacked up beside the moat, in the 'Platz, in the 'Strasse, along the outside walls of the crematorium, and just inside and outside the electric fence. The
SS
officers' wives have all gone, some west to Augsburg to surrender to the Americans, and others south to avoid both the Russians and the Americans.

Americans
. Will they be black or white or mixed up? I don't think mixed. Will white American soldiers look after me the way Negro ones would? And if they don't, what do I do? Great God Almighty, what if nothing's changed? C'mon, Cliff, whatever else has changed, you know
that
ain't changed. The whole world is looking for Americans to save them, and I don't know that they will.

I am going south with Anna tomorrow. Dieter Lange has arranged for us to go with a women's group. We won't have much food; two boiled potatoes each. Going may be safer than staying around here because there are supposed to be committees in the camp with arms to stop the guards from killing off the prisoners. That will start a war. The
SS
wants to empty the camp or leave corpses so the Americans can't know what they really did to us. Dieter Lange thinks the guards are crazy to want to kill more prisoners now, but it doesn't matter to him, he says. Of course it doesn't. He'll be gone. He's got money, civilian clothes, and papers, and he's not taking Anna, and certainly not me. Anna's on her own. She knows and Dieter Lange knows that I'll leave her as soon as I can. She's so weak she can hardly walk. We'll make a good couple for a little while. Me shuffling because of the infection, and her hobbling like some baby elephant. We'll go with the third group of women prisoners. She should keep her mouth shut and stay with the prisoners, Dieter Lange says, shaking his finger in her face. She's been crying and pleading with him, saying she can't walk all the way to Allach. There are no vehicles, Dieter Lange tells her, and besides, Cleef will look after you. Cleef is not my husband, she cries, and he shouts maybe he's not, but he's fucked you often enough. I think, why now? Who cares now who she's fucked or been fucked by? I am mad at Dieter Lange and I wish I was well enough to kill him. Look at him! Thin as a piece of old wire, his face wrinkled and worried and stubbled with a dirty gray beard, his muddy blue eyes sliding back and forth from her to me and to the window …

Yet if not for Dieter Lange, I would be dead, like those other colored men, the Africans from the Cameroons, the
Mischlings
, like those thousands and thousands of Reds, Russians, Jews, Gypsies, Witnesses, like all those thousands who were in the way. I needed him like God needs the Devil, like Loa Aizan needs Loa Baron Samedi. I would not rather have died. So we used each other, Dieter Lange and me. He liked tight places and a chocolate lollipop and jazz music. I liked living, being alive, and I lived better than the prisoners in the camp and sometimes better than those who worked out here. He could have taken my life as easily as he took me, even if he feared the consequences. If I was made into something less than human, I lived. If he gave me syphilis, I lived. If he enjoyed my humiliation and suffering, I lived. Living is everything. Death is shit. Death is smoke going up the chimney without one single note of sorrow being played or sung to mark your passing. Death in Dachau is rotting in the swamps, flying to the electric fence, bleeding from broken, beaten bones in the Bunker, being mauled by the dogs, shot by the
SS
, drowned by them, hung by them, beheaded by them, starved by them. And then they pull your gold-filled teeth before they burn you and spread your crushed bones and ashes over the Appellplatz or use them as fertilizer for flowers. In Dachau, death is escape, they always said, and maybe it is. I don't know. Life will keep me walking until I find the Americans, but I have to rest now. I'm not a youngster anymore, and I don't know how far we'll have to walk. I hope it stops raining.