Monday, June 7, 1937

The summer uniforms feel good, but tuxedos feel even better, like you’re somebody, not a prisoner. The guys in the band have a feel for each other now. Moritz and Fritz and me sometimes play some of their stuff. I struggle on the piano (I’m reading more now because of them) with stuff like Beethoven’s Concerto for Piano and Violin and Brahms’s Violin Concerto, which is mainly for Moritz. If I lose my way they just go on ahead without me, hearing a piano where there should be one until I catch up or plain drop out. Mostly they like the Brahms Double Concerto for Violin and Cello. I’ve heard Moritz many times off in a closet of The Nest playing his favorites, Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, Vivaldi’s Concerto in D Minor, and Mozart’s Fifth Violin Concerto. And he’ll go on as long as he can with violin sections from a lot of Bach.

Sometimes Teodor’s in another room running through Haydn, Vivaldi, and Purcell. The first time I heard him he stopped to explain that Bach had a guy named Gottfried Reiche playing trumpet for him, and Handel had Valentine Snow, and Henry Purcell had John Shore. “Now,” he said, “Cliff Pepperidge has his Teodor Loeb—with a French horn.” He waved up his circle of brass and valves and grinned. This guy Haydn also did a lot of things for cello, so many times Fritz sits in with Teodor and then does “Clouds” and “Festivals” from Debussy. They say they’re jamming when they play Berlioz’s “Roman Carnival,” because it’s fast.

Then there’s Ernst; I know he prefers the flute to his clarinet, and he woodsheds with Bach, too—Sonata in A Minor and Sonata in C Major. Thing that gets me about their music is that if you put down the right time to it, it can swing, which is exactly what my colonel once said. Seems like two thousand years since I knew him. Lord, how long? Maybe once I start writing and hearing from Willy Lewis on a regular basis, who knows what might happen? Who knows? All this made me think of Sam. Long gone by now, with his guitar, without looking back once, and I don’t blame him. I hope his whole family, if he had one, got the hell outa here. The Germans are death on Jews, the way Americans are death on Negroes. I really don’t understand that shit, but I know I can’t like it, don’t like it. I just wish I had the geetz, the gelt, the money, that Sam was able to come up with. I hope he can do another book, like Beimler, tell about Dachau, get us out of this place. But, you know, mostly, when a joker’s got his, it turns out he’s not too worried about anybody else.

It’s Eric Ulrich, though, who intrigues us the most. When he sets up we don’t have no time to worry about no Sam or anything else. The music is all. Did he really play with those jokers? We can understand that he’s gotta be careful. He don’t say shit but see you tomorrow or next week. Then gone. Then back again. Last Friday I thought I’d put some questions to him. I mean, who the fuck he think he is, just slipping in and pulling up a chair? Didn’t nobody invite him to sit in. Sure, Bernhardt probably told him it was okay, if he was careful, but Bernhardt’s probably already got some kind of bag to put Ulrich in by now. Like I got Baum.

So here he comes. I saw him. But I just took myself another sandwich in the kitchen and let him wait out there. Of course, when I went out and found him sitting on the stand, I pretended to be surprised. All right. I sat down and ran up and down the keyboard and he ran up and down his stops. Franz sneaked up and settled his cheeks. Danko just sort of floated up beside the drums. Oskar and Alex grabbed their Hohners, and Ernst and Teodor sidled up a respectful distance from the Oberleutnant. Moritz stayed in the kitchen with Fritz. I never said what I’d be playing because I didn’t know myself until I was already into the intro. Friday it was “The Man I Love.” I played that intro like a lawyer laying out his case, slow and serious, heavy on the chords to let the Oberleutnant know they were questions I wanted answers to. In the dim house lights—Ulrich never sat directly under lights—I saw from the corner of my eyes (it’s not only in Dachau where some things are better seen from the corners) his head turn toward me, his bright hair, like new hay tossed in going-down sun, sparkling as he moved. I finished the melody, statement, and questions, and started a series of ad-libs. The first was “What’s Your Story, Morning Glory?” How come you play like you know the lyrics, the kinda poetry in the words some of you jokers don’t even know are there? And if you are the greatest thing since fried chitlins because you played with Duke, Chick, and Jimmy, how come you wearing that Nazi shit, and how come you can’t understand my—and here I gave him some melody from “Mood Indigo”—? And I kept playing, finding melodies within crazy long lines of improvisation, losing everyone on the changes but Danko, throwing him “They Didn’t Believe Me,” “Body and Soul,” “You Rascal You,” “I Ain’t Got Nobody.”

Even with all the Chinese—the band trying to find the changes—I heard Eric Ulrich’s feet slide into a wider position. His lips went funny into a little smile when he inhaled around his mouthpiece. Right in between Danko’s beat he blew very quickly the seven notes that intro “I Cover the Waterfront,” then back into the melody of “The Man I Love.” But before he finished that, I thought I heard (and I looked around quick to see if anyone else thought he heard, too), “Deutschland, Deutschland, Über Alles,” played hard like running over stones, and cynical and made-fun-of, the way some of those Masters of Ceremonies sometimes introduced acts in Berlin: daaa-daaa, dee-dee, dum da do-do. I thought I even heard a goose step in there. But before anybody could know for sure, he found a spot to fit in “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans.” He loved jazz and where it came from and how it made him feel. He hit some notes that were solid and on time (da da da-da da, ba tha ba da-ba da) … “I can’t believe it, it’s hard to conceive it …”

Danko swiveled his head from me to the Oberleutnant and back; he scowled at the others, What’s going on? I know he didn’t get any answers. Franz was whisking those brushes around so soft that I knew he didn’t want to miss any answer that might come. It was just me and Ulrich. In phrases that just ran beside the melody (and I knew he was searching), he found the reprise of “My Buddy.” “Buddy” my behind, I thought, and threw him “I’ll Never Be the Same.” He got to his feet and planted them, and damned if he didn’t cut the rhythm right in half to play um humm-humm da da da-da da dummmmm, um humm-humm da da da-da da dummmmm … “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen, Nobody Knows My Sorrows.” I led him back to “The Man I Love” and gave everybody time to get in, and we closed out. The Oberleutnant sat back down waiting for the next number. Everyone else sort of shuffled around trying not to look at each other. We had been doing some good things with “Tea,” so we worked out on that and then “Honeysuckle Rose.” Never forget that session. With the exception of Teodor soloing on “I Can’t Get Started With You,” me on the vocal, of course, the sets didn’t go so hot that night, not that anyone but us knew it, because we were all thinking of Ulrich getting to his feet and the way he played and what he played. Everybody in the band knew I knew what he was saying, but they knew better than to ask. Maybe Bernhardt did notice. He thought we should add a conga and a rhumba to our repertoire.

Wednesday, June 30, 1937

Dieter Lange isn’t fooling me. He’s spooked because Himmler said not long ago that SS men caught in homosexual acts should be “shot while trying to escape.” But he also said that actors and other artists who were caught plugging the hole or anything like that could not be arrested unless he approved. I been peeking at Anna; she sure doesn’t look like she’s anywhere near pregnant. I thought that last edict would have scared her and Dieter Lange into making a baby, but maybe they can’t. And, even if she did get pregnant, dime to a dollar it wouldn’t be Dieter Lange’s kid. Hell, I know she’s not pregnant.

I’ve managed to keep him off me a few times just by saying, “Shhh! What’s that noise?” Or, “Listen—is that Anna?” There are always those times, though, when, whatever happens, I have to get mine, too, and there’s no one else but him to give it to me. Yeah, he’s scared. But he’s been scared before.

Wrote this long letter to Willy Lewis telling him how much I cost and did he know people who could help get me out without the money, maybe because they got connections. Told him not to send anything because I wanted to keep the mail simple and not suspicious, and that he should send his letters to the woman whose return address is on the envelope. She would see I got his letters. Gave the letter to Baum in time for his wife’s visit. He told me she was nervous, but he’d told her if she didn’t take care of the letter, the answer, and other letters that would be going out and coming in, they’d bury him under Dachau. She just had to do it, he told her, and the less she knew why, the better off she’d be.

The new crematorium is finished.

We put in the conga and the rhumba. Then we threw the rhumba out, but kept the conga—da-da da-da doomp da, da-da da-da doomp da. (“Am-per Riv-er Con-ga!” “Am-per Riv-er Conga!”) We got some maracas and gave them to Fritz. He found a sassy line inside the rhythm, and the conga line formed at least twice each set. I made up lyrics in my head, like the “Amper River Conga” and (also in my head) “Shake Yo Booo-ty This Way, Shake Yo Booo-ty That Way.” Or, “Girl You Got Some Big Ones, How You Get Such Big Ones?” Or, “Hit-ler Is a Fag-got, What a Big Mouth Fag-got.” New words came whenever we did a conga. It got to be fun. I was explaining the conga to Dr. Nyassa. When I finished, he said, “They do the same dance in Western Africa, only they call it the “High Life.” Africans carried the dance to South America when they were made slaves.” He laughed. “And look at the supermen and super-women, the Aryans, dancing,” he said growling, “like niggers.”

Friday, July 9, 1937

It’s a hot bright day and it’s quiet in the canteen where I’m writing today. Found myself a hiding place for you under the floorboards in the back room where we keep most of the stock. It gets very, very hot in here. There are no side windows, just front and back, and when they’re open all the dust from the work that’s always going on drifts in and settles everywhere—even under the floorboards. Outside: singing, running, marching, working, the loudspeaker, sometimes, and the dogs snapping at prisoners, right along with the guards.

The only time we hear the radio over here is when the big shots speak, but in Dieter Lange’s house we listen to it just about every night. Goebbels, Hitler, this one, that one, some news of the fighting in Spain, a lot on how great Germany and the Germans are. The news about Martin Niemoeller being arrested and brought to Dachau was never broadcast. Werner told me. This man was captain of a submarine during the war and was pastor of the Protestant Free Church in Berlin. An anti-Hitlerite. Werner doesn’t think he’ll be here long. This is just to teach him a lesson. And if he doesn’t shut up when he gets out …

Dieter Lange has everything set for the opening of Buchenwald on the 16th. He hates the work he has to do when a new camp is opened, but he likes the money he can rake off. And he and Anna have lots of that now, which is another reason why, whatever happens, they have to stick together. I even know where they hide the lock-box.

Baum should be due at any minute, so I’ve got to end this and gather the other sheets I sometimes have to leave here, and get over to Dieter Lange’s. As usual, there’ll be a session with Ulrich and two sets at The Nest tonight.

Tuesday, July 13, 1937

As soon as I came in the door last Friday, Anna called me from upstairs. She sounded high. “Cleef, Cleef! Kommen sie hier!” Something told me this was going to be trouble. “Dieter is in Munich, and it is two hours before the truck picks you up. Come!” she hollered. She would listen to no excuses. I wondered why she didn’t come to the head of the stairs at least. I wasn’t too happy walking upstairs. She had her head stuck out of her bedroom door, and it seemed to me, since I couldn’t see any collar around her thick neck, that she might not have anything on. I stopped and said I was not feeling good and that I should rest before the truck came, but she kept saying, “Come on, come on,” signaling with her finger. I asked what she wanted. “Come here,” she said, “just come here.”

I said, “But I’m afraid.” And I was. Now I was close and she took my hand (I could see by her bare shoulders that she wasn’t wearing clothes, at least not on top) and pulled me into the room she shared with Dieter Lange. I tried not to look at all that heavy white flesh and so looked elsewhere in the room and damned if Ursula Winkelmann wasn’t laying there without so much as a button on. She smiled and held out her arms. Anna pushed me down to the bed and followed me there. “Frau Lange—” I started to say, but she shushed me.

“You remember our visit downstairs?” Ursula said. “When you were sick?”

I told her I didn’t. They laughed. Anna began undoing the buttons on my clothes. She pressed hard on my skin and slid her hand over it. Ursula was at my shoes. I felt like I would throw up. “There,” Anna said when they were finished. “Lie here between us.” I was barely able to control my heaving stomach, but I knew I couldn’t get up and run out; I knew what they could do and say. No different than back home, and they knew it.

First Anna kissed me with her thick lips and heavy tongue, and she was waiting for me to give her mine. Then Ursula, humping her high behind, wanted a kiss, too. So there I was, flat on my back while they crawled over me like bugs, panting and slobbering and grabbing my piece and jacking it up and down, first one, then the other, and then without a word, just all this breathing and sighing, took turns on the clarinet until I thought it would turn into a bar of steel. Then they shifted around on the bed, snatching and pulling at each other and me until Ursula was flat on her back and Anna was flat on her stomach, crawling right up into her with her mouth, while Ursula jacked me and thrashed around, legs flying, spit spattering, “Mein Gott! Mein Gott!” until she took one great breath and then, shuddering, let it out. Quick as a flash, Anna twisted over and Ursula was on top, burrowing between those heavy thighs. Now Anna was jacking and muttering, mumbling, licking, sucking. I thought to grab my clothes and leave, but Anna really had me, and the closer she was to coming, the harder she squeezed as she jacked. I kept looking at Ursula’s behind, the sassy way it curved up and out. (There’d been times when I thought mine looked like that.) I unloosened Anna’s hand and I felt her tense. She looked at me, her eyes glazed. But I got up on my knees and moved around behind Ursula. She felt me coming and raised herself up high. Anna was like some heifer now with all her racket and bouncing around. I pushed my hips forward, brought up the clarinet, fiddled (I’d never done this), found the place and ran it in as Ursula tightened like I’d nailed her to a board. But she never left off what she was doing and she was about to come again, which she did as she forced her butt as far back on the stick as it’d go. After that round we had to have another, but the clarinet had to play Anna. When they finally let me go I went downstairs and threw up.

All my life white women had been like bad voodoo; you simply didn’t have anything to do with them, not even if you worked at a hotel where they were hooking and asked you to bring a bottle of hooch into a room where they were with a “client.” You didn’t look, or if you did, you made sure nobody was watching you. It was different with white men; you were a man and so were they, and so it didn’t seem to matter if both of you were freaks. But this business with Anna and Ursula was like all of us shuffling toward the end of the world, and since we were on our way, nothing mattered. I didn’t understand why they felt like that more than I did. Maybe it was the camp, where so many things went on that nobody gave a damn about, and if nobody cared who was missing, who drowned in shit, whose arms got pulled out of their sockets on the pole, whose head got smashed in the quarry, why would anybody care what a couple of SS wives were doing with each other? But they would care if they knew I was with them, jooging them as they tongue-whipped each other. I wasn’t shuffling toward the end of the world; I was being dragged there. I knew that because I was scared about the fix I was in, so scared that I was shaking. I hated them and myself. Them because they had the absolute power to do anything they wanted; myself because I couldn’t do anything about it. I threw up again and got ready for the truck that was coming for the afternoon and night at The Nest.

Thursday, July 29, 1937

Everybody wondered about that new building put up behind the Wirtschaftsgebaude, at the south end of the camp. It’s the place for the civilian “Prominents,” the “Honored,” and so they call it the “Honor Bunker.” It’s where they put Niemoeller, according to Hohenberg, and it will be the “Ritz Dachau” for other big shots who are yet to come, Werner says. (Werner has started taking trips down to the Puff, and so has Dr. Nyassa, who is popular with the farm girls who sneak in to work there. A colored doctor of anything must be pretty exotic, and besides, he can get the medicine to cure whatever ails them.)

Baum gave me a letter from Willy Lewis yesterday, and how good that felt! After all this time! That goddamn Dieter Lange! This’ll show up his little red wagon. In my letter I had explained how I got here and how I was the houseboy for that German drunk who first told him about me. I also told Willy about the band, and asked if he’d ever heard of this Eric Ulrich. As I imagined, the question of the money is absolutely out. Willy said he would write to the union in New York, but that probably wouldn’t help since he wasn’t a member and neither was I. He does not have an address for Mr. Wooding but is trying to get the address for the Moe Gale Agency because they might know how to get in touch with him. He was surprised that I got picked up for “funny business,” since people in Europe don’t seem to get excited about that kind of thing. He hadn’t heard that Germany was getting snotty about it, because lots of Germans who come to Holland are quite open about the way they are. Maybe, he wrote, they come because things have changed in Germany. No, he hadn’t heard of Ulrich, but he’d been away a long time, too. Being a houseboy and leading a band didn’t sound as bad as it could be. But prison is prison and he understood my wanting to get out. Couldn’t he visit and bring something, even if he wasn’t a relative? Couldn’t something be worked out? In the meantime, he would write to anyone he thought might help get me out. He was also sending letters to the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Afro-American. There was a 100-mark note in the letter.

Reading Willy’s letter was like opening a door on the first warm spring day to air out a house that had been closed tight all winter. I cried when I finished reading it, not because of the hole I was in, but because I’d managed to reach through almost five years and get someone to respond. Remembering Willy and his alto sax, he seemed more like Gabriel with his trumpet, not on Judgment Day but Jubilee Day. I prayed there in the back room of the canteen. Hadn’t done that in a long time because there didn’t seem to be Anybody or Anything to explain my situation to. I asked the Lord to forgive me. He knew the things I’d done I had to do. And some of the people I did them with were supposed to be real Christians. Christians, yeah, but as far as I knew, it was Christians who were running this part of the world. I prayed anyway, including to a Loa for good measure, and I gave thanks for reaching Willy.

Werner’s “people”—they were teachers, doctors, lawyers, clerks, scientists, reporters, plumbers, carpenters, toolmakers, masons, bricklayers, labor leaders, officeholders, writers, students, musicians, painters, and the like—are worried about what’s going on in Austria. Some of their friends have been killed by Austrian fascists. Over four years ago 1,000 were killed and 3,000 wounded when the workers’ buildings in Vienna were shelled. That was during my first year here, and my thoughts were mostly about myself. Being with Werner is like being with a teacher.

The Europe he talks about isn’t the same one I knew when I was a free man. He thinks Britain and France should stand up to Hitler and Mussolini—especially Hitler—but bets they won’t. In the meantime, he said, you can see for yourself what’s going on in Germany: new roads, new air corps, new ships for the navy, adventures (he calls them) in Alsace and Spain, and talks with the Japanese that have to end in a treaty; conscription, concentration camps—these started with the British in the Boer War, he told me, in Africa, but they sure didn’t stay there, and when these in Germany are finished, there’ll be camps elsewhere, because people are stupid and their leaders lie.

“Give the people other people they can be better than,” he said, “and they’ll be happy. Make Communists and Jews ‘bad Germans,’ and the people will certainly hate them because it’ll be legal to do so.” He said the leaders change the laws so people they don’t like will be outside them—the way it is for colored people in America—then they are not only outside the law, they are no longer citizens of the nation that made the law that put them outside it. So they have no citizenship. They are stateless persons, not covered by law, and are Dreck, Scheiss.

“You can do whatever you wish with words like ‘citizen’ and ‘national’ because in Germany they don’t have to mean the same thing.” He said the Americans had done it during slavery and after, and the Russians had done pretty much the same thing after their revolution. “The Germans just picked it up, and you can bet your last pfennig the method will be used again. And again.”

Werner’s talks always left me feeling blue, like the future was going to be just as bad as it is right now. But I’d get over the feeling after a while; now his words just hung around, like mist from the swamp.

Monday, August 20, 1937

A band can only play well if the musicians come together as one while allowing a single player to take a solo and run. But he must return home, be welcomed back, and then let another take the trip and come home. Sort of like sending a child away to grow up by improvising his way through a life he knows he can always return to—the melody. I’d never played with white musicians before, never wanted to. Training’s different and so are the experiences we put into our music. Few white musicians can describe pain or joy in their music, or at least not the kind of pain or joy Negro musicians know. That’s the mystery, I guess. They want to know about it, not live it. In Dachau all that changes. Fear gets to be a kind of pain you have to live with—everybody, all the time.

On Fridays and Saturdays it’s different for us musicians; we get to do what we love, even with the restrictions on what and how we can play, even with the instruments we’re stuck with. Every weekend I thank God for Bernhardt, and also for Dieter Lange, because it was through him that Bernhardt got to know my music. My life here could have been a shit storm like so many other prisoners’. Instead, I’ve played music, learned to read music (a little), learned to appreciate the violin and what it can do through Moritz (who doesn’t seem so moody anymore, maybe because—I think—he’s got a friend, another prisoner who works at The Nest). Moritz is almost funny now, sometimes. And Fritz has stopped apologizing for everything. Ernst doesn’t look so evil anymore, and he’s found that he can do things with both the flute and clarinet he never thought of before. Oskar and Alex have learned when to go and when not to on their instruments. They’re blending in very well now and both do sweet little solos, with a French atmosphere that everyone seems to like. They’ve also both found girlfriends from among the maids that work in the Pussy Palace, and when they don’t take the time to eat before rehearsal, I figure they’re knocking off a quickie. Teodor is more than confident; sometimes he’s so arrogant (that’s when he makes lots of mistakes, thinking that French horn can do everything a trumpet can) I have to sit on him. “Little Django,” Danko, has the kind of personality everyone likes. He’s only nineteen, and if he ever gets out of here, he’s got a great future. About Franz, I don’t know; he’s more showman than musician, and his set isn’t complete. I guess he does the best he can. He just can’t seem to learn that there are times when the drums should be seen and just barely heard. There are rhythms still to be explored, but he’s not too interested. Timing, phrasing, knowing what the other guy’s going to do, have made us a band.

Right now, I don’t think anyone even gives a thought anymore to trying to escape on the truck rides to and from The Nest. The jokers in the band even walk different than when we first got together. Compared to the average Haftling, they too are “prominent,” even if they are inside the walls. Things seem swell, copasetic. This is a good life by Dachau standards, but it’s not a free life. Things can change at any moment.

Speaking of escape, Werner was right. Niemoeller wasn’t held very long. He’s out. Maybe there is power enough out there to make the Nazis think twice.

The Winkelmanns have moved into a new house on a street where other new houses have been built for the SS who are married and have families. Ursula has been so busy getting settled that she hasn’t been over; instead, Anna visits her. It’s nice and quiet around the house when she and Dieter Lange are gone. The SS has been expanded again, I guess because the increase in prisoners means more guards. In place of the rickety wooden watchtowers, new concrete ones have been built into the walls. There are six: two at the south end, two on the east side, one on the north wall, and one on the west wall. The top of the Jourhaus, also on the west, serves as still another watchtower. There are armed guards in these all day and all night.

Just inside the wall is the electrified fence, and inside it, a few feet of earth with grass. Then the moat they’re finishing up; that will be about four feet deep and eight feet wide. On this side of it there is more earth. Nobody is supposed to be on that. Inside the second strip is where the camp streets begin. Thirty-four barracks, seventeen on each side of the Lagerstrasse, the main street, and spread across the front of them is the roll-call square, the Appellplatz.

To the west of the camp, where the little Amper River forms another moat, are the restored factory buildings and, beyond them, the married SS compound where I live with Dieter Lange and Anna. Inside the walls at the north end are gardens and a greenhouse and the disinfection hut. Northwest, outside the walls, is the crematorium. The SS rifle range, the swamps, and the quarry are all outside the north walls, and beyond the walls, north and east, are the farmlands that many prisoners work for the neighboring farmers. I never heard of a southern plantation during slavery that was run more efficiently.

Annaliese has found a place in SS society, I think. She impressed Ursula with her English, but that done, thank God, she doesn’t seem to have much interest in it anymore. In fact, the bitch surprises me when she comes up with some English. Now, that’s a burden, knowing about her and Ursula, but they carry it off okay. I don’t think Dieter Lange would care if he knew. I don’t know Captain Winkelmann that well. Maybe he’d care and maybe he wouldn’t. But I know something Dieter Lange doesn’t, and that’s like having lead in the bank, because I can’t cash it anywhere.

Wed., January 5, 1938

I have been busy and lazy, and it’s already the New Year. I guess I have to catch up—except there’s nothing much to catch up on. I’ve written three letters to Willy and got three answers. Baum’s wife seems to be getting used to the arrangement. Whenever Baum gives me a letter, I slip him a few packs of cigarettes so he can carry on trades, get those little extras they don’t allow you to have. But I invoice them as “missing,” so there’s a big chunk of inventory in cigarettes unaccounted for. Baum doesn’t know that if he messes up, I’ll just hand the list over to Dieter Lange, tell him Baum (and the guards) took them, and it’ll be Baum’s plump round behind. Of course, I’ll say nothing about my own nest egg under the floorboards—cigarettes, candy, canned fruits, and meat. For a rainy day.

Willy once suggested that he write directly to the camp commandant requesting my release. When I wrote back, I told him it would be better if someone representing an organization did that, but through offices in Berlin, otherwise these brutes could make me vanish. (A prisoner name of Kurt Schumacher had the woman he’s engaged to, an American from Chicago, write directly to Hitler. Schumacher’s a Red, a newspaperman, and was a Social Democrat M.P. They liked to have beat his ass to death and put it under Dachau!) Willy has already written to Downbeat and the NAACP and the colored papers, but hasn’t heard anything from them yet. It’s so frustrating! He could get things we need for the band, but if he sent them to Frau Baum … So, I mostly tell him what life is like here, my routine, the band. He writes about Amsterdam or Paris or London or Copenhagen where he goes to play, and how most people don’t even know about camps like Dachau. Willy says there’s a lot of war talk, but it doesn’t bother him. As far as he’s concerned, it’s white folks’ business and they could all do each other in and he wouldn’t lose any sleep. Sure, he wrote, it’s better than home, but don’t peel the banana back too far. It’s only their fascination with Negroes that’s kept the Europeans from treating them the way Americans do—so far. Had I heard anything about how the Nazis took the kids of the German women and colored American soldiers who’d been stationed in the Rhineland right after the war and made them so they couldn’t have children? They hadn’t done anything like that to me, had they? What’s all this stuff about blood and honor and Nuremberg laws?

I like for Willy to ask questions because they make me think about things I put out of my mind. Then I ask questions, talk to Werner and the other Reds and Dr. Nyassa and Gitzig. Oh! Gitzig got him some. Down at the Puff. Bernhardt, it seems, decided to let him go once a month. Gitzig looks forward to it, but I know he’d rather deliver milk closer to home. (Gitzig is also coming into camp once in a while to work in the Political Office.) While they haven’t given him “Prisoner Foreman” markings, Dr. Nyassa now seems to be in charge of Infirmary Two. He’s pretty free again with the medicinal brandy. That evil-looking block leader in One has nothing to do with Dr. Nyassa now, but both, along with the helpers, report to doctors—doctors who are very blasé about patients, whether they have colds or fractured skulls.

It’s the time of year nobody likes. It’s the time of the snow commandos and the worst time for roll calls, especially the evening ones. The snow commandos are the prisoners detailed to clear the snow from the entire camp, not with shovels, but with boards nailed to planks. Snow is as forbidden to exist in camp as flower beds are forced to be in camp. Flower beds. In this hellhole. I watch the snow commandos shovel from the canteen window; shovel, while the prisoner foremen and detail leaders and the SS holler and scream, kick, hit, and beat them. But the snow gets cleared and then everything is ice and frozen mud. Clothes freeze on the prisoners, become as stiff as the boards they shovel with. Their eyes water with the cold, and their noses run—but, at least at five o’clock, they can quit and march to their blocks singing to the music the band plays (some of my boys playing).

The Strafappell is punishment for every prisoner in the camp if even one man doesn’t answer the roll call. Some prisoners are too tired to move. They hide and sleep. Some have tried to escape. Others are too sick. But for any roll call, the prisoner has to be in his place on the Appellplatz. If not, then 6, 999 other prisoners stand Strafappell until the prisoner clerks can present to the roll-call officer a tally that shows all prisoners present and accounted for. I watch the roll calls from the canteen window. In warm weather even the Strafappell isn’t bad; sometimes the sunsets can almost make a man forget that he’s standing at attention, his hands along the seams of his pants, his cap tucked under his arm. Of course, people fall out on the ground, or get sick standing up, or even, as I’ve heard but never seen, die right there and keel over. Winter makes it worse. I look out the window and thank God for Dieter Lange. Seven thousand men standing like posts pounded into the ground, the winter night wrapped around the outsides of the searchlights. When things go well, roll call takes an hour and a half; when things do not go well—Strafappell can last all night with the lights on, the dogs barking, the guards shouting and cursing, the prisoners answering weakly or falling out, freezing, turning blue. And for the men who caused the Strafappell, there is pure, distilled hatred and maybe a beating in the shower, maybe even an “accidental” killing—a push from the top of the quarry stone, a push into the sewer or marsh, a falling tree, a gravel-filled wagon run over a foot or hand, and so on. For one man, or two or even three, cannot be allowed to make thousands suffer. That is how the SS keeps order, by placing the responsibility for keeping order upon the prisoners themselves.

I’m always afraid there will come that night when they call me out and stand me in a place to be counted just like the others, like so many heads of cattle or sharecroppers needed to pick cotton. Cross my fingers. Knock on wood. Turn three times. Call on the Loas. Pray.

Monday, January 24, 1938

On Saturday I watched a group of prisoners move a pile of frozen gravel from the far end of the ’Platz. Yesterday another group, the Punishment Company, which works even on Sunday, was putting it right back when the whistle and sirens began to sound. “Roll call for Jehovah’s Witnesses. Roll call! All Bible students! Roll call!”

They came out of their blocks shivering in the cold, sliding on the snow and ice and frozen mud, their purple triangles crinkling on their knees and chests as they approached the Dancing Ground, where leashed dogs and hollering guards surrounded and pushed them into formation. I know the other prisoners were relieved they weren’t being called out, too. Especially the Jews and the freaks. Everyone in the canteen who was not a Witness crowded to the windows, yet tried to stay out of sight; wanted to see but not be seen, because who knew what an SS guard might take a notion to do?

I saw Menno!

He looked bad. His eyes had that narrow, crafty look every other Protective Custody prisoner in Dachau has. Dr. Nyassa tells me they are still working his behind off in Revier One and on various labor details as well. He was shaking with the cold. I studied him as if he were a stranger. The kind of joker I wouldn’t want to meet in an alleyway after the last set. I couldn’t even remember our making love; that seemed to have happened a long time ago. He might have been younger than me, but I knew I now looked younger. This place can age you in no time flat, no time at all, and faster if you’ve really done the hard time. When the Witnesses were in formation and the roll taken, over the loudspeaker the roll-call officer shouted:

“On this German Christian Sunday we offer you nonbelievers an opportunity to pledge allegiance to the State, after which your sentences will be reconsidered, with release a probability. You will repeat after me. I, say your name!” (We heard the dissonance of 1,500 names being called out.) “Born, give your birth date!” (Again that ragged, splattering sound, this time of numbers.) “In, the town, the town!” (The sound was like a thousand different birds squawking at once.) “One! I acknowledge that the International Association of Jehovah’s Witnesses advocates a false doctrine using their religious activities as a pretext in their subversive aims. Two! I have therefore totally rejected this organization and have freed myself emotionally from the sect. Three! I hereby undertake never again to work for the International Association of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I shall report any persons who approach me with the false doctrine of Jehovah’s Witnesses or those who in any way display sympathy for them. Should I receive any Jehovah’s Witness literature, I shall surrender it immediately to the nearest police station.”

“Police station?” they were saying in the canteen. “That means they’ll be freed! You think they’ll agree? Bet? How much? How many cigarettes?”

“Four! I shall in the future observe the laws of the nation especially in the event of war, when I shall take up arms to defend my Fatherland and strive to become a wholehearted member of the national community. Five! I have been informed that I must expect a further term of Protective Custody if I fail to observe the present opportunity made today.” The ranks remained still, straight, and stiff. They can get out! I thought. Go free! And once out, keep truckin’ and never look back.

“Those accepting the opportunity presented by the Fuhrer … two steps forward!”

I know they were dying to look at each other, to read each other’s eyes, to see how strong was the faith. But the ranks stayed the same—for three or four seconds, the balloons of breath drifting above them. Then they broke. There was a man who stepped forward and hung his head; and then two, three, four others, and others followed until fully half the Witnesses had taken the two steps forward, among them Menno Becker. Almost at once, the guards and dogs closed in, dividing the two groups, herding those who’d accepted to the east side of the ’Platz and those who hadn’t to the west.

I went into the back room and left the running of the canteen to Baum. In the front the customers were murmuring, “War, did you hear him? ‘In the event of war,’ he said. Oh, shit. Then they are serious with this Lebensraum.…” I was thinking, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland … And after those, what? Who?

Thursday, February 10, 1938

The morgue is in Revier One, in the back. It’s where they keep the bodies before examination. Then they take them to the crematorium and burn them in the incinerator and pot the ashes for sending home. I never had anything to do with morgues. But yesterday Dr. Nyassa came into the canteen and asked me to come with him. There was something he wanted to show me. There isn’t much heat in the blocks, only a small stove in each barrack living room. The stove is smaller in the canteen, but when you have to go out in the snow and wind, you grow to appreciate what little heat you do get. And we just had to cross the Lagerstrasse. Dr. Nyassa wasn’t very talkative. He was bundled up. His nose and eyes were running from the cold, which had turned his skin more gray than black, and he seemed frozen in the blues. We went through the ward—there’re always more patients in the winter; everyone’s sick from the cold—and into the back. When it’s this cold, they don’t turn on the machinery that keeps the bodies cold; they don’t need it.

It was dim in there, and very still. The windows were iced over. Dr. Nyassa reached up and pulled the light string. Bodies lay in rows on the floor, each fixed in position as if molded in plaster, with just enough space to walk between them. In spite of the cold, there was a heavy smell, like you get when you walk into a butcher’s freezer. “Here,” he said. We’d reached a corner where the smell seemed to have collected. Menno. Menno, without a stitch of clothes on. I could hardly tell it was him, his face was so beat up and swollen. His head was twice its normal size. I looked at his body. There were long purple welts on it, from his head down to his ankles, each raised so high I couldn’t believe it. His whatchacallit was black, blue, and purple, big as a salami, frozen blood still on what was left of it. I began to shake. What would they do to me if they found out, if I had no protection? Dr. Nyassa said, “When they get mad at you fellows, they do anything. He’s not the first.” He lifted his foot and pointed it toward Menno’s crotch. “They are animals, animals. They wouldn’t do this to a pig.”

“I thought they were letting him go,” I said.

Dr. Nyassa turned me and gently pushed me out. “They were never going to let him go, Pepperidge. Make an example of him. He had hard time coming. He was doing hard time,” he said. “They were supposed to take his body to the oven so nobody would see this, which is what they usually do. But something must’ve come up, so they put him here until tonight. Your friend Werner got word from someone who heard it all in the Bunker last night. Worst thing they’d ever heard coming out of that place.”

Dr. Nyassa said, “God help us. I live in fear that because I put my penis in a white woman, wife or not, they’ll take it off, and yet, you know, even with that fear I keep going to those farm girls at the Puff.”

I returned to the canteen. It was starting to snow hard. Baum could tell something was wrong, and he didn’t bother me. I stared out the window and thought of voodoo revenge. But I didn’t have any eggs to tie to Menno’s hands, and there was no coffin to put him face down in, and I sure didn’t have and couldn’t get seven red candles for the bottom end of his coffin or nine white ones for the head. I couldn’t spend the two days and nights called for to do these things. And there would be no burial, with fresh-turned dirt on which I could throw broken eggshells. Even New Orleans voodoo took a whipping from the Nazis. So I stared out the window and could not cry. “God loves you, brother,” Menno had said the very first time we met, and I thought, He’s got a damned funny way of showing it. Even you must be surprised, Menno.

Monday, Mar. 14, 1938

Gitzig told me last week that it looked as though he might be going off on a brief trip soon, out into the world for a spell. But that was all he said, and I figured he was full of shit and was feeling his oats because he was moving in and out of the camp, doing his private work for Bernhardt, and managing to get some pussy now and again. But I guess he knew what he was talking about because yesterday was the “Joining.” I should have known something was going on because there was a strange atmosphere in The Nest when we played Friday and Saturday. We got requests for marches and the old German songs. A kind of excitement about something nobody really knows, only guesses at. Hitler is supposed to march into Vienna today. Hitler’s going to Austria and Dieter Lange is going crazy trying to figure out canteen supplies for the 80,000 Austrians who will be coming to the camps in Germany or going to camps already planned in Austria. “Sure, we can make money,” I heard him tell Anna, “but will all this planning never end, and how can I stop all this infernal stealing? Most of the goddamn SS ought to be wearing green or black triangles.”

I told Baum to question his wife very carefully about the mail from Holland. He said she said nothing had come. So I asked Baum: “Is she destroying the letters? Did you tell her to destroy them and say nothing had come? Did you tell her to destroy my letters?”

“Ah, no, Pepperidge. Please believe. No. You think I want trouble? Maybe your friend just doesn’t write anymore. Maybe he went away. Maybe he’s sick. I would never tell my wife to do as you just said, never.”

Willy Lewis owes me two letters, so I decided not to write until I hear from him. The SS might be smelling something, so it’s best to leave it be for now. If he writes, he’ll probably talk about Austria. After that conversation with Baum, I learned that a lot of people aren’t getting mail anymore—Dr. Nyassa, Werner, and others. But the prisoners who get fine packages from home have no trouble. Of course, they have to divvy up with the guards and the “seniors” who run the blocks and the camp and details. But the big thing is Austria. The Reds are about the only prisoners who aren’t happy. Maybe the Witnesses, too, but for different reasons. Everybody else is strutting around like mugs. The English did nothing, the Russians did nothing, and the French did nothing. Well, the Germans weren’t shitting on their doorsteps.

Sunday, March 20, 1938

Gitzig didn’t go any fucking place. Saw him this afternoon carrying lumber into Bernhardt’s house. Sneaked over and peeked into the cellar window. Bernhardt’s got him building the same kind of compartments Dieter Lange’s got in our cellar—except that instead of wire screening, Bernhardt’s got wooden walls. Looks like some of the loot from Austria will wind up down there, and I guess he doesn’t want anybody to see what’s behind the partitions. I rapped on the window and when Gitzig turned around, I grabbed my dick and shook it at him and left. Gitzig may not have gone to Austria, but I’d bet a dime to a dollar Bernhardt did, because he hasn’t been around The Nest in a couple of weeks. I let Werner know that. I was feeling pretty goddamn put out this afternoon, too, because I was walking toward the gatehouse, on my way home, when I saw Ulrich. He was coming toward me, right toward me. I stopped, took off my cap, the way you’re supposed to, and he went right on by without even so much as a “Kiss my ass,” and I wondered where did he get off with shit like that, after always wanting to play with us, hanging around, waiting, until we knew that we were the best thing that’d happened to him in a long time. We knew he enjoyed playing. This was the thanks. Well, I thought, I will put this motherfucker through some changes the next time; he’ll think he was wallowing lip-deep in shit. Fix his ninety wagon.

The guards are all talking about “new guests,” and I suppose they mean Austrians. This place is now so big that you can’t know what’s going on from one end to the other, from one side to the other, from one day to the next. People come and people go; some walk out, and some don’t, and the more prisoners come, the more guards come. Before I left camp, I ran into Hohenberg from the Labor Office. There are a lot more prisoners working there now. All tailors, he told me, have been detailed to make Jewish stars until further notice. He drew his finger across his throat and whispered, “Hitler wasn’t kidding.”

Wednesday, April 6, 1938

I still can’t believe it. At noon today Karlsohn comes into the canteen. I’m wanted at the gatehouse. Schnell! I want to ask him why, but that’s dangerous, and of course, he doesn’t tell me why. Just to get my ass over there quick. The last time I was in that place was to see Count von Hausberger, almost four years ago. That wasn’t during regular visiting hours and neither is this. I start thinking, Oh, shit. The letters. What else could it be? I’m walking fast across the ’Platz, thinking it might be my last walk. Spring’s on the way, the time when you start to feel like a human being again. I’m hoping it’s not my last spring.

I get to the gatehouse and the guards are smiling at me the way people smile when you’re the butt of a joke, or like you’re some kind of clown, or a joker with two heads. “Your mother’s here,” Reckse whispers. He’s a sergeant of the guards. He’s okay. I think to myself, Mother! He points up the same stairs where I saw Hausberger, and up I climb. At least it’s not about the letters or Reckse would not have been so nice. I was trembling. Mother? I smelled perfume that wasn’t gardenia before I got into the room, and then I saw in the great light that sweeps from the sky across the ’Platz, a small round figure in black, packages on the floor beside her.

The woman seemed to be weeping softly. “Oh, Lord Jesus, thank you. Oh, sweet Jesus, Amen,” she was mumbling between sobs. Behind the desk stood the duty officer of the gatehouse, a captain.

I came to attention again when I crossed the threshold. “Captain—” I said, but before I finished, the woman was on her feet rushing toward me, crying, boo-hoo-hooing, and shouting, the fat on her jiggling like jelly.

“Clifford! Oh, Clifford! Great God Awmighty! My son, my son. Thank you cap’n. Thank you boss,” and as she closed to embrace me, she winked and wrapped her arms about me, still sobbing, still thanking Jesus.

The captain cleared his throat. He was watching a minstrel show and it pleased him. He could afford to be kind, because he was being amused. “Prisoner Pepperidge, number 3003,” he said. “I have been ordered to allow this woman, your mother, just from America, this special visit because of her age and illness.” The woman and I backed off just enough to study each other. Behind her tears she winked again and—Damn! Ruby Mae Richards! “You have one-half hour, and you may keep the packages.”

I stepped back from Ruby to attention as the captain went out. As he did, I said, “Mother, I didn’t know you were sick, what’s wrong?”

She opened her mouth to talk, but I put my hand over it and led her back to the seat. I pulled up a chair beside her. “Whisper,” I whispered. “If I talk out loud then you talk out loud.” She nodded. Ruby Mae Richards was a fat little woman some people called “Little Bessie” or “Princess of the Blues,” since Bessie Smith was “Queen of the Blues” and Clara Smith was “Moaner of the Blues.” She had sung with Louis Armstrong, James P. Johnson, and Fletcher Henderson, last I heard, back home. Sang “Nobody Knows the Way I Feel Dis Mornin’,” “Broken Busted Blues,” did a couple of duets with Bessie, and so on. She was bad, too, could punch out your average man, and that made people wonder just what she carried between her legs. Right then I was so glad to see another colored musician from outside that I didn’t care if she had cannonballs under her dress. Didn’t know her well, but our paths had crossed, like they always do with musicians.

“I’m so happy you could come,” I said aloud and then whispered quickly, “How’d you get here?”

“Oh, son (boo-hoo) it’s so good to see you,” she said, then whispered, “Willy asked me to come and see what the hell’s going on here.”

“Can’t the doctors do anything?” I hope I sounded mournful. “But how’d you manage to get in here?” I whispered.

“They tryin’, son, they tryin’,” she boomed, and then whispered, “I just laid some of that old ignorant mammy shit on them, a little Jesus-Christ-will-bless-you business, you know. It worked all the way from the French border and right into this slammer. You know how that goes. Just play the nigger. Niggers can’t hurt you. They’re funny. I also got some phony statements from doctors and a joker works in the embassy in Paris.” She paused to let loose a moan and some more boo-hoos. Then in kind of a half-scream she said, “Clifford, what did you do to get in this place? Didn’t I raise you better?” She put her arms around my neck and I put mine around hers and we rocked and whispered. “Willy came down to Paris and told me the letters he sent you through that German woman were coming back stamped ‘Unknown.’ We figured an old black woman doin’ your mammy could do better than a black man trying to get in here to find out if you were dead or alive. Are you in here forever? How much time you draw? What you done?”

Last time I saw her she didn’t have any gray in her hair, but that was a long time ago. I suppose I looked a helluva lot older than she remembered, too. I told her what had happened and what was going on now. This was between a lot of boo-hoos and moaning and groaning and sometimes we even laughed. I cried, too, because here was some home-folks, after all this time. But what she finally had to say wasn’t very funny. Whenever anyone made an inquiry, and Ruby Mae said Willy had said there weren’t too many of those, the response from Germany was that no record had been found of a Clifford Pepperidge. Everyone, she said, was afraid of the Germans, even the Americans, and nobody’s about to lay their bottom dollar or play their hole card on a nigger faggot, she whispered, any more than they would for a bull dyke. She smiled and I knew that what people had gossiped about for years was true. “I don’t know what we can do,” she said. Nearly everybody who’s colored had left Germany, and some are leaving Europe. Had she run into this German joker, tenor man, who’d sat in with Duke, Chick, and Jimmy?—Ulrich? I asked. But lately I’d been thinking, There’s a big difference between playing with someone, as the rumor went with Ulrich, and sitting in. She said, no, but that name sounded familiar—a big blond German supposed to be a friend—maybe the only one around in this part of Germany. Then she asked if I’d heard anything of Valaida Snow, who used to sing with Fatha Hines and was now running around Europe somewhere?

I said, “What can I hear about anything in here?” But I was thinking, If Ulrich’s a friend, he sure got a funny way of showing it.

The captain returned and stood holding the door open, waiting. The minstrel show was over. I hit the floor, ramrod stiff. The half hour had gone by like a minute. Ruby Mae, crying, embraced me again. (Ah-boo-hoo-hoo.) The captain assured me that they’d get her to the station and see she got the right train back to France. Poor old nice little mammy like that, but no additional visits would be permitted. I thanked him. Ruby Mae dropped to her knees like a bag of fertilizer and thanked him, too, and told him God would bless him for being so kind to an old mammy done come all the way from Down South, United States of America. It’s wise to thank all the SS and even the few SA for any break they give you. The captain said my mother had told him this was the only camp she knew about and so she came here. Wasn’t it remarkable that she got to the right place the first time? I said yes it was, but my mother had always been lucky that way because she trusted in God. I thanked him again for his kindness. And that was it. I had made some contact. Willy knew I was here and alive, if not well in spirit. I hadn’t vanished. A few people thought about me, and one even cut through the shit and visited me, but I was thinking, Oh, that fucking Baum! Oh, Baum’s fucking wife!

Thursday, April 7, 1938

Dieter Lange called me right up to his office the first thing in the morning. Before I could fix breakfast. Anna wasn’t even up. I took the invoices with me. He couldn’t talk too loud, because he didn’t want Anna to hear. He wanted to know who the woman was who’d come yesterday; he knew I didn’t know if my real mother was dead or alive. He was mad and he was nervous. I told him some of the truth, that she’d been sent by Willy Lewis to see if I was all right. It was all his fault, after all, because, if he hadn’t been running his mouth in Amsterdam to Willy, none of this would have happened. Not even Anna would have known about us (except that, knowing her the way I do now, she would have come to know). And who was the woman? It turned out he once had a couple of records by Ruby Mae. We went downstairs and I started breakfast while he worried. “No more visitors,” he kept saying, “no more visitors. Too risky.” I said what was I supposed to do if, if I ever got another visitor, and he wasn’t around? Was I supposed to tell the guards to kiss my ass? That brought the worry lines back to his forehead. He wondered what they knew at the camp commandant’s office. He was glad that Eichmann had gone; too snoopy, too quiet. Better off working on the “Jewish Question.” The more he talked, the more confident he became that nothing would come of Ruby Mae’s visit. The “mammy visit,” he called it, after I’d described to him how she’d behaved, and how she’d looked. “She’d be great with the Gestapo,” he said, and the worried look came into his eyes again. Once he seemed calmer, I went after Baum.

“Baum’s a crook,” I said. “Look here. See?” I placed the invoices on the table where he was having the breakfast I’d fancied up. He glanced at me, and then the sheets, but he didn’t miss a beat shoveling the food into his mouth. “This goes back a little while,” he finally said. I told him I wasn’t sure at first, what with Karlsohn and the others who always take what they want. “But see,” I said, pointing, “what they take isn’t anything like what Baum takes, and besides, what can I do if the guards steal the goods?” Baum was another story, I said.

“All right! All right!” Dieter Lange said. “Let me go over these invoices.” I saw that he was checking the imported cigarettes. “That fat little fucker,” he said. “That two-bit crook—”

Anna’s cry from upstairs startled us both: “What’re you two faggots doing down there, huh?” Dieter Lange rolled his eyes at me. I started Anna’s breakfast in a light-hearted mood. Baum’s ass was mine.

Wednesday, April 13, 1938

Last Friday at The Nest I was fooling around on the piano, not really playing anything that could be recognized for more than three or four notes. Ulrich came into the hall. He always comes at the same time, and I recognized his footsteps. They stopped. I had a feeling that he was trying to guess what kind of mood I was in from the way I was playing. He started walking again, but it wasn’t his usual walk. The rest of the band was in the kitchen, of course, finishing up the meal. Ulrich climbed up, sat down, and opened his case. He strapped on his horn and waited for me to lead him into something. But I didn’t stop what I was doing; I just acted like he wasn’t there. Through the open windows I heard the babies crying in the nursery, and I damned them to death right then, not when they would become part of Hitler’s 600 new regiments, but then and there. Didn’t need any more Germans like those already grown.

If there’d been music for hate, I’d have played it because of that meeting in the ’Platz that had been more pass-by than meeting. I was still salty about that. Ruby Mae and Willy Lewis were wrong. This wasn’t the joker who was a friend. This was a Nazi, a superman, who was supposed to just appear and the machinery would be turned on right away for him. Oh, no, not anymore. I didn’t turn an inch. It was just me and him, with everyone in the kitchen or somewhere nearby, fucking, trying to fuck, or getting fucked, as they always did, until the beat and swing of a melody reached them. Ulrich waited. I gave him nothing, just like last week and the week before that. He shuffled his feet. I didn’t hear them, or pretended not to. He tapped them. I gave him shit. The only music I know about that’s got mad in it is the classical stuff. The music I was brought up with and played didn’t have it. I was looking for something that would tell Eric Ulrich to kiss my ass, but it wasn’t in our music. Our music signified, it was sassy, it was joyful, and it was blue. There was no hate in it. There should have been a lot in it. Maybe one day there would be, if not hate or anger, then the low-down gospel truth, the I-am-tired-of-taking-your-shit truth. Couldn’t call that hate music or mad music, just getting-ready-to-get-even music. I hit a chord that had so many angles in it, Ulrich stopped moving his feet, trying to figure out what it said. I kept creeping up and down the keyboard, thinking about our music and how this Nazi thought he could lay hold of it and still be the sonofabitch he was.

I heard doors squeaking open, felt eyes boring through the dim. This was the third week of this, and the guys in the band thought he must be good and mad by now. Maybe they heard something strange in the dissonant sounds Ulrich was now tootling. I was throwing out notes and smothering or snatching them back in favor of other ones. Our music never celebrated death the way white folks’ music did, I was thinking; our music rose above it or at least didn’t take you to Valhalla where you killed all day and ate all night and didn’t even have time to make love. James Reese Europe took all the fighting songs and built joy into them; the Europeans sensed that. For us, death was a Rambler, an Easy Rider; when the music took you through the St. James Infirmary, it remembered what love had been like. So I noodled and Ulrich tootled. We could have been a hundred miles apart. The bark and bite of the red, white, and black never came. Ulrich packed his horn and left without a word, once more, and the band came on for rehearsal.

Moritz eased up to me and whispered, “Is this wise, Pepperidge?”

I said, “Look. Fuck wise. Let’s work on ‘Lady Be Good.’ Give you a chance to work off some of that bitchiness.” Some of my anger was catching; rehearsal was a mess until Teodor just went off the scales with some bleedily-blee shit and I had to holler at him. They were mad at me because they didn’t know what Ulrich would do to us, but I knew he had to be Double C, calm and collected, because of Bernhardt. That’s exactly why I showed my ass the way I did. I ain’t no fool. I don’t have to let these jokers know everything I know. But we did the sets as we always did, a little weak now and again, and more sweet than swing, and I was wishing for the biggest brass section in the world to cover up the faking. But, however bad we are, if I cut the fool now and again, got down over the keyboard like it wouldn’t let me go, or sang with my eyes closed like the shit is even good to me, why, we got by.

The day after Dieter Lange and I had that little talk about Baum, Baum was gone. Baum was on the Baum, the “Tree,” hanging up there with his hands behind him. I didn’t see him; Dieter Lange told me. When they cut him down, he couldn’t use his arms, but they took him to the shower anyway so the prisoners who keep the place clean could help him wash. Unfortunately, poor Baum couldn’t use his arms to break his fall when he slipped, hit his head on the concrete floor, and died. Dieter Lange told me this after we’d made love. Anna was at a meeting to plan larger flower gardens throughout the SS quarters. I don’t know why I use that term, “made love.” I don’t love Dieter Lange and never did. He doesn’t love me or anybody else. What we do is fuck, that’s all. We are different men in strange times—but I never thought so strange that people would be killed to protect us, or that I would have to play along with his wife and her friend also to protect us. It had often crossed my mind and Dieter Lange’s that if Anna wasn’t around we’d be safer. But it was too late for that. So we didn’t make love, we fucked, sometimes with all the passion of men trapped by what and where we were. He had to save me to save himself.

I said to him, “A Badeaktion.”

He said, “Yes. It had to be that way. To protect us. You heard then?”

I laughed. I knew before he did. I said yes, I knew. A Badeaktion is a killing in the shower. You don’t need the SS to do that; there are always Greens or Blacks willing to do a favor to get a favor. Dieter Lange, stupid man, seems to think he is the only person who tells me about what goes on in camp, like my ears are stopped up and I am blind. There is a knowledge and a kind of talk that the prisoners and the guards have that no one else shares or speaks, and Dieter Lange is no guard. He likes jazz music, but playing it and sharing it with other musicians is still another world he can’t get into.

I lay there and considered that Dieter Lange, with the exception of my colonel and Menno, was the only lover I’d had in five years. But, here we were, growing older, old queers who on the outside would have fewer choices anyway, but here on the inside had almost none. We were a bad habit. But … Dieter Lange traveled. He had power. He could take what he wanted. How could I know what he did or who he did it with? My own urges seemed to come slowly, sometimes with blazing heat, most times not. Then I’d have to be warmed up, and we were not in a situation where that could take a lot of time.

Thursday, May 5, 1938

Yesterday I walked from the garden near the north fence up toward the main building where, in the showers, Baum got his brains splattered on the concrete floor. It was a nice day. There was a column of prisoners marching south about a hundred yards ahead of me on one side of the ’Strasse, and two other columns, one in the middle and one on the far side, marching north, facing me. At the head of the column on the far side were about fifteen Negroes or Africans—I couldn’t tell—and I was so surprised my mouth fell open. I know it fell open, because when I closed it, it was filled with dust. The colored men were carrying rocks down to the new wall. I knew they’d just come because not all of them wore the new striped uniforms, and they weren’t marching in step, and the old prisoners knew that whatever they did, they had to do it in step, whether the command was called or not; they had to watch the detail leader and fall in exactly as he did. I had to talk to Dr. Nyassa about the colored men, where they were from, what it was they were supposed to have done. There was another very large bunch of Gypsies brought into camp from Austria, Burgenland, wherever that is. But colored men?

I was still pooting in my pants with the fear that any moment now I could be in one of those columns, marching out to work or marching back in from it, marching down to the main hall to get my bowl of food, standing roll call, fighting to keep whatever I had from being stolen, worrying about lice and typhus and just catching a cold from another prisoner, worrying about bedbugs and time to shit. These days, I am afraid, running scared, even though the other prisoners believe I’m still lucky, still “prominent.” If God lets me through this one, He’s got a deeper believer. There isn’t a moment when I’m not praying or thinking of praying, and I have been since April 23.

We’d had two good sets; rehearsal had gone well, with Eric Ulrich sitting in. Things had gotten a little better between us. You could feel spring getting up in the air, and there was a smell of good green things out at the Pussy Palace. I didn’t even pay attention to the babies crying in the nursery. All the Frauleins looked good that night, and of course all the SS were turned out in their dress uniforms. That night made me feel kind of sad and sweet both. Everybody in the band felt it. Alex, Fritz, Oskar, Franz, Ernst, Teodor, Danko, and Moritz; all their solos were like nothing else I’d heard them play before that night, and I know I was the best jazz music piano player in the world. You can feel things like that, that you could cut the piano player at God’s right hand. And when we finished each solo, we came back together better than Germans marching, because that’s the way music is; it fits into where it came from, some place without a name, but some place we know is there. There were numbers we couldn’t ever play at The Nest, of course, and keys we couldn’t play in, but we were as close to the music as we could get, and that made us know we could do better if we had the chance. During some of the numbers I had the distinct feeling that this, being a prisoner of Dachau for all this time, was a mistake that any second would be discovered and made right. I suppose we all had feelings like that, and maybe wearing tuxedos twice a week helped. Maybe some of the way I felt was because Ulrich, before the guys joined us for rehearsal, had spoken to me for the first time in English.

“I understand why you were angry with me,” he said. “But I have to be careful—don’t stop playing.” I played and he apologized out of one corner of his mouth, while his sax rested in the other. Then we got into a groove. Just before the band came out, Ulrich said, “Bernhardt’s given his permission for me to drive you back to camp tonight. We can talk more then. Meet me near the front of the Parkplatz. Black BMW, plate number DAH829. Then he led me into “Sometimes I’m Happy.”

I was feeling mellow after the second set. Usually, the thought of being driven back to where I would have to put up with the who-struck-john of Dieter Lange, if he was home, or of Anna and Ursula, if they were home, turned my stomach the way taking Black Draught without baking soda did. No one seemed to care much anymore about me being in the house alone with Anna when Dieter Lange was away. That was because, I am sure, Anna said she’d be all right if Ursula was with her. Yeah, I guess so. The ride with Ulrich would be a pleasant change, a comfortable way to get “home.”

He had a girlfriend, and she was as tall and as blond as he was. She was “class.” She wasn’t wearing any gardenia perfume, I could tell that right away. Her scent was French. She was very beautiful, but there was something standoffish about her, and nobody can be that way more than upper-class Germans. But she tried to be friendly as we got into the car, me in the back seat. I wished I looked like her. I wished I was her. She had a bundle resting on her lap. Her name was Maria. Ulrich started and I leaned back in a corner of the car, waiting for the talk we were supposed to have. But he didn’t talk and neither did she. Halfway to the main road, Ulrich suddenly pulled off to the side, turned off the lights and stopped. Maria began to rip and snatch at the bundle. The smell of new clothes filled the car.

“Change, Pepperidge, now.” Ulrich was handing things back to me: a shirt, trousers, a jacket, a tie, a pair of shoes, a fedora. I was amazed that I recognized such things by touch, but my heart was galloping right up into my throat, and as tired as I was, I came wide awake. I asked what was going on, and Maria said, “Freiheit, my friend.”

“Change! Change!” Ulrich was saying. He sounded like a camp guard, and you do not argue with camp guards—or anyone else who’s not a prisoner. But—

“We go to the Swiss border, Mr. Pepperidge,” Maria said. She spoke English with a British accent, like Ulrich. She seemed to struggle to find words. I was pulling off the prison suit, with Ulrich’s help, but it was hard in so little space. “We have got papers for you, so now, when we get there, you can be free—”

“Come on, Pepperidge,” Ulrich was saying. Everything I managed to get out of he handed to Maria. I wanted to say, Wait, suppose—but Ulrich was speaking almost with a growl, “Quickly, quickly.” What a lovely smell the clothes had. I was out of my old pants and into the ones they’d brought. I slipped on the new shoes, pulled on the jacket, and got the tie around my collar while Ulrich mashed the hat down on my head, adjusted it, and pulled down the brim. Maria was already wrapping up my old shoes and uniform. “Let’s go!” Ulrich said. “Freedom can’t wait!” I was still feeling for buttonholes and fastening buttons when he started up and got back on the road with the car lights on. Wasn’t no need of me playing around. I told Ulrich I was scared and wanted to go to the camp. This was like a movie, or a dream, and I had the feeling both were bad.

“Don’t you want to be free?” Maria asked.

“Yes, but—”

“Don’t be afraid. Eric’s got everything fixed.” She passed me a heavy silver flask, and I turned that baby straight up and poured the cognac down my throat. I returned it and she held out a cigarette case. I took a cigarette and she lighted it. Of course, I wanted to be free, free to walk the streets of Paris or Amsterdam or New York—streets anywhere but in Germany. I couldn’t stop the tears from starting up. I could see me and Willy Lewis, me and Ruby Mae Richards, me strolling along 125th Street or Lenox Avenue, me in an apartment somewhere on Sugar Hill, me playing the best piano of my life. I also saw me hanging from the “Tree,” in the Bunker getting the shit beat out of me, saw myself standing alone in the center of the ’Platz under the hot sun until I passed out, me dead in the same corner of the Revier where I’d seen Menno. Hell, yeah, I wanted freedom, but God knows I was afraid to take it, so these two who wouldn’t listen to me would have to take me to it and hand me over.

“It’ll be all right, Pepperidge,” Ulrich said. Maybe, looking in the rearview mirror, he’d seen my tears as we passed an occasional light. At another main road, he turned south and a buzzing started in my head. “There’s a blanket back there. Wrap yourself in it if you get cold.” I didn’t move. “I understand you had a visit from Ruby Mae Richards,” he said.

I told him yes, I had, and that she’d told me he was a friend. “You sure didn’t act like one,” I said. “Bernhardt didn’t give you no permission to drive me to camp,” I said. “Did he?”

He gave a little laugh. “Well, Pepperidge, one has to be careful, very careful. All this will get worse before it gets better. And no, Bernhardt didn’t give me permission, and I’d never ask him anything like this, anyway. He’s just waiting for me to make a mistake. He’s my enemy; he’s the enemy of whatever good is still in Germany. And yet, I don’t understand—he loves jazz music, loves to listen to it.” He went on talking to me in English. I was thinking he had the same puzzlement about Bernhardt that I’d had about him. “Strange,” Ulrich said.

“Anyway, Colonel Bernhardt’s away,” Maria said.

I asked Ulrich how he could get away with whatever he was doing if Bernhardt was watching him. Ulrich said, and he and his girlfriend laughed as he said it, “We just have to be smarter than he is. For example, right now I am in my quarters, already asleep.” They laughed a little louder. “And of course we have friends. So we have until noon tomorrow to get back, by which time you’ll be free in Switzerland and we will have put another one over on Bernhardt.” I didn’t say anything about that “another” business.

Maria said, “On the other side it would be wise if you said nothing about an SS officer, Mr. Pepperidge.” I said all right. She said it was dangerous work, what they were doing, and she was sure I appreciated that.

Ulrich put his arm around her shoulders and said, “Sure he does.” She leaned her head against his arm and her hair fell like a patch of moonlight down the back of the seat.

We took side roads around most of Munich—we could see the city lights now and again—and then followed the sign to Starnberg. Ulrich stepped on the gas and we rushed through a tunnel of light, passing only a few other cars, until we got to the town, then slowed as we went through it. I was pressed back into my corner, the hat pulled down so that I could just barely see. We passed some SA patrols, but they didn’t stop us; Ulrich was wearing his uniform. Outside the town, we drove on toward—the signs had said—Lands-berg and Kaufering. Ulrich picked a road that seemed to go right between them, and another sign read To Buchloe. Ulrich told Maria to give me the papers. “American passport,” she said, “and money. We got your picture out of an old magazine from Berlin, re-shot it, and there you are. There’s enough money to get you to Paris.” In the few dim lights we were passing I saw that my occupation was—musician!—and that I’d entered Germany from Colmar, France, on business a week ago and was returning via Switzerland. My residence was in Paris. I remember how officially solid the passport and visa read, and how good that little book felt, and for how long I’d wanted to hold one just like it in my hand. Ulrich said, “Feels better already, doesn’t it?” I told him it sure did. But I was still afraid, and when we came around a curve near Buchloe, we almost ran over two old SA, and they flagged us down. They saluted when they saw Ulrich’s uniform, and started backing off; we slowed, but didn’t stop. Ulrich, who’d rolled down his window and held out his Ausweiss for identification, said good evening to them as we picked up speed. I hadn’t realized how long I’d held my breath; now I let it out and it seemed to never stop coming. Ulrich laughed. “Nothing,” he said. “Just a couple of old farts; should be in bed. Nearly everybody wants to protect the Fatherland. Pepperidge, everything, believe me, is copasetic.”

I grunted, I remember, and then began to tremble in my corner. They wanted to be heroes and maybe they were, but if we got caught, it’d be my ass to fry. I thought about that. Theirs, too, and their friends. But, shit, why didn’t they rescue somebody who wasn’t afraid of being rescued? Mindelheim, I could see through the thin, curving space beneath the brim of the hat, was a two-light village with two or three buildings—the church and the town hall I supposed. Mem-mingen was larger, but we had no trouble there, either, just kept boring through that tunnel made by the headlights. “Leutkirch, Wangen, and then Friedrichshafen,” Ulrich said. “Then Lindau and the border.” He stepped on the gas again. Friedrichshafen sounded familiar, like Kaufering, but I was beat to my socks; it’d been a long day, and my stomach had been in my mouth every second since we’d left The Nest. The buzzing in my head got louder, and the being tired, half-high with the cognac, and just plain scared, all came together. I remember thinking that I wouldn’t have minded being one of the servants who had to get up on Saturday morning and drill. They were asleep right now. I imagined our passage through the mountains we could see on clear days from Dachau. I knew we were climbing and climbing, because Ulrich was shifting gears, and it was getting colder in the car. Ulrich started humming “Dardanella” and Maria joined him. I knew it would please them if I joined in, but as far as I was concerned, if I was going to do any singing, it would be when I was safe in Switzerland. Maria was good. Sometimes she took harmony, and sometimes she took melody while Ulrich riffed his way through. I guess they’d done it before. I wondered who she really was and how many times they’d done this, and how many more Germans there were who were “friends.” It was better not to know. I asked no questions and they volunteered no more information. I must have fallen asleep because when the car stopped, I tried to lose myself behind the seat.

Cold air came whipping in through the window Maria was opening. I had the feeling we were on top of a mountain. She took the bundle of clothes and tossed it out into the night. “There,” she said. “No more uniform, no more number.” My number, I thought, is 3003, 3003. Outside Wangen, Ulrich stopped and filled the tank from a can of petrol he had in the trunk. That woke me up, too, but right away I started to think of the names of the towns and villages we’d passed through. In Dachau I guessed there were prisoners from every city, town, and village in Germany.

I dozed off again, and when I woke it was to the sound of Ulrich’s voice: “Achtsam! Pepperidge, careful!” The first thing I noticed was that Ulrich and Maria seemed to have got all stiff in their seats, like a couple of bird dogs. And they weren’t humming anymore. There were lots of lights up ahead in Friedrichshafen. “Keep that hat pulled down, Pepperidge.” Ulrich sounded as though he was going over a score with somebody in a band. “Pretend to sleep. They hardly ever see colored people down here, so don’t worry if they flash lights in your face. You pretend to wake up. You’re some high potentate, got it? From now on, if we get stopped, you’ve got to pretend to be above all this shit. Germans go for that, okay?” I said okay but my belly was skipping and jumping as I saw the lights of the town growing brighter beneath my hat brim.

“One more thing, Pepperidge, to stiffen your spine. It’s got to be now, this trip, for two reasons. I’m being reassigned; we don’t know when someone else will replace me. Second, we’ve heard that Frau Lange is pregnant. We can’t take the chance that this is a fraud. You know some SS wives have been caught abducting babies right out of the nursery back there. The Ordinance of September 13, 1936. You probably never heard of it. Every SS man has to have four kids.”

Yeah, I remembered it, but I didn’t tell him. I wondered how many he had; if he had any, I didn’t think they were with Maria.

“Now, think, Pepperidge, if Frau Lange has a child or children, what’ll happen to you? They’ll get female servants, won’t they? Oh, they might keep you on, but then again, maybe not.” His voice got low. “Do you think Lange could afford to have you running around loose in camp?”

I was thinking, If she is pregnant, it’s Bernhardt’s—or maybe not. Maybe Dieter Lange did his duty. Or maybe she was jiving. There did seem to be a lot more babies and female servants around the SS. compound lately. If Dieter Lange was looking for a chance to get rid of me, this would be the time—if Anna had been bigged. Hadn’t looked any fatter than usual to me. Who would listen to me in the camp? And why would I want to say anything anyway that would make it tougher for me? Oh, God. Why was everything happening at once?

“So now’s the time, isn’t it?” Maria said.

“Sure looks like it,” I mumbled, and it sure did, since we were nearly there and I couldn’t do boodily-boo about Anna or anything else. While I was thinking, they’d been talking about going through the town to save time, and we were driving slowly down a street a couple of blocks away from what looked like the main one. Ulrich and Maria were remarking that it looked good so far, when headlights swept up from the rear, swung to the side, and a police car pulled up beside us. There were two men in the front seat. The driver waved us down. Ulrich stopped and lowered his window. The cop in the passenger seat got out and came around to Ulrich’s side; I tried to vanish into the seams of the seat. When he was at Ulrich’s window, all I could see was a blotch of green that was his uniform. “What do you do, where do you go, this time of night, sir?” I was sure he was looking at Ulrich’s card, and had seen his uniform, because he wasn’t all loud and bullying, the way Germans can be if they have more power than you. The blotch of green was wrinkling and unwrinkling, and I could just see light poking around inside the car. The cop said good evening to Maria, and she answered in a chilly, high-class voice. The light lingered longest on me. “Please don’t wake him up, officer,” Ulrich said. “I have to get this man out of Germany. It’s a duty I preferred not to do, so I brought a friend to keep me company. He’s someone we don’t need in the Reich. And someone you’re better off not knowing about.” The green blotch grunted behind the light, which suddenly vanished, but with my eyes still closed, I saw flashes of red from it. Sweet words: “Okay. Sorry to have to stop you, sir. Heil Hitler.” Ulrich answered, “Heil,” with Maria joining in. We drove out of Friedrichshafen in silence. We’d gone several miles. Ulrich downed his window again. “Smell that, Pepperidge? That’s the Bodensee. Halfway over is Germany; the other half is Lake Constance, Switzerland. One side smells just like the other, the way land does, even if there are frontiers.” I felt a hand I knew to be Maria’s on my knee.

“Mr. Pepperidge, we’re almost there,” she said. She asked Ulrich in German if he was very tired, and he answered in German that this kind of trip never exhausted him. We were going down, easing through the night that was barely beginning to lighten.

Ulrich said, “Listen now. We have to go through Lindau and then Bregenz—German and Austrian frontier. Germany now controls Austria. Once in Austrian territory, we cross into Switzerland at Lusteneau. On our last trip the border was manned by Austrians. They’re still there, but so are Germans now. We have to be more careful here than anyplace else, and I mean Achtsam!” Again he sounded like a guard at camp. “If I have to say certain things, and do certain things, know now that I don’t mean them, understand? It is a game I may have to play. Once you’re on the Swiss side, forget them.”

“Oh, I don’t know if I can do this,” I said. I heard the resignation in my voice. Ulrich shouted that I had to. His girl tried to calm him down, but he said, “He’s just got to, that’s all.” He was quiet for a minute, then said, “Pepperidge, I know you’ll do your best. I understand what you say. A man doesn’t spend five years in that shithole without losing something. That’s the way it is, and that’s why they’re there. But damn it, man, you never thought you’d lose your freedom, and you did. I’m sure there were many times when you thought you’d never get it back; now you’ve almost got it and you’ve had two hours to prepare to take it. It is minutes away now, minutes.”

There was more silence, before Maria said, “If it doesn’t work, it won’t be just you going back to camp—”

“Maria,” Ulrich said, interrupting, “Don’t.” But she went on.

“Eric will go and I will go and some others as well, and the people who need help won’t get it, not from us. So don’t be nervous. Do nothing to make them suspicious, just like you did back there. You were fine. Oh! And remember, you know no German. Eric will translate everything, if necessary.” I told her I understood.

“What’s the name of your perfume?” I asked.

“Seducteur. You like it?”

“Devastating,” I said, and they laughed. The car seemed to glide to a stop at the crossing in an area of bright lights through which walked two border policemen on either side of the car. The red-and-white barriers lay waist-high across the road. Steam whiter than the lights rose from the mouths of the police.

Through his lowered window Ulrich called in German, “C’mon. Don’t take all night. I’ve got to get back to quarters.” He was already holding out his card. Maria was smiling at the cops on her side. Now, once more, I could see beneath my hat brim blotches of green-gray uniforms.

“What’s the hurry, sir?” one of the policemen said.

“To complete this rotten mission and get back to Munich. What’s yours, to drag ass all night?” Ulrich said. Once again, small, powerful beams of light swept through the car, coming to rest on me.

“Raise your hat,” one of the cops said in German. I didn’t move.

“Your hat, nigger,” Ulrich said in English. “Remove your hat.” I took off my hat.

“Papers,” the officer said.

Ulrich said, “Give him your passport and visa.” I did. I squinted at the light. Maria offered the officers on her side cigarettes from her case. They took them, checked the brand and smiled. On Ulrich’s side one officer was studying my papers while the other looked at me like I had three heads. Ulrich said, “Officer, his papers are okay. Let’s get this nigger out of here into Switzerland.” The cop shuffled faster through the passport.

“All right! You don’t mind if I check this piece of American shit, do you? You’ve got a job to do, I’ve got a job to do. Relax.” He went through the passport again and checked the visa once more. “Good thing he’s not one of those Rhineland bastards, or his ass would belong to us,” the cop said. He snapped shut the passport on the visa. “All right, sir. Proceed. Get him out of Germany.” The light on my face went out. The cop saluted Ulrich. “Heil Hitler,” he said, and Ulrich returned the salute and the words. I melted into my corner. Maria waved as the barriers were raised. Up they went, crank turn by crank turn. I was trembling. Maria and Ulrich said nothing until we moved.

“Not as bad as I thought,” he said, and sighed. “Just think. If we could have done this two months ago, you’d be free right now.”

“It went so well back there that I don’t think we’ll have any trouble ahead,” Maria said. “Now Switzerland. What would Europe do without Switzerland?” She put her head back on the seat.

A little while later Ulrich said, “Sam’s waiting for you on the other side.”

“Sam?” I said, “Sam who was guitar?”

“The same.”

“I thought he was in America.”

“He was, but he came back to help Jews and anyone else who needs it. He’s got a place. You’ll rest for a day or so and he’ll get you off to France. The Swiss will be kinder to you than to the Germans who’ve run there. In fact, Sam’s residency period has not much time to go. He’ll have to be replaced. The Swiss don’t want to upset the Germans by protecting refugees too long. If the refugees can’t get papers to France or anywhere else within a few months, phttt! back to Germany.” I was thinking of Sam with much fondness now. He was a so-so musician but, apparently, a great person. “Fifteen kilometers to go,” Ulrich said. Then I thought of Friedrichshafen and Kaufering: there would be camps going up there, part of the Dachau system, according to a map I’d seen on Dieter Lange’s table.

We came to the frontier at Lusteneau. I said to myself, Good-bye, Austria, hello Switzerland, see you soon, America. I was sweating, cold as it was. I remember the arrangement of it. There were five SS standing across the roadway in front of the barriers. The one in the middle patted his left hand flat down on the air, giving us the slowdown sign, while his right went up to signal Ulrich to stop. There was a smile on his face and he took a dainty little step toward us even before we stopped.

Ulrich said “Scheiss!” at the same time I recognized Bernhardt. Maria moaned. I pushed myself deeper into the corner of the seat. The rifles of the four men were pointed at Ulrich; Bernhardt’s pistol appeared suddenly in his hand. He aimed it at Maria who jerked back with her hands raised before her face. Ulrich braked and we all lurched forward. He climbed out slowly and raised his hands. Maria got out even more slowly; I think she was trembling. I didn’t move. Through the opened doors I heard the jangle of the metal on the gunbelts of the SS. The lights were very bright.

Bernhardt said, “You made good time, Ulrich. Is my piano player all right?” Ulrich said nothing. Bernhardt jerked his chin up and the four SS moved Ulrich and Maria away from the car with their rifles; Bernhardt looked inside. “Pepperidge, are you all right?” My teeth were chattering so much I couldn’t say anything. The sound of his voice was calming. “A little nervous then, Pepperidge?” I nodded vigorously. “You look dressed for Switzerland. How we’d have missed you—me, Lange, Frau Lange, and Frau Winkelmann, eh? We have another suit for you. Come on. Get out. Go over there into the office.” He pointed to the building, where several border guards were standing. I think I shuffled, because my legs seemed to have a mind of their own. As I went, I heard Bernhardt say loudly, I guessed to Ulrich and Maria, “Heil Hitler,” because they said together, as though they’d rehearsed it many times, “Fuck Hitler, fuck you.” I must have passed out then.

I woke up on the floor of a truck. It was daylight. I was back in uniform, but the new shirt was still on under the jacket, and the new shoes were on my feet. It seemed that a month had passed since the night. There were sharp pains everywhere—my face, my whole body. My lips were swollen, my eyes half-closed, and when I moved, pain jooged from one end of my body to the other. I groaned, and one of the two guards asked did I want a cigarette. I said yes, but it came out “yepths.” He stuck a Drummers in my mouth and lit it. The other guard looked at me and slowly shook his head. I couldn’t tell where we were going, but I supposed to the camp, to the guardhouse, and from there to the Bunker. I didn’t care. I didn’t mind dying then, but I didn’t want to die badly; I didn’t want it to hurt. I finished the cigarette and slipped back to sleep. The guards woke me this time. We were in front of Dieter Lange’s house. They helped me out and into the house, and left me. Dieter Lange came down the stairs real slow. He stopped and studied me, then finished coming down.

“Bernhardt was right,” he said. “He used you as bait. He would’ve looked very bad if they had pulled it off, but you know Bernhardt wasn’t going to let that happen. Took a little while, but he’s a patient man. Can you imagine, right here in the SS. Cigarette, Cleef?” I nodded. He gave me a Chesterfield. I was shaking so much I couldn’t light it; he had to do it for me. I asked about Ulrich and his girl. He got a basin of water and a cloth and helped me downstairs before he answered. “Bernhardt had them taken to Friedrichshafen prison. They were beheaded there, Execution durch Fallbeil.”

I finished the walk up the Lagerstrasse and went back to open the canteen. I knew that soon Dieter Lange would have a replacement for Baum, some sneak to keep an eye on me. I went into the back room and opened the new carton of toothpaste. Outside, the columns flowed up and down the main street, feet pounding, dust rising.

Thursday, May 19, 1938

“Guess what?” Anna asked me in English. Her face was scrubbed clean of makeup; her attitude was like a saint’s. I shrugged. I was washing dishes. Dieter Lange was not home. “Oh, come on. You must forget what happened. It wasn’t your fault. Colonel Bernhardt should not have beat you the way he did. But you are special to him, unique, a colored jazz music band leader. No one else in Germany has one, so you make this Lebensborn famous for him, in an unofficial way. You’re all right now. You are back home, back at the canteen, and back with your music. Don’t sulk. You could be where Ulrich and his girlfriend are, you know. So, now you guess what, Cleef.”

She said she was going to have a baby. She held up two fingers. Two months on the way. I said congratulations. She said thank you. That means you’ll be sending me into the camp to stay? I said. She said no, they—she and Dieter Lange—hadn’t discussed that. I knew she wasn’t pregnant at all. I clean up. I gather the garbage. I take care of what has to be burned, and, since I’ve been able, I’ve gone through all the Lange trash bit by bit, as I never did before. And I last saw Anna’s dead blood cunt rag last week. The bitch was padding herself. “And, can you imagine? Ursula’s pregnant two months also.”

I said, “Oh, imagine that.” So they were both going to pad themselves up to nine months. I didn’t know if Winkelmann would be happy. Since he and Dieter Lange were not friends, I didn’t know if he was a freak or not.

“Do you want a boy or a girl?” I asked.

She switched to German. “I don’t care, but I want it to be tall and with blue eyes and blond hair—even though I don’t have blond hair and neither does Dieter.” In my head, suddenly, there was an empty space waiting to be filled, and I knew nothing would fill it except saying something that was true. I told her that her hair was lighter around her pussy, so maybe she would have a blond kid, if she was pregnant. She started to scream, but stopped. She was worried about being heard. The saint was gone. She snatched my hands out of the dishwater and began to push me down the stairs to my room. She was following me down, her voice deep in her throat, calling me names, threatening me. She said she would send me into the camp, that Dieter Lange would make me disappear, that Bernhardt would chop off my head. I was being backed up into my room during all this. She suddenly quit and sat down on the steps. “Well, you see, we must do something. People are wondering where my babies are, when my babies will start coming. So.” She had started to cry. She lit a cigarette while we went back to the kitchen and the dishes. I asked what she would do with four kids, since she didn’t even like them. She said she didn’t know. Suppose, I said, you lose this one—the one you’re supposed to be having now. “And then?” she said. I asked her did she remember the whole ordinance about having babies, that the husband could have them by another woman? I saw that didn’t appeal to her, either. I was spieling and scheming to keep my behind out of that camp and she knew it; but she also didn’t wish to be held down by kids she didn’t want. So I told her she should have Dieter Lange make some arrangement to get a fake statement from a doctor saying she shouldn’t even try to have kids anymore because she might die. She lit another cigarette, all the time moving her head up and down. I knew the spiel was sounding good to her. “Umm,” she kept saying. “Umm.” She put out her cigarette, stood up pulling and tugging at her dress. “Some walking, some thinking,” she said, and then went out. Bitch, I thought. Everything I said she’d already thought of. I know it.

Mon., June 27, 1938

Last Thursday night Dieter Lange let me listen to the radio with him and Anna. Joe Louis was fighting Max Schmeling for the second time, and Joe Louis, I’d read, was now the heavyweight boxing champ. In camp they’d been talking about the fight for a week, throwing up their fists and laughing when I walked by, like they did after the first fight. “Oh, Schmeling’s gonna kill that guy, Sunshine, you watch! That nigger’s gonna get his, Snowball. Schmeling’s of the master race!” All this coming from some raggedy-ass Black or Green or SS. In a fair fight, I could’ve whipped half those cocksuckers, but the people in this camp don’t know nothing about fair.

When I first joined Mr. Wooding’s band, and people kept giving me this crap about my coming from Storyville, I got into some scrapes and did so well that, for a while there, they were calling me “Pepper.”

Anna set out some coffee and cake and schnapps. It was like a family, each of us with secrets put up on a shelf for the time being. The German announcer, Arno Helmers, said there were 70,000 people in Yankee Stadium. “You know that place, Yankee Stadium?” Dieter Lange asked. I told him I knew where it was, that it was practically brand-new when I left New York, and I thought about the bridge that carried you from Harlem into the Bronx and to the stadium. The announcer was describing the crowd, the records of each fighter, and how Schmeling had beaten Louis the first time. He said it was hot in New York, that Mike Jacobs was the promoter of the fight, and that now the fighters were entering the ring.

“Why does Schmeling get almost as many cheers as Louis?” Anna asked me. I was ashamed to tell her that white Americans wanted Louis to get beat almost as much as the Germans did. I pretended I didn’t hear her. We settled back and waited for the bell to begin the first round.

“Louis is across the ring,” the announcer said, “moving to the left. Schmeling moves back against the ropes. Louis! A left! A left and a right to the jaw! Schmeling’s trying to push Louis off with his left, but Louis keeps coming! A left to the jaw, another left and a right! Another left hook to the body and a right! Schmeling is reaching for the ropes! Louis is all over him! Schmeling’s knees are buckling! He’s turning away from Louis and here’s Louis with another right. Arthur Donovan is moving between them, counting … one, two … Now Donovan steps back and Schmeling advances and—Louis! A right that sends Schmeling to the floor. And now Schmeling is up, but—Louis! Left to the chin, another left, and another and a right to the chin—Schmeling is hanging on the ropes; Louis, another left to the head, a right to the body …”

I thought I heard a scream above the crowd noise, and then it was like somebody took a great big knife and sliced off the sound and the scream. The radio spit static, nothing else. Cursing, Dieter Lange sprang up to turn the dials. “What’s this? What’s going on?” He pounded the radio with the flat of his hand. Then he snatched his hat and ran out.

“I bet you they cut it off because Schmeling is losing,” Anna said. I didn’t say anything, but to me it sounded like Schmeling was getting murdered. Somehow I managed to keep from smiling, even though I wanted to jump and shout. First there was Jesse Owens and now Louis. In the first round! In seconds! That superman shit of Hitler’s was taking a whipping! I bet those colored men over in camp are catching hell from the other prisoners. You’d think they’d be happy to see Schmeling take a beating. But I know those jokers; they’re white and German first, prisoners second. I didn’t think white folks back home would go out killing black folks the way they did after Jack Johnson beat Jim Jeffries when I was a kid. Two colored men were killed by crackers over in La Providence then. But you never know.

When Dieter Lange came back, he was mad. I went downstairs to my room. In the darkness I raised my arms and opened my mouth and screamed silently, “Yay! Yay!! Yay!!!”

Yesterday I finally found Dr. Nyassa back in Revier One. Nobody seemed to know where he’d been. He looked and sounded tired and weak. He was thinner. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. He told me he was now under medical care; he was now as much patient as nurse. I asked where he’d been, and he smiled a little sad smile. “A long, bad story, my friend, very long and very bad.” First, he told me that some of the colored men I’d seen were Africans stranded in Germany, students, one or two boxers, adventurers. But the Germans called them Ballastexistenzen—persons without value. With them were some of “The Rhineland Bastards,” Der Rheinlandbastarde. These, he told me in a low and weary voice, are, or were, the children of the French colonial soldiers, the Senegalese and other Africans, and of the colored American soldiers who helped the Allies occupy the Rhineland after the World War. Some, of course, had grown up since 1918, and were among the men I saw; the rest were in other camps. How many may have gotten out of Germany he didn’t know. Dr. Nyassa was quiet for a long time, during which one of the new doctors stuck his head into the room and told him not to tire himself because they were going to do some tests on him. We had both scrambled to attention and said, “Yes, sir.” We sat down again. I asked him what tests, and he waved the question away. “A lot of those people, grown and children alike, were taken to clinics. I’ve been away, to Frankfurt, to the clinic of Dr. Otmar von Verschuer. I’ve been sterilized.”

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.

Anna surprises me with her temper, her sex, her drinking. And her English. Only rarely now does she ask me to explain a word she may hear over the radio during a BBC broadcast. She loves to read about Hollywood movie stars in American magazines, especially Marlene Dietrich who became a U.S. citizen last year. “German movies,” she says, “are all about being a good German, not romance, you know.” She’s come a long way from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and I did it. Everybody looks down on me, but I taught her English; everybody laughs at me, but they love my singing and playing; everybody despises me for being a faggot, but everybody wants to do it to me or have me do it to them. I wish I could lay this burden down, but on clear days when we can just see the mountains to the south, I remind myself how close I came, so I wait, just as Dieter Lange and Anna wait. When they’re together they talk about “afterward.” When Dieter Lange’s with me, “afterward” is without Anna. I think Anna, too, thinks about “afterward” without him. Me, when I think “afterward” it’s without either of them. Everybody’s waiting for something, yet I don’t think anybody can help believing that things are just beginning.

Thursday, Dec. 29, 1938

Of course, we’ve had Christmas: big dances at The Nest, and even a party here, for the first time in a long while. I’ll remember that party, because there were a couple of doctors who came; one was the man who was doing the tests on Dr. Nyassa. Recognized him right away.

Ursula Winkelmann and her husband have been feted all over the SS compound. Her pad is off! The baby is here! I can’t imagine what this Winkelmann is like that he went along. There are a bunch of strange saps in the SS! Ursula went to Momma’s a few days before the “baby” was expected, and when she returned to the compound, she had this baby all wrapped in pink. And her and Anna have been cooing over that little bastard like it was really her own! (Will she pad out four times for the bronze Honor Cross of German Motherhood, or six times for the silver, or eight times for the gold?) Who knows about this? Me, Anna, Dieter Lange, Ursula, naturally, and her husband, and maybe two or three people at Lebensborn.

There’s a big Christmas tree in the room where the piano is. I love the smell of it, and the decorations and lights and candles. The Winkelmanns, the Bernhardts, the Langes, and me sang Christmas carols, me playing the piano, last Thursday. Bernhardt gave me a carton of Players and a bottle of Scotch and patted me on the back as if to say, “Everything’s all right now,” but it isn’t. I’ve often wondered if he watched while they cut off Ulrich’s and Maria’s heads. (Or could he have done it himself?) Dieter Lange gave me some socks and handkerchiefs, but he had already slipped me a bit of that darling white powder. He once said, “If that fat-assed faggot Goering can use it, why can’t we?” Anna gave me a book that bored me after the first page. I put it away.

I spent Christmas alone with a goose, which I didn’t eat but left in the oven for Anna and Dieter Lange, some liquor, which I drank, and the piano, which I didn’t play. I don’t mind when I’m by myself, which is something most prisoners never get to enjoy; you’re alone if they put you in the Bunker, but that’s hell. This is more like heaven. You relax when you’re alone; you don’t have to be watching what you do or say, or watching, period. I sat at the piano. The truth is, I’m not happy like I used to be with the music. I haven’t found my real self in it since May. Just ricky-tick, tinky-tank stuff. My fingers don’t play what I think I hear. I can’t seem to make music out of the way I feel. I keep thinking there’s got to be a new kind of music to explain this shit I’m in, because music expresses every kind of experience one can imagine, but I can’t pump it out of myself, and that makes me afraid; if I don’t have my music, really don’t have it, then I don’t have anything. It’s bad not to have anything. You wind up doing what Dr. Nyassa did. Please, God. Help me.

Monday, January 9, 1939

Typhoid epidemic.

Typhoid, and everybody’s scared, so The Nest has been without inperson music for a couple of weeks, to make sure none of us brings to it what’s been knocking off prisoners in the blocks. The doctors and nurses from the Reviers have been giving shots and medicine day and night. Inmates lined up in the cold. Rivers of snot, shit, and saliva. Prisoners working on the sewers. Clean! Clean! the guards shout. Wash! Cleanliness is next to godliness. Wash! Don’t drink from here! Don’t drink from there! Smoke—black, oily, smelly—boiling out of the crematorium. In the SS compound, where the sewer system is good—except where some prisoners may have sabotaged it—everyone is boiling water; everyone is checking for the red spots and the runny bowels, waiting for the weariness that doesn’t end. There’s not a lot of running from bed to bed right now out here, let me tell you. Over in camp, those that’re well have to help those who aren’t, and prisoners are being switched from their regular details to the mess, cleanup, and crematorium details. If this is with less than a good heart, it is nevertheless good insurance; you never know when you might get sick and need help. From one end of the camp to the other, the smell of shit and burning bodies seems to have frozen right in the air.

When we’re not boiling water and scrubbing the house from top to bottom, me and Anna are smearing alcohol and disinfectant over everything. The house smells like a vat of chlorine, and I’m sure every house out here smells just the same. I think the smell of vinegar and dill is better. Dieter Lange is off on another trip, but one I think he went to, instead of being sent on. Maybe he’s hoping Anna will get sick and kick the bucket, maybe that I will, too. Anna needs me to help clean, and the canteen’s closed, anyway. Anna’s as strong as one of her father’s plough horses, and I’m in pretty good shape myself. Nobody’s visiting these days, either. Afraid of catching something. (Which is why Anna hasn’t been fucking with me. She’s afraid she might catch something from me, and I’m afraid I could catch something from her. I’d punch her in the jaw if she tried anything funny right now.)

Well. All this gives me time at the piano, and that’s good because I don’t have to go over scores. Instead, I’m trying to think up new music and find new ways to make it work, like planting the rhythm in space instead of leaving it alone. It’s nice, playing while Anna sews upstairs or sleeps. (Sometimes when she comes down she says, “That was nice. What was it?” Or, “That sounded like glass breaking in the middle of winter. What was that supposed to be?”) Being alone gives me a chance to think about things, too, like when I told Werner about Ulrich and Maria. He just shook his head, and asked if Maria had given her last name or where she was from. I told him I didn’t know. Then he wanted the exact date, which I gave him. I still think he’s writing things down for later. Funny how we all think there will be a “later.” He told me that some of the colored men had died, some more had come in, and all were put in the same block with the Jews. All had been sterilized, he told me, by X-ray; two, he believed, had been castrated. The thought of that made me shiver. He said they just slit the sacks and take out the nuts, sew up the sacks, and you sing alto instead of like Paul Robeson—unless they.… Then he asked if I understood all that was going on. Before I could answer, he started to give me a lesson in civics. Another one.

Things were very bad in France, he said, where fascist Frenchmen were exerting more and more power, which the working people could hold in check for just so long. (I wondered if there weren’t fascists everywhere; there seemed to be a lot of them in Germany, so I thought it’d be only natural for them to be all over.) When the French and English backed down over Czechoslovakia, a lot of French officers resigned, and so did some people in the British parliament. Werner called the French “shits who can’t be trusted”; they managed to drag the Americans into their front in the last war because they couldn’t handle it themselves, but that’s the way they are, he said, good in the kitchen, superb in bed, and cowards on the battlefield. I asked him, “Even the workers?” and he stopped short for a second, and then went on like he hadn’t heard me. Werner was mad that day, last week, the first of the new year. What a way to start it.

I feel most sorry for the gangs that have to clean up the snow and ice. They slip and slide with their boards fastened together, their shoes wrapped in rags if they have no arctics, and most don’t, their bodies bulging with old sweaters and pants, two or even three jackets, rags wrapped around their heads to protect them from the cold. They know the only way to keep warm is to move, so they have this little dance: slip-slide step-step shuffle, shuffle-step-step slide-slip, then shovel-lift-throw, and start all over again. They are the only ones who hear the music; it’s like watching a dance chorus in a movie without sound.

Wednesday, February 8, 1939

It’s so cold we’ve put up the porcelain stove in the living room. It burns wood we have brought to the back, where I split it. We don’t get as much coal as we used to, and when we do get it, it’s soft coal, coke, and doesn’t heat as well as the hard. The porcelain stove works just fine, but I hate taking out the ashes. Ashes make dust that I have to wipe up. The one good thing about winter, Dieter Lange says, is that he doesn’t have to buy ice or worry if I’m going to forget to empty the pan under the icebox. We have cold boxes attached to the kitchen windows. Whatever we put in the boxes freezes like rocks. The cream is pushed out of the bottles of milk we set out there. Sometimes the bottles crack. The meat looks like the parts of bodies I hear the SS doctors are dissecting. Of course, that may just be jailhouse gossip, of which there is an awful lot in camp. For example, Huebner was telling me about an ASO who came in fighting with the guards all the way from Frankfurt because he claimed his idiot kid had been taken away and killed. Threw him in the Bunker right away and proceeded to whip his ass every hour on the hour, twenty-five strokes, and still he fought. One day the prisoners near him didn’t hear him anymore, and a detail came in to wash out his cell. Where did he go? Up the chimney, they say. The Reds are still snooping around because, as Werner said, “A man can come in here and be crazy, but nobody can be that crazy without good reason.” Nobody knows the man’s name. Werner believes almost everything; I wonder how it is that he’s not crazy, too. You got to shut out some of this shit and believe it’s jailhouse gossip in order not to go nuts.

Monday, March 6, 1939

General mobilization. The German government is talking war with Czechoslovakia, the rumor says. Mad because the Czechs haven’t rolled over and given up like the British and French want them to. The English are calling up people, and in camp, Jesus Christ, there are prisoners who want to volunteer to go to war. Can’t be the “later” everyone’s been hoping for, war. Well, they’ve been talking about it coming for a long time. I’d imagine if The Nest was open, and it will be next week Bernhardt says, there’d be the same old saddle-up, flag-waving, give-me-some-pussy-because-I’m-going-to-war bullshit.

The second day the canteen was open after the epidemic was over, a colored boy came in wearing the black triangle of the asocials. Actually, he was just on the dark side of high-yellow. I didn’t know this until Lappus called me from the office and said a young colored prisoner wanted to talk to me; that was when I met him. “You’re Mr. Pepperidge?” he asked. He spoke first in German and then repeated in English. His English was okay. And it wasn’t British English, either. Before I could answer—and I wanted to answer quickly because no prisoner called another “mister,” and I didn’t want him to be laughed at—he said his own name was Pierre Braun. I said hello in English and led him away from the customers, who were not buying as much as talking about the possibility of war with Czechoslovakia. It stinks in the canteen in winter, and everyone tries to get as close to the little stove as possible. Five feet away from it there’s no warmth at all because of the bodies packed around it. Pierre looked about fifteen. He could have been my son. He was a skinny kid with big eyes that I thought must once have been very bright. He had a tic on the left side of his face. His hands were long and thin. There was something about him that made me want to put my arm around his shoulder. To comfort him. To stop the tic. To bring brightness back into his eyes. He seemed very sad.

“Well?” I said. He kept looking at me. Like a kid, too.

“Somebody told me you were an American.” In this place that could be anybody. Oh, Christ, I’m thinking. How come he knows American English? I’m curious to know how he got here, who he is.

So I say, “Yeah, that’s right.”

He holds out his hand again and I take it, and we shake for a second time while he’s telling me, “My father’s American, too. He was an American soldier. My mother’s German—from Mullheim—the Rhineland. I got my father’s English from her. And I studied it, so if we ever went to America …” I drop his hand. He cocks his head and looks at me, a question in his eyes. He sees I know. “You know about the Rhineland Bastards then?”

I pat his shoulder. “They, they …?”

He nods his head. “Yes. They did that to me and sent me here. It’s happening not only to black Rhinelanders, you know.” I don’t know why, but we’re whispering.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “What can I do for you?” He hunches his shoulders.

“Just tell me about America when you can.” After a minute he adds, “My father never came back. He never sent for us. My mother was mad.” And here it is.

“How old are you, Pierre?” I ask him. He tells me fourteen. I ask where he works and he tells me the disinfection hut. That’s near the north wall. The epidemic must have been hell for him. Then he has to go. I tell him, “Stop in any time except Saturday. We’ll talk about America.” He grabs my hand once more and shakes it and thanks me.

Huebner is about five years older than Pierre. I hadn’t thought about that before, how many young Witnesses there are here. I wonder what Huebner will do when the next Witness roll call takes place. Will he step forward and renounce the Witnesses, or stand in place? I think he’ll stand still, and I guess that’s why I like him.

Thursday, March 16, 1939

Gitzig came over Monday. Hadn’t seen him in a long time. Said Bernhardt was busy in Vienna and Lily was visiting relatives. He had the house to himself for a little while. He looked good: good clothes and shoes. He didn’t even seem to look as much like a rat as he used to—well, not quite as much. We talked about how big the SS compound had grown, and all the women and the babies. He said any SS man worth his salt was going to have a nice nest egg by the time all this was over. I asked what he meant by “by the time this is all over.” He told me the plan was to invade Czechoslovakia on Wednesday, since the Czechs were so slow to hand over the land Germany claimed. And later, they’d take the whole damn thing. “So,” he said, “that information I told you to take to Werner … a safe bet, eh? And don’t forget, Poland next. But I suppose by now they’ve got all their people out.” I told him I didn’t know. He had a problem, he said. “You remember those radio parts I told you about, how we ought to save everything? Well, I put together two.” Somehow I couldn’t imagine Gitzig the swindler being able to do that. “I got one complete radio in the camp,” he said, “and all but one tube of the second. It’s all wrapped.” I waited. “Take it to camp. Give it to Werner.”

I was surprised. “Werner has a radio?”

He laughed. “I know many things you don’t know I know. Werner knows how to use it.” He saw that I was not anxious to do that. “They don’t search you when you go through, Pepperidge, come on. There are people waiting for that tube.” I asked where he managed to get the parts and he said in his travels, and laughed again. “I’d have taken whole radios, but how in the hell could I get away with that? Bernhardt would have my ass in the Bunker like sixty just to start with.” Gitzig knew I was on my way to the canteen.

“Right now?” I asked him.

“The sooner the better,” he said. “They want to know what’s going on with Czechoslovakia.” (German troops went into Bohemia and Moravia yesterday.) I asked what would happen if they searched me this time at the guardhouse, and he said, “It’s your ass, I suppose. Even Bernhardt couldn’t save you. And they’d make you tell them who you were carrying it to, who you got it from, and then they’d make Werner tell, and the game would be up.” He shrugged. “That’s the chance you take, Pepperidge. What do you say?” I said all right. He slapped me on the back. “That’s the spirit. This thing can’t last forever.” I told him I thought he only stole, swindled, or pissed in the tea, and he said he still stole and he was a better swindler than Bernhardt—who didn’t have to swindle or steal because he was a licensed ass-kicker and could do anything he damn well pleased—and besides, the whole business was a swindle with the fucking Nazis; he knew because it takes one to know one.

Right now it was merely a matter of who was going to swindle who and for how long. He was hedging bets. I didn’t understand. This prick was in no position to make choices, just like the rest of us weren’t. But I said, “At my expense.”

He hawked some snot and said, “Who the fuck you think carried in all those other parts?” I told him I was wondering what was making him so stark all of a sudden, and he said he had a family he wanted one day to be proud of him. He’d never mentioned family to me, and I told him so. Over his face came a slow smile. It actually made the ugly sonofabitch look handsome. “I’m going to have a child. I mean, a woman is going to have a child by me,” he said.

“One of those country-girl whores,” I said.

“No,” he said. He loved this woman and she wasn’t a whore. He was still smiling when he said, “I put my life into your hands, Pepperidge, but I’m so happy I have to tell someone!” He leaned very close and whispered, “A woman out here.” I jumped away from him like he had a nasty cottonmouth snake in his hand.

“An SS wife?”

He just grinned—shy-like—and nodded his head. I started to ask him if he was crazy. Then I realized that this stuff was probably happening all over the place. Shit, in a twisted kind of way it was happening to me. But the business had to have started with the woman. No calfactor would dare approach the wife, daughter, mother, cousin, aunt, or grandmother of an SS man. Talk about leaving this place in a hurry, that would give you the right ticket. Well, Gitzig and me were in the same boat, except in my boat beside Anna were Ursula and Dieter Lange. Maybe the husband never did enough homework. Maybe, after a while, being the wife of an SS officer was like having the clap or worse, and the women got sick of it. I took a good long look at Gitzig, who was still grinning. Had he wondered which side his goose would slowly be cooked on if the baby looked like him? I saw he hadn’t. I just shook my head. It was plain to see that Gitzig was in love, and that never allowed you to look over the consequences when your love came down on the wrong side of things. The sonofabitch had joined the human race. I took the tube in without trouble and gave it to Werner. It was like carrying in a can of sausage for him, no trouble at all.

Thursday, March 30, 1939

There were new tuxedos for us when we returned to the Pussy Palace. No doubt from the wardrobe shop of another Jew who’d managed to get out or who was in a camp somewhere. The tuxes are midnight blue, not black, and smell so new that there couldn’t be a single typhus germ trucking in the seams. After all those weeks in Dieter Lange’s house and the camp, it felt good to be back. One problem, though, and it’s Moritz. He’s got blues deeper than Duke’s “Mood Indigo,” blues deeper than the color of his tux. After the first set of our first night back last week, I pulled him into a corner. Bernhardt knew music, but he didn’t know music. I mean, he couldn’t tell when someone was off unless they were way off. But I could, and I knew Moritz was off. I’d heard him play that fiddle long enough to know. I knew it wasn’t his love life; he had some real Berlin Leder among the Lebensborn workers, and I was happy he was happy. It was something else. All this time, he finally told me, he was hoping to get himself bought out of camp, but somehow his family could never get the money together. Then, during Kristallnacht, some of his family vanished. It was the worst time ever for Jews, he told me, and something had changed in the way he was now treated in camp. When he marched out with the band to have an inmate punished, get a whipping, or to be hung on the Tree, the guards spat at him and kicked him and called him names—which they’d not routinely done before. It was like he was the one going to punishment. So he was afraid, and I couldn’t do anything to help him, and that’s what was wrong with his playing. Then he cried. And I held him. That was all I could do. He heaved up and down in my arms, his lousy perfume sneaking up my nose, until, slowly, he came to a stop and blew his nose on a rag.

Tuesday, April 4, 1939

I slipped down to the disinfection hut today with a pack of Drummers (I don’t think he smokes, but he can trade them), a bar of chocolate, and a can of sausage for Pierre Braun. I thought I might talk with him about America. Yesterday Anna gave me a three-year-old Saturday Evening Post. On the cover was a fat colored woman who looked like Aunt Jemima. She was bent over an open oven basting a turkey. She wore a head rag. Sitting close by on the floor was a long-headed little colored boy. Reminded me of my auntie’s house back home when I was a kid.

I get to the hut without any trouble, look over at the garden, and I see Pierre there with Hohenberg. Hohenberg, with the stiff dick that never goes down. And the way he’s close to the kid, the look on his face, like he’s hungry for something, scares me and makes me mad at the same time. I don’t think about it twice. I just go over and tell Hohenberg to get the fuck away from the kid and leave him alone or I’ll kick his ass. The look on his face makes me know he’s up to no good. I can see the kid doesn’t know what’s going on. Maybe he’s never been approached before. Usually the prisoners stay away from disinfection hut workers for fear of catching something. Anyway, that’s the way I saw it: Hohenberg trying to take advantage of Pierre. I chase his ass right out of there. He knows I’d managed to take care of Baum; word gets around, or even if it doesn’t, the prisoners could guess at the sequence of events.

I pick up two rakes and give Pierre one so we won’t be standing around doing nothing. That’s the quickest way to get the guards on your ass. I ask how he’s been, if his health is all right, if he’s heard from his mother. Everything is all right with him, but he’s not heard from his mother and won’t because it’s forbidden. He asks me why I was mad at Hohenberg, and I tell him the camp is filled with men who haven’t had a woman in years, so the prisoners turn a little bit queer with each other. Young prisoners they tried to make into women. They bring gifts and sweet-talk them; or they beat them up or blackmail them. They do all sorts of things. I tell him I have cigarettes and food for him, but I wasn’t trying to slick him into anything; tell him I am queer myself, so I know what’s going on. I am thinking he might draw back a bit when I tell him, but he doesn’t. He says he isn’t like that at all and just didn’t think about the way it is in camp, but now he understands. He asks how I got that way. All the time we’re raking dirt and mixing it with pig shit to fertilize it. Tell him I didn’t know, I just am, and had been in America. So I get the conversation around to that and I can tell he feels easier. I ask where his father had come from and he says St. Louis. Do I know it? I say I don’t, but I know a little something about Kansas City in the same state. A lot of very good musicians lived there. Did his daddy play any kind of music that he knew of? He doesn’t think so. Was St. Louis a nice place? I tell him no. A lot of colored people had been killed there in race riots. He wants to know what those are, and when I describe them he asks if I’d ever been in one. I laugh because if I knew one was on the way, I’d run. Do they have those everywhere in America? No, I tell him, but they have enough. It isn’t easy for colored people back there. His daddy made his mother believe all that stuff about democracy and every man being equal to the next. I tell him, though, that there are some pretty nice places. If a colored man knew the ropes, New Orleans was a fine place with lots of good spicy food. I think then of a steaming bowl of gumbo and nearly cry. And Philadelphia is all right, and New York and Chicago, I tell him. I can see him brightening up. They don’t do there what they are doing here? he wants to know. Of course, I tell him no, and give him a scowl like a father would in answer to a silly question. Lots of colored people in those cities, I tell him.

Harlem, he wants to know about. I rake for a minute, then tell him it is the place every colored person with gumption or get-up-and-go wants to be. Because of the tall buildings? He’d seen pictures. I laugh again. How can tall buildings help a man get along? I ask him. You know better than that, I say. It’s just that people do things in New York that they don’t or won’t or can’t do anywhere else. Like Berlin, then? I start to say that depended on what you wanted to do, but I say instead, a little. What are colored Americans like? he wants to know. I am a little sorry I’d started this, but at the same time, it feels good to tell him about things, like a daddy would. They’re like your father and they’re like me. They’re like Joe Louis—and I wait to see if he knows about him. He does. Pierre grins. And like Jesse Owens. He grins again. They’re poor and a very few—very few—are rich, but not rich like white people are rich. Do they work in factories and stores and on the trams and buses? I rake out a new furrow. No, I tell him, but both the men and the women work very hard for little pay. So then he wants to know how they earn enough money to save and get ahead (which is every European’s goal). I have to tell him that colored people don’t own any factories and damn few stores and running the trams, trains, and buses is what white people do, that and all the neat, clean jobs. Then I rake and don’t say anything more, because I’m thinking, Shit! How do we get by? Anyway, it’s time for me to get on back up the street to the canteen. “I have to go now,” I say. “We’ll talk again.” I collect his rake and set them against the fence and steer him back toward the disinfection hut. If the guard in the tower is watching, I know he’s thinking I probably outtalked Hohenberg to get me some booty. I slip the stuff from under my jacket down into his shirt. Then I think of something, and I say, “Wait a minute.” I need a little more help. I pick up a rake again and with the end of the handle draw this into the dirt:

When I finish, I tell him, “Press your hand on it, right between those two things at the top.” He’s wondering what it is, and I say, “Go ahead. It’s colored American magic. It’ll protect you from anything bad.” He’s got a stupid look on his face. “Pierre. Do it!” He bends to his knees and presses the earth right between the sideways crosses at the top of the sign for Loa Aizan, who protects whoever wears the sign from evil spirits. Pierre looks at me sort of funny, like what’s going on with this guy, then he goes to the hut and I start up the street. I march right up into Werner’s block. Being a block leader doesn’t seem to be such a bad job at all. I mean, Werner doesn’t have to rush out of bed, bolt down his food, and march off to work and back singing as loud as he can. Not bad at all, just looking after things and seeing the others behave, and collecting information. He must see something on my face because he looks edgy. I don’t even say hello. I tell him to tell everybody, especially that goddamn Hohenberg, to leave that Braun kid alone if they want to stay healthy. Werner’s looking at me like I’ve gone nuts. Then he grins. Then he laughs, pats me on the shoulder and says he’ll tell them, don’t worry, he’ll tell them.

Monday, April 17, 1939

Another April, another bunch of baby bastards, the same old SS all dressed up, the girls who look the same as all the others, the same looks at each other (“I’m really off to war now, honey, so …”), the same thinning out of people just past the middle of the second set. Only thing different was we were playing more slow drags because this shit in Czechoslovakia was serious business, Bernhardt said last Friday. He showed up with Anna. His own wife’s sick a lot with that baby she’s carrying. Sure ought to be used to it by now; been carrying seven months. Bernhardt, he don’t need excuses for anything he does. Anyway, Dieter Lange’s away clearing up accounts at the other camps. He’s now going to be responsible for just the ones in Bavaria and Linz, and Mauthausen in Austria. That may come to thirty or forty small and large camps, I heard him say to Anna, if all the plans are put into operation. Last month, though, he had to get rid of seven prisoners at other camps because they were dipping in the till. I guess the same way he got rid of Baum. I wondered then just how many camps there were going to be when these crazy Germans got finished. Sure, everybody’s glad the epidemic is over and that the mess in Czechoslovakia doesn’t look too bad for now. But I guess before long there’ll be some Czechs in the camp, just like there are some Austrians (and they still ain’t stopped coming). On the stand, we’ve played the numbers so often we can just let our minds fly out of the Pussy Palace. Moritz was sounding better, more like himself, but still a little off. I was more worried about myself, because I knew I’d worn out my vocals. I wasn’t with them anymore, and I knew I was right when I’d catch somebody in the band looking at me and then look away quick just when I thought I was faking up a storm. Well, they’d become pretty good musicians.

That was last weekend.

This past weekend, Moritz wasn’t in the truck when it stopped to pick me up. I asked where he was, sick? Moritz hadn’t ever been sick. Nobody answered me right away. The guards smiled at each other, but said nothing. Franz, while lighting a cigarette, drew a finger across his throat, blew out the smoke, and turned to watch the road. We could talk while we dressed. We were always alone then. Somebody at The Nest had squealed on Moritz’s leather boy. They took him to the Bunker. They had Moritz stand alone on the Dancing Ground after the evening roll call. This was Thursday night. (I hadn’t gone to the camp Friday morning, because Anna got a bug up her ass about spring cleaning, so I hadn’t heard anything—not that you always will.) Then they marched him into the Bunker, got his violin, and made him play while he marched. “Marched to his own tune, straight up,” Teodor said, chewing a sandwich. He snorted. “He knew it was the end for him, crippled for life, or dead. He’s marching across the Appellplatz and he breaks out with this ‘Air.’” For a minute I thought he meant a fart. But he meant a tune. Then, he said, Moritz started a dancing march, bouncing to his own music.

I asked what the hell he was playing, and then Fritz broke in. “They say he was playing some Jew shit—‘Hava Nagila’—and the guards began to beat at his legs, but he kept on playing and marching, even when they started on his body and his head.” (All stories like this are pieced together. One prisoner sees this happen, another sees that happen, and others see what they see, and eventually the story gets put together.)

I asked if the tune meant anything to make them beat him up. Alex said, “Let’s rejoice.”

Danko said in a voice that sounded like he’d run a hundred miles, “From Palestine.” The Reds finished the story, put the final touches on it because the prisoners clean up all the messes, and those that belong to Werner’s gang report to him. It seems that Moritz’s leather boy was already naked on the whipping block. They gave Moritz the whip. By now they’d smashed his violin. He threw down the whip. They took the leather boy off the block and strapped Moritz to it. The leather boy didn’t throw down the whip. He flogged Moritz to death, although twenty-five strokes is supposed to be the limit—for small things, like leaving camp without authorization, saying rotten things about the government, or keeping certain articles or tools. For a couple of prisoner queers, all the rules went out the window. Then the guards flogged the leather boy to death. Werner’s people said it was a mess. So I had another bad weekend at The Nest. It was so bad that Bernhardt wanted to know what was wrong. I told him we needed new material, and he said okay. Then he took Anna by the arm and led her out of the hall, I suppose to the cottage he uses back on the far side of Lebensborn.

Sunday, April 30, 1939

Earlier I was upstairs with Dieter Lange and Anna listening to some records. No doubt that jazz music is changing. They’d been calling it “swing,” but it’s still jazz. Wonder how come they call Benny Goodman the “King of Swing?” He could be a “Duke” or a “Count,” but not a king. Dieter Lange’s got just about everything Fats Waller ever did, and Billie Holiday, too. I enjoy playing the records when Anna and Dieter Lange aren’t around, so I can relax and think about the way the music’s being played. When they’re around, Dieter Lange’s always saying, “That’s jumping!” or “That’s swinging!” What a pain in the ass. I’ve never liked people who couldn’t blow a halfway decent fart, but who run off at the mouth about this musician or that one, or what’s being done with the music and what isn’t. Sometimes, whether they’re home or not, if I hear something in the music, I’ll try to work it out on the piano my own way.

The Germans just kicked another few thousand out, over into Poland. That would be like kicking black people out of New York and Philadelphia and Chicago and sending them to Mississippi. Who the fuck would want to go to Poland? The Jews are not allowed to take whatever they have left with them, and once there, they can’t leave, and they have to live in certain places. How do they live? Their jobs were here, in Germany. Dieter Lange says Hitler told everybody how it was going to be in his book, Mein Kampf, but nobody believed him. I listen to the prisoners talking about the Jews—and they don’t mind my being there—as if I would naturally agree with them. Ha! With these bastards? They never ask me what I think, and I never tell them. I’m not dumb. They hate Jews, nearly all the prisoners, even many of the Reds. “The Jews controlled the banks until Hitler took them back. They control the banks of the world.” Really? I think. I never thought of it one way or the other. Some of the Jews I knew were gangsters or ran pawnshops. “The Jews took over our schools, the theater, wrote all the books, and squeezed all the Germans out of the retail business,” the prisoners tell each other. I didn’t know anything about that, not having spent all that much time in school back home, and certainly none in Europe. And I didn’t read that many books; never have. In Germany, and I guess everywhere else, you can’t tell a Christian from a Jew in a store or anywhere else. On Saturdays it was true that you saw Jews going to their church, but the very next day you saw Christians going to theirs. In Berlin show business, I knew Jews and Christians and couldn’t tell—shit, didn’t give a damn—which was which. As far as I knew, one club owner was as bad as another. Theater was something I didn’t know about. So when the prisoners talked about the Jews just taking over everything, I wondered how come the Christians were too lazy to write the books, do well in the retail business, run the banks and schools and other things? It was all a bunch of bullshit, what they were saying, and I knew it, and down deep they did, too. They just wanted to get rid of the Jews to make themselves feel more important. I could see that from where I stood in the pecking order back home. I got tired of all those stupid white people thinking they were more important or better than me. If the Christians have it in so much for the Jews who “stole everything,” why are they bringing in Gypsies as fast as they can? Gypsies don’t write shit, as far as I know, and not only don’t they own any banks, they don’t even use the motherfuckers; and they don’t want to have much to do with anyone who isn’t a Gypsy. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. The world runs on it the way a car runs on gasoline.

I thought about this business and what it would be like back home if white people in the Congress passed a law that would do to colored people what German laws are doing to the Jews. I mean, if the laws were everywhere back home, not just the South and some small towns around the country. Would we just pick up and march into prisons? Would we say, “Yazzuh, boss,” and march off to another Poland? All twelve million of us? How could we ever hide, pass for white, unless we damn near were? (I guess after all this time there’s got to be a few million who’ve slipped over the line.) Who would send us money to help get away and to where? Probably Africa, but I don’t know anything about no damned Africa, and wouldn’t want to go there, running around with a bone in my nose, or a plate in my lips, like in all the pictures. Who would hold conferences to figure out a way to save us? Conferences didn’t save those Jews, and my guess is, push come to shove, white people would prefer Jews to colored people, anyhow. Sometimes when I pass a bunch of Jews and hear quiet, secret laughing, or under-the-breath singing—not those work songs but something harder and deeper—it reminds me of colored men on the chain gangs that you pass on the roads in the South, and I know that the Boss-man, the Cap’n-suh, German or American, hadn’t yet managed to completely kill the spirit.

Last week Pierre told me that when he got out—when we got out—he wanted to go to New York. I asked about his mother, and he just hunched up his shoulders and let them fall down. He’s mad, I think, because she can’t write to him. And she let them carry him off without a fight. Says he couldn’t live in Germany anymore after what’s happened to him, and when I told him again that America wasn’t a bed of roses, either, he said he’d take his chances, that it’s better than this. I agree.

Pierre has a fine, well-shaped head. He’s always close-shaven, working in the disinfection hut. Other prisoners can have a little hair on their heads, but not enough to make a nest for lice. The gas Pierre and the other prisoners use to clean clothing and spray prisoners is very strong, he told me. Sometimes he has to go outside no matter how hard it’s raining or how cold it is. The good thing, he says, is that he’s sure no bug in the world wants to be bothered with him. He still has that tic. Pierre seems glad to see me, but to get to him is like moving between two worlds. I can see what his is like, but he can’t understand mine because I haven’t told him all about it, of course. I mean Dieter Lange or Anna. I did tell him about the club for the SS—that’s where I get the sandwiches and other things I can sometimes give him. He wanted me to explain jazz music and I told him there is no explaining it; it just is.

Pierre likes to play “Suppose.” “Suppose we get out of here.” (He always says “we.”) “Maybe next week. What would we do?”

“First,” I say, “supposing we had money, we’d get the first train out of Dachau to France, Paris.”

He smiles.

“Then we’d find rooms in Montmartre. There are a lot of clubs there where they play jazz. And I have friends there, Freddie Johnson and Ruby Mae Richards, and I think there’d be a guy there who played in my band at the SS club. We’d have fun in Paris.”

“And then?” He’s waiting for the America part, but I’m not in a big hurry to get to it.

I say, “I also have a friend in Amsterdam, and I know some recording people in Madrid, but maybe we’d go to London, so you can see that, too.”

“I would like that,” Pierre says.

“Then we’d take a ship, a Cunarder.”

“Do they let colored people on those ships?”

“Yes, and not the back of the ship, either. They’re great big things. You wonder how they can float.”

“I’d be afraid,” Pierre says, but his eyes sparkle.

I think about “Suppose” down in my room. The next time we play it, the ship will be coming into New York harbor.

I heard footsteps upstairs. They were Dieter Lange’s. “Cleef? Cleef, I’m coming down. We should have a drink.” He was on my stairs now. “It’s been a couple of weeks, Cleef. Anna stayed to help Ursula with the baby.” Clump, he came, clomp, he came, until he was at my door, in his pants and undershirt, holding a bottle of schnapps.

I hate Dieter Lange. Sometimes I wonder how I can hate him so much and still be alive. I think I hate him enough to drop dead from it. I wouldn’t hesitate one second to kill him, kill him in ways even the SS couldn’t begin to imagine. Thing about it is he knows I love living a helluva lot more than I hate him. I’ve had these thoughts before, I know, but I can’t get rid of them. They keep going round and round in my head like a trapped rat trying to find a way out. I think sometimes when we’re together, me and Dieter Lange, that I should just kill him. To hell with what comes next. I could. It wouldn’t be hard. He’s got all puffy and soft, and so deep in shit that he’s scared of everything. He can only relax with me. The power he has over most other people is shit. We both understand that. It wouldn’t be at all hard to kill him, but then what? Even if I could do it without laying a hand on him—gather some of his hair and make a potion, get a black rooster (from where?) and vinegar (plenty of that around here), write down his name seven times, split a fish and fill it with black pepper, sew up the fish with black thread and hang it in the yard, chop up bits of his or Anna’s hair real fine and put it in his food so that his stomach gets tangled up and he dies; or grind up glass in his food so it feels like no more than a bit of gravel or dirt, like you find in spinach or lettuce, and let him slowly bleed to death; or make a doll of him out of his clothes and hair and fingernails, say the words, and stick him with pins—then what? I’d never be allowed to stay in the house alone with Anna. Would Bernhardt take me in, me, his exotic, one-and-only jazz Neger? Hell, no. Because Dieter Lange’s his fall guy. Every Nazi has a fall guy between himself and disaster. We called them front men or beards back home.

Monday, May 15, 1939

I think the tic on Pierre’s face comes slower now, but it’s more violent, like one part of his face wants to rearrange the other. I can tell he’s embarrassed by this because he doesn’t talk as much and listens more. He is also confused because he doesn’t know what’s happening to him. I miss Dr. Nyassa. I trade goods for sulfa pills with the senior in Revier One. He’s been real top dog since Dr. Nyassa killed himself. The pills don’t seem to help Pierre. I think the problem’s nerves, but I don’t remember what they did for tics back home. Everyone knows it’s bad business to try to get to the doctors. They always think you’re malingering. You have to be just about dead to get excused from a detail. And even if you got into the Revier, you might not ever get out. They do things there. Better Pierre should have a bad tic than a bad death. I think that spray they use to kill lice is bothering him.

The flower gardens are ready to bloom. You’d think nature would say, “Uh-uh, not here you don’t.” But the blooms are coming, as they do every spring. I get a funny feeling about that, like the way you feel back home when a chain gang grows out from beneath a grove of magnolia trees. The Amper River flows fast now, and it is thick and dark. I’d like to be a leaf or twig riding its surface right out of camp. And now the prisoners, like small armies, march to their details inside and outside camp, singing more brightly. Dust doesn’t yet rise from beneath their feet, but it will in a few weeks’ time; it’s only May and the ground is still damp. To the quarry they march and it, after all this time, still looks untouched, they say; and to the swamps to continue to drain and plant; and to the gravel pit to gather the stones to make the roads and campgrounds smooth; the 4711 clears the sewers or lays new pipe; and details march to the SS compound to build new houses, clean the streets, put up lights, build new roads; to the SS barracks that are always being enlarged; to the farms, the factories, the warehouse construction sites; to the forests to cut and haul trees. They go singing as if they were on a holiday or the most decorated of Hitler’s legions, in step, uniformed in their chain-gang stripes, their striped berets, arms swinging. They are so many and look so mighty marching, that a stranger might wonder how so few guards could ever contain so many, many prisoners.

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 chest. 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 thinking 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?”

“Yes, Colonel, and perhaps we can even invite the great bands from America to entertain in the Reich.”

Bernhardt nodded and then said, “But first, we will hear those musicians in France—Johnson, Lewis, the gajo, Django Reinhardt.”

“Naturally,” Dieter Lange said.

“I have a special task for you,” Bernhardt said to me, uncrossing his legs. “I have spoken to Lange about it and advised him to do the same. The labels on all my records must be changed.”

He pointed to the box he’d placed on the table next to his chair. “It’s filled with labels from German record companies—Brunswick, Electric, Telefunken, Imperial, Gramophone. Remove all the old labels. For example, if you have an Ellington record with ‘Mood Indigo’ on one side and ‘Black, Brown and Beige’ on the other, you substitute Brocksieper’s ‘Tea for Two’ and ‘Polka Polka.’ But make a chart so I’ll know when I pick up a Wagner, I’ll really have Benny Moten, something like that, nicht wahr?” Before that business with Ulrich, Bernhardt and me had an easy relationship. He joked and I laughed; he rubbed my head and I smiled; he said the music was great and I smiled a bigger smile. But I always behaved like he was the crook running the club, and he knew it. Since Ulrich’s death, I’d behaved with him like a whipped dog, and he knew that, too. It was supposed to be that way. I told him I understood with a “Sir,” and he said he’d have the records brought over tomorrow.

I went back to my room, already missing The Nest. I’d miss our time in the kitchen, the good food there, the workers, the girls who came in their best dresses for the Friday and Saturday dances. I was already missing the hungry and sometimes loving way they looked at the young Siegfrieds in their dress uniforms, missing the smell of flowers in the spring and summer, the clean wind through the opened windows, the sight of civilians on the streets we drove through, the shop windows, the parks, even the crying babies. And the rehearsals when we played anything, tried anything, before we got down to the numbers we’d actually play that night. And I would certainly miss the tuxedos, white shirts, and shining black shoes. For a few hours they had helped us to believe we were not really what we were—prisoners without hope of release. What would happen to Danko? The Gypsies were suffering more than the Jews or the men in the Prisoner Company. Alex—what would happen to him? And Fritz, who had learned to whip the cello like a bull fiddle? Where is Franz to play his licks on the drums now? Who would now appreciate Ernst’s flute playing? And would Oskar only play his harmonica in a corner of Block 13 when he wasn’t on some detail that would smash his spirit? And Teodor, what music would he write now and who for? No need to worry about Moritz and that sweet violin, or about Sam, who was long gone in another direction. A band leader looked after his musicians, even though he might not like them. They’d looked to me for direction, ideas, and what Mr. Wooding called “execution.” But this is a different time, a different place, and it’s every swinging ass on his own.

Now I’m back to one benefactor, Dieter Lange, or maybe two, with Anna. But Dieter Lange is afraid and Anna is unpredictable.

I am lucky, still. The Polish prisoners and civilians are entering camp now. They’re like the new boy on the block; the guards must beat them up, show them who’s boss. Everyone in camp breathes easier because they are beating up the new guys, but that will last only a little while. Then the guards will be back beating everyone’s ass, as usual. The Polish boys they call “doll boys,” Pieple. Poor kids. Some of those bastards have already buggered them; I’ve seen a couple of kids who walked as though they were riding a horse, it hurt them so bad.

I was in bed and couldn’t sleep, listening to the trains rumbling out to the factories and warehouses. Sounds carry far in this place. Sometimes you know the trains are bringing prisoners, or taking them out. I was thinking this when I heard Dieter Lange coming downstairs. I was surprised. He wanted me to come up to the kitchen and make some coffee, which meant he wanted to talk. I didn’t know if it had to do with Bernhardt’s visit or not.

He sat at the table with his head in his hands. It was three o’clock and the fall darkness was so close it felt like a suit of clothes. When the coffee was ready, he signed for me to sit down at the other end of the table. He reached over and patted my hand. “Don’t look so worried,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep. You hear the trains?”

I said I had.

He slurped his coffee.

“Too bad about The Nest. You liked it?”

“Sometimes.” We’d talked about this before. I said, “What’s the matter? What’s bothering you?”

Dieter Lange pushed his cup aside. “I’m not getting the promotion,” he said. “They’re giving them all to the Waffen SS, not the Allgemein SS. The war.”

I looked at him over my coffee and listened to the small sounds in the house: floors creaking, wind against the windows, dogs barking far away outside. So the armed SS, not the general SS, would get all the breaks. That ought to put all the camp guards in their places, but it probably won’t. “Now you don’t have so much responsibility,” I said. “Isn’t that good?”

He half smiled. “That’s good, yes, but the promotion … well, it might have given us more protection, you understand.” He rubbed his face, and the bristles of his beard gave off a rasping sound. “But you’re right,” he said. “Too much responsibility isn’t a good thing here. Already I’m going crazy, moving the pieces.” His hands were flat down on the table, fingers spread. Dieter Lange looked at them. It was cold in the house. He sighed. “The Poles are coming in, you know.” His voice fell to a muttering. “The Poles come in and to Mauthausen we send the Pinks, and to Hartheim in Linz in invalid vans we send the crazy ASOS. We send the Jews to Poland, and if they have room at the subcamps, we send them there, all to make room here. Around and around it goes, from camp to camp to camp.”

Dieter Lange was feeling sorry for himself. “That’s not your worry,” I said, and it wasn’t. “That’s the camp commander’s headache.”

He raised both hands and let them fall back to the table. “You know I must have some idea of the numbers so I can stock the canteens in my jurisdiction, Cleef. You know that.” There were tears in his eyes. “First Germans, Jews or not, then Austrians, now Poles, and it’s too late for there not to be Belgians, French, and whoever else gets in the way. Round and round and round,” he said softly, “and Anna doesn’t understand the strain.”

I leaned across the table and spoke quietly to him. “Dieter, Dieter Lange. If you don’t get hold of yourself, Anna will have it all. You’ll be in the booby hatch and Anna will have the money and take all the stuff to her father’s farm. If you keep showing this weakness, she’ll tell Bernhardt to get rid of you, of us. I told you before, you got yourself and me into this mess, and you’ve got to get us out. The only way to do that now is to do what you have been doing, and stop all this goddamn whining. Are you a man or a fucking faggot?” I stood up. “I’m going to bed. You woke me up so I can listen to this crap? C’mon. Get hold of yourself.”

I went downstairs. I could hear him shuffling around in the kitchen, from the table to the sink; then I heard him go slowly up the stairs. Sometimes Dieter Lange needed talking to in a hard way. Anna cajoled. She often buried her impatience beneath a pretended interest and listened to him, mining every complaint like a jeweler with that thing to his eye used for diamonds. I wondered, as I often have, how it was that a man like Dieter Lange could hold in his hand the life of a man like me.

So it’s me and You again, God. You riding that sad train with its bells of brass ringing for clear passage into hell; You with a bunch of Polish prisoners in the boxcars. Will You send them like that in the middle of winter, too? Can You see me? Can You hear me through the sounding silence that is Your response to the prayers that climb up to You? Can You hear the prayers of the Gypsies, the prayers of the Jews, the ASOS with their curses, the criminals with theirs, the politicals? How can You not, if You are there? You have heard the cries of the Polish boys; where are You? Isn’t there something You must do? Have You no more good Loas to send us? You know, sometimes, most times, I think You are not there at all, that You are snake oil, that You are a vision that comes with cocaine. I’ve been in Your desert with its serpents for more than forty nights; in fact, I have suffered this desert more than forty years, it seems to me; I’ve been embalmed in the salt of fear for longer than forty days. The dead drift through my sleep—are they with You or with the Other Guy? And I see the shapes of those yet to die, crowding like clouds on the horizon. The sky is filled with them. I hear the music as they march down the ’Strasse:

Ta-dum, ta-dum; ta-dum, ta-dum

ta-dum ta-da-da ta-dum, ta-tum

The sad weak music of a harmonica, a drum, and an accordion. Marching to the gallows, the Tree, the Bunker, the rifle pits where sound splits the silence like a pointy-nosed dog barking once or twice or three times.

Were You there when they crucified my colonel?

Were You there when they crucified my Menno?

ooOOO—sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble,

tremble.…

Were You there when they crucified them all?

Were You there when they crucified Herr Ulrich?

Were You there when they crucified his girl?

ooOOO—sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble,

tremble.…

Were You there when they crucified them all?

Were You there when they crucified Nyassa?

Were You there when they crucified Moritz?

ooOOO—sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble,

tremble.…

Were You there when they crucified them all?

Ah, so. Nothing. I am still in my room and Pierre is still in his block, You willing. Dieter Lange and Anna still pound each other (can’t You hear them through the furnace flues?), and in the camp someone is dying in great pain that You will not ease; someone is hanging himself; someone is hungry and whimpering beneath a blanket whose warmth never was; someone is crying; someone is running away (bang! bang!); someone is cradled in the steel arms of the crematorium, which will soon be rebuilt by the priests; someone is locked inside a van whose destination is Hartheim Castle; someone is released and will report to his nearest police station for his homecoming; someone is on his way to work in a war plant, and someone is on his way home from a war plant; a German soldier just got killed in Poland; twenty-five Polish soldiers just got killed by a German machine gun; a baby was just born, and its grandmother just died. My music is wounded and it bleeds my life away. It won’t JUMP and SHOUT, do You hear me? It won’t SWING and SWAY … and I can’t get a sign that You hear me. I asked for a sign a long time ago. Your train done stalled? Didn’t You talk to Moses? Didn’t You talk to Jesus? Didn’t You give Saul the sign that he should be Paul? How come You talked so much then and ain’t sayin’ shit now? So I ain’t Your sweet, smiling Christian, Your kick-my-ass Witness, your Rabbiner Jew; so I only talk to You when the Amper River’s at flood tide like the Jordan, when the blues open up to nothing like a rotten fishnet. Say what? Faith is what? Hahahahahaha. You think You slick. But You know better than to show up down here. Germans eat Your ass for lunch, jack! You so chickenshit, You sent Your son down here and them other Germans nailed His ass to the cross, didn’t they?

You just snake oil squeezins? If not, please help me take care of Pierre. Please?

Saturday, November 11, 1939

Dieter Lange came up behind me this morning while I was cleaning the house before going to the canteen. Anna had gone shopping in Munich to get some new clothes. “They almost got him!” Dieter Lange whispered, as though someone was hiding in the house. “Almost got him!”

“Got who? Who’s they?”

His eyes were bright and he was all up in my face like when he’s drunk and he whispers, “Wie steht es?” How about it? “Hitler! They almost got Hitler, with a bomb in Munich, Thursday night!”

I snapped the dust out of my cloth. To me a miss was as good as a mile. I didn’t know what all the fuss was about. “But who did it?”

“Some Red carpenter in Munich. They got him.”

“But who else? You said they.”

“Just him, as far as I’ve heard. But it shows that people don’t want war and they want to be rid of Hitler. So maybe the next time they’ll get him, eh? And maybe that’s not too far off.” He walked around the room, his hands behind his back. “You know I’d let you go if we got out of this mess. I’d give you the money to get back home. I really would, Cleef.”

“I’d sure appreciate that,” I said, but it wouldn’t happen. He knew it and I knew it. White people fulla shit, especially when they run a place like Dachau. He stopped walking right in front of me and held my dusting hand. “What’s the matter with you, Cleef?” He gave me a close look, as though he might find something in my face that he’d missed before. “You’ve been … nicht heir for over a month now. Are you sick?”

I looked at him. I didn’t know what he was talking about. I said, “What do you mean?”

He raised his arms and moved them slowly up and down like he was a bird on the wind. “You just flott machen all the time, maybe like you had some cocaine?”

I released my hand and went back to dusting. He watched me and said, “Achtsam, Cleef, bitte, Achtsam” then he went upstairs to his office.

When I finished, I shouted to him that I was going to the canteen and left. I didn’t wait for him to answer.

It was another Armistice Day, ha-ha-ha, to celebrate the war to end all wars, except the one that just began. Ta-ta, da-da, de-dum …

“Hey, Sunshine!!”

I stopped and turned around. I’d passed through the Jourhaus gate. Sergeant Rekse, his Schaferhund straining at his leash, was shouting. I didn’t know why.

“What do you do, why do you skip like a little kid? Are you nuts, Pepperidge? You want to wind up in the Hartheim wagon like those other niggers went out of here this morning?” Skipping? I was skipping?

I whipped off my cap. “No, sir.”

“I’ll tell your mother on you!” he roared, laughing, rolling back on his heels. He rubbed my head for good luck. The shepherd he’d brought to heel snapped his head from me to Rekse and back again, its tongue hanging out. Would Rekse never forget that visit by Ruby Mae?

“Get going, Pepperidge, and get those marbles out of your head. They’re glass, you know, and can be broken.”

I thanked him and replaced my cap and walked quickly away, up the west-side path, into the stiff, cold wind. I lowered my chin to protect my throat even though the sun was shining. But would Pierre be gone? Would he have been one of those “niggers” on the wagon ride to Hartheim?

We used to gather on this side of the camp to hear Hitler’s speeches, which were broadcast over the loudspeakers hooked up across the moat on the SS side. The moat is outside the wall on this side of the camp. Now there are walls with electric fences on top. I could see the rooftops of the factories, hear the banging and clanging of work going on inside them, the hum and screech of machinery. I was almost never on this side, but I could marvel now at just how much the prisoners had done since I first came. Down at the end of the camp the sun was reflecting off the glass of the new greenhouse. Oh, Pierre. A group of prisoners pulled a wagon loaded with the dead from the Reviers and the morgue.

Then I was at the northwest corner where the small north road bisects the smaller west path, where the gates lead to the inferno the dead don’t feel. Or if they do, they can’t say so. The greenhouse stood before me; to its right was the garden, then a space where rabbits were raised for SS Hasenpfeffer and for Luftwaffe pilots’ jackets. Then the disinfection hut where Pierre had worked. Above all this was the north watchtower with its sliding glass windows, its machine gun, and the guard with his rifle. I stood there with my pass at the ready to show any guard, and watched the prisoners wheeling barrows of rich black dirt from a huge pile into the greenhouse. The prisoners were all white, untouched by that soft golden color that was Pierre’s. My stomach began a slow cold slide downward. I moved forward a few steps. Maybe the sun was shining too brightly, or the cutting wind was blurring my eyesight. “Oh, Pierre,” I whispered. I looked at the pile of earth, then saw a shovel and a pair of blackened hands, disembodied parts, moving in a slow steady rhythm, filling a barrow. I walked to where I could see who the shoveler was. It was Pierre! He saw me and winked and smiled. I smiled back and felt the wind sharper on my face where it met the tears. I waved and turned away toward the ’Strasse. Why were my footsteps heavier than before? Would Pierre be in the next group to Hartheim? Would it be easier for me if he was, or even if he’d gone this morning? There would be no more “Suppose,” no more worry. It would be over and done with. I felt I was walling up something inside me that no one could touch or reach from now on, that no one could hurt. Dieter Lange could be in me, but not in that place; Pierre could “Suppose” me, but never again would he be able to touch that place, because it was my sanctuary, my church, the grove where Loa Aizan, forever watchful, now rested.

I skipped up the ’Strasse humming. In answer to the smiles, the circles drawn on the sides of heads, I muttered, “Fuck you. Fuck you.”

Sat., December 8, 1939

That carpenter Dieter Lange told me about, who tried to blow up Hitler, is in the Honor Bunker. His name is Eller, but that’s a fake.

There are now supposed to be two Englishmen in the general population. Don’t know why not the Honor Bunker, where, the gossip is, they’ve got the president of Austria and some big shots from Czechoslovakia. I wonder how those people live there. I wonder what they think when they look between the poplar trees and see the rest of us. Are they keeping notes, too? Will they tell what happened? Hell, they’re probably thinking the same thing I’m thinking: better them than me.

I have finished putting new labels on Bernhardt’s records, and also on Dieter Lange’s. Of course, I played them all again as I was doing that, just to make sure I had the right labels for the right records. In the canteen, Huebner, Lappus, and me handle the Christmas rush. The prisoners with their sorry bits of money or camp chits buy the shitty items Dieter Lange stocked for them. The only good things are what Lappus has made—little lampstands and walking sticks and jewel boxes—and the SS guards want them for next to nothing. Other items are starting to come in. Mineral water, biscuits, candy, tins of fish and meat, but hardly anyone can afford these things. Sometimes groups put up the money, and each man gets just a taste. The packages from home and the Hilfe are coming in steadily. They usually do around Christmas. Sometimes I think Christmas was invented to help bad people do something good once a year.

For Pierre I have a pair of wool socks, brand new, and a sweater Dieter Lange gave me. The Langes plan to stay at home this Christmas—which means work for me. Not only the house and the cooking, but they want to have a party or two as well. Who will entertain? Guess who.

Sunday, December 9, 1939

Sundays are nice for me now. I don’t have to rush around after a Saturday night at The Nest and, while the canteen is often busy since the prisoners don’t work, there’s still a lot of time to drift around the Appellplatz and talk to people I don’t see very often. Some prisoners go down to the Priesterblock to church, and others visit friends. Today I introduced Pierre to Willy Bader who wears number 9 on his uniform. So he came here 2,994 prisoners before I did. And almost 13,000 prisoners before Pierre. He used to be good friends with Werner. I don’t know what happened. Bader seemed to know something about Pierre, but I suppose if you’re a colored man in a place like this, everybody knows, or thinks he knows, something about you. (The bad thing about walking around the ’Platz in the summer are the boxers—who don’t box, thank God, in cold weather. They put on shows for the SS. When I walk by, they call and whistle and holler “Choe Louis!” “C’mon fight, Choe!”)

The work in the greenhouse is hard, but comfortable, Pierre says as we walk and talk. In our game of “Suppose” he has finished his engineering studies. He has a girlfriend. She has rippling blond hair, he says, and I tell him, “Not in America you don’t.” So I have to explain that shit to him, and explain and explain, but somehow he can’t seem to get it, and I wonder, as I have done before, if we should continue to play this game. Then I look at him, see his tic, think about the way things are with his mother and how he’ll probably never see his father, and I decide that some things just ought to have a good ending, because life’s so goddamn shitty, and I feel sorry for him all over again. But not as sorry as before, ’cause he’s just not going to get into that place any more. Besides, he just doesn’t look as well as I thought he would. I think, He’s going to die. Pierre is going to die, and if he knows it, he never says it. After meeting Bader, he says he wants to go back to his block, 24, and find a place to sit down. He is tired. “Mr. Pepperidge, I also have great pain.” That is the first time. I don’t suggest that he go to the Revier, and I don’t think it ever crossed his mind. The last medical place he went to hurt him, and he is hurting again, with pain he can feel in his body this time, as well as in his mind, which, I think, won’t ever leave. God never tells you how much time you got. And neither does Loa Aizan.

Sunday, Dec. 24, 1939

It’s early. Dieter Lange and Anna aren’t up yet. It’s so early that I don’t even have to check the furnace. I can tell it doesn’t need shaking or stoking right now, so I’m writing. It’s so quiet, it sounds like the pencil is making a lot of noise.

Last night, long after dinner, Dieter Lange called me up and sat me down at the kitchen table and we had a couple of drinks. He was already high; he’d gone in the afternoon with Anna to an SS party. She was upstairs sleeping it off, but he wanted to go walking in the snow. Nothing I wanted to do, but he insisted and was starting to get mean about it. So we bundled up. He wanted to go to the camp. It was snowing soft, slow, great big flakes. “I want you to appreciate how lucky you are, Cleef. You’ve been in a funk lately. Maybe you’re sick again? You don’t think so? Well, I hope not.” We plodded on through the snow that was quickly replacing all that the snow commandos had removed earlier. Ahead, the lights of the camp seemed filled with dots as snowflakes flew down past them. Dieter Lange exchanged greetings with the guards on duty at the Jourhaus gate. They joked about the weather, lustig Weihnachtened one another. The guards even patted me on the back and offered me a drink from the same bottle they were drinking from. I was feeling better than I had when we left the house. It all looked quite pretty. Neat and regular, squared, arranged, like those little toy villages the kids settle in cotton under the Christmas tree. Peace on earth, good will to men. I saw a group of prisoners standing at attention on the Dancing Ground, stiff as icicles, the snow building on their caps and shoulders, creeping up around their shoes. What had they done? “See that?” Dieter Lange said. “You could be one of those. Look, look at those barracks, those blocks, and think of those poor bastards in them trying to keep warm. Tonight, whatever they find that burns they can put into the stoves. And tomorrow night—” he broke off as we turned down the ’Strasse and Gypsy singing drifted up the street in a sad, soft language I didn’t understand. But I understood the tone, like you can’t hear blues and not know that there is sadness up front, or tucked in between smarty-pants lyrics. Dieter Lange stopped, so I stopped. We listened. And in a dot of light reflected by a snowflake, I saw, or thought I did, a small flash that could have been a tear on his face.

Then we started to move again, into a frightened, whispered swell of sound from the other blocks: Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht … And I almost said, “Let’s go to 24,” but I didn’t. Pierre had my gifts, and I couldn’t trust this weeping, juiced-up, shit-packer. How can you ever trust people, really, who cannot, deep down, hear you because they’re so busy listening to themselves? Dear God, right then I wanted to trust somebody. But Dieter Lange was not that person. We walked and Dieter Lange sniffled; he kept saying, “See, you have it not so bad.” And, “Cleef, maybe, next Christmas …! Maybe.” We tramped back up the ’Strasse, back through the guardhouse gate, and home. When I was downstairs, I thought of the camp all soft under the new snow, the way it always looked under new snow, like frosted gingerbread, as though it could not be what it really was. And I knew, as I always had known, that when Dieter Lange woke up, he, too, would be the same. How could one drunken walk through camp on a Christmas Eve change anything? I just hoped I wouldn’t have to fight him off the booty later on.

Wednesday, January 3, 1940

“What can be the matter with my little Cleefie?” Anna said. She’d tried to come down the steps quietly, but I knew it was her. What was she doing down here? Dieter Lange hadn’t gone out. She pushed open my door and stood there in a rumpled silk slip through which the light from upstairs outlined her thick body. “Cleefie?” I had a more than passing acquaintance with that tone in her voice. I said nothing. I was nervous. They’d been recovering from a New Year’s Eve party, then a New Year’s Day of eating and drinking and running upstairs for a couple of hours, then running down and back up. Feeding, fucking, and drinking.

I know what is going to happen, and I say, “No.” Anna is close to my bed, reaching down for my wrist.

“Come,” she says.

They are bored with each other, I think, but it’s never been this bad. Do they think if they pound and probe each other long enough and hard enough they will forget they hate and fear each other? Is that what they’ve been trying to do these last two days?

“Yes. Oh, yes. Dieter sent me. He has some very fine cocaine for you, and we can all celebrate the New Year. Come, Cleefie.”

She grips my wrist in a hand that feels like damp warm dough. “We will make you well.” From upstairs Dieter Lange’s voice booms down the stairwell, “Come, Cleef!”

“No,” I whisper, but Anna has pulled me half out of bed with one hand and is yanking at my dick with the other. “No. No!” The blankets are off. She pulls me to my feet, laughing softly, the way hunters do when they lift a rabbit or bird they’ve shot. She crushes the silk of her slip between our bodies. She smells sour through her tired perfume. I think then that I will take a walk, go away, not be with them, not be the plaything they can bend, stick, lick, and suck.

In the “Greeting Room” of the Jourhaus the guards are beating the prisoners who have just arrived, teaching them the “Saxon Greetings,” hands behind the head, leaving the body an open invitation to violence. I stroll around, spitting in the faces of the guards. They do not notice. I climb upstairs to the room where I met Count Walther von Hausberger and later Ruby Mae. Reckse sits behind the desk; his feet are on it. He’s asleep. I take his pistol and shoot him, but there is no sound and he remains as before. I go back down and open the files and rip the papers and let them fall like snowflakes; somehow the pieces never reach the floor.

The Bunker is dark and cold, a long square tunnel. It smells of blood that hasn’t been cleaned up; it’s a slaughterhouse, more fit for animals than men. I float down the corridor. The doors to the cells are three feet from the floor; they are like pens for animals. Down the corridor I go, seeing behind the bars wounded, beaten men who look as though they should be hanging from hooks. I answer a scream with a gentle “Sshhhh …” but the scream does not stop. It seems to urge forth other screams and moans. Three guards drag a prisoner out to the courtyard. They joke with each other: “This one will be like grape jam in the morning.” I will the guards to die. They do not. The wooden doors bang open and they enter the courtyard. I make the sign of Loa Aizan, but He says, “Shit, Clifford. It’s too late for that joker.”

“Come on now, Cleef. That’s a good boy. This is very fine stuff. That’s it, a quick little snort. Zooom, eh? This foolish talk of being a plaything.…”

In the Wirtschaftsgebaude. The Records Office. Labor Office. Political Office (Bernhardt and Gitzig). Storerooms. Showers. Kitchen. Camp Police Office. I start fires. I rip papers. I let the showers run. I reassign Pierre to me. I assassinate Bernhardt. (How can I harm Gitzig?) In the kitchen. I see monstrous rats in the thin red water of the great cooking pots. I throw real meat and then turnips, cabbage, and potatoes from the ice room into the pots, which hang on hooks before a row of fires that look like the entrance to hell. More meat! All the small fires come together in a big one. I imagine that the flames can be seen all the way into downtown Dachau. How I love the smell!

Across the way, on the wind-ripped Dancing Ground, I urge the twenty men standing at attention, held like actors in the floodlights, to return to their blocks before they freeze to death. I kick the dogs and their guards. “Thank you, Pepperidge,” the prisoners say (everyone knows me), but they don’t move. I enter the canteen and find Pepperidge in his little cubbyhole of an office. He sits on a box writing under the light of a coal oil lamp. “What is it we’re writing?” I ask.

“A very long letter.” He doesn’t pause; he doesn’t look up. He is thin. That makes him look taller than he really is. He has a squeezed, tender face, and eyes with very long lashes that darken the room with the belligerent sadness of having known too much. The stinking kerosene smoke mixes with the vapor of his breath. I look at him and I want to cry. I want to put my arm about him and make that hawk/wren look the gaze of doves.

“To whom are we writing?”

Now he looks up, raps his teeth with the stub of the pencil. His fingers are like slender brown worms that have dried in the sun. “I do not know,” he says. “Maybe God.”

“I see,” I say, but he’s returned to his feverish scratching.

We are a tangle of bodies emitting stink and liquids. I am hurting, therefore I want to hurt; even while crying, I want to hurt, then to wound; even more, to kill. I try to kill her as he’s hurting me, but Anna doesn’t mind; the slow, terrible frenzy in my head freezes with the realization that she is to pain what sugar is to flies. “Stop that goddamn crying!”

The Infirmary is quiet now, except for the whimpering that dares not grow to a moan. The duty orderly drinks Dr. Nyassa’s brandy. I piss in his cup and stir it with my finger. The orderly ignores me, swallows and swallows with great loud gulps. I draw syringes to full with morphine and inject the worst-looking patients. It’s the least I can do, but they continue to whimper in both buildings. I check the morgue and find no one I know. There are more bodies these days. They’ll have to make more room.

Werner and Bader sit in the Red block and are not talking, not even listening to the radio. All the Reds have been down in the mouth lately. I would like to be friends with Werner again, but that business will always be there between us. What I don’t understand is if the Reds can be so good at organizing and running things in here, why didn’t they do it out there a long time ago? Then maybe none of us would be here. We have all been captured by the politics of ourselves. The Nazis have let us know what we’re really like. They are men and women, too, just like us. But they have dared, with terrible success, to take politics beyond the thin invisible line of whatever morality men think they have won over the beasts of the field. This must be what the Reds are pondering in the charged silence of their block. I sit there in the emptiness between the two men and finally ride the silence of the other, brooding Reds out to Prisoner Block 7.

I enter with both fear and admiration. In the center of our hell, many of the prisoners—the Pinks, the Reds, the Purples, the Golds, even some of the Greens, Blacks, and Browns—have said in word and deed, “Fuck Hitler,” for personal reasons or larger ones. Who knows? Who cares? They lie in their chains, the presumption of something larger than individual manhood, a pride as fierce as their hatred of their captors, stilling the expressions of pain that must reside in their swollen limbs and crushed flesh. (“I am the baddest motherfucker in this place.”) There is order and quiet here that transcends even that in the political block. These punishment prisoners await the next scheme, the next murder of an SS guard, the next slaughter of each other, the march to the gallows to music.

“Gentlemen,” I say.

“Fuck off, nigger.” This in bored voices.

“I would like to play some music for you.” I conjure up a piano and await their permission.

“Fuck your music. Get out!” They rattle their chains, hawk up snot, and hurl it at me with the precision of marksmen.

“I am”—the word is clumsy in my mouth—“a comrade.”

The block is filled with real and mouth-made sounds of breaking wind. They bounce their chains on their wooden planks; the sound grows to an ugly basso crescendo and I leave. It may be a very good thing that they are chained up.

In Block 15 are the Jews with their stars; starred because their second triangle—red or green or black or pink—is inverted over the first gold one to make the six points of David’s star. They are made to suffer so much. A few of them pray in Yiddish or Hebrew. The others cannot wait for God’s good intercession; they know they have to look out for themselves. I see that some have the blank look of men who realize, too late, that this experience is one they could have avoided had they believed what they saw going on. They are exhausted, these men. Working the quarry and the gravel pit in winter is consignment to death; anywhere they work is consignment to death. The slightest untoward word, look, movement, from one of them is reason enough for even the most reserved guard to kill him on the spot or slowly, as his mood takes him, without fear of reprimand from his superiors. With a few exceptions, other prisoners, equally doomed, ease their slides to hell by being as vicious as the guards. The Jews are the niggers of Dachau and in all the other camps where they are found.

I dump an armload of challah onto a bunk; I set down a huge vat of matzoh-ball soup, far better than Aschinger’s pea soup, and call them to eat. No one hears me. I tell them another conference has been called at Evian, and this time all the nations in the world will, after arranging their freedom, accept them without quibble and stake them to a new start. They will be as many as the sands on a thousand beaches. No one moves. The observant among them sit quietly, already bent in subservience to the Messiah, for all this is His will, His doing, and the purpose will later be made clear. The others discuss the prisoners who are secret Jews who will have nothing to do with them. Some say, “Good for them.” Others call them traitors. But no one will give them away; no one will trade a name for another day of life. Pierre’s name hasn’t come up. They look at him and know for an absolute certainty that he can’t be one of them. He is a Negro, or part of one. Loa Aizan must be smiling.

Pierre lays in his upper bunk in Block 24. His face seems a different, unwholesome color, like slate that dogs have shit on.

“You have finished engineering school and tried to find your real father but haven’t, and now you’re ready to marry your girlfriend—and no, she’s not blond. Where would you like to live? 555 Edgecombe Avenue? Why not? The top floor, of course, where you have a marvelous view.”

In his sleep Pierre seems to smile. He hears.

“You work downtown and ride the ‘A’ train there and back. Your wife is a teacher. Yes, there are a few colored teachers in Harlem. She, too, has gone to college, you see. You are very happy and hardly ever think about Germany or your mother and real father anymore. Me? I just keep on playing. It’s too much fuss having your own band, though. Running around getting those jokers together for the road or just making them be on time for work in New York. And somebody’s always complaining about the money, and how the uniforms wear out so fast because they’re so cheap. So I play for somebody else. Maybe Teddy Wilson has left Benny Goodman. I know Teddy made good geets with Goodman. Geets? That’s money, son. No, no, I don’t live with you. I live down on ’37th Street, where I think you and me thought about living once, remember? Nah, young people don’t need no old folks soaking up their space. But you and your wife come to see me and I have dinner with you all every Sunday when you come home from church. Usually fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, string beans, biscuits, lemonade, and strawberry shortcake for dessert. Your wife is a very good cook.” I pass Pierre the platter of chicken. He crunches into a thigh. The sound is like music. “Then you know what happens? AhhHHH! you guessed it. You bigged her. You’re going to be a father and that’ll make me a grandfather! Hotdamn, Pierre, hotdamn!”

Pierre now looks very tired, like maybe he’s having a bad dream. I tell him it’s going to be all right, that he’s not going to die from those X-rays they gave him. He can’t die.

“Why not let him sleep with us?” Anna whines. I picture her waking and wanting to jump at the Woodside again.

Dieter Lange is half asleep, but he says again, “Go, Cleef.” To Anna he snarls through his drunkenness, “You want someone to come to the house and find him up here? Stupid woman! No! You like doing it with him, eh? Well, no! And that’s it! Go, Cleef. Give him the last of the cocaine.”

“Well, at least he ain’t all queer like you,” she whines. Anna is drunker than a hundred skunks, but I’m at the door, aching front and back; then I’m diving downstairs to draw water for a hot, or at least warm, bath, but “ain’t all queer” lingers in my aching head. Country girl. Didn’t know shit when they first met, except that those farm animals always climb on from the back, and maybe she thought that’s where the action was. And got to like it. Wouldn’t be the first, man or woman. And Dieter Lange made her believe that doing it in the hump was the only way to do it, until she tangled with Bernhardt who showed her the front-way bliss. Please, let me remember this when I wake up.

It’s good that Block 24 is right next door to 26, where the priests and ministers are. Where I met Menno. I can hear Loa Aizan chuckling: “Fools. So what did your God do for you?” He shouts over my shoulder. But they all seem to be thinking or talking softly and seriously. About the rabbits they’re caring for, or the garden in good weather, or the other easy jobs they hold, or how to get Commandant Loritz to allow them to have a chapel, or how to get those colleagues who’d not been brought here to push their congregations to send more packages, or how to conduct an ordination in secret, with monstrance, crozier, oils, silk mitre, and so on. They are also concerned about measures they can take to secretly get their rations at camp and packages from home so they will not have to share with other prisoners. They need their strength to minister to the inmates. Should they post guards at the door to discourage the hungry? Loa Aizan is grinning. He must know that many of these are honorable men who have spoken out against the National Socialists. But then he lets me know that places like Dachau make honor regrettable. These men thought it would be rewarded, like in the movies. Instead, they were brought here, where honor is a burden. They are like everyone else who is here, Loa Aizan whispers. They want to survive, to live.

“All ye who are heavily laden …” I start. I stop because these men are pleased that it is the Polish priests, arriving now in great enough numbers to be segregated in 28, next door, who will be taught how to build the new crematorium, replace the wooden one with stone. German humor. They do not see that, I can tell. “This time,” the men of God are saying, “the crematorium will last.” I think, They are always reconstructing death, these Germans, even their priests, who anoint the constant journey to it with oil and wrap it in the linen of consoling words.

The bodies are stacked outside where the weather is as efficient as a hospital morgue. The chimney exhales its thick, black, oily smoke; the fuel source is endless. The Sonderkommando detail here need never worry about warmth. These ovens, made for baking bread and stoked with coke, give off constant heat, and the prisoners have come to enjoy it. The bodies outside are naked. The clothes have been removed and washed and sprayed and stacked, ready for the new prisoners. The stacks of bodies remind me of the photos of the Great War, with the dead piled sky-high along row upon row of trenches. They didn’t pull gold-filled teeth during the Great War; they do here. The bodies are brought in and dumped to the floor where two men pry apart the jaws; one takes pliers, rips out the gold teeth, and dumps them into a bucket. Then another group hauls the body to the oven, where yet another has already pulled out the “sled.” They deposit the body into it and slide it inside the oven, into the leaping, curling flames that attack it with the speed of a nest of frightened snakes. The oven door is closed. A prisoner shakes the grate with a long metal rod. Body ashes, mixed with snapping, sputtering sparks, tumble down into the pit. The ashes are shoveled out; the finest of them into the urns, which are haphazardly affixed with names and numbers; the heaviest of the charred bone fragments, including the skulls that may have cracked with the heat, are pounded into smaller bits and wheeled outside in barrows. This bone and ash will be used to make smooth the Appellplatz, the Lagerstrasse, the east and west roads, the paths to everywhere, and to fertilize the gardens that will bloom again in spring.

How efficient this gruesome assembly line is. The prisoners work in silence, exclaiming only if a tooth is difficult to pull or when fire snatches at the hair of a body before it is pushed farther into the oven. I think of Albrecht Dürer’s Apocalypse and of Hansel und Gretel. All right, witches, here is your oven. What is there for me to say in this place? The decay that brings the worms takes too long; the Sonderkommandos only hasten decomposition, for, as Dieter Lange said, “The pieces have to be moved.” This is the last movement.

The water is warm enough. I sit and let the juices that have dried on my skin come loose and slide into the water. The Langes’ snores rumble down through the house like small trains rocking over a trestle. The compound is between sleep and wakefulness. It is close to the hour when the guards change watch. A truck whines down to the SS barracks.

Four floors and a basement for the enlisted men of the SS. Where there was nothing when I first came, there is now this great edifice to house our tormentors, a parade ground, and an arched walkway. Here they hang up their whips, clubs, and guns, those instruments of power, without which they are just like us; and here they kick off their boots, remove their long coats and jackets, and loosen their tunics, symbols, like armor, of power. Here they shower and play snap-ass with their towels; they play cards, farts, and the radio. Here they must think over the day (or night) and consider the weak and troublesome. Here they must plan, these men of Himmler, the guardians of the state, the manner in which their victims should be dispatched. Rules are nothing. They make and are the rules, and they know the prisoners know that. In these plain rooms they scheme to get to know the officers’ wives or daughters or sisters better; how to get into town to sleep with girls (or, often enough, with each other); how to visit the cabarets in Munich. They wonder how well the war will go, though there’s been little action so far. Some have vowed to seek transfers into the fighting SS; some have not, because here the prisoners can’t shoot back.

I hear them talk. I listen to their thoughts rustling from room to room down the narrow halls. Our keepers are very plain people who believe strongly that the law is the law, and it is their law—police law—which is always designed to serve the big people, never the little people. All these men (one for every 150 prisoners, the same for all the other SS at all the other camps) and their families—how is it that all of Germany does not know? How is it that an entire nation slumbers so easily?

I clean the tub and creep down to my room. There will be no early risers this morning.