Clifford's Blues by John A. Williams Page A

leaking out, and he smelled of sweat, and the dust outside had its smell, and whatever was growing just beyond this prison had a smell, and we did it with those sounds you think are quiet, but you remember them forever. And once it was over, all the badness was suddenly gone. I lost that earlier feeling that if Karlsohn had walked in, I’d have just kicked his ass and thrown him out on the ’Platz. Menno was shaking, I was shaking and rushing him out, and there were no nice words between us, nothing like the ease and wonderful sense of being so goddamn special that I’d last had with him. When the door closed behind Menno I felt okay, I mean relieved and then, right away, I wanted to be with him again.
    Sunday, Aug. 11, 1935
    Dieter Lange sent me to the camp today to push the stock around. He just wanted me out of the way while he played one of his wild games with Anna. They’ve been doing that lately, and I’m glad, because it takes his mind off me. I’ve heard them running and jumping, whooping and hollering, screaming and laughing, and then it gets quiet. I guess I’ve become like a piece of furniture. They never used to carry on like that. Fat bitch.
    In the camp, after looking through the canteen and seeing nothing to do, I took a stroll around. Oh, shit. I headed right for the Infirmary. Menno wasn’t there. Nyassa told me he was down at the Priesterblock ministering to the new Witnesses. I sat down. Nyassa looked sad. There weren’t too many patients around. There never are in summer. It’s the winters that kill people. I asked how it was going and he said all right, but his wife would have to divorce him. Kids? He said no. It was tough enough in Germany for a black adult. Why have kids go through that, too? Me? Not married, no kids, I told him. Had I really been in Dachau three years, he wanted to know. I knew why he was asking, of course. He could see himself in here for three years or longer, too. He didn’t know his sentence.
    Then he started to talk fast, I mean up-tempo. He said he’d just written to his wife, telling her to go to America and wait until he got out. They all want to go to America. Me, too. I asked what made him think it would be better for him there than here. Told him that where I came from, if you even looked at a white woman, you’d be dancing at the end of a rope. He said he’d heard that, but didn’t believe it. Why? he wanted to know. I said that’s just the way things were. Wasn’t he in jail for being black and marrying a German woman?
    Ernest Just was involved with a German woman, he said, and would probably marry her and take her to America, Washington, DC . I said the man must be crazy. He said some people thought so, but he himself had found him to be a brilliant scientist. He was always struggling, though, to find money and places where he could do his work, which was difficult to do in America, but not so hard here. At least they did let him work right here in Germany at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, before he went to Naples. Nyassa was talking even faster, his eyes bucking bigger. And Just could have worked in France, too, if he’d wanted to, Dr. Nyassa said. “Brilliant!”
    Man, he ran on with this Just, throwing out all this stuff—marine biologist, head of the department of physiology (or did he say psychology?), mostly working with worms, had reversed the sex of some worms (oh, yes?) in an experiment, made more chromosomes (?) in animals, reproduced the histological characteristics of human cancer cells (or did he say historical characteristics?). Then he asked me if I’d ever heard of a Dr. Domagk, but didn’t wait for me to say no. This man had invented a miracle drug, Nyassa said, to kill bacteria and therefore infection.
    â€œHummm,” I said.
    Then he said it was called Protonsil, sulfanilamide. Domagk was the director of the I.G. Farben Research Institute, and Nyassa said