Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

‘Mm. Still. Stranger things have happened.’

‘ Much stranger things have happened.’

Yes. Because it was a time when everybody felt the fraudulence, the sarcastic shamelessness, and the breathtaking hypocrisy of all prohibitions. I said,

‘I’ve got a kind of plan.’

Boris sighed and looked vacant.

‘First I’ll need to hear from Uncle Martin. Then I’ll make my opening move. Pawn to queen four.’

After a while Boris said, ‘I think that pawn’s for it.’

‘Probably. But there’s no harm in having a good look.’

Boris Eltz took his leave: he was expected on the ramp. A month of staggered ramp duty was his punishment within a punishment for yet another fistfight. The ramp — the detrainment, the selection, then the drive through the birch wood to the Little Brown Bower, in Kat Zet II.

‘The most eerie bit’s the selection,’ said Boris. ‘You ought to come along one day. For the experience.’

I ate lunch alone in the Officers’ Mess (half a chicken, peaches and custard. No wine) and went on to my office at the Buna-Werke. There was a two-hour meeting with Burckl and Seedig, mostly concerning itself with the slow progress of the carbide production halls; but it also became clear that I was losing my battle about the relocation of our labour force.

At dusk I betook myself to the cubicle of Ilse Grese, back in Kat Zet I.

Ilse Grese loved it here.

I knocked on the gently swinging tin door and entered.

Like the teenager she still was (twenty next month), Ilse sat hunched and cross-ankled halfway down the cot, reading an illustrated magazine; she did not choose to look up from its pages. Her uniform was hooked on the nail in the metal beam, under which I now ducked; she was wearing a fibrous dark-blue housecoat and baggy grey socks. Without turning round she said,

‘Aha. I smell Icelander. I smell arsehole.’

Ilse’s habitual manner with me, and perhaps with all her menfriends, was one of sneering languor. My habitual manner with her, and with every woman, at least at first, was floridly donnish (I had evolved this style as a counterweight to my physical appearance, which some, for a while, found forbidding). On the floor lay Ilse’s gunbelt and also her oxhide whip, coiled like a slender serpent in sleep.

I took off my shoes. As I sat and made myself comfortable against the curve of her back I dangled over her shoulder an amulet of imported scent on a gilt chain.

‘It’s the Icelandic arsehole. What’s he want?’

‘Mm, Ilse, the state of your room. You always look impeccable when you’re going about your work — I’ll grant you that. But in the private sphere… And you’re quite a stickler for order and cleanliness in others.’

‘What’s the arsehole want?’

I said, ‘What is wanted?’ And I continued, with thoughtful lulls between the sentences. ‘What is wanted is that you, Ilse, should come to my place around ten. There I will ply you with brandy and chocolate and costly gifts. I will listen as you tell me about your most recent ups and downs. My generous sympathy will soon restore your sense of proportion. Because a sense of proportion, Ilse, is what you’ve been known, very occasionally, to lack. Or so Boris tells me.’

‘… Boris doesn’t love me any more.’

‘He was singing your praises just the other day. I’ll have a word with him if you like. You will come, I hope, at ten. After our talk and your treats, there will be a sentimental interlude. That is what is wanted.’

Ilse went on reading — an article strongly, indeed angrily arguing that women should on no account shave or otherwise depilate their legs or their armpits.

I got to my feet. She looked up. The wide and unusually crinkly and undulating mouth, the eye sockets of a woman three times her age, the abundance and energy of the dirty-blonde hair.

‘You’re an arsehole.’

‘Come at ten. Will you?’

‘Maybe,’ she said, turning the page. ‘And maybe not.’

In the Old Town the housing stock was so primitive that the Buna people had been obliged to build a kind of dormitory settlement in the rural eastern suburbs (it contained a lower and upper school, a clinic, several shops, a cafeteria, and a taproom, as well as scores of restive housewives). Nevertheless, I soon found a quite serviceable set of chintzily furnished rooms up a steep lane off the market square. 9, Dzilka Street.

There was one serious drawback: I had mice. After the forcible displacement of its owners, the property was used as a builders’ squat for nearly a year, and the infestation had become chronic. Although the little creatures managed to stay out of sight, I could almost constantly hear them as they busied themselves in the crannies and runnels, scurrying, squeaking, feeding, breeding…

On her second visit my charlady, young Agnes, deposited a large male feline, black with white trimmings, named Max, or Maksik (pronounced Makseech). Max was a legendary mouser. All I would be needing, said Agnes, was a fortnightly visit from Max; he would appreciate the odd saucer of milk, but there would be no need to give him anything solid.

It wasn’t long before I learned respect for this skilful and unobtrusive predator. Maksik had a tuxedoed appearance — charcoal suit, perfectly triangular white dickey, white spats. When he dipped low and stretched his front legs, his paws fanned out prettily, like daisies. And every time Agnes scooped him up and took him away with her, Max — having weekended with me — left behind him an established silence.

In such a silence I drew, or rather amassed, a hot bath (kettle, pots, buckets), and rendered myself particularly trim and handsome for Ilse Grese. I laid out her cognac and candies, plus four sealed pairs of hardy pantihose (for she disdained stockings), and I waited, looking out at the old ducal castle, as black as Max against the evening sky.

Ilse was punctual. All she said, and she said it faintly sneeringly, and deeply languidly, as soon as the door closed behind her: all she said was — ‘Quick.’

So far as I could determine, the wife of the Commandant, Hannah Doll, took her daughters to school, and brought them back again, but otherwise she hardly left the house.

She did not attend either of the two experimental thés dansants ; she did not attend the cocktail party in the Political Department thrown by Fritz Mobius; and she did not attend the gala screening of the romantic comedy Two Happy People .

On each of these occasions Paul Doll could not but put in an appearance. He did so always with the same expression on his face: that of a man heroically mastering his hurt pride… He had a way of tubing his lips, as if planning to whistle — until (or so it seemed) some bourgeois scruple assailed him, and the mouth recomposed itself into a beak.

Mobius said, ‘No Hannah, Paul?’

I moved closer.

‘Indisposed,’ said Doll. ‘You know how it is. The proverbial time of the month?’

‘Dear oh dear.’

On the other hand, I did get a pretty good view of her, and for several minutes, through the threadbare hedge at the far end of the sports ground (as I was walking by I paused, and pretended to consult my notebook). Hannah was on the lawn, supervising a picnic for her two daughters and one of their friends — the daughter of the Seedigs, I was fairly sure. The wickerwork basket was still being unpacked. She didn’t settle down with them on the red rug but occasionally dropped into a crouch and then re-erected herself with a vigorous swivel of her haunches.