Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

I’m sorry to burden you with this but to be frank there’s no one else I can ask.

Every Friday I may be found by the sandpit at the Summer Huts between the hours of four and five.

Thank you. Yours sincerley, Hannah Doll

PS. I apolagise for my spelling. They say I have a ‘condition’. But I think I’m just not up to it. And it’s funny, because the only thing I’ve ever been any good at is langauges. HD.

SO, NO, IT was hardly the glazed summons or the desperate solicitation for which I had perhaps callowly yearned. But when after a day or two I showed the letter to Boris he tried to persuade me that it was, in its way, quietly encouraging.

‘She’s long lost all trust in the Old Boozer. That’s good.’

‘Yes, but yours sincerely ,’ I said with some petulance. ‘And Herr Thomsen . And there’s no one else I can ask .’

‘You fool, that’s the best bit. Pull yourself together, Golo. She’s saying you’re her only friend. Her only friend in the whole world.’

Still writhing slightly I said, ‘But I don’t want to be her friend.’

‘No, naturally. You just want to… Patience, Golo. Women are very impressed by patience. Wait till the war’s over.’

‘Oh, sure. Wars do not observe the unities, brother.’ The unities of time, place, and action. ‘Wait till the war’s over, indeed. Who knows what’ll be left? Anyway.’

Boris obliged me and promised that he would interrogate Szozeck’s Block Leader. He added,

‘Adorable PS. And she’s got nice handwriting. Sexy. Unselfconscious. Flowing.’

And in my solitary contemplations, with Boris’s inspiring words still fresh in my mind, I looked again at Hannah’s holograph — the lewd orbs of her eh s and oh s, those shamelessly plunging jay s and why s, that truly unconscionable doubleyou .

But then the whole thing froze over for nearly two weeks. Boris was sent to the subcamp of Goleschau (with orders to purge and reinvigorate its demoralised guardhouse). Before he left he had to get Esther out of Block 11; this took priority, reasonably enough, because she would have starved to death in his absence.

As a political criminal, Esther was now in the custody of the Gestapo. The non-venal Fritz Mobius, luckily, was away on leave, and Jurgen Horder, his number two, was in the Dysentery Ward of the Ka Be. Boris therefore applied to Michael Off, who, he hoped, would be considerably cheaper than Jurgen Horder.

*

So when I saw Hannah, at the theatre on Saturday night, I could only mime my impotence and say glancingly, while Horst Eikel loudly joked with Norberte Uhl, ‘Friday next…’ At first I felt strangely numbed ( And the Woods Sing For Ever was about a clan of mildly famished but stoutly anti-intellectual yokels in northern Pomerania); but this very quickly and sharply changed.

A variety of physical forces seemed to be at work on me. Standing in a casual group with Hannah, I was electrically aware of her mass and body scent; she loomed huge, like a Jupiter of erotic gravity. By the time Doll took her off I was so unmoored, and so roused, that I almost pressed myself on the pale, limp, terrified figure of Alisz Seisser, and later on, as I lay in bed and stared at the darkness, it took a long time before I eventually ruled out a surprise visit to Ilse Grese.

And now I had another letter in front of me, as I sat drinking synthetic coffee in Frithuric Burckl’s office at the Buna-Werke. ‘Esteemed Sir,’ it began. The correspondent was the chief personnel officer at Bayer, the pharmaceutical firm (a subsidiary of IG Farben), and the addressee was Paul Doll.

The transport of 150 women arrived in good condition. However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results as they all died during the experiments. We would kindly request that you send us another group of women to the same number and at the same price.

I looked up and said, ‘How much are women?’

‘One seventy RM each. Doll wanted two hundred, but Bayer gypped him down to one seventy.’

‘And what were Bayer testing?’

‘A new anaesthetic. Overdid it a bit. Obviously.’ Burckl sat back and folded his arms (the tonsured black hair, the thick-framed spectacles). ‘I showed you that because I think it’s indicative. Indicative of a faulty attitude.’

‘Faulty, Mr Burckl?’

‘Yes, faulty, Mr Thomsen. Did the women all die at once? Were they all given the same dose? That’s the least idiotic explanation. Did the women die in batches? Did they die one by one? The point is that Bayer were repeating their mistakes. And that’s what we’re doing.’

‘What mistakes?’

‘All right. Yesterday I came through the Yard, and one of the work teams was lugging a mass of cables to the substation. At the usual swift stagger. And one of them fell down. He didn’t drop anything or break anything. He just fell down. So the Kapo started clubbing the life out of him, and this Britisher from the Stalag intervened. Next thing we know a noncom got involved. Net result? The POW loses an eye, the Haftling’s shot in the head, and the Kapo gets a broken jaw. And it’s another two hours before the cables get lugged to the substation.’

‘So what do you suggest?’

‘Treating the workforce as disposable, Mr Thomsen, is hugely counterproductive. My God, those Kapos! What’s the matter with them?’

I said, ‘Well. If a Kapo isn’t pulling his weight, in the noncom’s opinion, then he loses his status.’

‘Mm. Reduced rations and whatnot.’

‘It’s more serious than that. He gets beaten to death later the same day.’

Burckl frowned. He said, ‘Does he? Who by? The noncoms?’

‘No. The prisoners.’

Burckl went still. Then he said, ‘You see, that shores up my point. The chain of violence — everyone’s aquiver with it. The whole atmosphere’s psychotic. And it doesn’t work. We’re not getting there, are we, Mr Thomsen.’

Our deadline was the middle of next year.

‘Oh I don’t know,’ I said. ‘We chug along.’

‘The Chancellery is bulldozing the Vorstand. The Vorstand is bulldozing us. And we’re bulldozing… Jesus Christ, look at it out there.’

I looked at it out there. The figures that held my attention, as always (I too had an office at Buna, and spent many hours in front of its window), the figures that held my attention were not the men in stripes, as they queued or scurried in lines or entangled one another in a kind of centipedal scrum, moving at an unnatural speed, like extras in a silent film, moving faster than their strength or build could bear, as if in obedience to a frantic crank swivelled by a furious hand; the figures that held my attention were not the Kapos who screamed at the prisoners, nor the SS noncoms who screamed at the Kapos, nor the overalled company foremen who screamed at the SS noncoms. No. What held my eye were the figures in city business suits, designers, engineers, administrators from IG Farben plants in Frankfurt, Leverkusen, Ludwigshafen, with leather-bound notebooks and retractable yellow measuring tapes, daintily picking their way past the bodies of the wounded, the unconscious, and the dead.

‘I have a proposition. Oh, it’s pretty radical, I admit. Will you hear me out at least?’

He righted the low stack of papers in front of him and took out his fountain pen.

‘Let’s go through this one step at a time. Now. Mr Thomsen, how long — what’s the longest our workers last?’

I said wearily, ‘Three months.’

‘So every three months we’re having to induct their successors. Tell me.’