Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

I shrugged stiffly. ‘Mortal fear does strange things.’

‘Do you believe any of it?’

‘You see their reasoning, don’t you? It mustn’t get about. That a prisoner can do that to the Commandant and live.’

‘Do what to the Commandant?’

‘Well. Hit him even by accident. Bohdan gave him his black eyes.’

‘Bohdan didn’t give him his black eyes.’ Her mirthless smile changed — it widened and tightened. ‘ I gave him his black eyes.’

‘ What would you rather? ’ yelled Sybil from the distant sandpit. ‘ Know everything or know nothing? ’

‘ Know nothing ,’ I yelled back. ‘ Then you have the fun of finding everything out .’

That same Friday I walked in the late dusk through the muddy alleys of Kat Zet III. Financed entirely by IG Farben, Kat Zet III had been put together, with a literalist’s care, on the model of Kat Zet I and Kat Zet II. The same searchlights and watchtowers, the same barbed wire and high-tension fencing, the same sirens and gallows, the same armed guards, the same punishment cells, the same orchestra bay, the same whipping post, the same brothel, the same Krankenhaus, and the same mortuary.

Bohdan had had a Pikkolo — this was Hannah’s designation. The word was ambiguous: unlike a Piepl, which meant bumboy and no mistake, a Pikkolo was often just a young companion, a charge, someone the older prisoner looked out for. In this case he was a fifteen-year-old German Jew called Dov Cohn. Dov was sometimes to be seen in the Dolls’ garden (and I had glimpsed him on the day I paid my first visit). Hannah said that Bohdan and Dov were ‘very close’… In common with the Buna-Werke, Kat Zet III was still under construction, and for now only a colony of builders was quartered there. According to the registrar in the Labour Section, Dov Cohn was to be found in Block 4(vi).

By this time, partly through induction, I had settled on what seemed to be the likeliest sequence of events. The morning in question: first, there is a serious altercation between husband and wife, during which Hannah deals Doll a blow to the face; over the course of the day, as the bruises pool and darken, Doll realises that he’ll be needing an explanation for his disfigurement; at some point Bohdan, perhaps in an act of clumsiness, attracts his notice; he invents the story of the shovel, and relays it, together with his instructions, to Lagerfuhrer Prufer, whose adjutant notifies the Punishment Commando… The only remaining mystery, so far as I could see, was the fate of poor Torquil.

My approach to Kat Zet III had been from the direction of the Buna-Werke, and I felt as certain as you could ever feel that I wasn’t being followed.

With my baton I rapped on the Block door and threw it open: a barn the size of two tennis courts, containing a hundred and forty-eight three-tier bunkframes with two or three to each berth. The heat of eleven or twelve hundred men gushed out at me.

‘Blockaltester! Here!’

The boss, an elder, fiftyish and well fleshed, emerged from his side room and walked hurryingly forward. I stated a name and a number and gave a sideways wag of the head. Then I stepped back into the lane, and exhaled. I lit a cheroot — to fumigate my nostrils. The smell in Block 4(vi) was a different smell: it wasn’t the outright putrefaction of the meadow and the pyre, nor was it the smell diffused by the smokestacks (that of cardboard with wet rot, moreover reminding you, with its trace of charr, that human beings evolved from fish). No, it was the apologetic funk of hunger — the acids and gases of thwarted digestion, with a urinous undertang.

He stepped out, the boy, and not alone. Accompanying him was one of the Block Kapos, with his triangular green Winkel (denoting felon), his bare arms tattooed to the thickness of a sleeved singlet, his spiky pate a mere continuation of the stubble that framed his mouth. I said,

‘Who are you?’

The Kapo looked me up and down. And who was I, for that matter, with my height, my frosty blue eyes, my landowner’s tweeds, my Obersturmfuhrer armband?

‘Name.’

‘Stumpfegger. Sir.’

‘Well leave us, Stumpfegger.’

As he turned to go he made a half gesture, raising his arm for a moment and then letting it drop. It seemed to me that he wanted to pass a proprietorial hand over the fuzz of the boy’s black hair.

‘Dov, walk with me a while,’ I said carefully. ‘Master Dov Cohn, I want to talk to you about Bohdan Szozeck. You may be unable to help me, but you should not be unwilling to help me. No harm will come to you because of it. And some good will come of it whether you help me or not.’ I took out a pack of Camels. ‘Have five.’ What was the value of five American cigarettes — five bread rations, ten? ‘Salt them away somewhere.’

For several paces the boy had been rhythmically nodding his head, and I started to feel almost sure he would give me my answer. We halted, under the ensnared lamps. It was now night, and the black sky very faintly crepitated with coming rain or coming snow.

‘How did you end up here? Relax. Have some of this first.’

It was a Hershey bar. Time slowed… Carefully Dov freed the cellophane wrapping, stared for a moment, and gave the brown nub a reverent lick. I watched. He would be an artist with this delicacy; it would probably take him a week to carve it to nothing with his tongue… Hannah had talked about Dov’s eyes: rich dark grey, and perfectly round, with little inlets on the line of the diameter. Eyes made for innocence, and confirmed in innocence, but now protuberant with experience.

‘You’re German. Where from?’

In a firm voice that nonetheless occasionally leapfrogged an octave, he told me his story. It was unexceptional. Flushed out of a Jews’ House in Dresden, along with the rest of his family, in the autumn of ’41; a month in the holding camp of Theresienstadt; the second transport; the leftward selection, on the spur, of his mother, four younger sisters, three grandparents, two aunts, and eight younger cousins; the survival of his father and two uncles for the usual three months (digging drainage ditches); and then Dov was alone.

‘So who looks out for you? Stumpfegger?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, with reluctance. ‘Stumpfegger.’

‘And Professor Szozeck for a while.’

‘Him too, but he’s gone.’

‘D’you know where?’

After a still moment Dov again started nodding.

‘Bohdan walked here from the Stammlager to say goodbye. And to warn me not to go looking for him at the villa. Then he went back. He was waiting. He was sure they’d come.’

Dov knew everything.

On his last morning, Bohdan Szozeck went to the Ka Be (to have the dressing changed on his infected knee) and got to the villa garden later than usual, about half past nine. He was in the conservatory when the Commandant, with one hand pressed to his face, came reeling out of the glass doors of the breakfast room — in pyjamas. At first (and here I felt stirrings on the back of my scalp) Bohdan thought that Doll, swaying there in his blue and white stripes, was a prisoner : a Zugang (his stomach still fat, his clothes still clean), drunk or mad or just wildly disorientated. Then Doll must have caught sight of the tortoise as it inched across the lawn; he picked up the shovel and brought the flat blade down full strength on its carapace.

‘And he fell over, sir. On the gravel — really hard. Backwards. His pyjama bottoms, they’d come undone and tripped him up. And he fell over.’

I said, ‘Did Doll see the professor?’

‘He should’ve hid. Why didn’t he hide, sir? Bohdan should’ve hid.’