Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

‘Not the Reichsleiter, not the Reichsmarschall, not the Reichsfuhrer. The Reichskanzler himself wants a meeting with an IG delegation — on quite another topic.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘Weaponised poison gas. Mr Thomsen, I’m going to go ahead with my reforms, inasmuch as I can without your support.’ He held my eye. ‘You know, with the Jews I’ve never seen what all the fuss is about. In Berlin, half the time, I couldn’t even tell a Jew from an Aryan. I’m not proud of saying this, but I was personally quite relieved when they brought in the Star. Otherwise how can you tell?… Go on, delate me. Have me burnt at the stake for heresy. No. No, certainly not. I’ve never seen one good reason for all this fuss about the Jews.’

On Friday, as I walked from the Old Town to Kat Zet I, I found I wasn’t being followed; so I turned east and made the trek to the Summer Huts, without the least expectation that I would have company there. Swift and sticky rain, thin and cold, and smoke-soiled low-hanging clouds; the playground deserted, the sodden chalets all shuttered up. Everything answered to my mood, and to my hopes of Hannah. I pressed on through the sand and the scrub.

‘Well it’s all off now,’ Boris had said the night before. ‘Golo, I’d’ve liked nothing better than to see you put the horns on the Old Boozer. But it was always stupidly dangerous.’

And this from a colonel of the Waffen-SS (with three Iron Crosses) and a wild philanderer, who adored all danger… I said,

‘It’s good about the pyjama bottoms, isn’t it.’

‘Yes. Very. Here’s a husband who tries it on with his wife and gets smashed in the face. And then falls over with his cock out in the garden. But that makes it all worse, Golo. Even murkier. The brew’s too thick.’

‘Maybe just once in the Hotel Zotar. I went down there and it’s not that dirty and there’s only one—’

‘Don’t be a moron, Golo. Listen. All the things that are laughable about the Old Boozer — they make him more of a menace, not less. And he has the powers.’

One did not make such an enemy in the concentrationary universe, where the pressure of death was everywhere; all Doll would need to do was nudge it in the direction he chose.

‘Think,’ said Boris. ‘You — you’d probably survive it. You’re a scion of the New Order. But what about her?’

Hugging my coat, I walked on. Realsexuellpolitik. All’s fair in love and… Yes, and look how Germany waged it. The Commandant’s erring wife could expect no help from the provisions of the Hague and Geneva Conventions; it would be Vernichtungskrieg — to-nothing war.

… I reached a coppice of decrepit birches where the smell of natural decay blessedly overwhelmed the circumambient air. Natural decay, unadulterated, and not the work of man; and a smell thick with memories… After a while I defeatedly dragged my thoughts elsewhere: to Marlene Muthig, the wife of an IG petrologist, with whom I often bantered in the market square; to Lotte Burstinger, a recent addition to the ranks of the Helferinnen; and to Agnes’s eldest sister (the only unmarried one), Kzryztina.

Up ahead, just in front of the high hedgerow that marked the Zonal boundary, someone or other had started erecting a pavilion or gazebo — and then run out of time and timber. A planked backing, two side walls of different lengths, and half a roof. It looked like the shelter of a rural bus stop. I came round the front of it.

Paneless windows, a flat wooden bench. And Hannah Doll, in the corner, with a blue oilskin spread over her lap.

And she was dead to the world.

The hour that followed was marked by great stillness, but it was far from uneventful. Every few minutes she frowned, and the frowns varied (varieties of puzzlement and pain); three or four times her nostrils flared with subliminal yawns; a single tear gathered and dropped and melted into her cheek; and once a childish hiccup briefly shook her. And then there was the rhythm of her sleep, her breath, the surge of her soft insufflations. This was life, moving in her, this was the proof, the iterated proof of her existence…

Hannah’s eyes opened and she looked at me with so little loss of composure that I felt I was already there, fully established in her dream. Her mouth opened along all its width and she made a sound — like the sound of the tide of a distant sea.

‘Was tun wir hier,’ she said steadily and unrhetorically (as if really wanting to know), ‘mit diesen undenkbaren Leichenfresser?’

What are we doing here , she said, with these unimaginable ghouls …

She stood, and we embraced. We didn’t kiss. Even when she started crying and we were probably both thinking how delicious it would be, we didn’t kiss, not on the lips. But I knew I was in it.

‘Dieter Kruger,’ she eventually began.

Whatever it was, I was in it. And whatever it was, it would have to go forward.

Where now? Where to?

If little things may be compared to large, and if a cat can look at a king, then it seems that I, Paul Doll, as Kommandant (the spearhead of this great national programme of applied hygiene), have certain affinities with the secret smoker!

Take Hannah. Yes, she will do very well, I believe, she will do nicely, I fancy, as an example of the secret smoker. And what do Hannah and myself have in common?

1stly, she has to find somewhere secluded for the gratification of her ‘secret’ need. 2ndly, she must bring about the disappearance of the remains: there is always the fag end, doubtlessly smeared with some loud lipstick, the butt, the stub (and to be perfectly direct about it, corpses are the bane of my life). 3rdly, she is required to deal with the odour, not only of the smoke itself but also of its residue, clinging to the clothes and especially to the hair (and in her case befouling the breath, for whilst the aroma of an expensive cigar lends authority to the internal scents of the Mensch, the reek of a penny Davidoff desecrates the salubrious waft of the Madchen). 4thly and finally, she has the obligation, if honesty is a concept she even acknowledges let alone understands, to account to herself for her compulsion to do what she does — stinking herself up, and wearing her guilt like some dirty little slut rancidly emerging from a strenuous joust on a hot afternoon…

Here the 2 of us happen to part company, and the analogy breaks down. Yes, we part company here.

For she does what she does out of wrongness and weakness. And I do what I do out of rectitude and indomitable might!

‘You’re wearing Mama’s make-up.’

Sybil’s hand flew to her face.

‘You thought you’d washed it all off, didn’t you? But I can still see traces of rouge. Or are you blushing?’

‘… I didn’t!’

‘Don’t tell lies, Sybil. You know why German girls shouldn’t use cosmetics? It affects their morals. They start telling lies. Like your mother.’

‘What do you mean, Vati?’

‘… Are you excited about the pony? Better than a silly old tortoise, nicht?’

Even the most stalwart National Socialist, I think, would have to concede that the task the SS set itself in Kulmhof, in the January of this year, was exceptionally sharp. Yech, that was a somewhat extreme measure, bordering, perhaps, on the excessive — the Aktion leading to the recruitment and induction of the Sonder, Szmul. To this day it is mildly famous; people think it stands as a rare behavioural curiosity, quite possibly a 1-off. We informally call it the time of the silent boys.

(Reminder: Szmul’s wife lingers in Litzmannstadt. Find out where.)