Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

As I passed the old crema and approached the garden gate, I contemplated my imminent rendezvous with Frau Doll; and I felt that lovely glow of surety that heats and tickles you when you’re playing 2-card brag (a game far more complicated than it at 1st appears): you look round the table, and count the pips, and you’re satisfied for a mathematical fact that victory is yours. She doesn’t know I know about the letter she passed to Thomsen. She doesn’t know I know about the missive he handed to her. I’m going ‘to tie her up in knots’. I just want to see the look on her face.

Meinrad, the pony, neighed feebly whilst I ascended the steps.

Hannah was on the couch before the fire, reading Vom Winde Verweht to the twins. No one looked up as I settled on the revolvable stool.

‘Hear me, Sybil, hear me, Paulette.’ I said, ‘Your mother’s a very wicked woman. Very wicked indeed.’

‘Don’t say that!’

‘An evil woman.’

‘Oh what d’you mean , Vati?’

I slowly let my frown darken. ‘Go to bed, girls.’

Hannah clapped her hands. ‘Off with you. I’ll be up in 5 minutes.’

‘ 3 minutes!’

‘Promise.’

As they were getting up and moving off I said, ‘Ho ho. Ho ho ho. I think it’ll take a bit longer than that .’

In the firelight Hannah’s eyes seemed to have the colour and texture of the skin of crème brûlée.

‘I know something you don’t know,’ I said with my chin going lazily from side to side. ‘I know something you don’t know I know. Ho ho. Ho ho ho. I know you don’t know I—’

‘You mean Herr Thomsen?’ she said brightly.

For a moment, I admit, I could think of nothing to say. ‘… Yes. Herr Thomsen . Come on, Hannah, whats your game? Listen. If you don’t—’

‘What are you talking about? I’ve got no reason to see him again. And I was sorry to impose in the 1st place. He was polite enough, but I could tell he rather resents anything that gets in the way of his mission.’

Again it was a while before I said, ‘Oh really? What “mission” is this?’

‘He’s obsessed by the Buna-Werke. He thinks it could decide the war.’

‘Well he’s not wrong there.’ I folded my arms. ‘No, hang on. Not so fast, my girl. The letter you had Humilia give him. Yes, oh yes, she told me all about it. Some people know what morality is, you see. That letter. Perhaps you’d care to satisfy me as to its contents?’

‘If you like. I asked for a meeting by the Summer Huts. At the playground. Where he reluctantly agreed to trace Dieter Kruger for me. I finally had a chance to apply to someone high up. Someone really important.’

I stood suddenly, giving my crown a glancing cuff on the mantelpiece.

‘You keep a civil tongue in your mouth when you talk to me young lady!’

After a moment her head gave a penitent bow. But I didn’t like the way this was going 1 bit. I said,

‘And the 2nd missive — the 1 he slipped you at the riding school?’

‘That was his reply, of course. His full report.’

3 minutes later Hannah said,

‘I’m not telling you. Do you understand? I’m not telling you. And now, if you don’t mind, I’ll keep my promise to the girls.’

And with that she sashayed from the room… No. Our little exchange didn’t go at all as I’d planned. For a while I stared into the grate — at the punily lashing flamelets. Then I picked up a bottle of something or other and went off for some testing cogitations in my ‘lair’.

That night I woke up and my face was completely numb — my chin, my lips, my cheeks. As if drenched in novocaine. I rolled off the divan and dipped my head beneath my knees for an hour and a ½. It didn’t help. And I thought, If any girl or woman kissed my rubbery cheeks or my rubbery lips then I wouldn’t feel anything at all.

Like a dead leg or a dead arm. A dead face.

In addition we are being mocked, which is not very nice either, so to say. Mocked, and profaned. There is a Star of David on the ceiling of the airtight chamber. The foot rags they issue us with are scraps of prayer shawls. Transit Route IV, the slave-built highway from Przemsyl to Tarnopol, is laid out on the crushed rubble of synagogues and Jewish gravestones. Then there is the ‘Goebbels Calendar’: no holy day passes without an Aktion. The sharpest ‘measures’ are reserved for Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana — our Days of Awe.

The eating. I believe I can explain the eating.

Of the five senses, taste is the only one that we, the Sonders, can partly control. The other senses are ruined and dead. It is strange about touch. I carry, drag, shove, seize — I do these things all night long. But the sense of connection is no longer there. I feel like a man with prosthetic hands — a man with false hands.

And when you consider what we see, what we hear, and what we smell, you won’t deny that we do badly need to control what we taste. What would it be, the taste in our mouths, in the absence of food? As soon as you swallow and the food is gone, it comes, it returns: the taste of our defeat, the taste of wormwood.

I mean the taste of our defeat in the war against the Jews. This war is in every conceivable sense one-sided . We did not expect it, and for far too long we gazed with real incredulity at the incredible anger of the Third Germany.

There is a transport from Theresienstadt which includes a number of Poles. During a three-hour delay caused by the non-appearance of the Disinfektoren, I fall into conversation with the family of a middle-aged industrial engineer (a one-time member of the Jewish Council in Lublin). I am reassuring his daughter and her children about the ample meals and snug lodgings, here at the KZ, and the man trustingly takes me aside and tells me a strange and terrible story about the recent events in Łódź. It turns out to be a story about the power of hunger.

September 4, and there is a thick crowd on Fireman’s Square. Rumkowski, weeping, reveals the latest German demand: the surrender, for deportation, of all adults over sixty-five and all children under ten. The next day the old will go, the young will go…

‘They’re probably all right,’ I manage to say. ‘You’ll be all right too. Look at me. Do I look half starved?’

But of course there is more. That same afternoon the people learn that a supply of potatoes is ready for distribution. And a wave of euphoria surges through the streets of the ghetto. Now the focus of talk and thought is not the disappearance of all adults over sixty-five and all children under ten, but the potatoes.

‘Don’t kill me, kill someone else,’ it increasingly amuses Doll to say. ‘I’m not a monster. I don’t torture people for the hell of it. Slay a monster, Sonderkommandofuhrer. Kill Palitzsch. Kill Brodniewitsch. Slay a monster.’

Sometimes he says (and I find, even in all this, that his diction still succeeds in offending me), ‘Kill someone powerful. I’m nothing. I’m not powerful. Me — powerful? No. I’m a cog in a vast machine. I’m rubbish. I’m just a cunt. I’m shit.

‘Why don’t you wait for the next visit of the Reichsfuhrer? If you don’t get him, try Mobius. His rank’s lower than mine but he’s far more weighty. Or Standartenfuhrer Blobel. Or Odilo Globocnik when he’s next here.

‘But don’t kill Paul Doll — though of course you’re welcome to try. Doll’s nothing. He’s shit. He’s just a cunt.’

*

The thought I find hardest to avoid is the thought of returning home to my wife. I can avoid the thought, more or less. But I can’t avoid the dream.

In the dream I enter the kitchen and she swivels in her chair and says, ‘You’re back. What happened?’ And when I begin my story she listens for a while and then turns away, shaking her head. And that is all. It’s not as if I tell her about my first thirty days in the Lager (spent in full-time exploration of the orifices of the recently dead, in collaboration with the German quest for valuables). It’s not as if I tell her about the time of the silent boys.