Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

That is all, but the dream is unendurable, and the dream knows this, and humanely grants me the power to rouse myself from it. By now I am bolt upright the instant it starts. Then I climb from my bedding and pace the floor no matter how tired I am, because I’m afraid to go to sleep.

This morning, in another of our comradely debates, we return yet again to the matter of alleviation . Here are a few of the things that are said.

‘Every time, with every transport, we should sow panic. Every time. We should all move along the ramp whispering of murder.’

‘Futile? No, not futile. It would slow them down . And corrode their nerves. The Szwaby , the Zabójcy — they’re mortal.’

This speaker — like ninety per cent of all the Jews in the Sonderkommando — became an atheist about half an hour after starting work. But certain tenets linger. Judaism, unlike the other monotheisms, does not hold that the Devil takes human form. All are mortal. But this is another doctrine I am starting to doubt. The German is not something supernatural, but neither is he something human. He is not the Devil. He is Death.

‘They’re mortal. They tremble too. But when there’s panic. Nightmare!’

‘ Good . So it should be.’

‘Why make it worse for our people? Why make their last minutes worse?’

‘They’re not their last minutes. Their last minutes are spent jammed solid and dying. And there are fifteen of them. Fifteen minutes.’

‘They’re going to die anyway. We want it to cost the Szwaby .’

Another says, ‘The fact is we don’t sow panic. Do we. We smile and lie. Because we’re human beings.’

Another says, ‘We lie because when there’s panic we get killed quicker.’

Another says, ‘We lie because we fear the bloodlust and the rage.’

Another says, ‘We lie for our lousy selves.’

And I say, ‘ Ihr seit achzen johr alt, und ihr hott a fach . That’s all there is. There’s nothing else.’

With his shirt off and gasmask on, Doll looks like a fat and hairy old housefly (a housefly that is nearing the end of its span). He sounds like a housefly too, as he repeats the number I have given him: a sizzling whine. He asks me something else.

‘I can’t make you out, sir.’

We are in the ‘ossuary’ — a broad concavity upwind of the pyre. I am counting charred hipbones before their transfer to the grinding teams.

‘Still can’t hear you, sir.’

He gives a jerk of his head, and I follow him up the slope.

On level ground he frees his mouth with a gasp and says, ‘So we must be nearly there, nicht?’

‘We’re definitely past half way, sir.’

‘Half way ?’

The pyre is sixty metres from where we stand, and the heat, though still immense, is now seamed with autumn cold.

‘Well fucking get on with it… I know what’s worrying you. Fear not, hero. When we’re done here the whole squad’s for it. But you and your best fifty will proudly live on.’

‘Which fifty, sir?’

‘Oh, you choose.’

‘… I select, sir?’

‘Yes, you select. Go on, you’ve seen it done a thousand times. Select… You know, Sonder, I never nursed any particular hatred for the Jews. Something had to be done about them, obviously. But I’d’ve been content with the Madagascar solution. Or having you all neutered. Like with the Rhineland Bastards, nicht? The by-blows of the French Araber und Neger. Nicht? No killing. Just snipping. But you lot — you’re neutered already, ne? You’ve already lost what made you men.’

‘Sir.’

‘I didn’t decide all this.’

‘No, sir.’

‘I just said zu Befehl, zu Befehl. I just said ja, ja, yech, ja. Sie wissen doch, nicht? I didn’t decide. Berlin decided. Berlin.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘… You know that white-haired streak of piss who’s always in civvies? You must’ve heard talk of Thomsen, Sonder. Thomsen’s the nephew of Martin Bormann — the Reichsleiter, the Sekretar. Thomsen’s Berlin.’ Doll laughs and says, ‘So kill Berlin. Kill Berlin. Before Berlin kills you.’ He laughs again. ‘Kill Berlin.’

As he starts off back to the jeep Doll turns and says, ‘You live on, Sonder.’ Again he laughs. ‘I’m best of friends with the appropriate authority in Litzmannstadt. Maybe I can arrange a reunion. You and uh, “Shulamith”. She hasn’t got enough vitamin P, Sonder. Protektsye , nicht?

‘She’s still there, you know. In the attic above the bakery. She’s still there. But where’s her vitamin P?’

*

One morning I am in the lane passing the Kommandant’s garden, and I see Frau Doll setting off for school with her daughters. She looks in my direction and she says something quite extraordinary to me. And I recoil from it as if I have smoke in my eyes. Five minutes later, standing bent behind the main guardroom, I am able to shed tears for the first time since Chełmno.

‘Guten Tag,’ she says.

The urge to kill is like the bore of a river, a steepsided wave coming up against the flow. Against the flow of what I am or what I was. Part of me hopes the urge is there at the end.

But if it should happen that I go to the gas (in fact I am probably too conspicuous for that, and they’ll just take me aside for the shot to the nape — but imagine): if it should happen that I go to the gas, I will weave among them.

I will weave among them, saying, to the old man in the astrakhan coat, ‘Stand as close to the meshed shaft as you can, sir.’

Saying, to the boy in the sailor suit, ‘Breathe deeply, my child.’

THERE WAS A big sick bird, a kite I think it was — there was a big sick bird that hovered over the oak beyond the scaffold on the well-tended lawn (mown in stripes) facing the Appellplatz of the Farben Kat Zet.

It hovered there, in all weathers, brownish, yellowish, the colour of the healing eyes of the Commandant; and it never seemed to use its wings. It dangled — it just hung.

Now I knew a bird could do this, given a lucky confluence of currents, of rising thermals; but the sick bird did it all day long. Perhaps all night, too.

Would it like the upper air, you wondered? Sometimes the wind got in under its pinions, and they stirred, and you sensed effort, and you felt you could hear a distant groan of aspiration. Yet it failed to rise. The bird was aloft, merely; it couldn’t fly.

Sometimes it abruptly dropped three or four metres, it lurched downwards, as if tugged by a cord. It seemed inorganic, manmade — like a kite , in fact, directed by a boy’s inexperienced hand.

Perhaps it was mad, this ponderous predator of the air. Perhaps it was dying. You sometimes felt it was not a bird but a fish, a ray, floating, drowning, in the ocean of the sky.

I understood the bird, I absorbed it, I contained it within me.

This is what I passed to her at the riding school.

Dear Hannah:

Events oblige me to start with yet more bad news. Professor Szozeck’s Pikkolo, Dov Cohn, has also been ‘transferred’ (along with a Kapo called Stumpfegger, who took an interest in him and was possibly his confidant). And this six weeks after the event. It’s particularly hard to take, because I thought — didn’t you? — that Dov was very well equipped to survive.

After what you told me about the circumstances of your marriage, I no longer feel the need to pay your husband even the minimal respect due to the father of Paulette and Sybil. He is what he is, and he is getting worse. If he thought he had the right to eliminate three people, one of them a child, over a single instance of compromised prestige, which in truth was an act of kindness — well. I have a measure of protection, through my uncle. You have none.