Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

‘It still looked viable till about late September. Vernichtungskrieg, Golo, isn’t really my cup of tea, but it seemed to be doing the trick… It was a very silly idea, though, invading Russia. Step aside.’

He wanted a better view of himself in the wall mirror above the sink. Leaning back at a ludicrous angle, Boris attended to his pewtery hair with a flat brush in either hand.

‘Is it very wrong, do you think,’ he asked, ‘to adore looking in the mirror?… I know it’s a crime to say it, but we’ve lost, Golo.’

‘All right, you’re nicked.’

‘Christ, you could’ve done it on the back of an envelope. A war on two fronts? On one front, the USSR. On the other, the USA. Plus the British Empire. Christ, you could’ve done it on the back of an envelope. December ’41.’

‘November ’41. I’ve never told you this, Boris, but they did it on the back of an envelope in November. The armaments people. And told him he couldn’t win.’

Boris shook his head with a kind of admiration. ‘He can’t win against Russia. So what’s he do? He declares war on America. It isn’t a criminal regime, dear. It’s a regime of the criminally insane. And we’re losing.’

I said uneasily, ‘There’s no second front yet . And the Allies might bust up with Moscow. And, Boris, don’t forget we’re making wonder weapons.’

‘So are they. With our scientists. Let me give you a little lesson on war, Golo. Rule number one: never invade Russia. All right, we kill five million and take five million prisoner, and starve to death another thirty million. That still leaves a hundred and twenty-five million.’

‘Quieten down, Boris. Have some alcohol. You’re too sober.’

‘Not till afterwards. Listen. Even if you raze Leningrad and Moscow, then what? You’ll have a boiling insurgency right down the length of the Urals for ever and ever. How do you pacify Siberia? Which is the size of eight Europes.’

‘Come on, we did it last time — invaded Russia.’

‘Not comparable. That was an old-style cabinet war against a dying regime. This is a war of pillage and murder. See, Golo, the Red Army’s now just the vanguard. Every Russian will fight, every woman, every child… Until October, until Kiev, I thought murder-war was winning. I thought massacre could do the impossible.’ He passed a hand over his face, and gave a wondering frown. ‘I thought night was winning, Golo. I thought night would win and then we’d see.’

I said, ‘And then we’d see what?… Well I’ll have another finger or two, if I may.’

He appraised me with a friendly sneer. ‘Mm. I suppose you can’t wait to be breathing the same air as Hannah… Take that look off your face, Golo.’

‘I only do it when I’m with you.’

‘Well only do it when you’re by yourself. As I told you, it’s absolutely nauseating.’

In our greatcoats we hurried down Cherry Street, heading for the motor pool. In the middle distance the new Topf crematories, I and II (there would soon be III and IV), were being test-fired. How did the flames force their way up those towering funnels and come sprouting out into the black sky?

‘An unsympathetic observer’, said Boris with his teeth clacking in brief spasms, ‘might find all this rather reprehensible.’

‘Yes. Could make it look quite bad.’

‘Ooh, we’ve got to fight like very devils now. We’ll need all the victors’ justice we can get. And they’ve got me here rotting with the fucking Viennese.’

Cherry Street forked left and became Camp Street.

‘Prepare yourself, Golo. Esther Kubis. This afternoon I gave her a long lecture. And she heard me out and said, I’m going to punish you tonight . Why, Esther, why?’

‘She’s got very intransigent eyes. And she does have her grievance.’

‘You know what’ll happen, don’t you, if she’s thought to have failed? Half an hour later, she’ll be flogged to death by Ilse Grese. That’s what.’

I contemplated the hooded sidecar, and prepared myself for a freezing and deafening half-hour… The war is lost . This had momentarily sickened me — because for the last week at Buna I had been a witness to the ferocious innovations of Rupprecht Strunck. But now I stiffened. Yes, it was necessary to go too far, to overfulfil and superabound — anything, anything and everything, to make sure that night wouldn’t win.

‘In you get then,’ said Boris as he straddled the driver’s seat. Before attaching his goggles he took one last look at the skyscraping beacon of the firestack. ‘It’s all France. None of this would be happening if it wasn’t for France. It’s all France.’

The subcamp of Furstengrube was famous, hereabouts, not only for the self-defeating lethality of its coal mines (where the average slave lasted less than a month), but also for the venerable tonnage of its theatre (in contrast to the fabricated Playhouse at Kat Zet I). It was a churchy redbrick rotunda with a squat black dome — requisitioned from the town for our exclusive use in the summer of 1940.

We milled about in the courtyard, officers, noncoms, privates, chemists, architects, engineers (all of us with metre-long plumes of vapour billowing from our mouths), and then gradually filtered up the steps and through the oak portal. Within, the soft reddish light had the damp sheen of gauze and worn silk; and it bore me off on a kind of memory cascade — Saturday-morning pictures in Berlin (me and Boris all bright-eyed and innocent and clutching our sweets), amateur theatricals in titivated town halls, sore-lipped necking sessions that lasted the length of whole double bills (plus newsreel) in the rear seats of provincial cinemas…

In the foyer I checked our coats, and by the time I caught up with Boris in the murmuring auditorium he was crooked over Ilse Grese, who had installed herself near the centre of the front row. As I approached he was archly saying,

‘Everyone knows the uh, the nickname or title they have for you here, Ilse. And I’m sorry but I think it’s slightly malapropos. Half of it’s all right. Half of it’s dead on.’ Boris turned to me and said, ‘You know what they call her? The Beautiful Beast.’

I found I was gazing at Ilse with all the freshness of discovery: the strong legs mannishly wide-planted, the hefty trunk in a black serge uniform gullibly studded with signs and symbols — lightning flash, eagle, broken cross. And I had kissed those crinkly lips, and sought favour from the voids of those borehole eyes…

She said tightly, ‘Which half, Hauptsturmfuhrer?’

‘Why, the adjective, of course. The noun I angrily repudiate. You know, Ilse, I would go before a court of law and argue under oath that you’re basically humane.’

A spotlight was roaming over the blue velvet curtain. ‘It’s filling up,’ I said.

‘In a minute. Ilse,’ he said intently. ‘An investigator here from Berlin told me you set your dogs on a Greek girl in the woods, just because she wandered off and fell asleep in a hollow. And you know what I did? I laughed in his face. Not Ilse , I said. Not my Ilse . Good evening to you, Oberaufseherin.’

A cracked electric bell was distantly sounding when they entered — the Commandant and his wife. He too was in dress uniform (with a rack of medals), and she wore a… But Hannah was already in shadow, and now was lost in darkness.

First, the cobbled-together chamber orchestra (two violins, guitar, flute, mandolin, accordion), and a lengthy ‘medley’ intended to appeal to the softer side of the praetorian heart (early Strauss, Peter Kreuder, Franz von Suppé). The stage cleared, darkened, and the players regrouped. Lights. There followed an hour-long operetta based on The Sorrows of Young Werther , the Goethe novella so beguilingly forlorn that it provoked an avalanche of suicides, not just in Germany but throughout Europe: the anomic hero in the bucolic village, the orphaned lass, the doomed love (for she is betrothed to another), the self-inflicted pistol wound, the slow death…