Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

Curtain, and judicious applause, and silence.

An SS sergeant not yet in his twenties, tall, thin, fair, pale, and chinless, mounted a little spotlit dais and for the next forty-five minutes recited memorised verse, his face and voice grimly or gaily reenacting all the emotions that the poets had in fact mastered and formalised; while he spoke I could hear much thumping and wheeling and whispering from backstage (as well as Boris’s heaving and swearing). The Unterscharfuhrer’s chosen writers were Schiller, Holderlin, and, bizarrely and ignorantly, Heinrich Heine. It was an ignorance his listeners shared; the handclaps, when they came, were weary and scanty, but not because Heine was Jewish.

During the brief intermission Paul Doll took an apparently sober but curiously wobbly stroll in the theatre’s chancel, head back, lips out, and with his nose twitching censoriously as if verifying a smell…

The lights dimmed, the audience stopped muttering (and started coughing), and the curtains drew slowly asunder.

In a parched and childish voice Boris said, ‘There Esther is at last…’

It was the middle act of a ballet I had seen before, Coppelia (music by Delibes).

A magician’s lush workshop: scrolls, potions, wands, broomsticks (and the two violinists, dressed as clowns, one in each far corner). Old Dr Coppelius — played with restrained agility by Hedwig in frockcoat and grey peruke — was preparing to animate his life-size marionette. Surrounded by lesser dolls and dummies (half completed or partly dismembered), Esther sat rigid on a straight-backed chair, immaculate in tutu, spangled white tights, and bright pink slippers, reading a book (the wrong way up: Coppelius corrected her). She stared downwards sightlessly.

Now the wizard began casting his spell, with flinging gestures of the hands, as if freeing them of moisture… Nothing happened. He tried again, and again, and again. Suddenly she twitched; very suddenly she jumped up, and threw the book aside. Blinking, compulsively shrugging, and noisily flat-footed (and often falling over backwards like a plank into Hedwig’s waiting arms), Esther clumped about the stage: a miracle of the uncoordinated, now flopsy, now robotic, with every limb hating every other limb. And comically, painfully ugly. The violins kept on urging and coaxing, but she swooned and swaggered on.

Probably nobody could have said how long it lasted, in non-subjective time, so vehement was the assault on the senses. It seemed, at any rate, as if the whole of January was coming and going. We reached the point where Hedwig — after a final few thrusting flutters of her fingers — simply gave up, and stopped acting; she put her hands on her hips and turned to her mentor in the front row, who was tipping forward in her seat. Coppelia clockworked madly on.

Boris gasped, ‘Oh, enough…’

Enough. It was enough. Now the charm took hold, the glamour took hold, the magic turned from black to white, the scowl of inanition became a willed but still blissful smile, and she was off and away, she was born and living and free. On her first tour jeté, not so much a leap as an upward glide — even at its zenith all her sinews shivered, as if trying, needing to fly even higher. The audience warmed and murmured; but I was asking myself why her movements, whose liquidity now caressed the eyes, seemed no easier to bear.

A wet snort exploded to my left; Boris was on his feet and heading for the exit, bent almost double with his arm raised to his face.

Very early the next morning, he and I crept drunkenly to Cracow in a Steyr 220. Up ahead, thanks to the Schutzstaffel’s gift for Organisation, we had a Last-Kraft-Wagen carefully leaking sand and salt into our path. We hadn’t slept.

Boris said, ‘I’ve just realised. She was apeing the slaves. And the guards.’

‘Was that it?’

‘Staggering, strutting, staggering, strutting… And later, when she really danced. What was the accusation? What was she expressing?’

I eventually said, ‘Her right to freedom.’

‘… Mm, even more basic than that. Her right to life. Her right to love and life.’

As we climbed from the car Boris said, ‘Golo. If Uncle Martin fucks about, I’ll’ve already gone east when you get back. But I’ll fight for you, brother. I’ll have to.’

‘How’s that?’

‘In the event of defeat,’ he said, ‘no one’ll think you’re good-looking any more.’

I held him close with my hand on his hair.

At the post-performance reception, standing in a group with Mobius, Zulz, the Eikels, the Uhls, and others, Hannah and I exchanged two sentences.

I said to her, I might have to go on to Munich and look in the files at the Brown House.

She said to me, nodding in the direction of Paul Doll (who was in marked disarray), Er ist jetzt vollig verruckt.

Boris, looking utterly beaten, sat at a table with a carafe of gin; Ilse was stroking his forearm and ducking her head down to smile up at him. At the end of the room Doll suddenly wheeled and started back towards us.

He is now completely mad.

I got in around midnight; and from the Ostbahnhof I groped my way through the chilled and blackened city (other people were just shadows and footsteps) to the Budapesterstrasse and the Hotel Eden.

Cracked it!

… Solved it, grasped it, fathomed it, unravelled it. Cracked it!

Oh, this brain-twister cost me many, many nights of concerted cunning (I could hear myself lightly panting with guile), down in my ‘lair’ — as, fortified by the choicest libations, your humble servant, the stubborn Sturmbannfuhrer, outfaced the witching hour and the hours beyond! And, just minutes ago, illumination and then warmth came flooding in with the first lambent beams of morning…

Dieter Kruger lives . And I’m glad . Dieter Kruger lives. My hold on Hannah is restored. Dieter Kruger lives.

Today I shall call in a favour, and seek official confirmation — from the man who, they say, is the 3rd most powerful in the Reich. It’s just a formality, of course. I know my Hannah and I know her Sexualitat. When she read that letter in the locked bathroom — it wasn’t the thought of Thomsen that made her Busen ache. No, she likes real men, men with a bit of sweat and stubble, a bit of fart and armpit on them. Like Kruger — and like myself. It wasn’t Thomsen.

It was Kruger. Cracked it. Kruger lives. And now I can go back to my old MO: threatening to kill him.

And when at last the harsh smell of cordite dispersed, I wrote on the lined notepad, 14 warrior-poets lay sprawled in the…

‘Oh what d’you want , Paulette?’ I said. ‘I’m composing an extremely important speech. And by the way you’re too short and fat for that smock.’

‘… It’s Meinrad, Vati. Mami says you’ve got to come and look. He’s got all this goo coming out of his nose.’

‘Ach. Meinrad.’

… Meinrad is a 1-trick pony and no mistake. First mange, then blister-beetle poisoning. And what’s his latest stunt? Glanders.

On the credit side, this means that Alisz Seisser’s Sunday visits — the nutritious lunches, the leisurely ‘soaks’ — are becoming a family tradition!

It’s not enough that a chap should be constantly traduced and provoked in his own home. Certain people have seen fit to call into question my professional correctitude and integrity if you don’t bloody well mind …

In the office at the MAB I received a delegation of medical men — Professor Zulz, of course, and also Professor Entress, plus doctors Rauke and Bodman. Their gist? According to them I’ve got ‘worse’ at deceiving the transports.