Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

‘No. I bet he doesn’t.’

At this point I was registering how thoroughly the invocation of the Commandant had lowered the tone of this very promising and indeed mildly enchanting encounter. So I softly clapped my hands and said,

‘Your garden, Mrs Doll. Could we? I’m afraid I have another rather shameful confession to make. I adore flowers.’

It was a space divided in two: on the right, a willow tree, partly screening the low outbuildings and the little network of paths and avenues where, no doubt, the daughters loved to play and hide; to the left, the rich beds, the striped lawn, the white fence — and, beyond, the Monopoly Building on its sandy rise, and beyond that the first pink smears of sunset.

‘A paradise. Such gorgeous tulips.’

‘They’re poppies,’ she said.

‘Poppies, of course. What are those ones over there?’

After a few more minutes of this, Mrs Doll, having not yet smiled in my company, gave a laugh of euphonious surprise and said,

‘You know nothing about flowers, do you? You don’t even… You know nothing about flowers.’

‘I do know something about flowers,’ I said, perhaps dangerously emboldened. ‘And it’s something not known to many men. Why do women love flowers so?’

‘Go on then.’

‘All right. Flowers make women feel beautiful. When I present a woman with a plush bouquet, I know it will make her feel beautiful.’

‘… Who told you that?’

‘My mother. God rest her.’

‘Well she was right. You feel like a film star. For days on end.’

Dizzily I said, ‘And this is to the credit of both of you. To the credit of flowers and to the credit of womankind.’

And Hannah asked me, ‘Can you keep a secret?’

‘Most assuredly.’

‘Come.’

There was, I believed, a hidden world that ran alongside the world we knew; it existed in potentia ; to gain admission to it, you had to pass through the veil or film of the customary, and act . With a hurrying gait Hannah Doll led me down the cindery path to the greenhouse, and the light was holding, and would it be so strange, really, to urge her on inside and to lean into her and gather in my dropped hands the white folds of her dress? Would it? Here? Where everything was allowed?

She opened the half-glass door and, not quite entering, leaned over and rummaged in a flowerpot on a low shelf… To tell the truth, in my amatory transactions I hadn’t had a decent thought in my head for seven or eight years (earlier, I was something of a romantic. But I let that go). And as I watched Hannah curve her body forward, with her tensed rump and one mighty leg thrown up and out behind her for balance, I said to myself: This would be a big fuck. A big fuck: that was what I said to myself.

Now righting her body, she faced me and opened her palm. Revealing what? A crumpled packet of Davidoffs: a packet of five. There were three left.

‘Do you want one?’

‘I don’t smoke cigarettes,’ I said, and produced from my pockets an expensive lighter and a tin of Swiss cheroots. Moving nearer, I scraped the flint and raised the flame, protecting it from the breeze with my hand…

This little ritual was of high socio-sexual signifignance — for we dwelt in a land, she and I, where it amounted to an act of illicit collusion. In bars and restaurants, in hotels, railway stations, et cetera, you saw printed signs saying Women Asked Not To Use Tobacco; and in the streets it was incumbent on men of a certain type — many of them smokers — to upbraid wayward women and dash the cigarette from their fingers or even from their lips. She said,

‘I know I shouldn’t.’

‘Don’t listen to them, Mrs Doll. Heed our poet. You shall abstain, shall abstain. That is the eternal song .’

‘I find it helps a bit’, she said, ‘with the smell.’

That last word was still on her tongue when we heard something, something borne on the wind… It was a helpless, quavering chord, a fugal harmony of human horror and dismay. We stood quite still with our eyes swelling in our heads. I could feel my body clench itself for more and greater alarums. But then came a shrill silence, like a mosquito whirring in your ear, followed, half a minute later, by the hesitantly swerving upswell of violins.

There seemed to be no such thing as speech. We smoked on, with soundless inhalations.

Hannah placed the two butts in an empty bag of seeds which she then buried in the lidless rubbish barrel.

‘What’s your favourite pudding?’

‘Um. Semolina,’ I said.

‘Semolina? Semolina’s ghastly . What about trifle?’

‘Trifle has its points.’

‘Which would you rather be, be blind or deaf?’

‘Blind, Paulette,’ I said.

‘Blind? Blind’s much worse. Deaf!’

‘Blind, Sybil.’ I said. ‘Everyone feels sorry for blind people. But everyone hates deaf people.’

I reckoned I had done pretty well with the girls, on two counts — by producing several little sachets of French sweets and, more saliently, by dissimulating my surprise when told that they were twins. Being non-identical, Sybil and Paulette were just a pair of sisters born at the same time; but they looked not even distantly related, Sybil taking after her mother while Paulette, several inches shorter, helplessly fulfilled the grim promise of her forename.

‘Mummy,’ said Paulette, ‘what was that dreadful noise?’

‘Oh, just some people fooling about. Pretending it’s Walpurgis Night and trying to scare each other.’

‘Mummy,’ said Sybil, ‘why does Daddy always know whether I’ve cleaned my teeth?’

‘What?’

‘He’s always right. I ask him how and he says, Daddy knows everything . But how does he know?’

‘He’s just teasing you. Humilia, it’s a Friday but let’s get their bath going.’

‘Oh, Mummy. Can we have ten minutes with Bohdan and Torquil and Dov?’

‘Five minutes. Say goodnight to Mr Thomsen.’

Bohdan was the Polish gardener (old, tall, and of course very lean), Torquil was the pet tortoise, and Dov, it seemed, was Bohdan’s teenage helper. Under the swathes of the willow tree — the crouching twins, Bohdan, another helper (a local girl called Bronislawa), Dov, and tiny Humilia, the Witness…

As we looked on Hannah said, ‘He was a professor of zoology, Bohdan. In Cracow. Just think. He used to be there. And now he’s here.’

‘Mm. Mrs Doll, how often do you come to the Old Town?’

‘Oh. Most weekdays. Humilia sometimes does it, but I usually take them to school and back.’

‘My rooms there, I’m trying to improve them, and I’ve run out of ideas. It’s probably just a question of drapery. I was wondering if you might be able to look in one day and see what you thought.’

Profile to profile. Now face to face.

She folded her arms and said, ‘And how do you imagine that might be arranged?’

‘There’s not much to arrange, is there? Your husband would never know.’ I went this far because my hour with Hannah had wholly convinced me that somebody like her could have no fondness, none, for somebody like him. ‘Would you consider it?’

She stared at me long enough to see my smile begin to curdle.

‘No. Mr Thomsen, that’s a very reckless suggestion… And you don’t understand. Even if you think you do.’ She stepped back. ‘Let yourself in through the door there if you still want to wait. Go on. You can read Wednesday’s Observer .’

‘Thank you. Thank you for your hospitality, Hannah.’

‘It’s nothing, Mr Thomsen.’