Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

Willi : How are you, Kurt?

Kurt : None too well, quite frankly, Willi.

Willi : Are you ailing? The good God, you look green .

Kurt : I know I do. That’s why I’m drinking brandy.

Willi : Well tell me what’s the matter.

Kurt : Ach. I just experienced something absolutely dreadful. Above us, you know, lives a young woman, a Jewess. A scientist, a serious professional lady. And today she turned on the gas valve. We found her an hour ago.

Willi : Ach.

Kurt : They’d just informed her she was being sent off to the east.

Willi : Well that would be upsetting!

The smile I wore was starting to become a burden to my face. I recrossed my legs and said, ‘Hannah, I’m not sure this is—’

‘Shoosh, Paul, I’m listening.’

Willi : I can’t understand why she wasn’t deported earlier.

Kurt : What? Oh. Well, she was a technician in an armaments plant. You know, Willi, we tried to encourage her, to hearten her, Lotte and I. We said it might not be too bad where she’s going. And anything’s better than…

Willi : No, my friend. A quick death in your own kitchen is far, far… I know this from the office. Trust me.

Hannah said, ‘Where does Willi work again?’

‘The Ministry of Public Enlightenment,’ I said moodily.

Kurt : What are you saying? Does that really happen?

Willi : Well. It does happen.

Kurt : But why? What’s the point? A little lady — part of the war effort? It’s totally unnecessary!

Willi : No, Kurt. It is necessary. Why? To instil the fear of defeat. The fear of punishment.

Kurt : But what’s that got to do with the Jews?

Willi : Mensch, don’t you understand? The fear of retribution! Every German is implicated in the largest mass murder that has ever—’

‘ Feindlicher Rundfunk ,’ I burst out. ‘Enemy radio! Zweifel am Sieg! Doubting victory! Feindlicher Rundfunk!’

‘… Oh, don’t blame Kurt and Willi,’ she said with exaggerated torpor. ‘Poor Willi. Poor Kurt . Listen. They’re ordering more brandy. They’re feeling rather sick.’

Now Hannah did something that quite dismayed me. She stood; she unfurled her sash; and she shrugged off the kimono’s sapphirine folds — revealing her Unterkleid! From Kehle to Oberschenkel her body seemed to be coated in icing sugar, and I could clearly see the outlines of her Bruste, the concavity of her Bauchnabel, and the triangle of her Geschlechtsorgane…

‘Do you know’, she said, plucking at the collar, ‘which dead woman you stole this from?’ She smoothed it with her hands, up and down. ‘Do you know?’

Hannah took up a hairbrush and went at it with arrogant eyes.

‘You’re… you’re mad,’ I said, and backed my way out.

And whilst we’re on the subject of wives, what price ‘Pani Szmul’?

To locate a Jew in a Polish ghetto one casually turns to the Uberwachungsstelle zur Bekampfung des Schleichhandels und der Preiswucherei im judischen Wohnbezirk. This used to be a subdivision of the Jewish Order Police, recruited from the pre-war underworld, and responsible to the Gestapo; but natural selection has done its work, and the spies, narks, pimps, and skankers are now running the whole show. Criminalising the gendarmerie: that’s how you ‘squeeze’ a subject people, and gain access to its hoarded wealth!

Casually, limply, I turn to the Control Office to Combat Black-Marketeering and Profiteering in the Jewish Residential District — ja, die Uberwachungsstelle zur Bekampfung des Schleichhandels und der Preiswucherei im judischen Wohnbezirk.

It wouldn’t have looked so scandalous in Berlin, ne? In the days when that profoundly unGerman contraption, ‘democracy’, was falling apart. Or in Munich, nicht? A blushful beauty of 18, as dew-bright as the fresh cornflower in her buttonhole, trailing after a burly ‘intellectual’ virtually twice her age?

All right in Berlin or Munich, no? But there they were in mannerly Rosenheim, with its parks, its cobblestones, its onion domes. Everybody could tell that friend Kruger was making a swine of himself with his childish ward; and it pains me to say that Hannah, for her part, was no less brazen — ach, she could barely keep her tongue out of his ear (her fingers fidgety, her colour hectic, her thighs glueyly asquirm). It was also common knowledge that they’d taken adjacent rooms at an especially disreputable boarding house in Bergerstrasse…

My protective instincts were sorely roused. Hannah and myself were by this juncture on the most cordial terms; friend Kruger was, as they say, a busy man, and she was nearly always ‘on’ for a ramble in the public gardens or a glass of tea in 1 of the many elegant cafés. I think she knew she was doing wrong, and was drawn to my air of probity and calm. Na, 1 thing was clear: she was a middle-class girl with no taste at all for the radical. This was hardly a meeting of minds — nicht? On a number of occasions I quietly ascended the stairs to her attic, and became aware of the most alarming ululations — they were not the modest coos, trills, and warbles of healthy and hygienic Geschlechtlichkeit! They were sounds of excruciation and woe; indeed, they took me back to that time in the parsonage, when I was 13, and had to listen all night to Auntie Tini giving birth to the twins.

You could feel it. These dark acts. The growing void in the moral order.

It seems, these days, these nights, that whenever I go to the ramp something dreadful happens — I mean to me personally.

‘Wear that,’ she said.

At 1st it seemed to be 1 of the softer transports. A smooth debouchment, an inductionary address (from Dr Rauke), a brisk selection, and a short drive through the forest, the docile evacuees, with a leaderless but competent team of Sonders discreetly murmuring among them… I had taken up position in the hallway between the outer door and the undressing room when a prematurely white-haired Judin approached me with a smile of polite inquiry; and I even inclined my head to attend to her question. In a spasm of animal violence she reached up and smeared something on my face — on my upper lip, my nose, the orbit of my left eye.

‘Wear that,’ she said.

Lice.

Of course I went straight to Baldemar Zulz.

‘This could’ve been serious. You’re lucky, my Kommandant.’

I frowned up at him (they had me lying flat on a table under a strong light). ‘Fleckfieber?’ I asked.

‘Mm. But I know a Kamchatka louse when I see 1,’ he said, showing me the filthy little crab in the pinch of his tweezers, ‘and this critter’s a European.’

‘Na. The transport was Dutch. From Westerbork, ne?’

‘You know, Paul, the Haftlinge, they’ll pluck the nits off a Russian corpse and slip them under the collars of our uniforms. In the Laundry Block. Exanthematic typhus. Very nasty.’

‘Yech, that’s what did for Untersturmfuhrer Kranefuss. Prufer’s meant to be dealing with it. Some hope there I don’t think.’

Zulz said, ‘Off with your togs. Fold them tidily and remember where they are.’

‘What for?’

He tensed as if ready to pounce. ‘… Disinfection!’

So we had a crazed cackle about that.

‘Paul, come on. Just to be on the safe side.’

Well then. A considerable relief all round!

‘Wear that,’ she said.

*

Ever since I fixed things so that Alisz Seisser got shifted to the facility in the basement of the MAB, it has been possible for she and myself to spend some precious hours together.

When my hard day’s toil is done (you know, I’m sometimes in my office till well past midnight?), I consistently look in on little Alisz, bearing a ‘snack’, more often than not — a prune or a cube of cheese — which she then appreciatively devours!