Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

As I went to bed that night I prayed I wouldn’t dream about the naked twins, grinning in the Little Brown Bower.

… If you’re wearing a straitjacket, you know, and you fall over, you land on your face.

If you’re wearing a straitjacket, do you see, and you fall over and land on your face, you can’t get up again — not by yourself you can’t.

‘Did you manage to take a look at them?’

‘Yes. A bit. Not really my kind of thing, Paul.’

A week ago I lent Alisz 2 monographs on ethnobiology, with a view to enriching our nightly chats. But unfortunately she has little taste for the printed word. Her days in the MAB, I fear, are not much diversified by event (for I am naturally her only visitor). Ne, not markedly alleviated by anything actually happening — just the crank of metal, at 11.30, when the food tray is shoved through the slot.

Last night we reminisced about the early days of our respective marriages — she, swept away by the virile noncom Orbart in Neustrelitz, myself, mentoring the scapegrace Hannah in Rosenheim and later in Hebertshausen, near Munich. She shed a tear or 2 as she talked of her sainted husband, and I found I spoke elegiacally, as if my spouse had also passed away (in childbed, perhaps).

It was an edifying hour, and as I took my leave I permitted myself to kiss her with the utmost formality on the brow — on her ‘widow’s peak’.

‘Ah, my darling Sybil. Why the tears, my pretty?’

‘Meinrad. His throat’s all bulged up. Come and see.’

After his glanders, what’s Meinrad’s new 1? Strangles, that’s what.

As for developments on the eastern front? Loyally but anxiously I attend to my Volksempfanger; and all I hear is that somewhat puzzling silence from Berlin. Initially I thought, Well, no news is good news, nicht? Then I began to wonder.

But I’ll tell you who’s quite good at filling you in on the military situation. Not Mobius, not Uhl (both are dauntingly taciturn). And not Boris Eltz. Eltz is naturally high-spirited, and of course reliably gung-ho, but he’s a sly, sarcastic sort of customer. Too clever by half, if you ask me (like a lot of people I could name).

No, the chap to go to, surprisingly enough, is young Prufer. Wolfram Prufer has many faults, God knows, but he’s an unimpeachable Nazi. Moreover, his brother Irmfried is on Paulus’s staff, no? And the mail, it seems (at least for now, as Christmas nears), is the only thing that’s getting in or out of Stalingrad.

‘Oh, we’ll carry the day, mein Kommandant,’ he said over lunch in the Officers’ Mess. ‘The German soldier scoffs at the objective conditions.’

‘Yes, but what are the objective conditions?’

‘Well we’re outnumbered. On paper. Ach, any German soldier is worth 5 Russians. We have the fanaticism and the will. They can’t match us for merciless brutality.’

‘… Are you sure about that, Prufer?’ I asked. ‘Very stubborn resistance.’

‘It’s not like France or the Low Countries, Sturmbannfuhrer. Civilised nations. They had the gumption and the decency to bow to superior might. But the Russians are Tartars and Mongols. They just fight till they’re dead.’ Prufer scratched his hair. ‘They rise up from the sewers at night with daggers between their teeth.’

‘Asiatics. Animals. Whilst we’re still lumbered with the Christian mentality. What does this mean for the 6th Army, Hauptsturmfuhrer, and for “Operation Blue”?’

‘With our zeal? Victory’s not in doubt. It’ll just take a bit longer, that’s all.’

‘I hear we’re undersupplied. There are shortages.’

‘True. There’s hardly any fuel. Or food. They’re eating the horses.’

‘And the cats, I heard.’

‘They finished the cats. It’s temporary. All they’ve got to do is retake the airfield at Gumrak. Besides, privation presents no obstacle to the men of the Wehrmacht.’

‘There’s disease, they say. And not much medicine, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘It’s 30 below but they’ve got plenty of warm clothing. It’s just a shame about the lice. And you have to be vigilant. Irmfried woke up the other night and a huge mouse had gnawed through his bedsocks and was eating his toes. He couldn’t feel it because of the frostbite. Oh, and ammo. They’re running out of ammo.’

‘The good God, how’re we going to win without ammo?’

‘For a German soldier these difficulties are as nothing.’

‘Isn’t there a danger of encirclement?’

‘The German ranks are impregnable.’ Prufer paused uneasily and said, ‘If I were Zhukov, though, I’d go straight for the Romanians.’

‘Ach, Zhukov’s a muzhik . He’s much too stupid to think of that. He can’t hold a candle to a German commander. Tell me, how is Paulus’s health?’

‘The dysentery? Still bedridden, Sturmbannfuhrer. But hear me, sir. Even if we should be technically surrounded, Zhukov can’t stop Manstein. Generalfeldmarschall Manstein will smash his way through. And his 6 divisions will turn the tide.’

‘As you said yourself, uh, Wolfram, defeat’s a biological impossibility. How can we go down to a rabble of Jews and peasants? Don’t make me laugh.’

2 simultaneous but of course completely independent visitors from Berlin, the hulking Horst Sklarz of the Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt, and the epicene Tristan Benzler of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt. And it’s the same old song.

Sklarz only has thoughts for the war economy, whilst Benzler’s sole concern is national security. In other words, Sklarz wants more slaves, and Benzler wants more corpses.

I had ½ a mind to lock Sklarz and Benzler in the same room and have them argue the toss; but no, they came and went singly, and I was obliged to sit there getting hollered at for hour after hour.

On only 1 theme did their opinions coincide. Sklarz and Benzler both talked in extraordinarily disrespectful terms about the quality of my bookkeeping and my general paperwork.

In addition, 1st Benzler and then Sklarz dropped identical hints about my possible transfer to a subsidiary of the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps in Cologne. Both of them referred to this as a ‘promotion’, despite the drop in rank and the loss of all real power (not to mention the brutal cut in salary). And, what’s more, Cologne is the region’s Militarbereichshauptkommandoquartier, and it’s forever being bombed .

… Well they’re gone now. It’s probably true: I should take a more orderly approach to the clerical side of things. My desktop in the MAB, as Sklarz and Benzler alike remarked, is a disgrace. A haystack upon a haystack. And where did I put that needle?

A cut in salary, eh? How fortunate that I’ve managed to put something aside — a little ‘nest egg’, if you will — during my custodianship of the Konzentrationslager!

‘Hurry up, Paul.’

The Dezember Konzert has already come upon us!

I was behindhand, that evening, and somewhat annoyed and flustered, because Hannah, if you please, was wearing her highest high heels, and she also had her hair stacked up on her head, giving me the impression, when the 2 of us met up in the hall (the Dienstwagen awaited), that I was only ½ her height. As I’ve so often told her, the German girl is a natural girl: she’s not supposed to wear high heels.

‘Coming!’

Thus I dashed to my study and looked for my ‘stilts’. Nicht? The leather wedges I sometimes slip into my boots for the extra few centimetres? And I couldn’t find them, so I dismembered an old copy of Das Schwarze Korps and folded 4 pages into 1/16ths and used them instead. German girls aren’t supposed to wear high heels. High heels are for the mincing sluts of Paris and New York, with their silk stockings and their satin garter belts and their—