Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

Rudi/Helmut, Ilse/Eike, Adolf/Kronzi, Heinie, and Eva were sitting round the tree (hung with lit candles, cookies, and apples), quietly gloating over their presents. Irmgard was at the piano; she sounded the highest key, using the mute.

‘Stop that, Irma! Ach, Golo, they’re saying, No corporal punishment! How can you get any work out of them otherwise?’

‘How? How? But it’s all right, Onkel, now Burckl’s gone. No more wet-nursing. We’re back to the tried and trusted.’

‘There are too many of them as it is. If we’re not careful, you know, we’ll win the war militarily and lose it racially. Dutch gin?’ Uncle Martin gave a snort and said, ‘The Chief made me laugh the other day. He’d just heard that someone was trying to ban contraception in the eastern territories. It must have been the Masturbator’ — Rosenberg (der Masturbator). ‘And the Chief said, Anyone tries that and I’ll personally shoot them dead! He was in a right taking. So to cheer him up I told him something I’d heard about the ghetto in Litzmannstadt. There, for their own use, they’re making condoms out of babies’ pacifiers. And he goes, That’s the way round it’s supposed to be! Salut!’

‘Salut. Or as the English say, Cheers .’

‘… Feast your eyes, lad. Ach. A good quiverful of kids. A crackling log fire. Outside, the snow. Over the soil. Over the Erde. And the helpmeet in the kitchen, never happier than when going about her appointed tasks. And those two guards by the gate. With cigarettes up their sleeves. Listen to this, Golo,’ he said. ‘It’s a good one.’

Uncle Martin was losing his hair along the usual male lines, but his peaked forelock had something artistic in its shape, and still glistened. He ran his knuckles over it.

‘Late October,’ he said, without lowering his voice. ‘I’d looked in at the SD to pick up some paperwork from Schneidhuber. I needed mimeographs, and I collared one of the girls from the pool. She’s standing there looking over my shoulder as I mark up the pages. And on impulse, Golo, I slipped my left hand between her calves. She didn’t even blink… Up and up I went, past the knees. Up and up. Up and up. And when I reached my destination, Neffe, she just — she just smiled … So I got my thumb and jammed it—’

‘That is a good one, Onkel,’ I said with a laugh.

‘Ah, but that very minute, Neffe, that very minute I was called to the Wolfsschanze! Gone for a month. I come back and of course she’s disappeared. No trace of her in the pool. Concentrate, Neffe. Jouncy little minx with russety hair. An absolute squiggle of curves. Begins with a k. Klara?’

‘… Oh. She’s famous. And she’s not in the pool, Onkel. She goes around with the tea urn. Krista. Krista Groos.’

The Reichsleiter hooked his little fingers into the corners of his mouth and whistled so shrilly that Irmgard and Eva both burst into tears. Then you could hear the quickening gait of stout shoes and Gerda came through the doorway with a naked Hartmut on her hip.

‘Neffe can reunite me’, said Uncle Martin, wet-eyed, ‘with my smiling redhead.’

Gerda lifted Hartmut to her shoulder. ‘How well timed, Papi. Because I won’t be usable by March. You see, after the third month, Golo,’ she confided, ‘he never comes near me. Children! The goose is served! Oh, stop snivelling, Eva.’

Over the next three days Uncle Martin was seen only at mealtimes. He had a series of visitors — a Max Amman (Party Publications), a Bruno Schultz (Race and Resettlement), and a Kurt Mayer (Reich Ancestry Bureau). Each of these officials, in their turn, joined the grown-ups for dinner, and they all wore the same expression, that of men who steer their ships by guidance of the highest stars.

*

I went on long walks with Gerda. Entertaining Gerda, absorbing Gerda, unlading Gerda: this had always been part of my function, and part of my value to the Reichsleiter. After one of your visits, Golo , he once said, for weeks on end she sings while she scrubs the floor .

That Christmas we shuffled arm in arm along the lawns and lanes, all swaddled up, Gerda in tweed hat and tweed scarf and tweed shawl. When I embraced her, as I quite often did (a nepotic reflex going back thirteen years), I imagined she was Hannah — the same height, the same mass. I held her shoulders steadyingly and tried to take pleasure in her face, the strong nose, the essentially tender brown eyes. But then her shapely lips would open, and she would speak… I embraced her again.

‘You have that look, Golito. You’re thinking of someone, aren’t you. I can tell.’

‘I can’t hide anything from you, Tante. Yes. And she’s your height. When I hug you I can feel your chin against my neck. It’s the same with her.’

‘Well. Perhaps you can settle down after the war.’

‘But who knows? Wars are messy, Tante. You can’t tell what’ll be there at the end.’

‘… True, Golito. True. Now how’s that Boris?’

We edged on. The odourless air was magnificent. The silence was magnificent — just the steady crumplings of our tread. The whiteness of the folds and bolsters of snow was magnificent. White snow.

And what was Uncle Martin up to — with Max Amman, with Bruno Schultz, with Kurt Mayer, in the last days of 1942? He told me all about it.

With Party publisher Amman, Uncle Martin was taking steps to abolish the German alphabet. Why? Because the Chancellery had surmised that the old Gothic script (whose brambly curlicues were the toast of every chauvinist) might be Jewish in origin. So the idea now was to replace it (at incalculable expense) with Roman Antiqua — throughout the Reich, in school textbooks, newspapers, documents, street signs, and all the rest.

With Schultz, of Race and Resettlement, Uncle Martin was trying to find a workable definition of the Mischlinge, or the ethnic hybrids. Having defined them, they would decide what to do about them. That December he and Schultz were ‘costing’ sterilisation for an estimated seventy thousand men and women, all of whom, prohibitively, would need ten days in hospital.

It was different with Racial Researcher Mayer. With Amman and Schultz, the Reichsleiter was applying himself, was enthusiastically putting himself about; with Mayer, though, he could not disguise a faint impatience with his destiny.

Uncle Martin might have been occasionally piqued by his offspring; but he was chronically tormented by his forebears. An official of his rank needed to be provably Aryan to a depth of four generations; and they kept running up against the void of his great-grandfather.

The inquisition about the Bormann genealogy had begun in January 1932.

‘And it won’t end,’ he said (presciently). ‘Even if the Russians cross the Oder and the Americans cross the Rhine — it won’t end.’

Uncle Martin’s great-grandfather, Joachim, was illegitimate. And Uncle Martin’s great-great-grandmother, as he put it, was the town pump — so Joachim’s paternal origin was anybody’s guess .

‘Wear full fig tonight, Neffe. To intimidate Mayer. I’m wearing mine.’

He had never raised a hand in anger, except at home, and he was not an Old Fighter, originally, but just a paymaster of Old Fighters. All the same, Uncle Martin had just received another promotion, and came to dinner dressed as an SS-Obergruppenfuhrer — a lieutenant general.

‘I’m paying for my bit. Out of my own pocket, too. But I’ve offered Mayer’s people “proportional support” from state funds. That might do it. As long as I keep plugging away.’