Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

‘That cabal of little hens. Norberte Uhl, Suzi Erkel, Hannah Doll. Hannah Doll, Paul.’

‘Ach.’

‘Defeatism. Frivolity. Enemy radio — that’s clear enough from the things they say. Now, Paul , I had a word with Drogo Uhl, and Norberte’s kept her trap shut ever since. Likewise with Olbricht and Suzi. I had a word with you and…’

‘Ach.’

‘Now I didn’t say this before but you can’t not know that your whole… position here is dangling by a thread. And there’s Hannah beaming and glowing at every little snippet of bad news. And you’re the Kommandant! If things don’t change and change soon I’ll have to report it to Prinz Albrecht Strasse. I ask again. I mean it’s pretty basic, isn’t it? Can you, or can you not, control your wife?’

‘Ach.’

I’d decided to get to bed at a prudent hour, and I was lying there curled up with the pre-war bestseller, Die judische Weltpest: Judendammerung auf dem Erdball .

The door swung open. Hannah. Naked but for her highest high heels. And made up to the 9s. She advanced and stood over me. She reached down and took my hair in both hands. She ground my face roughly and painfully into the brambles of her Busch, with such force that she split both my lips, then released me with a flourish of contempt. I opened my eyes, and saw the vertical beads of her Ruckgrat, the twin curves of her Taille, the great oscillating hemispheres of her Arsch.

He plays with his Viper, he plays and he plays. He plays with his viper, he plays and he plays. Darkness is a master from Germany. Look around: see how it all leaps alive — where death is! Alive!

It won’t be this week. It won’t even be next week. It won’t even be the week after. It will be the week after that.

And I was ready for it. But I am not ready for this; and I should have been.

Somebody will one day come to the ghetto or the Lager and account for the near-farcical assiduity of the German hatred.

And I would start by asking — why were we conscripted, why were we impressed, in the drive towards our own destruction?

One day in December 1940 my wife came back from the textile plant to the small unheated room we shared with three other families — and she said to me,

‘I have spent the last twelve hours dyeing uniforms white. For use on the eastern front. And who do I do this for?’

Pauperised, frozen, famished, imprisoned, enslaved, and terrorised, she was working on behalf of the forces that had bombed, shelled, strafed, and looted her city, flattened her house, and killed her father, her grandmother, two uncles, three aunts, and seventeen cousins.

There it is, you see. The Jews can only prolong their lives by helping the enemy to victory — a victory that for the Jews means what?

Nor should we forget my silent sons, Schol and Chaim, and their contribution to the war effort — the war against the Jews.

I am choking, I am drowning. This pencil and these scraps of paper aren’t enough. I need colours, sounds — oils and orchestras. I need something more than words.

*

We are in the dank black sepulchre under Crematory IV. Doll stands there with his gun in one hand and a cigar in the other; he smooths his eyebrow with a little finger.

‘All right. Let’s practise your thrust. Let the weapon drop down out of your sleeve and into your hand. And spear that sack there. As fast as you can… Very good , Sonder. I think you’ve had a bit or practice already, ne? Listen. To repeat. They will come for Shulamith Zachariasz at noon on May the first. Unless I countermand my order that morning by telephone. So it’s very simple. And very elegant.’

He steps forward and leans into me, chin to chin, saying bright-eyed in a spray of spittle,

‘Walpurgisnacht, nicht? Walpurgisnacht. Nicht? Nicht? Yech? Nicht? Yech? Nicht. Walpurgisnacht… Sonder, the only way you can keep your wife alive’, he said, ‘is by killing mine. Klar?’

The earth obeys the laws of physics, turning on its axis and describing its loop round the sun. So the days pass, the land thaws, the air warms…

It is midnight on the spur. The transport has made good time from the camp in unoccupied France. Each boxcar was equipped with a keg of water and, even more unusually, a child’s potty. The selection is beginning, and the queue, winding down the entire length of the platform (traced by the white glow of the reflectors), remains orderly. Some of the floodlights are dimmed or have their faces averted; there is calm, and a soft breeze. A sudden flock of swallows dips and climbs.

They recast you (I am muttering to myself), they recast you in their own image, they recast you as if on a blacksmith’s workslab, and, having battered you into a different shape, they grease you with their fluids, they smear you with themselves…

I realise I am staring at a family of four: a woman of about twenty with an infant in her arms, flanked by a man of about thirty and another woman of about forty. It is really too late to intervene; and if there is the slightest commotion I will die tonight and Shulamith will die on May Day. And yet, eerily impelled, I approach, touch the man’s shoulder, draw him aside, and say as meaningly as I’ve ever said anything,

‘ Monsieur, prenez le garçon et donnez — le à sa grand-mère. S’il vous plaît, Monsieur. Croyez moi. Croyez moi. Celui n’est pas jeune? ’ I shook my head. ‘ Les mères ayant des enfants? ’ I shook my head. ‘ Que pouvez-vous y perdre? ’

After several minutes of troubled hesitation he does as I say. And, when their turn comes, Professor Entress selects two, and not one, to the right.

So I delay a death — the death of la femme . I have, for now, saved a wife. More than this, for the first time in fifteen months I have suffered a man to look into my eyes. I take this as a sign .

It is not today. It is not even tomorrow. It is the day after that.

I am in the empty changing room at the Little Brown Bower. There will again be a very long delay caused by the handlers of the Zyklon B, who are both incapacitated by drugs or alcohol and will have to be replaced.

We are awaiting a transport from Hamburg, the SS and I.

The undressing area looks businesslike with its hooks and benches, its signs in all the languages of Europe; and the hosed-down gas chamber has resumed its imitation of a shower room, with nozzles (but with no drains set into the floor).

Here they come. They are filing in now, and my Sonders move among them.

An Unterscharfuhrer hands me a note from Lagerfuhrer Prufer. It says:

20 Wagons (approx. 90 in each) out of Hamburg. Stop at Warsaw: additional 2 Wagons. Total: 22 Wagons. 1,980 Settlers minus 10 % found fit for work = 1,782 approx.

I see a boy, who is clearly alone, walking strangely and painfully. He is club-footed — and his surgical boot will have been left in the stack on the platform, along with all the other trusses and braces and prostheses.

‘Witold?’ I say. ‘Witold.’

He looks up at me, and after a moment of emptiness his face flares with gratitude and relief.

‘Mr Zachariasz! Where’s Chaim? I went looking for him.’

‘Went looking for him where?’

‘At the bakery. It’s shut. It’s boarded up. I asked next door and they said Chaim went ages ago. With you and Schol.’

‘And his mother? His mother? Pani Zachariasz?’

‘They said she went too.’

‘On a transport?’

‘No. Walking. Her brother took her. Mr Zachariasz, I got arrested! At the station. For vagrancy. Pawiak Prison! We thought they were going to shoot us but they changed their minds. Is Chaim here?’