Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

There was a short delay while they attached the dining car. I would be relying, of course, on the hamper prepared for me by the heroic (and uncannily costly) kitchens of the Hotel Eden. A whistle blew.

And now Berlin started off on its journey, westward — Friedrichshain with its blocked sebaceous glands and pestilential cafeterias, the Ahnenerbe with its skeletons and skulls, its scurf and snot, the Potsdamer Platz with its smashed faces and half-empty uniforms.

I got back to the Old Town at four o’clock in the afternoon. It was my intention to have a bath, put on some fresh clothes, and go and present myself at the villa of the Commandant. Ah, a postcard from Oberfuhrer Eltz. I’ve already picked up a knock , wrote Boris, a stab wound in the neck, which is a bore; but it won’t stop me joining in tomorrow’s assau … The last two lines had been tidily blotted out.

Maksik, the storied mouser, was sitting with his eyes closed on a damp mat by the roped refrigerator. I supposed Agnes had dropped by the day before, and left Max to his work. He looked very well fed; and now, all his duties discharged, he had assumed the tea-cosy position, with his tail and all four paws tucked in under him.

Halfway across the sitting room I felt my steps slow. Something was different, altered. For the next ten minutes I scanned tabletops and quickly opened drawers and cupboards. My rooms, it was clear, had come in for scrutiny. The Gestapo approach in such matters could go one of two ways: an almost undetectably ghostlike visitation, or else an earthquake followed by a hurricane. The place hadn’t been searched; it had been casually and sloppily frisked.

I washed myself with extra will and vigour, because you always felt the taint — only mildly loathsome, in this case — of violation (I imagined Michael Off rolling a toothpick in his mouth as he poked through my toiletries). But as I sank back in the tub for a while before the final rinse, well, my best guess was that this was just a warning, or even a matter of routine, and that many people, perhaps the entire IG staff, had been given a once-over. I took from the closet my tweeds and twills.

When I went back into the kitchen Max was straightening up; he flexed his forepaws, and idled towards me. Although he was on the whole an unsentimental creature, occasionally, as now, he drew himself up to his full height, waited a beat, and then fainted back-first to the floor. I reached down and stroked his chin and throat, waiting for the gruff and breathy purr. But the cat did not purr. I looked at his eyes and they were the eyes of a quite different kind of feline, almost dried out with severity and animus. I whipped my hand away — but not fast enough; there was a thin red stripe on the base of my thumb, which in a minute or so, I knew, would start to seep.

‘You little shit,’ I said.

He didn’t flee, he didn’t hide. He lay there on his back staring at me with his claws unsheathed.

And it was doubly weird to see the beast in him. Because on the night train I had (prophetically) dreamt that the Zoo across the Budapesterstrasse from the Hotel Eden was being bombed by the English. SS men were running around the mangled cages shooting the lions and the tigers, the hippos and the rhinos, and they were trying to kill all the crocodiles before they slithered off into the River Spree.

It was five forty-five when I came down the steps and out into the square. I trudged through the rubble of the synagogue, followed the curving, dipping lanes to the flat road, and entered the Zone of Interest, getting closer and closer to the smell.

I’ve come to believe that it was all a tragic mistake.

Lying in bed at dawn, and readying myself for yet another immersion in the fierce rhythms of the KL (reveille, washroom, Dysenterie, foot rag, roll call, Stucke, yellow star, Kapo, black triangle, Prominenten, work teams, Arbeit Macht Frei, brass band, Selektion, fan blade, firebrick, teeth, hair), and facing 1,000 challenges to my rictus of cool command, I turn things over in my mind and, yes, I’ve come to believe that it was all a tragic mistake — marrying such a large woman.

And such a young woman, too. Because the bitter truth is…

Of course, I am not unfamiliar with hand-to-hand combat, as I showed, I think, on the Iraqi front in the Great War. However, in those cases my adversaries were nearly always gravely injured or else incapacitated by hunger or disease. And later, in my Rossbach period, whilst there were firefights und so, there was no rough stuff, no wet stuff, unless you count that business with the schoolteacher in Parchim, and in that instance I enjoyed a distinct numerical advantage (5 to 1, no?). Anyway, all that was 20 years ago, and since then I’ve just been a glorified bureaucrat, sitting at a desk with my bottom gradually oozing and seeping over the hardbacked chair.

Now I don’t claim you have to be a genius to understand what I’m getting at. I cannot do the necessary — that which would restore order and contentment, and job security, to the orange villa: I can’t beat her up (and then give the giant witch a sound tup in the master bedroom). She’s too fucking big.

And little Alisz Seisser — Alisz is no more formidable than Paulette. She knows her place and retreats to it the very instant the Sturmbannfuhrer starts to glower!

*

‘Stop this snivelling at once. Listen, it happens all the time all over the world. No need to make a song and dance about it.’

The stool, the chemical toilet, the cauldron of water at last starting to bubble on the office hotplate…

‘Oh brighten up, Alisz. A clean termination. It’s something you should celebrate — over a bottle of gin in a scalding bath! Nicht? Come on, let’s see a smile… Ach. Wha wha wha. All right. It’s ½ past. It’s time. Wha wha wha wha wha. Now can you pull yourself together, young lady, on your own steam? Or d’you need another slap in the face?’

… She brought a fair bit of clobber with her, did Miriam Luxemburg.

1st she unfolded a portable stand (it looked like a miniature operating table) and laid it all out on a blue cloth: syringe, speculum, clamp, and a long wooden stick with a sharp, crenellated metal loop at the end of it. The instruments seemed to be of reasonable quality — far, far better than the gardener’s kitbag to which even SS sawbones periodically resort.

‘Is it just me,’ I said with perfect calm, ‘or was there a whisper of spring in the air today?’

A trifle miffed, perhaps, by my repeated deferments of the procedure, Luxemburg gave a wan smile, and Alisz, who had a kind of leather thong in her mouth by this stage, made no reply (and of course she hadn’t been outdoors for a considerable period of time). Wearing a white singlet, the patient lay on the stripped and towel-padded cot with her legs apart and her knees up.

‘How long does it take again?’

‘20 minutes if things go smoothly.’

‘There. Hear that, Frau Seisser? No need for all that song and dance about it.’

I had intended to make myself scarce the moment the business began, as I’m very fastidious about all matters pertaining to females and their tubes. But I stayed whilst Luxemburg applied the cleansing solution and injected the local. And I lingered as she went about the process of dilation — the speculum, with its reverse-tweezer effect. And I remained for the curettage.

It was most odd. I searched my senses for squeamishness — and squeamishness just wasn’t there.