Martin Amis - The Zone of Interest

There was an old story about a king who asked his favourite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn’t show you your reflection. Instead, it showed you your soul — it showed you who you really were. But the king couldn’t look into the mirror without turning away, and nor could his courtiers. No one could.

What happens when we discover who we really are? And how do we come to terms with it? Fearless and original, The Zone of Interest is a violently dark love story set against a backdrop of unadulterated evil, and a vivid journey into the depths and contradictions of the human soul.

Martin Amis is the author of two collections of stories, six works of non-fiction, and thirteen previous novels, most recently Lionel Asbo .

I WAS NO stranger to the flash of lightning; I was no stranger to the thunderbolt. Enviably experienced in these matters, I was no stranger to the cloudburst — the cloudburst, and then the sunshine and the rainbow.

She was coming back from the Old Town with her two daughters, and they were already well within the Zone of Interest. Up ahead, waiting to receive them stretched an avenue — almost a colonnade — of maples, their branches and lobed leaves interlocking overhead. A late afternoon in midsummer, with minutely glinting midges… My notebook lay open on a tree stump, and the breeze was flicking inquisitively through its pages.

Tall, broad, and full, and yet light of foot, in a crenellated white ankle-length dress and a cream-coloured straw hat with a black band, and swinging a straw bag (the girls, also in white, had the straw hats and the straw bags), she moved in and out of pockets of fuzzy, fawny, leonine warmth. She laughed — head back, with tautened throat. Moving in parallel, I kept pace, in my tailored tweed jacket and twills, with my clipboard, my fountain pen.

Now the three of them crossed the drive of the Equestrian Academy. Teasingly circled by her children she moved past the ornamental windmill, the maypole, the three-wheeled gallows, the carthorse slackly tethered to the iron water pump, and then moved beyond.

Into the Kat Zet — into Kat Zet I.

*

Something happened at first sight. Lightning, thunder, cloudburst, sunshine, rainbow — the meteorology of first sight.

Her name was Hannah — Mrs Hannah Doll.

In the Officers’ Club, seated on a horsehair sofa, surrounded by horse brass and horse prints, and drinking cups of ersatz coffee (coffee for horses), I said to my lifelong friend Boris Eltz,

‘For a moment I was young again. It was like love.’

‘Love?’

‘I said like love. Don’t look so stricken. Like love. A feeling of inevitability. You know. Like the birth of a long and wonderful romance. Romantic love.’

‘Déjà vu and all the usual stuff? Go on. Jog my memory.’

‘Well. Painful admiration. Painful. And feelings of humility and unworthiness. Like with you and Esther.’

‘That’s completely different,’ he said, raising a horizontal digit. ‘That’s just fatherly. You’ll understand when you see her.’

‘Anyway. Then it passed and I… And I just started wondering what she’d look like with all her clothes off.’

‘There you are, you see? I never wonder what Esther’d look like with all her clothes off. If it happened I’d be aghast. I’d shield my eyes.’

‘And would you shield your eyes, Boris, from Hannah Doll?’

‘Mm. Who’d have thought the Old Boozer would’ve got someone as good as that.’

‘I know. Incredible.’

‘The Old Boozer . Think, though. I’m sure he was always a boozer. But he wasn’t always old.’

I said, ‘The girls are what? Twelve, thirteen? So she’s our age. Or a bit younger.’

‘And the Old Boozer knocked her up when she was — eighteen?’

‘When he was our age.’

‘All right. Marrying him was forgivable, I suppose,’ said Boris. He shrugged. ‘Eighteen. But she hasn’t left him, has she. How do you laugh that one off?’

‘I know. It’s difficult to…’

‘Mm. She’s too tall for me. And come to think of it, she’s too tall for the Old Boozer.’

And we asked each other yet again: Why would anyone bring his wife and children here? Here?

I said, ‘This is an environment more suited to the male.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Some of the women don’t mind it. Some of the women are the same as the men. Take your Auntie Gerda. She’d love it here.’

‘Aunt Gerda might approve in principle,’ I said. ‘But she wouldn’t love it here.’

‘Will Hannah love it here, do you think?’

‘She doesn’t look as though she’ll love it here.’

‘No, she doesn’t. But don’t forget she’s the unestranged wife of Paul Doll.’

‘Mm. Then perhaps she’ll settle in nicely,’ I said. ‘I hope so. My physical appearance works better on women who love it here.’

‘… We don’t love it here.’

‘No. But we’ve got each other, thank God. That’s not nothing.’

‘True, dearest. You’ve got me and I’ve got you.’

Boris, my permanent familiar — emphatic, intrepid, handsome, like a little Caesar. Kindergarten, childhood, adolescence, and then, later on, our cycling holidays in France and England and Scotland and Ireland, our three-month trek from Munich to Reggio and then on to Sicily. Only in adulthood did our friendship run into difficulties, when politics — when history — came down on our lives. He said,

‘You, you’ll be off by Christmas. I’m here till June. Why aren’t I out east?’ He sipped and scowled and lit a cigarette. ‘By the way, your chances, brother, are non-existent. Where , for instance? She’s far too conspicuous. And you be careful. The Old Boozer may be the Old Boozer but he’s also the Commandant.’