by Martin Amis
She delightedly moves back into her parents’ house, and lies there, among golden-winged angels. And Odilo? Where are our parents, for Christ’s sake? Suddenly I’m in a five-floor boardinghouse, turbid with cabbage and gym shoes, sharing an attic with Rolf and Reinhard and Rüdiger and Rudolph, and living a nightmare, an Alpdruck, of towel fights and textbooks and jokes about courtship and corpses. That’s right: I’m at med school. In the New Germany too, and feeling rather jumpy and furtive along with everybody else. Even the streets are like a dorm these days, with much peer-group pressure and unpredictably intense scrutiny, adolescent, unpleasant, sexual but sexually obscure or half-formed, and made up of ridiculous postures no one is allowed to laugh at. Laugh at these ridiculous postures, and everybody will want to kill you. How fortunate that I am unkillable. Unkillable, but not immortal. What happened to our manhood?
It could be worse, because we still see Herta every day, at the school: she’s a tight-skirted secretary in Superintendence. I often get ten minutes with her in a corridor, and sit quite near her table in the cafeteria, and there’s a stairwell where we go and kiss—where we breathe into one another. Apart from that it’s park benches and dark archways. Mickey Mouse sniggers and Greta Garbo averts her pained gaze from our mortified writhings on the shallow fur of cinema seats. We cling close in the safety of crowds under streetlights and torchlights. During certain ten-minute intervals in her parents’ front room, while they set out the filthy plates for dinner, I have achieved much … Also on our spring and summer picnics. Among the delphinium, the snapdragon, the hollyhock, and the sweet pea, on a blanket, by a basket, she will grant me a nostalgic caress—always followed, on Odilo’s part, by hours of sniveling entreaty. Where once we ruled, now we serve. His most prosperous theme is that the frustration is damaging his health. Another thing that usually works is the naming of flowers, in English. The woods embolden her. The German girl is a natural girl. Odilo is hysterically grateful for any sylvan handful or eyeful or mouthful that comes his way. But I’m not. He forgets. I remember. This tormented groping. I am excoriated by erotic revanchism. And I know something he seems unable to face: it will never happen again. The future always comes true. Sadly we gather forget-me-nots. She loves me.… Actually we hardly dare look at her now, the tiny typist, such power does she wield. Ja say the ghosts of painted letters on the trees in the avenues. Nein says Herta as she takes my hand and places it, for an angry moment, between her thighs. Then, in the late afternoon, to the school: zygoma, xanthelasma, volvulus, all drained from him, at least, at last, all that ugly shit. But most of his lessons, to my surprise, aren’t about the human body being a machine: they are about hospital administration. Sometimes, late at night, Odilo and I sneak out alone onto the roof of the boardinghouse, while the Germans dream their dreams. There we enjoy a precocious (and faintly paranoid) perfecto, and watch the stars, which seem to soothe our sight.
A parallel pleasure and comfort, for me at any rate, was to watch the Jews. The people I had helped to dream down from the heavens. And I was inspired by the size of the contribution they were clearly destined to make. It would all work out. Wisely cautious at first—awed, probably, by sheer numbers (because they were coming in, now, from all over the shop, from Canada, from Palestine)—German society duly broadened itself to let the newcomers in. Their brisk assimilation, and their steady success, caused some harsh words to be spoken. The Jews were walking into all the plum jobs, in the medical profession especially, which infuriated Odilo and his friends, and which, to be frank, even worried me. I hadn’t come all this way to see my sons turn into doctors. But what the hell. Somebody’s got to do it: for some reason. Despite my worsening cares and loneliness, the racial-law repeals always rallied me. Even here, though, there was a sadistic irony at work, because these progressive measures always coincided with some fresh interdiction of Herta’s. Yes, very droll, no doubt. With step after step the Jews move blinking into the sunlight. While I am gradually declassed: mocked and spurned by all the liberties of love. For example.
Blind and deaf Jews can now wear armbands identifying their condition in traffic. I no longer have a lower body, an external heart, in Herta’s scheme of brings. I am cut off at the waist forever.
Jews allowed to keep pets; budgies and puppies, etc., doled out at police stations; Jews weeping with gratitude as they take their new playmates home. Herta starts to breathe differently as we kiss; she is always self-possessed; every move of mine is coldly monitored.
Jews permitted to buy meat, cheese, and eggs. Revocation of all picnicking privileges, even though I whine about my health and name flowers in English until I’m blue in the face.
Jews empowered to have friendly relations with Aryans. Herta no longer says “I love you.” I still say it. Kissing continues, after a fashion, but tongues now completely verboten.
Curfew for Jews lifted. It used to be nine P.M. in summer and eight P.M. in winter. Herta has to be home by eight-thirty, whatever the season.
The designation Unbeliever ceases to be mandatory for the Jews. But I have to say that I no longer believe.
She loves me, she loves me not. I take the same two-hour bus and tram ride for the same old peck on the cheek. Soon she will celebrate her sixteenth birthday. Then what? Will we even hold hands? Sometimes, wildly, I find myself urging Odilo to use violence (quickly, before she’s fifteen): violence, which mends and heals. Actually, though, I have little enthusiasm for the venture. Could he do it, do you think? Is it in him? I’ve come to the conclusion that Odilo Unverdorben, as a moral being, is absolutely unexceptional, liable to do what everybody else does, good or bad, with no limit, once under the cover of numbers. He could never be an exception; he is dependent on the health of his society, needing the sandy smiles of Rolf and Rudolph, of Rüdiger, of Reinhard. On Kristallnacht when we all romped and played and helped the Jews, and the fizzy shards swirled like stars or souls, and when Herta bent to wipe her lips with a pink handkerchief—before spitting my tongue out of her mouth. Is it somehow the Jews’ fault? That lock of her hair he had, kept in a pillbox—why did he return it? Now I can exactly see the shape and size, the perfect fit, of the loneliness that is approaching. She gives me flowers, but she loves me not. She loves me not.
Still, sprich durch die Blume. Hush now, speak through a flower. I know you shouldn’t grumble: for one thing, it’s against the law.… She’s stopped talking to me. It was only a matter of time. Hush now. One day at the bus stop, as she alighted, she just waved goodbye to me. In the evenings I still wait there for her, and track her as she walks to school, with my ears humming. Now she moves right through my gaze, which no longer has the power to slow or halt her. Then she vanished. Her small shape is gone, forever, replaced by a void of the same dimensions. I look for her everywhere—but he doesn’t. Odilo’s recovery was idiotically swift. The very next day he was upbraided by the professor for giggling out loud in Gross Anatomy: Rolf and Rudolph were making jokes about the new female corpse. Indeed, his affections seem to have redirected themselves, platonically but otherwise intact, to fair-browed Reinhard.… I suffer alone. Arzt für Seelisches Leiden, say the placards in the ground-floor windows. Doctor for sick souls. Now that sounds like the kind of doctor I need. At present we’re spending much of our time at the hospital, as a visitor—because our mother’s turned up at last. Her name, by the way, is Margaret. Odilo and I have been airing the new apartment until it is heavy with her smell. I suppose we’ll probably set up house together. At least she’ll be someone to talk to. In English. She reminds me of Irene. She keeps saying, “Where am I? Where am I?” “In the hospital,” Odilo keeps dourly replying. “In the hospital. In the ward in the hospital. Das Krankenhaus, Mutti. Im Krankenhaus.”
In the what? I want to take her hand and say, Mother. You are on a globe that looks like a crystal ball or a marble in a light bed of cotton wool. Birds fly around it. Mother, you are on the planet earth.
PART 3
8
Because du
cks are fat
Ever since my days at Schloss
Hartheim I had thought of making a
sentimental journey, to Auschwitz.
The place of power on the confluence of the rivers; the place where the numbered Jews, and all the others, who had no number, came down from the heavens; the place where, for a time, there was no why. And it happened. In 1929. I had done a fair bit of traveling by then, during my military service and my labor service and my Strength Through Joy holidays and all the rest of it, and I thought I’d missed my chance. But it happened. I was thirteen.
It happened on a camping trip sponsored by one of the youth organizations that derived from the old Stalhhelm. The morning was colorless with fog when we bivouacked on the left bank of the Sola. I unrolled my sleeping bag, quite unthinkingly, though I noticed the patches of arrow grass, the familiar three-pronged marsh plant, with its burst points. That night the arrow grass filled me with inklings, and disquieted me, as Odilo slept. When I awoke, the air was warm and the night was clear beneath the deep and uncrackable code of the stars. We sat around the fire, as you do, and sang and chanted and yodeled; then I picked up the buckets and went with Dieter, whom Odilo loved, to bring water to the shallows. And there it was: the confluence of the rivers under a hunter’s moon, and the railway tracks in their arrested journey.
Later we filed past the site. There were about twenty brick hovels, apparently held together by their own filth (Austrian artillery barracks, for the War), and, a little farther on, several ridiculously undistinguished buildings, which belonged, I learned, to the Polish Tobacco Monopoly. Oswiecim. Auschwitz. Beyond, through the birch wood, lay Birkenau: beyond, through the birch wood, lay birchy Birkenau, where I was in harmony with the engine of nature. Everything was miserable and innocent. All the quiddity, all the power and wonder, had been washed away by time and weather.
* * *
I’m three years old now and living, in rather reduced circumstances, on the southern edge of a town called Solingen.
Solingen is famous for its knives, its scissors, and its surgical instruments. From a catchment area that spans much of central Europe, the knives, the scissors, and the surgical instruments are gathered here in Solingen and turned into steel. Also, and quite nearby, we can offer golf, riding, tennis, and archery. Finally, modest Solingen harbors a proud secret. I’m the only one who happens to know what that secret is. It’s this: Solingen is the birthplace of Adolf Eichmann. Schh … Hush now. I’ll never tell. And if I did, who would believe me?
Soon I’ll be born too. This terraced house will be my birthplace. It’s a pretty tense situation, I suppose, but I don’t let it get me down. In fact my lucid intervals are increasingly brief and rare. Father is a sallow-fleshed skeleton with half a right foot. Mother is like warm pastry in the icing of her nightdress. She is a nurse: she works in Solingen’s Home for the Old. Odilo’s days are fabulous drugs but we still need to cry sometimes until Father takes the pain away with a rhythmical upward sweep of his rattling hand. Then we are happy again (and up to no good). Mother’s faith is intercessionary; but he has the power. The morning coos at Odilo and me in a language only we can hear. To our mother we say things like:
“Mummy? Chickens are alive. We catch them and burn them—and then they’re dead! But you can’t eat chicks. Not little good chicks. Because chicks are good. You can just stroke them and everything. But you can eat ducks. Because ducks are fat.”
Wait. Mistake there. Mistake. Category … We brang. We putten. We brang, we putten, their own selves we tooken all away. Why so many children and babies? What got into us? Why so many? We were cruel: the children weren’t even going to be here for very long. I choiced it, did I? Why? Because babies are fat?… But now we’re away, running through the field where every living thing flourishes in desperate abandon, and lurching each second between joy and horror, our mind full of nonsensical objections to nonsensical premises, and ignorant and innocent, never having known anyone, even Irene, even Rosa, even Herta, even the Jews and the others I made.
Only Mother. Our relations are already very intimate and, if everything goes through okay, will soon get more intimate still. For instance, many, many hours of every day and night I shall spend cradled in her arms, kissing her breasts. (It will be allowed. He can’t stop it.) Then eventually our corporeal bond will be tied, with Solingen scissors. When I enter her, how she will weep and scream. That I am gone. Odilo himself doesn’t know how much power we have over her and how much she loves us: he doesn’t sense her when she comes in the night and loosens our blankets and feels our brow and cries with worry when we’re sick.… Soon, Father will have her all to himself. I think he is starving. He is as thin as a Muselmann. When he eats, he just doesn’t come up with enough. Not enough—not enough to keep body and soul together. It is with an internal smirk that I call him Fatti. His furious, unforgiving, defeated look: his eyes are grimed with it, his face is nutcrackered with defeat and with unhealed wounds. He will probably improve, after the War. His ruined foot will improve. Naturally I cannot forgive my father for what he will have to do to me. He will come in and kill me with his body. Odilo knows this and feels this too.
I must make one last effort to be lucid, to be clear. What finally concerns me are questions of time: certain durations. Even as things stood, the Jews were made to wait too long in city squares, with their children getting difficult, and I now know how difficult they can get, when they start creating: how quickly their worlds can fall away. The Jews were made to wait too long in summer meadows, under racing skies, where families were often united by procedures that involved too much suspense, with children running this way and that and stopping still with their hands raised like claws, searching, and babies on the ground every few yards in shawls, crying, with no parents readily available, for much too long.… Now Odilo’s dreams are all colors and noises, rapturous or dread filled, but with no content, not anymore.
He pauses for a moment, in the field. Only a moment. There are no larger units of his time. He has to act while childhood is still here, while everything is his playmate—including his ca-ca. He has to act while childhood is still here, before somebody comes and takes it away. And they will come. I hope the doctor will be wearing something nice, something appropriate, and not the white coat and the black boots, which surely … Myself. Mistake. Mistake. We brang, we putten. Look! Beyond, before the slope of pine, the lady archers are gathering with their targets and bows. Above, a failing-vision kind of light, with the sky fighting down its nausea. Its many nuances of nausea. When Odilo closes his eyes, I see an arrow fly—but wrongly. Point first. Oh no, but then … We’re away once more, over the field. Odilo Unverdorben and his eager heart. And I within, who came at the wrong time—either too soon, or after it was all too late.
AFTERWORD
This book is dedicated to my sister Sally, who, when she was very young, rendered me two profound services. She awakened my protective instincts; and she provided, if not my earliest childhood memory, then certainly my most charged and radiant. She was perhaps half an hour old at the time. I was four.
I also owe a great debt to my friend Robert Jay Lifton. Two summers ago I found myself considering the idea of telling the story of a man’s life backward in time. Then, one afternoon, after a typically emotional encounter on the tennis court, Lifton gave me a copy of his book The Nazi Doctors. My novel would not and could not have been written without it. Probably the same applies to the works of Primo Levi, in particular If This Is a Man, The Truce, The Drowned and the Saved, and Moments of Reprieve. Other writers whom I found especially helpful, for various reasons, include Martin Gilbert, Gitta Sereny, Joachim Fest, Arno Mayer, Erich Fromm, Simon Wiesenthal, Henry Orenstein, and Nora Waln. At the back of my mind I also had a certain short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer and a certain paragraph—a famous one—by Kurt Vonnegut. (I won’t list the authors of the medical textbooks I unenthusiastically pored over; but I am glad to thank Lawrence Shainberg for his enterta
ining and terrifying Brain Surgeon.) Then, too, one’s feelings about this subject—here I mean the Holocaust—emerge and develop through conversation, over many years. I am grateful to my interlocutors, among them my wife, Antonia Phillips; my father, Kingsley Amis; my stepfather-in-law, Xan Fielding; my brother- and sister-in-law, Chaim and Susannah Tannenbaum; my brother-in-law, Matthew Spender; and Tom Maschler, Peter Foges, Piers and Emily Read, John Gross, Christopher Hitchens, James Fox, Zachary Leader, Clive James, Joseph Boothby, Sholom Globerman, Ian McEwan, Saul and Janis Bellow, Edmund and Natalia Fawcett, Jonathan Wilson, Michael Pietsch, and David Papineau.
My alternative title was The Nature of the Offense—a phrase of Primo Levi’s. The offense was of such a nature that perhaps we can see Levi’s suicide as an act of ironic heroism, an act that asserts something like: My life is mine and mine alone to take. The offense was unique, not in its cruelty, nor in its cowardice, but in its style—in its combination of the atavistic and the modern. It was, at once, reptilian and “logistical.” And although the offense was not definingly German, its style was. The National Socialists found the core of the reptile brain, and built an autobahn that went there. Built for speed and safety, built to endure for a thousand years, the Reichsautobahnen, if you remember, were also designed to conform to the landscape, harmoniously, like a garden path.
