The Zone of Interest

by Martin Amis

  At last I straightened my neck. Doll, whose face now looked like a huge and unwashed strawberry, was coming to the end.

  ‘Can a man cry?’ he asked. ‘Oh, ja, ja! Ach, ever and anon he must! Ever and anon he cannot but keen . . . You see me wipe away my tears. Tears of grief. Tears of pride. As I kiss this flag, badged with the blood of our hallowed heroes . . . Now. You will soon be joining me . . . in renditions of “Das Horst Wessel Lied” and “Ich Hatt’ Einen Kameraden”. But yet firstly, however . . . there will be a three-minute silence for . . . each of our lost martyrs. For each of the Old Fighters, the fallen. Ach, at the going down of the sun, and again in the dawn, we will remember them. To the last, to the last, they endure.

  ‘One . . . Claus Schmitz.’

  And after ten or twelve seconds it began – the diagonal blizzard of strafing hail.

  There was then an instantly and maximally drunken lunch in the Officers’ Club, and I moved through it, after the first half-hour (by which point Doll was laid out flat on a deep settee), as if in a mellifluous dream of peace and freedom, and there was music from the gramophone and some people danced, and although she and I kept our distance we were, I felt, intensely and continuously aware of one another, and it was hard not to submit to pressures of a different kind, different pressures on the chest, hard not to laugh and also hard not to crumple at the naively ardent lovesongs (from sentimental operettas), ‘Wer Wird denn Weinen, Wenn Man Auseinandergeht?’ and ‘Sag’ zum Abschied leise Servus’.

  ‘Who Will Weep, As We Two Sunder?’. ‘Say So Long Softly When We Part’.

  Ten days went by before Konrad Peters called again from Berlin.

  ‘Sorry, Thomsen, it’s going to take longer than I thought. The atmosphere around this case – it’s unusual. There’s a certain uh, opacity. And a settled silence.’

  ‘I was thinking,’ I said. ‘He couldn’t have been drafted, could he, sir? Have they begun emptying the prisons?’

  ‘Yes, but they’re not conscripting politicals. Only criminals. Your man would still be considered uh, unwurdig . . . I’ll keep at it. My guess is he’s a red triangle somewhere. Somewhere queer – you know, like Croatia.’

  For reasons that might seem more transparent than they actually were, I was ill-disposed towards Dieter Kruger. I felt scorn for what he represented – and it was a scorn long shared by all Germans of non-dependent mind. He personified the national surrender of March 1933. Obedient Kremlinites like Kruger (who always insisted, said Hannah, that the Social Democrats were as bad as the fascists) saw to it that there would be no unity, and no potency, on the Left. The whole thing seemed to have been calibrated by malign yet artistic fingers. For years the Communists had done enough, and blustered enough (about their ‘readiness’), to lend a kind of legitimacy to their own immediate suppression; and after the Reichstag Fire and the passage, the next morning, of the Decree for the Protection of People and State, civil rights and the rule of law became things of the past. And what did the Communists do? They unclenched their raised fists, and limply waved goodbye.

  But then, too, these thoughts led to other thoughts. For instance – why did I feel like the sick bird that couldn’t fly, that couldn’t rise?

  Uncle Martin recently told me a story about Reinhard Heydrich – the blond paladin whose fate it was to be slowly killed by a car seat (the assassins’ grenade had forced leatherwork and horsehair into his diaphragm and spleen). One night, after a long session of solitary drinking, the Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia – ‘the Butcher of Prague’ – went upstairs and confronted his own reflection in the full-length bathroom mirror. He unholstered his revolver and fired two shots into the glass, saying, At last I’ve got you, scum . . .

  The truth was that I had another reason to resent Dieter Kruger. Whatever else he might or might not have been (conceited, predatory, trust-abusing, heartless, wrong), he was capable of courage.

  Hannah had loved him. And he was brave.

  It could no longer be deferred. On the last day of November I stamped around the Yard at the Buna-Werke till I saw the thick shape of Captain Roland Bullard. I hung back and then lingeringly and watchfully followed him into one of the tool cabins between the Stalags. He had the components of a dismantled welding gun laid out on a pillowslip.

  ‘Players,’ I said. ‘Senior Services. And – Woodbines.’

  ‘Woodbine! . . . They’re not the dearest, but they are the best. I take that very kindly, Mr Thomsen. Thank you.’

  ‘Rule Britannia. I made some research. Hark. “The nations not so blest as thee Must, in their turn, to tyrants fall, While thou shalt flourish great and free: The dread and envy of them all.”’ I said, ‘Do we understand?’

  He assessed me, he took me in for the second time, and his cuboid head inclined forward.

  ‘Captain Bullard, I have been prying on you. Tomorrow I . . . Yesterday I saw your bending the blades of the cooling fan in the Polimerisations-Buro. And I liked it.’

  ‘You liked it?’

  ‘Yes. There are others as you?’

  ‘. . . There are. Twelve hundred others.’

  ‘Now. For reasons that do not bother us, I am fed up completely of the Third Realm. They say they will last one thousand years. And we do not wish the buggers here till . . .’

  ‘Till 2933. No. We don’t.’

  ‘You need information? I can be help?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Then do we understand?’

  He lit up a Woodbine and said, ‘Hark. “Thee, haughty tyrants ne’er shall tame; All their attempts to bend thee down Will but arouse thy generous flame, But work their woe and thy renown.” Yes, Mr Thomsen. We understand.’

  It turned out that I was going to see Hannah, up close, one more time before I left for Berlin – at the Dezember Konzert (scheduled for the nineteenth). I only became aware of it when Boris seized my arm as we were crossing the parade ground of the Stammlager and said proudly (and smugly),

  ‘Quick. This way.’

  He led me to a vast and unexpected expanse of land between the Women’s Camp and the outer perimeter. As we started off across it he said with a groan,

  ‘This was quite a while ago. I had a sordid row with Ilse. In bed.’

  ‘How very unfortunate.’

  ‘Mm. And the consequence is that Esther’s being persecuted not just by Ilse but by her little bumgirl, Hedwig.’

  ‘What was the sordid row?’

  ‘Not entirely creditable.’ Boris’s head yawed. ‘I’d seen her use the lash that day. And I think it affected my mood . . . I had a fiasco.’

  ‘Mm,’ I said. ‘Which gets noticed.’

  ‘Not only that. I said to her, Yes, Ilse, that’s the best way to torture a man in bed. You don’t need your knout. Just give him a fiasco.’

  ‘. . . Do you think there’s any real harm in Hedwig?’

  ‘Not really. It’s all Ilse. They make a pet of Esther too and she says that’s the worst bit. It’s all Ilse. Now shsh. Behold.’

  We approached a free-standing structure the size of a warehouse, with fresh wood on four sides (over which a soggy pitch roof seemed to slobber). There was frozen mud underfoot but the sky was blue and filled with huge ivory clouds rippling with hard muscles.

  ‘Oh,’ gasped Boris as he peered through the head-high window. ‘A sonnet. A rose.’

  It took my eyes several seconds to penetrate the stipples of grit on the glass and then adjust to the streaky light . . . The considerable space was lined with bunk beds and masses of humped equipment loosely covered in tarps. Then I saw Esther.

  ‘She’s on the triple ration. They’ve got to take care of her – she’s their big star.’

  Herself overseen by Ilse Grese in full Aufseherin gear (with cape, white shirt and black tie, long skirt, boots, the crested belt cinched tight with the whip coiled in it), Esther, in the company of five, no six, no seven other girl Haftlinge, plus Hedwig, was organising what seemed to be a slow waltz.

  �
��Ilse cares deeply about this, Golo. Our Friday-night fuck in Berlin thinks she’s been catapulted into high culture.’ He said, ‘It’ll all hinge on the principal. And if she lets Ilse down . . .’

  I watched. Esther’s movements were reluctant, but helplessly fluid; and during a lull she went up on her toes (barefoot) and formed a perfect circle with her arms as her hands met above her head.

  ‘Is she trained?’ I whispered.

  ‘Her mother was corps de ballet. Prague.’

  ‘What happened to her mother?’

  ‘We killed her. Not here. There. In the Heydrich reprisals . . . Do you think she’ll behave, on the night? It’ll be tempting for her not to. In front of that mass of SS. Look.’

  The slow waltz resumed, with Esther leading.

  ‘She was born . . .’ He raised a hand and pointed to the glacial caps of the High Tatras to the south-west. ‘She was born there and was a child there for ten years . . . Look at her. Look at them. Golo, look at them all dancing in their stripes.’

  Predictably, but with unexpected starkness, the matter of Dieter Kruger was asking me a certain question.

  I had just said my farewells to Frithuric Burckl, and then been introduced to his replacement (an Old Fighter, and an old Old Fighter, called Rupprecht Strunck), when Peters’s call came through.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Transferred from Brandenburg Penitentiary to Leipzig State Prison on Christmas Day, ’33. Just him. In a Steyr 220. Then the trail goes cold.’

  ‘Why the Dienstwagen, sir?’

  ‘Oh I think this thing goes pretty high up. As I see it there are only two possibilities. He certainly wasn’t freed. So either he escaped, later on. And in particularly embarrassing circumstances. Either that or he was spirited away for special treatment. Very special treatment.’

  ‘Killed.’

  ‘Oh. At least.’

  So the question was clearly framed.

  Did I want the rugged Kruger at large, boldly masterminding an isolated splinter of the resistance, perhaps, hiding, planning, putting himself in harm’s way – his craggy good looks gaining and maturing in nobility and honour?

  Or did I want his existence reduced to an exhausted echo or two in a blood-bespattered Horrorzelle, a handful of ashes, and a scratched-out or inked-over name in a barracks register?

  Well, which?

  At four o’clock she came out of the glass doors of the breakfast room and into the garden . . .

  As things now stand, Doll will have no reason to strike out at you. But if your plan works, he won’t need a reason.

  Let me now say something from the heart. You can stop memorising. Perhaps you should start forgetting. And if you don’t already look quite leniently on me you could simply skip to the last (eleven-word) paragraph.

  After we elevated to the Chancellery a known political killer who, when he spoke in public, often foamed at the mouth, a man almost visibly coated in blood and mire, and as the gross mockery settled on the lives of all but the mad: emotion, sensibility, and delicacy retreated from me, and I developed the habit of saying to myself, almost daily, ‘Let it go. Let it go. What, let that go? Yes, let it go. What, even that? Yes, that too. Let it go. Oh, let it go.’ This internal process was astoundingly well caught, in eight syllables, by the English poet Auden (writing in about 1920):

  Saying Alas

  To less and less.

  In that gazebo or half-made pavilion, as I watched you sleep: during those sixty or seventy minutes I felt something happen to the sources of my being. Everything I had waived and ceded made itself known to me. And I saw, with self-detestation, how soiled and shrunken I had let my heart become.

  When you finally opened your eyes I was experiencing something like hope.

  And now I feel I am starting again – and starting from nothing. I am perpetually harassed by first principles, like a child or a neurotic, or like a trite poet in an ingenuous novelette. But this is the state of mind of the artist, I’m sure: the diametrical opposite of what we call taking things for granted. Why does a hand have five digits? What is a woman’s shoe? Why ants, why suns? Then I look, with definitive incredulity, at the bald stickmen and bald stickwomen, huge-headed, in lines of five, scurrying back to slavery while the band plays.

  Something like hope – even something like love. And love: what is that?

  Everything you do and say warms and thrills and touches me. I find you physically beautiful beyond assimilation. And I simply can’t help it if in my dreams I kiss your mouth, your neck, your throat, your shoulders, and the rib between your breasts. The woman I kiss is not of the here and now. She lives in the future, and she lives elsewhere.

  That poem is called ‘The Exiles’ (and aren’t we, the sane – aren’t we all inner exiles?). It concludes as follows:

  Gas-light in shops,

  The fate of ships,

  And the tide-wind

  Touch the old wound.

  Till our nerves are numb and their now is a time

  Too late for love or for lying either,

  Grown used at last

  To having lost,

  Accepting dearth,

  The shadow of death.

  And to this we say an emphatic No.

  It would infinitely reassure me if, once a week, on Tuesdays, say, at four o’clock, you would go out and take a five-minute turn in your garden. I will see you from the building up on the hill, and I’ll know you are well (and that you’re walking there for me).

  A great void lies ahead – my one or two or perhaps three months in the Reich; but what I have I have, and I will hold it to me.

  When the future looks back on the National Socialists, it will find them as exotic and improbable as the prehistoric meat-eaters (could they really have existed, the velociraptor, the tyrannosaur?). Non-human, and also non-mammalian. They are not mammals. Mammals, with their warm blood and live young.

  You will now of course destroy this letter beyond retrieval. GT.

  ‘Esther will fail tonight – on purpose. And oh yeah. The war is lost.’

  ‘. . . Boris!’

  ‘Oh, come on. And I don’t just mean the Sixth Army. I mean lost anyhow.’

  I poured him a schnapps. He waved it away. On the Volga, Friedrich Paulus’s troops were encircled (and frozen, and starving). And von Manstein’s relief armour, which began its march three weeks earlier, had not yet engaged Zhukov.

  ‘The war is lost. Esther will fail. There. Put a drop of ponce behind your ears.’

  ‘What? What’s this? Eau des Dieux . . .’

  ‘A bit of ponce can be very appealing, Golo. On a man of exceptional virility. Behind your ears. Don’t be shy. That’s it. There.’

  We were in his cramped flatlet in the Fuhrerheim, making ourselves especially smart and fragrant for the Dezember Konzert over in Furstengrube. With five months of his one-year demotion still to run, Boris was defiantly accoutring himself in the dress uniform of a full colonel. Full colonel, senior colonel, active colonel in the Waffen-SS. And Boris, this night, was levitational with nerves.

  ‘That was a very silly idea,’ he said. ‘Invading Russia.’

  ‘Oh. So you’ve changed your tune, have you?’

  ‘Mm. I admit I was all for it at the time. As you know. Well. I got a little ahead of myself after France. Everyone did. No one could refuse him anything after France. So the Corporal said, Now let’s invade Russia, and the generals thought, Sounds insane, but so did France. Fuck it, he’s our man of destiny. And come on, while we’re there we may as well indulge his fever dream about the Jews.’

  ‘Oy. The greatest military genius of all time. Those were your words.’

  ‘France, Golo. Smashed in thirty-nine days. Four days, really. Much better than Moltke. France.’

  Boris was my blood brother, and the connection went back beyond the limits of human memory (we got to know each other, apparently, when we were one). But there had been several serious lacunae along the way. I found it impossible to be near
him in the months after the seizure of power: in 1933 there were only two people in Germany who viscerally wanted world war – and Boris Eltz was the other one. Then there was that froideur between the invasion of Poland and the sharp setback at the gates of Moscow in December ’41. And our views continued to be in less than perfect accord. Boris was still a fanatical nationalist – even though that nation was Nazi Germany. And if he knew what I was up to with Roland Bullard, Boris wouldn’t hesitate. He would draw his Luger and shoot me dead.

  ‘It still looked viable till about late September. Vernichtungskrieg, Golo, isn’t really my cup of tea, but it seemed to be doing the trick . . . It was a very silly idea, though, invading Russia. Step aside.’

  He wanted a better view of himself in the wall mirror above the sink. Leaning back at a ludicrous angle, Boris attended to his pewtery hair with a flat brush in either hand.

  ‘Is it very wrong, do you think,’ he asked, ‘to adore looking in the mirror? . . . I know it’s a crime to say it, but we’ve lost, Golo.’

  ‘All right, you’re nicked.’

  ‘Christ, you could’ve done it on the back of an envelope. A war on two fronts? On one front, the USSR. On the other, the USA. Plus the British Empire. Christ, you could’ve done it on the back of an envelope. December ’41.’

  ‘November ’41. I’ve never told you this, Boris, but they did it on the back of an envelope in November. The armaments people. And told him he couldn’t win.’

  Boris shook his head with a kind of admiration. ‘He can’t win against Russia. So what’s he do? He declares war on America. It isn’t a criminal regime, dear. It’s a regime of the criminally insane. And we’re losing.’