The Zone of Interest

by Martin Amis

  ‘If anything, sir, it’s probably an underestimate.’

  ‘Na. So now I divide by 2, ne?’

  ‘I’ve already done that, sir.’

  The figure was always going to be fairly high, true, as it included not only the transports up to the time when cremation was first employed, but also the prisoners in the Stammlager who died of natural causes during the winter of 1941–2, when the coal-fired crema near the Ka Be was out of action for a considerable period of time.

  Still. 107,000 . . .

  ‘We were all very stirred by your speech,’ said Hannah at breakfast.

  I calmly buttered my roll. ‘It went down tolerably well, I fancy.’

  ‘Think. 14 Brownshirts! A massacre. Have you ever known that many men die at once?’

  ‘Ach. It happens.’

  ‘Brown,’ she said. ‘Such a gorgeous colour. With beautiful associations.’

  ‘. . . What associations, Hannah?’

  ‘The soil, of course. The earth.’ She reached for an apple. ‘Shame about the last hour, Pilli. How many cases of hypothermia and frostbite?’

  ‘Yech, it should’ve been a 1-minute silence per martyr. Not 3.’

  She said, ‘Kurt and Willi’s on at 5. I heard the little extract. Sounds intriguing. Paul, let’s listen to it together. Like we used to.’

  The unfamiliar congeniality of her tone put me on my guard. But what was there to fear from Kurt and Willi? I slapped my thigh and said, ‘Kurt and Willi? Yes, let’s. I love Kurt and Willi. Haven’t heard from Kurt and Willi for months. A bit “off”, mind you – die BBC! – but where’s the harm in Kurt and Willi?’

  Just the 1 transport that day, at 13.37. Baldemar Zulz did the necessary with the megaphone. We apologise for the lack of sanitary facilities in the boxcars. All the more reason, though, for a hot shower and a light disinfection – because there are no diseases here and we don’t want any. Frightfully good, that, I had to admit. The stethoscope, the white coat (the black boots) – awfully good. Oh, and would diabetics and those with special dietary needs report to Dr Bodman after supper at the Visitors’ Lodge. Thank you. Fearfully good, that, really 1st rate . . .

  In the Little Brown Bower, as the atmosphere suddenly worsened and there was that dry-throated mutter we all know so well, I felt a cold damp presence invade my ungloved left hand. Took a look: I had been latched on to by a little girl of 4 or 5. My reaction was strangely slow in coming (to rear back with a snarl); I stifled it, and was able – with great effort and greater unease – to do my duty and go on standing there as required.

  *

  16.55: the master bedroom.

  ‘Has it begun yet? . . . Oh and did Willi ever buy that car?’

  Sitting on a chair with her back to the window, and warmly colourful against the damp gauze of the autumn sky, Hannah was significantly attired. There were but the 2 items of apparel (I couldn’t see if she were wearing slippers): the royal-blue kimono with which I presented her on the occasion of our wedding (the fringed sash, the vast sleeves); and, next to her skin, that special white Unterkleid, or ‘camisole’. This 2nd garment was also a gift bestowed on Hannah by her husband; I picked it up in Kalifornia the day before she joined me here at the KL (though when I suggested, the next night, that we ‘try it out’, madam seemed not best pleased). Albeit controversial, it was a gorgeous article of clothing, a semi-transparent creamy white veneering of the sheerest silk, smoother than a baby’s sit-upon . . .

  ‘Some light comedy,’ I said, rubbing my hands together as I relaxed on the settee at the end of the bed. ‘Kurt and Willi’s what we want – not all that propaganda. How’s Kurt’s mother-in-law? That’s always good for a laugh.’

  She said nothing and reached for the dial.

  A jaunty run on the accordion gave way to the muttering and clinking of a typical Bierstube in the Potsdamer Platz. Kurt and Willi exchanged ‘the German greeting’ – rather apathetically, in my view – and then we heard the accents of Berlin (you know, with the ‘g’ sounding like a ‘y’ und so, ne?).

  Willi: How are you, Kurt?

  Kurt: None too well, quite frankly, Willi.

  Willi: Are you ailing? The good God, you look green.

  Kurt: I know I do. That’s why I’m drinking brandy.

  Willi: Well tell me what’s the matter.

  Kurt: Ach. I just experienced something absolutely dreadful. Above us, you know, lives a young woman, a Jewess. A scientist, a serious professional lady. And today she turned on the gas valve. We found her an hour ago.

  Willi: Ach.

  Kurt: They’d just informed her she was being sent off to the east.

  Willi: Well that would be upsetting!

  The smile I wore was starting to become a burden to my face. I recrossed my legs and said, ‘Hannah, I’m not sure this is—’

  ‘Shoosh, Paul, I’m listening.’

  Willi: I can’t understand why she wasn’t deported earlier.

  Kurt: What? Oh. Well, she was a technician in an armaments plant. You know, Willi, we tried to encourage her, to hearten her, Lotte and I. We said it might not be too bad where she’s going. And anything’s better than . . .

  Willi: No, my friend. A quick death in your own kitchen is far, far . . . I know this from the office. Trust me.

  Hannah said, ‘Where does Willi work again?’

  ‘The Ministry of Public Enlightenment,’ I said moodily.

  Kurt: What are you saying? Does that really happen?

  Willi: Well. It does happen.

  Kurt: But why? What’s the point? A little lady – part of the war effort? It’s totally unnecessary!

  Willi: No, Kurt. It is necessary. Why? To instil the fear of defeat. The fear of punishment.

  Kurt: But what’s that got to do with the Jews?

  Willi: Mensch, don’t you understand? The fear of retribution! Every German is implicated in the largest mass murder that has ever—’

  ‘Feindlicher Rundfunk,’ I burst out. ‘Enemy radio! Zweifel am Sieg! Doubting victory! Feindlicher Rundfunk!’

  ‘. . . Oh, don’t blame Kurt and Willi,’ she said with exaggerated torpor. ‘Poor Willi. Poor Kurt. Listen. They’re ordering more brandy. They’re feeling rather sick.’

  Now Hannah did something that quite dismayed me. She stood; she unfurled her sash; and she shrugged off the kimono’s sapphirine folds – revealing her Unterkleid! From Kehle to Oberschenkel her body seemed to be coated in icing sugar, and I could clearly see the outlines of her Bruste, the concavity of her Bauchnabel, and the triangle of her Geschlechtsorgane . . .

  ‘Do you know’, she said, plucking at the collar, ‘which dead woman you stole this from?’ She smoothed it with her hands, up and down. ‘Do you know?’

  Hannah took up a hairbrush and went at it with arrogant eyes.

  ‘You’re . . . you’re mad,’ I said, and backed my way out.

  And whilst we’re on the subject of wives, what price ‘Pani Szmul’?

  To locate a Jew in a Polish ghetto one casually turns to the Uberwachungsstelle zur Bekampfung des Schleichhandels und der Preiswucherei im judischen Wohnbezirk. This used to be a subdivision of the Jewish Order Police, recruited from the pre-war underworld, and responsible to the Gestapo; but natural selection has done its work, and the spies, narks, pimps, and skankers are now running the whole show. Criminalising the gendarmerie: that’s how you ‘squeeze’ a subject people, and gain access to its hoarded wealth!

  Casually, limply, I turn to the Control Office to Combat Black-Marketeering and Profiteering in the Jewish Residential District – ja, die Uberwachungsstelle zur Bekampfung des Schleichhandels und der Preiswucherei im judischen Wohnbezirk.

  It wouldn’t have looked so scandalous in Berlin, ne? In the days when that profoundly unGerman contraption, ‘democracy’, was falling apart. Or in Munich, nicht? A blushful beauty of 18, as dew-bright as the fresh cornflower in her buttonhole, trailing after a burly ‘intellectual’ virtually twice her age?

  All righ
t in Berlin or Munich, no? But there they were in mannerly Rosenheim, with its parks, its cobblestones, its onion domes. Everybody could tell that friend Kruger was making a swine of himself with his childish ward; and it pains me to say that Hannah, for her part, was no less brazen – ach, she could barely keep her tongue out of his ear (her fingers fidgety, her colour hectic, her thighs glueyly asquirm). It was also common knowledge that they’d taken adjacent rooms at an especially disreputable boarding house in Bergerstrasse . . .

  My protective instincts were sorely roused. Hannah and myself were by this juncture on the most cordial terms; friend Kruger was, as they say, a busy man, and she was nearly always ‘on’ for a ramble in the public gardens or a glass of tea in 1 of the many elegant cafés. I think she knew she was doing wrong, and was drawn to my air of probity and calm. Na, 1 thing was clear: she was a middle-class girl with no taste at all for the radical. This was hardly a meeting of minds – nicht? On a number of occasions I quietly ascended the stairs to her attic, and became aware of the most alarming ululations – they were not the modest coos, trills, and warbles of healthy and hygienic Geschlechtlichkeit! They were sounds of excruciation and woe; indeed, they took me back to that time in the parsonage, when I was 13, and had to listen all night to Auntie Tini giving birth to the twins.

  You could feel it. These dark acts. The growing void in the moral order.

  It seems, these days, these nights, that whenever I go to the ramp something dreadful happens – I mean to me personally.

  ‘Wear that,’ she said.

  At 1st it seemed to be 1 of the softer transports. A smooth debouchment, an inductionary address (from Dr Rauke), a brisk selection, and a short drive through the forest, the docile evacuees, with a leaderless but competent team of Sonders discreetly murmuring among them . . . I had taken up position in the hallway between the outer door and the undressing room when a prematurely white-haired Judin approached me with a smile of polite inquiry; and I even inclined my head to attend to her question. In a spasm of animal violence she reached up and smeared something on my face – on my upper lip, my nose, the orbit of my left eye.

  ‘Wear that,’ she said.

  Lice.

  Of course I went straight to Baldemar Zulz.

  ‘This could’ve been serious. You’re lucky, my Kommandant.’

  I frowned up at him (they had me lying flat on a table under a strong light). ‘Fleckfieber?’ I asked.

  ‘Mm. But I know a Kamchatka louse when I see 1,’ he said, showing me the filthy little crab in the pinch of his tweezers, ‘and this critter’s a European.’

  ‘Na. The transport was Dutch. From Westerbork, ne?’

  ‘You know, Paul, the Haftlinge, they’ll pluck the nits off a Russian corpse and slip them under the collars of our uniforms. In the Laundry Block. Exanthematic typhus. Very nasty.’

  ‘Yech, that’s what did for Untersturmfuhrer Kranefuss. Prufer’s meant to be dealing with it. Some hope there I don’t think.’

  Zulz said, ‘Off with your togs. Fold them tidily and remember where they are.’

  ‘What for?’

  He tensed as if ready to pounce. ‘. . . Disinfection!’

  So we had a crazed cackle about that.

  ‘Paul, come on. Just to be on the safe side.’

  Well then. A considerable relief all round!

  ‘Wear that,’ she said.

  *

  Ever since I fixed things so that Alisz Seisser got shifted to the facility in the basement of the MAB, it has been possible for she and myself to spend some precious hours together.

  When my hard day’s toil is done (you know, I’m sometimes in my office till well past midnight?), I consistently look in on little Alisz, bearing a ‘snack’, more often than not – a prune or a cube of cheese – which she then appreciatively devours!

  And what do we do? Why, we simply talk. About the past, about the springtime of our lives and the experiences we share – the arbours and spinneys of our beloved German countryside. She amuses me with tales of her summer frolics on the golden sands of Pomerania, whilst I divert her with stories about the Haardt Forest and my coal-black gelding, Jonti – his flowing mane, his glittering eyes!

  Of course, the arrangement is not ideal.

  ‘But you’re safe here, Alisz. At least until it passes – this mania for selections. Wild selections, and not just in the Ka Be. I can’t be everywhere, you know.’

  Her respectful gratitude knows no bounds.

  ‘Oh, I trust you, Paul.’

  There is never the slightest question of any impropriety. I regard her with the veneration due to the simple widow of a fallen comrade. More than this, I see Alisz as a kind of charge, or protégée, whom I must unswervingly guide.

  She sits, rather primly, on her narrow cot with her hands folded on her lap. I myself prefer to pace, or swivel, in the little tract between the footstool and the chemical toilet.

  ‘. . . I sometimes miss the open air, Paul.’

  ‘Ah, but there it is, Alisz. Protective custody, nicht?’

  Yech, the ‘Gruppe’, the weekly meetings in the cellar of the seedy Selbstbedienungsrestaurant, the interminable Dialektik! The conversion of product into value, the superstructure above the economic base, the law of increasing immiseration . . . Originally a theocrat, then a monarchist, then a militarist, I succumbed to the spell of Marxism – till I set Das Kapital aside and turned, rather, to an intensive study of Mein Kampf. Enlightenment was not slow in coming. Page 382: ‘Marxism is only the transference, by the Jew, Karl Marx, of a philosophical attitude . . . into the form of a definite political creed . . . And all this in the service of his race . . . Marxism itself systematically plans to hand the world over to the Jews.’ Well, you can’t argue with logic of that calibre. No: quod erat demonstrandum. Next question, please.

  . . . You know, there was a sort of tumbling gracelessness about Hannah in those days; she had not yet acquired the poise and bearing she would gain as Frau Paul Doll, first lady of the KL. And let’s be honest – there’s nothing more sick-making, in the end, than adolescent adoration: the awful way they lay themselves open, and the puppy fat, and the hot breath. I simply waited for friend Kruger to tire of her, which he eventually did (he moved out and moved on). But then what happens?

  Picture, if you will, the communal lounge at the boarding house – the doilies, the cuckoo clock, the fat dachshund dozing (and silently breaking wind) in the corner. All very ‘gemutlich’, ne? Lovelorn Hannah and myself are seated at a little round table, and steady progress is being made by my tactful commiserations, my petits cadeaux, my avuncular hand-patting, und so weiter. And then the bell would sound, and, jawohl, friend Kruger would stick his snout round the parlour door. He didn’t even have to snap his fingers. Hannah would lead the way upstairs for another of their groaning, shuddering trysts. This happened time after time after time.

  Ah, but then fate came to my aid. On a certain night, after 1 of his sweat-soaked reunions with that fundamentally innocent child, our Marxist lion was surprised on Bergerstrasse by a crew of gaunt lads from the Sturmabteilung (Cell H). And the crunchy beating he received was so severe that his people from the KP and the Workers’ Trust smuggled him off to Berlin. Our paths didn’t cross for another 4½ years. And when I next saw him, friend Kruger was face down on the floor of a punishment cell in Dachau. A moment to relish to the full, no? I went on in, with a couple of comrades, and I locked the door behind us.

  That was in March 1933, when it all came good, after the Reichstag Fire. After the Reichstag Fire, do you see, we took the simple step of illegalising all opposition. And the autobahn to autocracy lay clear.

  Who started the Reichstag Fire?

  Was it started by the fuddled lone-wolf Dutch Kommunist, van der Lubbe, with his matches and faggots and his lavish ID? No. Was it started by us? No. The Reichstag Fire was started by destiny, by providence.

  On the night of February 27 the Reichstag was torched by Gott!

  Ha
nnah asked me, ‘Who’s that wiry man I see coming down the slope every day?’

  ‘You must mean Szmul.’

  ‘He’s got the saddest face I’ve ever seen. And he never meets my eye. Never.’

  ‘Yes, well, he’s the Klempnerkommandofuhrer. Drains.’

  SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Eichmann is on the whole boyishly meticulous with his choo-choos and his chuff-chuffs; it does sometimes eventuate, however, that transports (every Kommandant’s nightmare) overlap. And so it was in the small hours of this morning.

  My hands are still aflutter and I have just washed down 3 Phanodorms.

  I insisted on wielding the bullhorn, and it has to be conceded that things soon . . . But I simply don’t accept that I’m getting worse at deceiving the evacuees. What’s happened is that they’ve got better at not being taken in. And (come to think of it) it’s easy to see why. Yes, we should have anticipated this difficulty – but you can only live and learn. The people in the target communities are drawing their own conclusions from an obvious and irrefutable truth: Nobody Has Ever Come Back. Thus they’ve put 2 and 2 together, and we have lost the ‘element of surprise’ . . . All right, I’ll phrase that slightly differently: in the matter of what awaits these ‘settlers’ in the eastern territories, we no longer have the advantage of being unbelievable. The decisive asset of being beyond belief.

  This afternoon the first draft collapsed pretty well immediately – they were barely out of the cattle cars. Professor Zulz and his chaps hadn’t even begun the selection; there were 800 men, women, and children slewing around in the slush; and it began. A questing whimper that seems to seek and grope and probe, then the first real scream, then a whiplash, then a bodyblow, then a gunshot.