The Zone of Interest

by Martin Amis

  I can only liken the sensation, when we’re alone . . . not to the aftermath of sexual failure but to its prospect. And that defies all intuition: for the last 8 months, with Hannah, there have been no failures (and no successes).

  And she continues, downstairs, to look preoccupied and smug. Is she dreaming about the effeminate charms of Angelus Thomsen? I don’t believe she is. She’s just sneering at the thwarted virility of Paul Doll.

  . . . Last night I was in my ‘lair’, quietly imbibing (in moderation, however, as I’ve reduced substantially of late). I heard the knob give its creak, and there she was, filling the doorway in her green ballgown, gloved to the elbows, her naked Schultern taking the coiled weight of her Haar. At once I felt my blood go loath and cold. Hannah stared at me, unblinking, until I turned away.

  She advanced. Very heavily, and very noisily, she sat herself down on my lap. The armchair was fairly swamped by the crackling pleats of her dress. How I wanted this weight off me – how I wanted it off, off . . .

  ‘Do you know who you are?’ she whispered (and I could feel her lips against the down of my ears). ‘Do you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Who am I?’

  ‘You’re a young single man, and a fucking fool of a Brownshirt, a violent fucking buffoon who marches with the Brownshirts. Who sings songs with the Brownshirts, Pilli.’

  ‘Go on. If you must.’

  ‘You’re a fucking chump of a Brownshirt who, tired of thinking dirty thoughts and playing with his Viper, falls asleep in his bunk and has the worst of all possible dreams. In this dream nobody does things to you. You do things to them. Terrible things. Unspeakably terrible things. Then you wake up.’

  ‘Then I wake up.’

  ‘Then you wake up and you find it’s all true. But you don’t mind. You go back to playing with your Viper. You go back to thinking dirty thoughts. Goodnight, Pilli. Kiss.’

  Aspiration number 3. To shatter Judaeo-Bolshevism once and for all.

  Now let’s think. We haven’t had much luck, so far, with Bolshevism. As for the Judaeo side of it . . .

  Not long ago there was a widely discussed murder, in Linz, where a man stabbed his wife 137 times. People seemed to think this was somehow excessive. But I immediately saw the logic of it. The night logic of it.

  We can’t stop now. Or what were we doing, what did we think we were about, over the last 2 years?

  The war against the Anglo-Saxons does not resemble the war against the Jews. In the latter conflict, we enjoy, in military terms, a distinct advantage, as the other side has no army. And no navy and no air force.

  (Reminder: have that word with Szmul soon.)

  So let’s see. Living space. 1,000 Year Reich. Judaeo-Bolshevism.

  Result? 2½ out of 3. Yech, I’ll drink to that.

  Emergency summit in the Political Department! Myself, Fritz Mobius, Suitbert Seedig, and Rupprecht Strunck. Crisis at the Buna-Werke . . .

  ‘This cocksucker was mixing sand with the engine grease,’ said Rupprecht Strunck (a very slightly gross old party, if we’re perfectly honest about it). ‘To screw the gears.’

  ‘Wirtschaftssabotage!’ I lithely interjected.

  ‘And they’d weakened the rivets,’ said Suitbert. ‘So they’d pop. They also skewed the pressure gauges. False readings.’

  ‘Christ knows the extent of it,’ said Strunck. ‘There must be dozens of the shitpigs, with a coordinator on the floor. And there must be a mole. Inside Farben.’

  ‘How do we know that?’ asked Fritz.

  Suitbert explained. The evildoers only tampered with equipment that was a long way away from ‘first use’. So by the time you deployed this or that piece of machinery, and the thing jammed, stalled, collapsed, or exploded, nobody had any idea who’d put it together. Strunck said,

  ‘They’ve got a fucking calendar of 1st use. Someone’s given them a fucking calendar.’

  I smartly said, ‘Burckl!’

  ‘No, Paul,’ said Fritz. ‘Burckl was just a sap. Never a traitor.’

  ‘And has the apprehended culprit been interrogated?’ I inquired.

  ‘Oh yes. He spent all last night with Horder. Nothing yet.’

  ‘A Jew I suppose.’

  ‘No. An Englishman. An NCO called Jenkins. We’ve got him in the crouchbox for now. Then Off will have a go. Then Entress with the scalpel. See how he likes that.’ Fritz stood, stacking his papers. ‘Not a whisper of this to anyone. Not a whisper to Farben, Doktor Seedig, Standartenfuhrer Strunck. Sit on your hands, mein Kommandant. Understood, Paul? And for the love of God, don’t go blabbing to Prufer.’

  Of course the girls are dying to trot around on that little wreck Meinrad, but he’s got curb now and can hardly walk. Nor, for some time, have we been able to depend on the weekly ministrations of Tierpfleger Seisser! Ach. Now we just get the odd visit from Bent Suchanek, the schludrig muleskinner loosely attached to the Equestrian Academy.

  She was a rare bird, a Judin Prominent in the SS-Hygienic Institute (the SS-HI), 1 of several prisoner doctors who, under close supervision of course, did lab work on bacteriology and experimental sera. Unlike the Ka Be (an indigent hospice or holding pound) and unlike Block 10 (a free-for-all of castrations and hysterectomies), the SS-HI bore quite persuasive resemblances to an establishment devoted to medicine. I went there for the introductory chat, but for our 2nd meeting I had her over to a quiet stockroom in the MAB.

  ‘Please sit.’

  A Polish–German, her name was Miriam Luxemburg (and her mother was said to be a niece of Rosa Luxemburg, the famous Marxist ‘intellectual’), and she’d been with us for 2 years. Now women do not on the whole age gracefully in the KL – but it’s chiefly complete lack of food that does that (and even hunger, chronic hunger, can wipe away all the feminine essences in 6 or 7 months). Dr Luxemburg looked about 50, and was probably about 30; but it wasn’t malnutrition that had reduced her hair to a kind of mould and turned her lips outside in. She had some flesh on her and, moreover, seemed tolerably clean.

  ‘For security reasons it’ll have to be done around midnight,’ I said. ‘You’ll bring your own gear of course. What else’ll you need?’

  ‘Clean towels and plenty of boiling water, sir.’

  ‘You’re just going to give her a preparation, aren’t you? You know, 1 of those tube pills they talk about.’

  ‘There are no tube pills, sir. The procedure will be dilation and curettage.’

  ‘Well, whatever you have to do. Oh by the way,’ I said. ‘It’s possible that the directive may be subject to change.’ I spoke, as it were, conjecturally. ‘Yes, the orders from Berlin may quite possibly undergo modification.’

  My initial offer of 6 bread rations having been dismissed with some hauteur, I now passed along a paper bag containing 2 sleeves of Davidoffs, and there would be 2 more to follow: 800 cigarettes. She intended, I knew, to expend this capital on her brother, who was struggling, somewhat, in a penal Kommando in the uranium mines beyond Furstengrube.

  ‘Modified in what way, sir?’

  ‘The Chancellery may yet opt’, I explained, ‘for a slightly different outcome. Wherein the procedure does not go well. From the patient’s point of view.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning, sir.’

  ‘Meaning, sir?’

  ‘There would be a further 800 Davidoffs. Of course.’

  ‘Meaning, sir?’

  ‘Sodium evipan. Or phenol. A simple cardiac injection . . . Oh, stare not so, “Doktor”. You’ve selected, haven’t you. You’ve done selections. You’ve separated out.’

  ‘That has sometimes been asked of me, yes, sir.’

  ‘And you’ve disposed of live births,’ I said. ‘There’s no point in denying it. We all know it happens.’

  ‘That has sometimes been asked of me, yes, sir.’

  ‘Quite heroic in a way. Secret deliveries. You risk death.’

  She didn’t reply. For she risked death every day, every hour, just by being what she was.
Yes, I thought: that’ll put a few bags under your eyes and a few notches on your mouth. I gave her an interrogative stare, and she gulped and said,

  ‘As a student, as an intern, I had such very different things in mind. Sir.’

  ‘No doubt you did. Well, you’re not a student now. Come on. What’s 1 jab?’

  ‘But I don’t know how to do that, sir. The cardiac injection. The phenol.’

  I came close to suggesting that she walk down the corridor, at the SS-HI, and put in some practice – it was called ‘Room 2’ and they did about 60 per day.

  ‘It’s easy, isn’t it? Perfectly straightforward, I’m told. 5th rib space. All you need’s a long syringe. It’s easy.’

  ‘It’s easy. All right, sir. You do it.’

  For a moment I turned away in thought . . . My earlier dialectic, as regards Alisz Seisser, had, in the end (after much to and fro), gone as follows: why take a chance? But the alternative wasn’t free of hazard either; and there’d be the usual sullen intractability of the corpse. I said,

  ‘Now now. Most likely the Chancellery will adhere to its original adjudication. I’m pretty sure there’ll be no change of plan. Boiling water, eh?’

  I suppose too that I wanted to bind her to me. For insurance, obviously. But now we are beginning to think about the exploration of darkness, we may say that I wanted her to come with me, out of the light.

  ‘When can I assess the patient, sir?’

  ‘What, beforehand? No, I’m afraid that’s impossible.’ This was literally true: there were guards down there, witnesses down there. ‘You’ll have to do her sight unseen.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘29. She says. But you know how women are. Oh yes – I almost forgot. Is it painful?’

  ‘Without at least a topical anaesthetic? Yes, sir. Very.’

  ‘Mm. Oh well. We’d better have a topical anaesthetic then. You see, we can’t have her making much noise.’

  Miriam said she’d need money for that. 20 US, if you please. I had only 1s; I started counting them out, employing mental arithmetic.

  ‘1, 2, 3. Your uh, great-aunt,’ I said with ½ a smile. ‘4, 5, 6.’

  Back in Rosenheim, during my Leninist period (ever a dreamer!), I used to puzzle with my future wife over the chief Luxemburgian oeuvre, The Accumulation of Capital (and Lenin, despite her criticisms of his use of terror, did once call her ‘an eagle’). In early 1919, just after the pathetic failure of the German Revolution, Luxemburg was arrested by a Freikorps unit in Berlin, not my Rossbach boys but a pack of hooligans under the nominal command of old Walli Pabst . . .

  ‘10, 11, 12. Rosa Luxemburg. They clubbed her to the floor and shot her in the head and threw her body in the Landwehr Canal. 18, 19, 20. And how many languages did she speak?’

  ‘5.’ Miriam straightened her gaze. ‘This procedure, sir. The sooner the better. That’s axiomatic.’

  ‘Well. She’s not showing,’ I said (my mind was made up). ‘She seemed fit enough the last time I saw her.’ And it’s good, not using Parisians. I expressively crinkled my nose and said, ‘I think we’ll leave it a bit.’

  Szmul was bringing his expertise to bear on 1 of the new installations, namely Crema 4: 5 3-retorters (capacity: 2,000 per 24 hours). This particular facility had proved to be a major pain right from the start. After 2 weeks the rear funnel wall collapsed; and when we got it going again it lasted a mere 8 days before Szmul pronounced it ‘burnt out’. 8 days!

  ‘The firebricks got loose again, sir. And fell into the duct between the oven and the chimney. There’s nowhere for the flames to go.’

  ‘Shoddy workmanship,’ I said.

  ‘Poor materials, sir. The clay’s been qualified. See the discoloured veins?’

  ‘Wartime economies, Sonder. I take it 2 and 3 are holding the fort?’

  ‘At ½ volume, sir.’

  ‘Good God. What do I tell Communications? That I’m refusing transports? Ach, back to the pits, I suppose. And more Crap from Air Defence. Tell me . . .’

  The Sonderkommandofuhrer straightened up. He shut the grate with his foot and slid the lateral bolt on the oven door. Some distance apart, we stood in the grey gloom of the vault, with its low ceiling, its caged lights, its echoes.

  ‘Tell me, Sonder. Does it feel different? Knowing your uh – time of departure?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Of course it does. April 30th. Where are we now? The 6th. No, the 7th. So. 23 days to Walpurgisnacht.’

  He took an indescribably filthy rag from his pocket and set about scouring his fingernails.

  ‘I’m not expecting you to confide in me, Sonder. But is there anything . . . positive about it? About knowing?’

  ‘Yes, sir. In a way.’

  ‘Calmer and all that. More resigned. Well I’m sorry to be a killjoy. You may not relish your last duty. You may not exactly warm to the final service you’ll render me. And render the Reich.’

  And I gave him his assignment.

  ‘You lower your head. You look downhearted. Take comfort, Sonder! You’ll be saving your Kommandant no end of trouble. And as for your poor little conscience, well, you won’t have to “live with yourself” for very long. About 10 seconds, I’d say. At the most.’ I rubbed my hands together. ‘Now. What are you going to use? Get your bag . . . What’s this? What’s this fucking spear here? Mm. A kind of marlinspike with a handle. Good. It’ll go up your sleeve. Try it . . . All right. Now put it back.’

  I made a motion. We climbed up from the basement and walked down a tunnel covered in sheets of creaking, whistling tin.

  ‘Oh, we know where your wife is, Sonder.’

  Actually, and annoyingly, this had ceased to be the case; Pani Szmul was no longer to be found in the attic above the bakery at number 4 Tlomackie Street. And when the kitchen foreman was brought in for questioning he confessed that he’d had a hand in getting her out of the ghetto – her and her brother. They were heading south. No mystery there: Hungary, where the Jews, apart from the odd razzia and massacre, were just 2nd-class citizens (and weren’t even badged). And this despite the personal guarantee of President Chaim Rumkowski. Most scandalously of all (I can’t get over this), most scandalously of all (I really can’t get over this), it happened right under the noses, right under the noses of the Uberwachungsstelle zur Bekampfung des Schleichhandels und der Preiswucherei im judischen Wohnbezirk! And how much money did I disperse? I said,

  ‘Halt.’

  Na, I wasn’t really discouraged. Shulamith’s flit was only a theoretical or platonic reverse: the threat would still hold; the charm was still firm and good. Having taken the trouble to locate the woman, though, I found it an aesthetic irritation, somehow, to think of her strolling scot-free down the boulevards of Budapest.

  ‘Well, Sonderkommandofuhrer. Until the 30th. Walpurgisnacht, nicht?’

  Mobius took a pull on his drink. He wiped his mouth on a serviette. He sighed and said quietly,

  ‘That cabal of little hens. Norberte Uhl, Suzi Erkel, Hannah Doll. Hannah Doll, Paul.’

  ‘Ach.’

  ‘Defeatism. Frivolity. Enemy radio – that’s clear enough from the things they say. Now, Paul, I had a word with Drogo Uhl, and Norberte’s kept her trap shut ever since. Likewise with Olbricht and Suzi. I had a word with you and . . .’

  ‘Ach.’

  ‘Now I didn’t say this before but you can’t not know that your whole . . . position here is dangling by a thread. And there’s Hannah beaming and glowing at every little snippet of bad news. And you’re the Kommandant! If things don’t change and change soon I’ll have to report it to Prinz Albrecht Strasse. I ask again. I mean it’s pretty basic, isn’t it? Can you, or can you not, control your wife?’

  ‘Ach.’

  I’d decided to get to bed at a prudent hour, and I was lying there curled up with the pre-war bestseller, Die judische Weltpest: Judendammerung auf dem Erdball.

  The door swung open. Hannah. Naked but for her highest high heels. And made up to the 9
s. She advanced and stood over me. She reached down and took my hair in both hands. She ground my face roughly and painfully into the brambles of her Busch, with such force that she split both my lips, then released me with a flourish of contempt. I opened my eyes, and saw the vertical beads of her Ruckgrat, the twin curves of her Taille, the great oscillating hemispheres of her Arsch.

  He plays with his Viper, he plays and he plays. He plays with his viper, he plays and he plays. Darkness is a master from Germany. Look around: see how it all leaps alive – where death is! Alive!

  3. SZMUL: A SIGN

  It won’t be this week. It won’t even be next week. It won’t even be the week after. It will be the week after that.

  And I was ready for it. But I am not ready for this; and I should have been.

  Somebody will one day come to the ghetto or the Lager and account for the near-farcical assiduity of the German hatred.

  And I would start by asking – why were we conscripted, why were we impressed, in the drive towards our own destruction?

  One day in December 1940 my wife came back from the textile plant to the small unheated room we shared with three other families – and she said to me,

  ‘I have spent the last twelve hours dyeing uniforms white. For use on the eastern front. And who do I do this for?’

  Pauperised, frozen, famished, imprisoned, enslaved, and terrorised, she was working on behalf of the forces that had bombed, shelled, strafed, and looted her city, flattened her house, and killed her father, her grandmother, two uncles, three aunts, and seventeen cousins.

  There it is, you see. The Jews can only prolong their lives by helping the enemy to victory – a victory that for the Jews means what?

  Nor should we forget my silent sons, Schol and Chaim, and their contribution to the war effort – the war against the Jews.

  I am choking, I am drowning. This pencil and these scraps of paper aren’t enough. I need colours, sounds – oils and orchestras. I need something more than words.

  *