The Zone of Interest

by Martin Amis

  Maksik, the storied mouser, was sitting with his eyes closed on a damp mat by the roped refrigerator. I supposed Agnes had dropped by the day before, and left Max to his work. He looked very well fed; and now, all his duties discharged, he had assumed the tea-cosy position, with his tail and all four paws tucked in under him.

  Halfway across the sitting room I felt my steps slow. Something was different, altered. For the next ten minutes I scanned tabletops and quickly opened drawers and cupboards. My rooms, it was clear, had come in for scrutiny. The Gestapo approach in such matters could go one of two ways: an almost undetectably ghostlike visitation, or else an earthquake followed by a hurricane. The place hadn’t been searched; it had been casually and sloppily frisked.

  I washed myself with extra will and vigour, because you always felt the taint – only mildly loathsome, in this case – of violation (I imagined Michael Off rolling a toothpick in his mouth as he poked through my toiletries). But as I sank back in the tub for a while before the final rinse, well, my best guess was that this was just a warning, or even a matter of routine, and that many people, perhaps the entire IG staff, had been given a once-over. I took from the closet my tweeds and twills.

  When I went back into the kitchen Max was straightening up; he flexed his forepaws, and idled towards me. Although he was on the whole an unsentimental creature, occasionally, as now, he drew himself up to his full height, waited a beat, and then fainted back-first to the floor. I reached down and stroked his chin and throat, waiting for the gruff and breathy purr. But the cat did not purr. I looked at his eyes and they were the eyes of a quite different kind of feline, almost dried out with severity and animus. I whipped my hand away – but not fast enough; there was a thin red stripe on the base of my thumb, which in a minute or so, I knew, would start to seep.

  ‘You little shit,’ I said.

  He didn’t flee, he didn’t hide. He lay there on his back staring at me with his claws unsheathed.

  And it was doubly weird to see the beast in him. Because on the night train I had (prophetically) dreamt that the Zoo across the Budapesterstrasse from the Hotel Eden was being bombed by the English. SS men were running around the mangled cages shooting the lions and the tigers, the hippos and the rhinos, and they were trying to kill all the crocodiles before they slithered off into the River Spree.

  It was five forty-five when I came down the steps and out into the square. I trudged through the rubble of the synagogue, followed the curving, dipping lanes to the flat road, and entered the Zone of Interest, getting closer and closer to the smell.

  2. DOLL: THE SUPREME PENALTY

  I’ve come to believe that it was all a tragic mistake.

  Lying in bed at dawn, and readying myself for yet another immersion in the fierce rhythms of the KL (reveille, washroom, Dysenterie, foot rag, roll call, Stucke, yellow star, Kapo, black triangle, Prominenten, work teams, Arbeit Macht Frei, brass band, Selektion, fan blade, firebrick, teeth, hair), and facing 1,000 challenges to my rictus of cool command, I turn things over in my mind and, yes, I’ve come to believe that it was all a tragic mistake – marrying such a large woman.

  And such a young woman, too. Because the bitter truth is . . .

  Of course, I am not unfamiliar with hand-to-hand combat, as I showed, I think, on the Iraqi front in the Great War. However, in those cases my adversaries were nearly always gravely injured or else incapacitated by hunger or disease. And later, in my Rossbach period, whilst there were firefights und so, there was no rough stuff, no wet stuff, unless you count that business with the schoolteacher in Parchim, and in that instance I enjoyed a distinct numerical advantage (5 to 1, no?). Anyway, all that was 20 years ago, and since then I’ve just been a glorified bureaucrat, sitting at a desk with my bottom gradually oozing and seeping over the hardbacked chair.

  Now I don’t claim you have to be a genius to understand what I’m getting at. I cannot do the necessary – that which would restore order and contentment, and job security, to the orange villa: I can’t beat her up (and then give the giant witch a sound tup in the master bedroom). She’s too fucking big.

  And little Alisz Seisser – Alisz is no more formidable than Paulette. She knows her place and retreats to it the very instant the Sturmbannfuhrer starts to glower!

  *

  ‘Stop this snivelling at once. Listen, it happens all the time all over the world. No need to make a song and dance about it.’

  The stool, the chemical toilet, the cauldron of water at last starting to bubble on the office hotplate . . .

  ‘Oh brighten up, Alisz. A clean termination. It’s something you should celebrate – over a bottle of gin in a scalding bath! Nicht? Come on, let’s see a smile . . . Ach. Wha wha wha. All right. It’s ½ past. It’s time. Wha wha wha wha wha. Now can you pull yourself together, young lady, on your own steam? Or d’you need another slap in the face?’

  . . . She brought a fair bit of clobber with her, did Miriam Luxemburg.

  1st she unfolded a portable stand (it looked like a miniature operating table) and laid it all out on a blue cloth: syringe, speculum, clamp, and a long wooden stick with a sharp, crenellated metal loop at the end of it. The instruments seemed to be of reasonable quality – far, far better than the gardener’s kitbag to which even SS sawbones periodically resort.

  ‘Is it just me,’ I said with perfect calm, ‘or was there a whisper of spring in the air today?’

  A trifle miffed, perhaps, by my repeated deferments of the procedure, Luxemburg gave a wan smile, and Alisz, who had a kind of leather thong in her mouth by this stage, made no reply (and of course she hadn’t been outdoors for a considerable period of time). Wearing a white singlet, the patient lay on the stripped and towel-padded cot with her legs apart and her knees up.

  ‘How long does it take again?’

  ‘20 minutes if things go smoothly.’

  ‘There. Hear that, Frau Seisser? No need for all that song and dance about it.’

  I had intended to make myself scarce the moment the business began, as I’m very fastidious about all matters pertaining to females and their tubes. But I stayed whilst Luxemburg applied the cleansing solution and injected the local. And I lingered as she went about the process of dilation – the speculum, with its reverse-tweezer effect. And I remained for the curettage.

  It was most odd. I searched my senses for squeamishness – and squeamishness just wasn’t there.

  When I drove Luxemburg back to the Hygienic Institute (and handed over the paper bag containing the additional 400 Davidoffs), I asked how long it would take – before little Alisz was her old self again.

  On April 20th, of course, we celebrated a certain someone’s 54th birthday. A rather subdued occasion in the Officers’ Mess, with Wolfram doing the honours as toastmaster.

  ‘Dem Prophet der Deutschen Status, Selbstachtung, Prestige, und Integritat restauriert!’

  ‘. . . Einverstanden.’

  ‘Der Mann der seinen Arsch mit dem Diktat von Versailles abgewischt!’

  ‘. . . Ganz bestimmt.’

  ‘Der Grosster Feldherr aller Zeiten!’

  ‘. . . Richtig.’

  The only partygoer who responded with any verve, apart from myself and young Wolfram (the dear boy’d got slightly sozzled), was my wife.

  ‘So,’ I murmured, ‘you’ve entered into the birthday spirit.’

  ‘I have,’ she murmured back.

  Hannah was making a thorough spectacle of herself, as usual. Dressed like a common prostitute, she cheered the myriad salutations (far too loudly), and then devoted herself to satirical titters – aimed at the decorous solemnity of the prevailing mood. I closed my eyes and thanked the Lord: Fritz Mobius was on furlough.

  ‘Yes, I’m in the birthday spirit,’ she said, ‘because with any luck it’ll be his last. Now how will the miserable little wanker do himself in? I suppose he’s got some sordid pill – you know, put by for a rainy day. Did they give you 1 too? Do they give them to all their key wankers? Or
are you not key enough?’

  ‘High treason. And richly deserving’, I said with composure, ‘of the supreme penalty . . . Yes, that’s the way. Get your laughing done with.’

  I just want to see the look on her face.

  It’s aspergegillosis now: fungus on the lungs.

  The equestrian academy won’t hear of taking Meinrad back, so I proposed selling him to the schmierig muleskinner – as scrap. The result? Good God, no end of juvenile caterwauling. In this respect Sybil’s just as bad as Paulette. They practically live in Meinrad’s filthy lean-to, stroking him whilst he lies there on his side, panting hard.

  You know – I miss Dieter Kruger!

  Myself and my muckers had a very good time with him, personally, in ’33, in his cell at Dachau; and he went on to become the wellspring of more vicarious amusement in the period 1934–40. Ach, in my mind I bounced friend Kruger from prison to prison and from camp to camp – I parked him wherever I bloody well liked. And once war neared, why, I had him levelling dunes in Stutthof, quarrying in Flossenburg, licking out the clay pits in Sachsenhausen. Oh, I ran him ragged – and ingeniously enriched his sufferings (solitary, penal Kommando, starvation rations, medical experiment here, 75 lashes there). Anyway, it appears I got somewhat carried away; I overdid it, evidently, and ceased to be believed.

  Kruger’s fate was the only thing that held any sway over Hannah. In the old days you could even worm the odd martyred fuck out of her, on the strength of friend Kruger. Ach, how far away, now, those ecstatic meldings seem!

  I miss Dieter Kruger.

  ‘You going to the fireworks?’ asked Fritz Mobius. We were heading for his office, walking past all the file clerks bent over their desks. Bunker 11: Gestapo.

  ‘The girls’ll be going. I’ll watch it from the garden.’

  No talk of Hannah, no talk of spousal discipline: Fritz was darkly preoccupied with the matter at hand.

  ‘How was your leave?’ I asked (the Mobiuses’ home was in what was left of an apartment block in central Bremen). ‘All beer and skittles?’

  ‘Oh get away with you,’ he said wearily as he ran his eye down the 1st page of Rupprecht Strunck’s report. ‘So this bastard’s the coordinator on the floor?’

  ‘Exactly. The NCO, Jenkins, fingered him and then Strunck found his calendar in the tool cabin.’

  ‘Good. Ach, Paul. No windowpanes, no electricity, no water – it takes till lunch to organise your morning shit. You have to walk 4 blocks to fill the bucket for the flush.’

  ‘Ja?’

  ‘Mm. And everyone goes on about potatoes.’ He turned a page and underlined something. ‘There she is, the little woman, boring my prick off about . . . potatoes. Her mother’s the same. So’s her sister. Potatoes.’

  ‘Potatoes.’

  ‘And in the shelter, Jesus Christus, you should see the way they stare at each other’s sandwiches. They ogle, Paul. Hypnotised. It’s pathetic.’ Mobius yawned. ‘Tried to get some rest. So likely. Come on.’

  He led the way down the crunching stone steps to the 2nd-level basement.

  ‘And how long’s this gentleman been in our care?’

  ‘Uh, 6 days.’ I said. ‘Almost a week.’

  ‘Yes, Paul,’ he said over his shoulder (I could tell he was smiling), ‘6 days is almost a week. So. Who in Farben gave him the calendar of 1st-use?’

  ‘He won’t say.’

  Fritz crunched to a halt. ‘. . . What d’you mean he won’t say? He’s been kennelled I take it? And the electrode up his crack?’

  ‘Ja, ja.’

  ‘Really? And Entress?’

  ‘Oh, Entress had a go. Twice. Horder says this bastard’s a masochist. Bullard. Bullard fucking loves it.’

  ‘Oh, God save us.’

  He yanked back the bolts. Within were 2 men, Michael Off half asleep on a stool with a pencil in his mouth, and Roland Bullard lying on his side in the dirt. I noted with fascination that Bullard’s head looked like a halved pomegranate.

  Mobius sighed and said, ‘Oh. Excellent work, Agent.’ He sighed again. ‘Agent Off, a man who’s been in the crouch-box for 72 hours, a man who’s twice felt the probe of the professorial scalpel, is not going to see the light because of 1 more kick in the face. Is he now. Can you stand up at least when you’re talking to me?’

  ‘Ortsgruppenleiter!’

  I thought that Fritz was making a very good point. A man who . . .

  ‘Some imagination? A little creativity, Off? Oh no.’

  With the tip of his boot Mobius nudged Captain Bullard under the arm.

  ‘Agent. Go to Kalifornia and bring me some pretty little Sara. Or have you fucked things up so thoroughly that he can’t even see? Turn his head . . . There, the eyes are gone.’ Mobius drew his Luger and deafeningly fired into the straw mattress. Bullard twitched. ‘All right. Well. He can’t see. But he can listen.’

  Again I thought that Fritz’s reasoning was fundamentally sound. All right, he can’t see, but as long as he can . . .

  ‘The Brits are hopelessly sentimental. Even with Jews. Paul, I guarantee this will all be over in 2 shakes of a lamb’s tail. A man like Bullard – he long ago stopped caring about him.’

  What do I find in the Officers’ Club, this breezy Friday, but a copy of Der Sturmer? On its front page, as usual, we are given an artist’s impression of (as it might be) Albert Einstein rutting against a somnolent Shirley Temple . . .

  I tirelessly insist on this: Julius Streicher has done all that is most thoughtful about our movement a great deal of harm, and Der Sturmer may be the sole reason why, contrary to the Deliverer’s initial vision, exterminatory anti-Semitism has not ‘caught on’ in the West.

  I’ve pinned up on the Club noticeboard a warning to all officers (of course you can’t do much about other ranks). Anyone found in possession of this foul rag will 1) lose a month’s pay, and 2) forfeit a year’s leave.

  Only by the most stringent measures, enforced without fear or favour, can I convince certain people that I happen to be a man who means what he says.

  ‘Come into the garden, Hannah.’

  She was ½ curled up on the armchair beside the chimney piece, with a book and a drink, her Beine not so much under her as beside her, nicht?

  ‘Watch the Roman candles. And oh yes – humour me. Klempnerkommandofuhrer Szmul, no less, wants to give you a present. He worships you.’

  ‘Does he? Why?’

  ‘Why? Didn’t you tell me you once bade him good morning? That’s sufficient for a person of his sort. I let slip it was your birthday, and he wants to give you a present. Come on, it’s nice out. I won’t mind if you smoke. And there’s something I have to tell you about our friend Herr Thomsen. I’ll get your shawl.’

  . . . The sky was a vulgar dark pink, the colour of café blancmange. Down in the dip the flames of the bonfire were darting and wriggling. In the smoky air you caught the tang of scorched potato skins.

  ‘Tell me what about Thomsen?’ she asked. ‘Is he back?’

  I said, ‘Hannah, I sincerely hope there hasn’t been any kind of intrigue between you 2. Because he’s a proven traitor, Hannah. A filthy saboteur. The purest scum. He’s been wrecking some very crucial machines at the Buna-Werke.’

  And I felt the charge of vindication, ½ thrill, ½ stoic disburdenment, as Hannah said,

  ‘Good.’

  ‘. . . Good, Hannah?’

  ‘Yes, good. I admire him and fancy him all the more for it.’

  ‘Well, he’s in a great deal of trouble. I shudder to think what the next months will hold for friend Thomsen. The only person who can alleviate his extremity’, I said, ‘is myself.’

  I was smiling and Hannah smiled back and said, ‘Oh, sure.’

  ‘Poor Hannah. Fatally attracted to the sweepings of our prisons. What is it, Hannah? Were you sexually interfered with at a tender age? When you were an infant, did you play overmuch with your pooh-pooh?’

  ‘Nicht? Don’t you usually say nicht? After 1 of your joke
s?’

  I chuckled and said, ‘All I mean is you don’t seem to have much luck with your boyfriends. Now Hannah. This could lead to an investigation. Into you. Reassure me. You weren’t involved with his efforts in any way? Can you swear, hand on heart, that you’ve done nothing to impede our project here?’

  ‘Not nearly enough. I’ve made a Piepl of the Kommandant. But that wasn’t hard.’

  ‘. . . Thank you for saying that, Hannah. Yes, that’s right – get your laughing done with. Are you relishing your cigarette?’

  I just want to see the look on her face.

  ‘Why d’you need your gun?’

  ‘Standard procedure with Haftlinge. Here he comes. With your gift. Look. He’ll be taking it out for you now.’

  3. SZMUL: NOT ALL OF ME

  It won’t be this morning, it won’t even be this afternoon. It will be at the end of the day, as darkness falls.

  Although I live in the present, and do so with pathological fixity, I remember everything that has happened to me since I came to the Lager. Everything. To remember an hour would take an hour. To remember a month would take a month.

  I cannot forget because I cannot forget. And now at the last all these memories will have to be dispersed.

  There is only one possible outcome, and it is the outcome I want. With this I prove that my life is mine, and mine alone.

  On my way over there I will inhume everything I’ve written, in the Thermos flask beneath the gooseberry bush.

  And, by reason of that, not all of me will die.

  AFTERMATH

  1. ESTHER: LOST IN MEMORY

  ROUGHLY CHRONOLOGICALLY . . .

  Szmulek Zachariasz stopped living at about six forty-five on April 30, 1943 – an hour after my arrest.