The Zone of Interest

by Martin Amis

  ‘Golo. Why bother to ask. A Haftling can’t brain the Commandant and expect to walk away. Imagine if it got around. And there’s also petty revenge of course. You should take a lesson from this. Don’t mess with the Old Boozer.’

  ‘How long before they came for him? Bohdan.’

  ‘That same night. Slung him in with the next trainload. And guess what. Before he knocked off work in the garden Bohdan mushed the children’s pet tortoise. With the flat of his shovel.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘Because he knew he was for it.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Bohdan Szozeck was a professor of zoology. He looked like an old poet. Anyway, what do I tell Hannah? Finally.’

  ‘You could have done all this yourself. I’ll show you who to ask. You don’t even have to bribe her. Just a few smokes for her pains.’

  ‘What do I tell Hannah?’

  ‘Tell her what I’m telling you. Tell her it’s Doll’s version, but the only thing you know for sure is that Bohdan’s grave is in the sky . . . Look at Ilse. Christ, her tomboy can’t be any older than Esther.’

  I said, ‘Is Esther behaving? How’d you get her out?’

  ‘Thanks for offering by the way, brother, but money’s no good here any more. There’s too much of it swilling around. It’s like the Inflation. Because of all the jewellery. With Off I bid a thousand RM. The little slag wanted ten. I’d already given five hundred to that old prick in the Postzensurstelle. So I said, Let her out or here and now I’ll break your face.’

  ‘Boris.’

  ‘I couldn’t think what else to do. The car was waiting.’

  We both had our eyes on Ilse, who seemed to be teaching Hedwig how to waltz.

  Boris said, ‘Well. There goes our Friday-night fuck in Berlin.’

  This was a colloquial reference to the recent edict which forbade the running of baths, in the Reich capital, except on Saturdays and Sundays.

  ‘I’m in her bad books as it is.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said. ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Bit shaming. Let’s leave it for now. Alisz Seisser was the one I fancied . . . You know, Golo, today I came in at the end of a Behandlung.’

  ‘Ah. I thought you seemed a bit – a bit manic.’

  ‘The end of a Behandlung. You should see the way they get stacked.’

  ‘Quieter, Boris.’

  ‘Stacked upright. Sardinenpackung, only vertical. Vertical sardines. They’re treading on each other’s insteps. In a single wedge. With toddlers and babies slotted in at shoulder height.’

  ‘Quieter.’

  ‘That’s thrift, that is. Zyklon B’s cheaper than bullets. That’s all it is.’

  A meaty face at the adjacent table swung round and stared.

  Boris, of course, stared back. He said loudly, ‘What? What? . . . Oh. It’s the merry beggar, is it? You like pissing money away, do you?’

  And the face stared on but then withdrew.

  ‘Remember, Golo,’ he said more quietly. ‘With Hannah. You’re her only friend. Work on that. But listen. Treat her like a wine. Lay her down.’

  ‘She can’t come to my place,’ I said, ‘but there’s this little hotel behind the castle. It’s down an alley. An enormous bribe would do it. And, all right, the rooms aren’t perfect but they’re reasonably clean. The Zotar.’

  ‘Golo.’

  ‘I know it’s in her.’

  The main course was baby chicken with garden peas and new potatoes, served with a sanguinary burgundy, followed by peaches and cream and a glass or two of still champagne. Then Calvados with the walnuts and tangerines. Boris and I were by now the soberest German males in the room, and we were both very drunk.

  ‘A single mouthful,’ said Boris gravely. ‘How many prisoners here? Seventy thousand? Ninety-nine per cent of them would drop down dead after a single mouthful of what we’ve had tonight.’

  ‘That occurred to me too.’

  ‘I feel like beating someone up.’

  ‘Not again, Boris. Not so soon.’

  ‘I’m champing, see. I want to go east.’ He looked around. ‘Yes, I want a fight, and I want a fight with someone good. So it lasts longer.’

  ‘You won’t get any takers here. After what you did to Troost.’

  ‘It doesn’t work like that. There’s always some fat bastard who’s heard about me and is suddenly feeling brave. Him for instance. The farmerboy by the mantelpiece.’

  When we were twelve years old Boris and I had a shouting match that turned physical – and I couldn’t believe the passion of the violence that came at me. It was like being run over by a frenzied but also somehow self-righteous combine harvester. My first thought when I finally got back to my feet was this: Boris must have always hated me very much. But it wasn’t so. Later he wept, and stroked my shoulder, and kept on saying and saying how sorry he was.

  ‘Golo, I had a kind of uh, anti-eureka in Goleschau. I heard . . . I heard that they were killing psychiatric patients in Konigsberg. Why? To clear bedspace. Who for? For all the men who’d cracked up killing women and children in Poland and Russia. I thought, Mm, all is not quite as it should be in the state of Deutschland. Excuse me for a moment, my dear.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Boris got up from his chair. ‘You know, Bohdan was sure they’d come for him. Sat by the door, marking time. He’d given away all his worldly goods.’

  ‘His worldly goods?’

  ‘Yeah. His bowl, his spoon. His foot rags. You’re dropping off, Golo . . . Dream about Hannah,’ he said. ‘And the Old Boozer’s black eyes.’

  I dozed for a minute or two. When I stirred and looked out, Boris was over by the mantelpiece, listening to the farmerboy, with his teeth bared and his chin up.

  Friday came, so I hiked over the duney scrub, with its bubbled and knotted black hair, like wind-dried seaweed. Every eminence brought a fresh stretch of land into view, and your body hoped to see a beach, a shore, or at least a lake or a river, or a stream or a pond. But what you were confronted by was always the continuation of Silesia, the continuation of the great Eurasian plain, which stretched over twelve time zones and went all the way to the Yellow River and the Yellow Sea.

  The ground levelled out, levelled out into what might have been a municipal facility in the square of some indigent township in the German north-east – two swings, a slide, a seesaw, a sandpit. There were small clusters of women on benches, one trying to read a flimsy newspaper in the wind, another knitting a yellow scarf, another extracting a sandwich from the shiny white folds of its greaseproof wallet, another merely staring into space, while time passed – Hannah Doll, with her open palms on her lap, staring into space, staring into time. Beyond, like spartan chalets, lay the pennanted Summer Huts.

  ‘Good afternoon to you, madam,’ I called out. She stood and I came up close and said, ‘I don’t want to sound histrionic but I was followed here and we are being watched. This is the truth.’ I forced a broad smile. ‘Seem at ease. Now where are those girls?’

  I approached the slowly revolving roundabout. Affectingly, some might have thought, I had two bags of boiled sweets in my pockets; but they would now have to stay where they were. I asked,

  ‘When’s your birthday? I want to give you something. When is it?’

  ‘Years away,’ said Paulette.

  ‘I know what I’m going to call my children,’ said Sybil. ‘The twins’ll be Mary and Magda. And the boy’ll be August.’

  ‘Those are very good names.’

  I backed off and felt Hannah draw near.

  ‘Can you feel the season changing, Frau Doll? Ah, the alerting zest of late September. I swear to you we’re being watched.’

  She made as if to brighten. ‘Watched? And not just by the mothers? Well. What’ve you got to tell me, Herr Thomsen?’

  ‘It makes me wretched to give you bad news,’ I said with every appearance of gaiety. ‘But Bohdan Szozeck is no more.’

  I expected her to flinch: in fact it was more
like a jump, a spasm of expansion both upward and outward, and her hand flew to her mouth. Then she at once recovered, with a shake of her hair, and raised her voice, saying,

  ‘Paulette, darling, don’t bounce so hard!’

  ‘It’s what the seesaw’s for! It’s the whole point!’

  ‘Gently! . . . So he didn’t go to Stutthof?’ she asked, smiling.

  ‘I’m afraid he went nowhere,’ I answered, smiling.

  And we retained our smiles, somehow, as I followed the narrative given to me by Boris Eltz: the mishap with the garden tool, the inevitable order to Prufer, the dispatch of the Punishment Commando. I said nothing of the gas, but she knew.

  ‘And the tortoise?’

  ‘Bohdan’s parting gesture. Apparently. This is in effect your husband’s version. At several removes.’

  ‘Do you believe all that? Bohdan?’

  I shrugged stiffly. ‘Mortal fear does strange things.’

  ‘Do you believe any of it?’

  ‘You see their reasoning, don’t you? It mustn’t get about. That a prisoner can do that to the Commandant and live.’

  ‘Do what to the Commandant?’

  ‘Well. Hit him even by accident. Bohdan gave him his black eyes.’

  ‘Bohdan didn’t give him his black eyes.’ Her mirthless smile changed – it widened and tightened. ‘I gave him his black eyes.’

  ‘What would you rather?’ yelled Sybil from the distant sandpit. ‘Know everything or know nothing?’

  ‘Know nothing,’ I yelled back. ‘Then you have the fun of finding everything out.’

  That same Friday I walked in the late dusk through the muddy alleys of Kat Zet III. Financed entirely by IG Farben, Kat Zet III had been put together, with a literalist’s care, on the model of Kat Zet I and Kat Zet II. The same searchlights and watchtowers, the same barbed wire and high-tension fencing, the same sirens and gallows, the same armed guards, the same punishment cells, the same orchestra bay, the same whipping post, the same brothel, the same Krankenhaus, and the same mortuary.

  Bohdan had had a Pikkolo – this was Hannah’s designation. The word was ambiguous: unlike a Piepl, which meant bumboy and no mistake, a Pikkolo was often just a young companion, a charge, someone the older prisoner looked out for. In this case he was a fifteen-year-old German Jew called Dov Cohn. Dov was sometimes to be seen in the Dolls’ garden (and I had glimpsed him on the day I paid my first visit). Hannah said that Bohdan and Dov were ‘very close’ . . . In common with the Buna-Werke, Kat Zet III was still under construction, and for now only a colony of builders was quartered there. According to the registrar in the Labour Section, Dov Cohn was to be found in Block 4(vi).

  By this time, partly through induction, I had settled on what seemed to be the likeliest sequence of events. The morning in question: first, there is a serious altercation between husband and wife, during which Hannah deals Doll a blow to the face; over the course of the day, as the bruises pool and darken, Doll realises that he’ll be needing an explanation for his disfigurement; at some point Bohdan, perhaps in an act of clumsiness, attracts his notice; he invents the story of the shovel, and relays it, together with his instructions, to Lagerfuhrer Prufer, whose adjutant notifies the Punishment Commando . . . The only remaining mystery, so far as I could see, was the fate of poor Torquil.

  My approach to Kat Zet III had been from the direction of the Buna-Werke, and I felt as certain as you could ever feel that I wasn’t being followed.

  With my baton I rapped on the Block door and threw it open: a barn the size of two tennis courts, containing a hundred and forty-eight three-tier bunkframes with two or three to each berth. The heat of eleven or twelve hundred men gushed out at me.

  ‘Blockaltester! Here!’

  The boss, an elder, fiftyish and well fleshed, emerged from his side room and walked hurryingly forward. I stated a name and a number and gave a sideways wag of the head. Then I stepped back into the lane, and exhaled. I lit a cheroot – to fumigate my nostrils. The smell in Block 4(vi) was a different smell: it wasn’t the outright putrefaction of the meadow and the pyre, nor was it the smell diffused by the smokestacks (that of cardboard with wet rot, moreover reminding you, with its trace of charr, that human beings evolved from fish). No, it was the apologetic funk of hunger – the acids and gases of thwarted digestion, with a urinous undertang.

  He stepped out, the boy, and not alone. Accompanying him was one of the Block Kapos, with his triangular green Winkel (denoting felon), his bare arms tattooed to the thickness of a sleeved singlet, his spiky pate a mere continuation of the stubble that framed his mouth. I said,

  ‘Who are you?’

  The Kapo looked me up and down. And who was I, for that matter, with my height, my frosty blue eyes, my landowner’s tweeds, my Obersturmfuhrer armband?

  ‘Name.’

  ‘Stumpfegger. Sir.’

  ‘Well leave us, Stumpfegger.’

  As he turned to go he made a half gesture, raising his arm for a moment and then letting it drop. It seemed to me that he wanted to pass a proprietorial hand over the fuzz of the boy’s black hair.

  ‘Dov, walk with me a while,’ I said carefully. ‘Master Dov Cohn, I want to talk to you about Bohdan Szozeck. You may be unable to help me, but you should not be unwilling to help me. No harm will come to you because of it. And some good will come of it whether you help me or not.’ I took out a pack of Camels. ‘Have five.’ What was the value of five American cigarettes – five bread rations, ten? ‘Salt them away somewhere.’

  For several paces the boy had been rhythmically nodding his head, and I started to feel almost sure he would give me my answer. We halted, under the ensnared lamps. It was now night, and the black sky very faintly crepitated with coming rain or coming snow.

  ‘How did you end up here? Relax. Have some of this first.’

  It was a Hershey bar. Time slowed . . . Carefully Dov freed the cellophane wrapping, stared for a moment, and gave the brown nub a reverent lick. I watched. He would be an artist with this delicacy; it would probably take him a week to carve it to nothing with his tongue . . . Hannah had talked about Dov’s eyes: rich dark grey, and perfectly round, with little inlets on the line of the diameter. Eyes made for innocence, and confirmed in innocence, but now protuberant with experience.

  ‘You’re German. Where from?’

  In a firm voice that nonetheless occasionally leapfrogged an octave, he told me his story. It was unexceptional. Flushed out of a Jews’ House in Dresden, along with the rest of his family, in the autumn of ’41; a month in the holding camp of Theresienstadt; the second transport; the leftward selection, on the spur, of his mother, four younger sisters, three grandparents, two aunts, and eight younger cousins; the survival of his father and two uncles for the usual three months (digging drainage ditches); and then Dov was alone.

  ‘So who looks out for you? Stumpfegger?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, with reluctance. ‘Stumpfegger.’

  ‘And Professor Szozeck for a while.’

  ‘Him too, but he’s gone.’

  ‘D’you know where?’

  After a still moment Dov again started nodding.

  ‘Bohdan walked here from the Stammlager to say goodbye. And to warn me not to go looking for him at the villa. Then he went back. He was waiting. He was sure they’d come.’

  Dov knew everything.

  On his last morning, Bohdan Szozeck went to the Ka Be (to have the dressing changed on his infected knee) and got to the villa garden later than usual, about half past nine. He was in the conservatory when the Commandant, with one hand pressed to his face, came reeling out of the glass doors of the breakfast room – in pyjamas. At first (and here I felt stirrings on the back of my scalp) Bohdan thought that Doll, swaying there in his blue and white stripes, was a prisoner: a Zugang (his stomach still fat, his clothes still clean), drunk or mad or just wildly disorientated. Then Doll must have caught sight of the tortoise as it inched across the lawn; he picked up the shovel and
brought the flat blade down full strength on its carapace.

  ‘And he fell over, sir. On the gravel – really hard. Backwards. His pyjama bottoms, they’d come undone and tripped him up. And he fell over.’

  I said, ‘Did Doll see the professor?’

  ‘He should’ve hid. Why didn’t he hide, sir? Bohdan should’ve hid.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  With a pleading face Dov said, ‘He went out and helped him up. And put him on a stool in the shade. And fetched him a bottle of water. Then the Commandant waved him away.’

  ‘So . . .’ I considered. ‘Bohdan knew. You said he knew they’d come for him.’

  ‘Naturlich. Selbstverstandlich.’

  ‘Because?’

  His eyes were exophthalmic with all they knew.

  ‘Because he was there when the Commandant showed weakness. He saw the Commandant cry.’

  We walked back up the slight slope of the defile. Halfway to his Block I gave him the rest of the Camels plus ten US dollars.

  ‘You’ll put that somewhere safe.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said (almost with indignation).

  ‘Wait. Does Doll know you were Bohdan’s friend?’

  ‘Don’t think so. I only went to the garden twice.’

  ‘. . . Okay. Now, Dov, this is our secret, all right?’

  ‘But sir. Please. What should I tell him?’

  ‘The Blockaltester?’

  ‘He doesn’t care. No. What should I tell Stumpfegger? He’ll want to know what we talked about.’

  ‘Tell him . . .’ I must have been thinking about this, on some level, because the answer was ready and waiting. ‘All day yesterday at the Stammlager,’ I said, ‘there was a man standing in the corridor between the wire and the fence. A Kapo. In handcuffs. He had a sign hanging from his neck. It said Tagesmutter. Kleinaugen. You know what that means?’

  Dov knew.

  ‘Tell Stumpfegger that I put him there. Tell him I’m conducting an investigation ordered by Berlin. Can you tell him that?’

  He smiled and thanked me and hastened off into the dusk.

  And into the snow. The first grey snow of the autumn, grey snow, the colour of ash, the colour of Dov’s eyes.