by Martin Amis
Tagesmutter. Kleinaugen. Childminder. Short Eyes.
It seemed to be intermittent and non-systematic, but I was being followed. Being followed had happened to me often enough when I worked for Military Intelligence (the Abwehr), and you quickly developed a subsense for it. When you were being followed, you felt as if an invisible string connected you and your monitor, your sharer: depending on the intervening distance, you felt it loosen or tighten. When it was tight: that was when you twisted your head round – and saw, in your wake, a certain figure jolt or stiffen.
The man who walked behind me was a Haftling, in stripes. He was a Kapo (evident from his girth alone), like Stumpfegger, but he wore two triangles, green and red; he was a criminal and a political. This could mean a lot or it could mean almost nothing; it was possible that my shadow was merely a persistent jaywalker who had once shown some interest in democracy. But I didn’t think so – he had a dour, sour look to him, a penitentiary look.
Why was I being followed? Who was the instigator? It was always foolish to underestimate the paranoia of the Geheime Staatspolizei (which here meant Mobius, Horder, Off, etc.), but they would never enlist a prisoner, let alone a political. And the only subversion I had committed so far was the tendering of bad advice.
Common sense pointed to Paul Doll. That there had been illicit contact between Hannah and me was known to only four people: the principals, plus Boris Eltz and the Witness, Humilia. Only two people, then, could have alerted the Commandant – and it wasn’t Boris.
This coming Sunday Hannah and I would both attend a piano recital and drinks party in the Officers’ Club, to honour the signing (with Italy and Japan) of the Tripartite Pact on September 27, 1940. I hoped to be able to tell her that Humilia had been turned.
More promisingly, the day after that, at five-thirty, I was scheduled to bump into Hannah at the Equestrian Academy. I would be feigning an interest in riding lessons. Hannah would be making inquiries about buying or leasing a pony: Paulette and Sybil had their eye on a shaggy Shetlander called Meinrad. In my thoughts I was mapping out a letter; it would be a heavy call on me to write it; I was going to say that for prudential reasons our friendship, or whatever it was, would have to end.
‘How many bucks did you bag?’
‘Me? None. I fired in the air. It’s an appalling pursuit. You see a beautiful animal nibbling on a rosebush, and what do you do? Chew it up with two barrels’ worth.’ He took off his spectacles, breathed on the glass, and applied his crumpled handkerchief (he did this every three or four minutes). ‘Quite nice countryside. Even a decent hotel on the lake. It’s not all hovels and yurts. But why did I say yes? Wolfram Prufer. I had two dinners with him à deux. A remarkably stupid young man. Mr Thomsen, Dr Seedig tells me there’s no ethyl acetate. I don’t know what that means. Do you?’
‘Yes. No colorimetric measurements. We have the acetic acid. But there’s no ethyl alcohol.’
For a while we talked about the shortage, or the non-existence, hereabouts, of ethyl alcohol. We then moved on to the sorry state of the hydrogenation plant.
‘Well, tell that to Berlin. Mr Thomsen, have you thought about my proposal?’
‘I have. The modifications you suggest sound quite sensible. On the face of it. But you’re forgetting something, Mr Burckl. For the most part we’re dealing with Jews.’
Burckl’s large brown eyes lost all their light.
‘I can assure you’, I went on, ‘that in the office of the Reichsleiter there’s no disagreement about this. The entire upper echelon is unanimous on the point.’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘Let me summarise. And here I’ll actually be quoting the very words of the Reichsfuhrer . . . Genetically and constitutionally, the Jew is averse to all work. For centuries, for millennia, he has lived very happily, thank you very much, off the host nations of the diaspora. Work, hard graft, is the preserve of the guileless Gentile, while the Jew, chuckling happily to himself, grows sleek and rich. Physical work – it simply isn’t in them. You’ve seen the way they skive and malinger. Brute force is the only language they understand.’
‘. . . Get on with it, man.’
‘As for the idea of increasing their rations – that’s laughable, quite frankly. Put a square meal inside a Jew and you’ll never get a stroke out of him. He’ll lie back thinking of milk and honey.’
‘I say again – Szmul.’
‘Szmul is a false analogy, Mr Burckl. Szmul works towards no foreseeable goal. Here at Buna, the Jews’ll be well aware that the moment we’re on line their usefulness will come to an end. So they’ll impede us at every turn.’
This gave Burckl pause. He said grumblingly, ‘Until six or seven years ago there were plenty of Jews at Farben. High up, too. Excellent men. Notably diligent.’
‘Saboteurs. Either that or stealing patents and selling them to the Americans. It’s well known. It’s documented.’
From the yard came a series of screams – unusually piercing and prolonged.
‘“Documented”. Where? At the Ahnenerbe? You’re boring me, Mr Thomsen.’
‘You’re disconcerting me, Mr Burckl. You’re flying in the face of one of the cornerstones of Party policy.’
‘Produktive Vernichtung,’ said Burckl with cold resignation. ‘But Vernichtung isn’t produktiv, Mr Thomsen.’ He turned his head sideways. ‘I’m a businessman. I understand that here we have a people that it is opportune to exploit. How to do it ergonomically, that’s the thing. Anyway. I won’t be needing your Uncle Martin. We’ve got another route to the Chancellery.’
‘Oh?’
‘Not the Reichsleiter, not the Reichsmarschall, not the Reichsfuhrer. The Reichskanzler himself wants a meeting with an IG delegation – on quite another topic.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Weaponised poison gas. Mr Thomsen, I’m going to go ahead with my reforms, inasmuch as I can without your support.’ He held my eye. ‘You know, with the Jews I’ve never seen what all the fuss is about. In Berlin, half the time, I couldn’t even tell a Jew from an Aryan. I’m not proud of saying this, but I was personally quite relieved when they brought in the Star. Otherwise how can you tell? . . . Go on, delate me. Have me burnt at the stake for heresy. No. No, certainly not. I’ve never seen one good reason for all this fuss about the Jews.’
On Friday, as I walked from the Old Town to Kat Zet I, I found I wasn’t being followed; so I turned east and made the trek to the Summer Huts, without the least expectation that I would have company there. Swift and sticky rain, thin and cold, and smoke-soiled low-hanging clouds; the playground deserted, the sodden chalets all shuttered up. Everything answered to my mood, and to my hopes of Hannah. I pressed on through the sand and the scrub.
‘Well it’s all off now,’ Boris had said the night before. ‘Golo, I’d’ve liked nothing better than to see you put the horns on the Old Boozer. But it was always stupidly dangerous.’
And this from a colonel of the Waffen-SS (with three Iron Crosses) and a wild philanderer, who adored all danger . . . I said,
‘It’s good about the pyjama bottoms, isn’t it.’
‘Yes. Very. Here’s a husband who tries it on with his wife and gets smashed in the face. And then falls over with his cock out in the garden. But that makes it all worse, Golo. Even murkier. The brew’s too thick.’
‘Maybe just once in the Hotel Zotar. I went down there and it’s not that dirty and there’s only one—’
‘Don’t be a moron, Golo. Listen. All the things that are laughable about the Old Boozer – they make him more of a menace, not less. And he has the powers.’
One did not make such an enemy in the concentrationary universe, where the pressure of death was everywhere; all Doll would need to do was nudge it in the direction he chose.
‘Think,’ said Boris. ‘You – you’d probably survive it. You’re a scion of the New Order. But what about her?’
Hugging my coat, I walked on. Realsexuellpolitik. All’s fair in love and
. . . Yes, and look how Germany waged it. The Commandant’s erring wife could expect no help from the provisions of the Hague and Geneva Conventions; it would be Vernichtungskrieg – to-nothing war.
. . . I reached a coppice of decrepit birches where the smell of natural decay blessedly overwhelmed the circumambient air. Natural decay, unadulterated, and not the work of man; and a smell thick with memories . . . After a while I defeatedly dragged my thoughts elsewhere: to Marlene Muthig, the wife of an IG petrologist, with whom I often bantered in the market square; to Lotte Burstinger, a recent addition to the ranks of the Helferinnen; and to Agnes’s eldest sister (the only unmarried one), Kzryztina.
Up ahead, just in front of the high hedgerow that marked the Zonal boundary, someone or other had started erecting a pavilion or gazebo – and then run out of time and timber. A planked backing, two side walls of different lengths, and half a roof. It looked like the shelter of a rural bus stop. I came round the front of it.
Paneless windows, a flat wooden bench. And Hannah Doll, in the corner, with a blue oilskin spread over her lap.
And she was dead to the world.
The hour that followed was marked by great stillness, but it was far from uneventful. Every few minutes she frowned, and the frowns varied (varieties of puzzlement and pain); three or four times her nostrils flared with subliminal yawns; a single tear gathered and dropped and melted into her cheek; and once a childish hiccup briefly shook her. And then there was the rhythm of her sleep, her breath, the surge of her soft insufflations. This was life, moving in her, this was the proof, the iterated proof of her existence . . .
Hannah’s eyes opened and she looked at me with so little loss of composure that I felt I was already there, fully established in her dream. Her mouth opened along all its width and she made a sound – like the sound of the tide of a distant sea.
‘Was tun wir hier,’ she said steadily and unrhetorically (as if really wanting to know), ‘mit diesen undenkbaren Leichenfresser?’
What are we doing here, she said, with these unimaginable ghouls . . .
She stood, and we embraced. We didn’t kiss. Even when she started crying and we were probably both thinking how delicious it would be, we didn’t kiss, not on the lips. But I knew I was in it.
‘Dieter Kruger,’ she eventually began.
Whatever it was, I was in it. And whatever it was, it would have to go forward.
Where now? Where to?
2. DOLL: STUCKE
If little things may be compared to large, and if a cat can look at a king, then it seems that I, Paul Doll, as Kommandant (the spearhead of this great national programme of applied hygiene), have certain affinities with the secret smoker!
Take Hannah. Yes, she will do very well, I believe, she will do nicely, I fancy, as an example of the secret smoker. And what do Hannah and myself have in common?
1stly, she has to find somewhere secluded for the gratification of her ‘secret’ need. 2ndly, she must bring about the disappearance of the remains: there is always the fag end, doubtlessly smeared with some loud lipstick, the butt, the stub (and to be perfectly direct about it, corpses are the bane of my life). 3rdly, she is required to deal with the odour, not only of the smoke itself but also of its residue, clinging to the clothes and especially to the hair (and in her case befouling the breath, for whilst the aroma of an expensive cigar lends authority to the internal scents of the Mensch, the reek of a penny Davidoff desecrates the salubrious waft of the Madchen). 4thly and finally, she has the obligation, if honesty is a concept she even acknowledges let alone understands, to account to herself for her compulsion to do what she does – stinking herself up, and wearing her guilt like some dirty little slut rancidly emerging from a strenuous joust on a hot afternoon . . .
Here the 2 of us happen to part company, and the analogy breaks down. Yes, we part company here.
For she does what she does out of wrongness and weakness. And I do what I do out of rectitude and indomitable might!
‘You’re wearing Mama’s make-up.’
Sybil’s hand flew to her face.
‘You thought you’d washed it all off, didn’t you? But I can still see traces of rouge. Or are you blushing?’
‘. . . I didn’t!’
‘Don’t tell lies, Sybil. You know why German girls shouldn’t use cosmetics? It affects their morals. They start telling lies. Like your mother.’
‘What do you mean, Vati?’
‘. . . Are you excited about the pony? Better than a silly old tortoise, nicht?’
Even the most stalwart National Socialist, I think, would have to concede that the task the SS set itself in Kulmhof, in the January of this year, was exceptionally sharp. Yech, that was a somewhat extreme measure, bordering, perhaps, on the excessive – the Aktion leading to the recruitment and induction of the Sonder, Szmul. To this day it is mildly famous; people think it stands as a rare behavioural curiosity, quite possibly a 1-off. We informally call it the time of the silent boys.
(Reminder: Szmul’s wife lingers in Litzmannstadt. Find out where.)
And by the way, if there are still a few fantasists who somehow retain sympathy for our Hebrew brethren, well, they ought to take a thorough look – as I was obliged to do (in Warsaw, last May) – at the Jewish Quarters in the cities of Poland. Seeing this race en masse, and left to itself, will shoo away any humanitarian sentimentality, and pretty sharpish, too, I shouldn’t wonder. Nightmare apparitions, miserable destitutes, sexually indistinguishable men and women throng the corpse-strewn thoroughfares. (As a loving father, I found it particularly hard to stomach their vicious neglect of the semi-naked children who howl, beg, sing, moan, and tremble, yellow-faced, like tiny lepers.) In Warsaw there are a dozen new cases of typhus every week, and of the ½ a million Jews 5–6,000 die every month, such is the apathy, the degeneracy, and, to be quite frank about it, the want of even the rudiments of self-respect.
On a lighter note, let me describe a little incident where myself and my travelling companion (Heinz Uebelhoer, a charming ‘young turk’ in the offices of the Reichsfuhrer-SS) managed to alleviate the gloom. We were at the Jewish cemetery, chatting to the noted film director Gottlob Hamm (he was making a documentary for the Ministry of Enlightenment), when a Kraft durch Freude motor coach pulled up and all the Jugend disembarked. Well, Gottlob, Heinz, and myself interrupted the funeral service then under way to take a few photographs. We set up some ‘genre’ pictures: you know, Old Jew Stands Over Cadaver of Young Girl. The Strength through Joy schoolboys were in stitches (but these ‘snaps’ unfortunately came to light whilst I was visiting Hannah at Abbey Timbers and there was hell to pay. Moral: not everyone is blessed with ‘a sense of humour’).
And yet, and yet . . . Szmul’s wife gallivants round the streets of Litzmannstadt – or ‘Łódź’, as the Poles call it (pronouncing it Whoodge or some such).
Shulamith may be needed.
I think I shall send a communication to the head of the Jewish Council there, whose name – where did I put that report? – is ‘Chaim Rumkowski’.
Of course, muggins here did have to go down to Katowitz for more petrol refuse. I motored there (with 2 guards) in my 8-cylinder diesel Steyr 600, heading a convoy of trucks.
At the conclusion of business I took afternoon tea in the office of our civilian contractor, 1 Helmut Adolzfurt, a middle-aged Volksdeutscher (with his pince-nez and his widow’s peak). Then, as usual, Adolzfurt produced a bottle and we were putting away a few drams. Suddenly he said,
‘Sturmbannfuhrer. Do you know that from about 6 in the evening to about 10 at night, here in town, no one can swallow a mouthful?’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Because the wind turns and gusts up from the south. Because of the smell, Sturmbannfuhrer. The smell comes up from the south.’
‘To here? Oh, nonsense,’ I said with a carefree laugh. ‘That’s 50 kilometres.’
‘These windows are double-glazed. It’s 20 to 7. Let’s go outside. If you woul
d, sir.’
We duly traipsed downstairs and into the yard (where my men had almost finished their work). I wondered out loud,
‘Is it always this strong?’
‘It was much harsher a month ago. It’s slightly better now it’s colder. What causes it, Sturmbannfuhrer?’
‘Ah, well the truth is, Adolzfurt,’ I said (for I’m not unaccustomed to quick thinking), ‘the truth is, we have a very sizable piggery in the agricultural station, and there’s been an epidemic. Of porcine sepsis. Caused by worms. So we’ve had no choice, do you see, but to destroy and incinerate. Nicht?’
‘Everyone talks, Sturmbannfuhrer.’
‘Well tell everyone that then. About the piggery.’
The last of the tanks of benzene were now aboard. I waved the drivers on. Shortly thereafter, I forked out the 1,800 zlotys, subsequently obtaining the requisite receipt.
During the drive back, whilst the guards dozed (I myself was of course at the controls of the prestigious machine), I kept pulling over and sticking my head out of the window and taking a sniff. It was as bad as I’ve ever known it, and it just got worse and worse and worse . . .
I felt as if I were in one of those cloacal dreams that all of us have from time to time – you know, where you seem to turn into a frothing geyser of hot filth, like a stupendous oil strike, and it just keeps on coming and coming and piling up everywhere no matter what you try and do.
*
‘They spent about 2 or 3 minutes talking, Herr Kommandant. In the enclosure behind the ranch.’
He meant the riding school. My Kapo, Steinke (a Trotskyite cut-throat in civilian life), meant the riding school – the Equestrian Academy . . . So, 2 meetings: the Summer Huts and the Equestrian Academy. And now 2 letters.
‘You mean the riding school. The Equestrian Academy, Steinke. Christ, it’s boiling in here . . . They talked in plain sight?’