The Zone of Interest

by Martin Amis

  ‘Yes, Herr Kommandant. There were a lot of people about.’

  ‘And they just talked, you say. Did any documents change hands?’

  ‘Documents? No, Herr Kommandant.’

  ‘Written material? . . . Yes, well you see, you’re not looking hard enough, Steinke. There was a transfer of written material. You just failed to spot it.’

  ‘I lost sight of them for a few seconds when all these horses went past, Herr Kommandant.’

  ‘Yes. Well you get horses at riding schools,’ I said. ‘Steinke, have you seen the signs mad people wear here? Saying dumm? Saying Ich bin ein Kretin? I think we’ll order 1 of those for you.’ Yes, and 1 for Prufer while we’re at it. ‘Steinke, you get horses at riding schools . . . And listen. From now on don’t bother with him. Just monitor her. Klar?’

  ‘Yes, Herr Kommandant.’

  ‘How did they greet each other?’

  ‘With a handshake.’

  ‘With a handshake, Herr Kommandant. How did they say goodbye?’

  ‘With a handshake, Herr Kommandant.’

  We stepped aside as a group of Poles (implausibly overburdened) edged by. Steinke and myself were in 1 of the storehouses affixed to the tannery. It is here that the cheapest odds and ends of the evacuees are stacked prior to their elimination, as fuel, in the tannery furnace – cardboard shoes and plastic handbags and slabby wooden prams and so on and so forth.

  ‘What were the respective durations of the 2 handshakes?’

  ‘The 2nd 1 was longer than the 1st, Herr Kommandant.’

  ‘How long was the 1st 1?’

  Although I am indifferent to every aspect of ‘interior decoration’, I’ve always been pretty handy with a toolbox. Working alone, in the spring of this year, whilst Hannah tarried in Rosenheim, I successfully completed my ‘pet’ project: the installation of a fitted safe in the wall of the 1st-floor dressing room. Of course, I have the use of the locker in my study (and there’s always the massive strongbox in the MAB). But the function of the fixture upstairs is quite otherwise. Its visible face, with the dials and tumblers, is hardly more than a facade. Open it up and what do you find? A 2-way mirror commanding a partial view of the bathroom. Alas, over the years, do you see, my wife has become rather shy, physically, and I happen to like appraising her when she’s clothed in nature’s garb – as is surely my conjugal right. The special ‘looking glass’ (and that’s the mot juste, nicht?) I picked up on Block 10, where they were employing it to improve the monitoring of certain medical experiments. A sheet was going spare, and I thought, Hello, I’ll be having that!

  Well, yesterday, Hannah was just back from the Equestrian Academy (the pony) and there I was, standing to attention for the evening ‘show’. Now normally Hannah turns on the taps and then rather listlessly disrobes. Whilst she’s waiting for the tub to fill, repeatedly bending over to test the water’s temperature – that’s the best bit (her emergence is worth watching too, though she has an irritating habit of drying herself by the heated towel rack, which happens to be out of sight). It wasn’t like that yesterday . . . She entered, locked the door and leaned back on it, yanked up her dress, and produced from within her panties 3 slips of light-blue paper. She studied their contents; she absorbed them a 2nd time; not satisfied with that, she perused them yet again. For a moment she seemed lost in reverie. Then she moved to her left, ripping the missive to pieces; the toilet flushed, and, after the necessary interval, flushed once more.

  I am now faced with the duty of recording an unpleasant truth. As Hannah read, her face 1st showed horror, then puzzled concentration, until . . . Towards the end, each time, her free Hand was at her Kehle; after a while it slid downwards somewhat, and appeared to caress the Brust area (her Schultern, in addition, were tensely turned in on themselves). How I felt, as a husband, confronted with that, may be fairly easily imagined. And that wasn’t the end of it. Despite the obvious fact that she was aroused – despite the clear actuality that the female essences had stirred in her (the moistenings, the quickenings, the secret glistenings) – Hannah didn’t even have the common decency to take a bath.

  And ever since she’s had this expression on her face. Contented, serene: in a word, unendurably smug. Moreover, she is physically abloom. She looks like she looked when she was 3 months pregnant. Full of power.

  Mobius of the Politische Abteilung thinks we’ve got to do something about the Poles.

  ‘How many Poles?’

  ‘Not finalised. I’d say in the 250 range.’ He tapped the file on his desk. ‘A big job.’

  ‘250.’ It didn’t sound very big to me – but I was by now almost unhinged by the astronomical numbers relayed to me by Szmul at the Meadow. ‘Yes, I suppose that’s fairly extensive.’

  ‘And it’s our own fault in a way.’

  ‘How d’you work that 1 out?’

  ‘All that stuff at the tannery.’ He sighed. ‘Slightly insensitive, don’t you think?’

  ‘I’m sorry, old boy, I don’t quite follow.’

  ‘All those odds and ends should never have left Kalifornia.’

  ‘What odds and ends?’

  ‘Come on, Paul – wake up.’ He then said heavily, ‘All that rubbish from the pacification of the area round Lublin. Peasant clothes. Tiny slippers. Crude rosaries. Missals.’

  ‘What’re missals?’

  ‘Not really sure. I’m just going by Erkel’s report. Some kind of filthy prayer book, I expect. They’re very Catholic up there. Have you seen the condition of those men? It’s a scandal. How did we let that happen?’

  ‘Prufer.’

  ‘Prufer. This mustn’t wait. It’ll be touch-and-go as it is. They aren’t Jews, Paul. They aren’t old ladies and little boys.’

  ‘Do they know, the Poles?’

  ‘Not yet. They have their suspicions, of course. But they don’t know.’

  ‘What do they hope’ll happen?’

  ‘That they’ll just get dispersed. Sent hither and yon. But it’s too late for that.’

  ‘Oh well. Get the list to me tonight. Ne?’

  ‘Zu befehl, mein Kommandant.’

  As the bearer of 2 Iron Crosses (2nd class and 1st) , I am perfectly secure in my virility, thank you very much, and need make no nervous boasts about the force of my libido – in the matter of the carnal urge, as in everything else, I am completely normal.

  Hannah’s tragic frigidity unmasked itself fairly early on in our marriage, just after I swept her off to Schweinfurt for our honeymoon (her initial unresponsiveness, earlier, as our intimacy bloomed, I had attributed to medical considerations; but these no longer obtained). Personally, I laid it at the door of Dieter Kruger. And yet I faced the challenge awaiting me with the proverbial brash optimism of youth (or of relative youth, being 29). I felt sure that, over time, she would begin to respond to my gentleness, my sensitivity, and my extraordinary patience – a stoicism fortified by the purity of my love. But then there was a further development.

  We were wed at Christmastide in ’28. 1 week later, after our return to the environs of Rosenheim, Hannah’s intuition was officially verified: she was 6 weeks gone. And this changed everything. You see, I happen to adhere to the doctrine propounded by that great Russian writer and thinker, Count Tolstoy, who, in an oeuvre whose title escapes me (it featured a German name, which was what piqued my interest . . . Got it! ‘Kreutzer’!), calls for the eschewal of all erotic activity, not only during the months of gestation but also throughout the period of lactation.

  It’s not that I’m particularly nauseated by natural processes in a female. It’s simply the principle of the thing: reverence for new life, for the priceless and inviolable formation of a fresh human being . . . We discussed it all quite openly, and Hannah, with a rueful smile, soon acceded to the superiority of my arguments. Paulette and Sybil were born in the summer of ’29 – to our inestimable joy! And then my wife proceeded to nurse the twins for the next 3½ years.

  The atmosphere between us, it’s fair to say,
grew increasingly strained. So by the time spousal relations were at last set to resume, we were – how shall I put this? – virtual strangers to each other. That 1st night, with the candlelit dinner, the flowers, the subdued lighting and soft music, the timely retirement, that 1st night was very far from being a success. After some preludial difficulties, I was in the end perfectly ready to perform – but Hannah proved quite unable to make herself mistress of her tension. It was no better the next night, or the next, or the next. I begged her to go back on her medication (or at least see the doctor and procure some sort of unguent), all to no avail.

  The time was early 1933. And the Glorious Revolution was about to come to my aid. Permit me if I smile – just as Clio, the muse of history, must have smiled as she relished the irony. After the Reichstag Fire (February 27), and the myriad arrests that followed it, the very man who had brought such sadness to my bedroom became the source of erotic relief. I mean friend Kruger. Ach, but that’s another story.

  Was it any wonder that, meanwhile, as a healthy young man with normal needs, I’d been obliged to look elsewhere?

  To begin with there was a series of intensely lyrical, almost Edenic dalliances with various . . .

  A knock at the door.

  ‘Come in,’ I said. ‘Ah. Humilia.’

  With Mobius’s list.

  Have you noticed, at night, whilst drowsing, that when you reach down to readjust the sheet, you often find that this necessitates lifting yourself free of it? And what an enormous effort it seems to demand of you. It’s a big thing, the body, a big, heavy thing, and this is a living body, mine – all right, soggy with sleep, but buoyant with life, life!

  ‘Vile morning, I’m afraid. Are we off then, Sturmbannfuhrer?’

  ‘Yes yes. I’m coming for pity’s sake.’

  ‘All is well, mein Kommandant?’

  I joined Prufer on the skiddy porch. A grey mist, weakly pullulating with grey snow – fat wet flakes of it. I cleared my throat and said, ‘Which Bunker are we? I forget.’

  . . . Stanislaw Stawiszynski, Tadeusz Dziedzic, Henryk Pileski – now and then, the night before, as I ran through Mobius’s ‘bill of fare’, I was able to put a face to a name. And I realised that at least some of these men were truly legendary workers, veritable Stakhanovites, human sawmills and steamrollers, who regularly did a whole month in the coal mine at Furstengrube, and then (after a few weeks humping railway ties) went back for more . . . Seated at my study desk, massaging my brow under the lamp, I began to have serious doubts about the measure Mobius proposed, and as a result (what with my other troubles) I drank far, far too much Riesling, vodka, armagnac, and above all slivovitz, and didn’t get to bed until 04.07.

  So I was feeling very seedy indeed when, at 06.28, I took my place on the bench behind the table in the basement of Bunker 3 (redbrick, windowless). Also present, apart from Prufer, Mobius, and myself: 2 Agents from the Political Section, plus captains Drogo Uhl and Boris Eltz. There was also a translator from the Postzensurstelle whom Prufer dismissed: the Poles, he said, were all ‘old numbers’ and understood German well enough . . . Stacking his papers, Mobius coolly told me that he foresaw no complications. Uhl started to hum under his breath. Eltz lit a cigarette and muffled a yawn. And after a while I sat back and managed a contented albeit crapulent gurgle. I shouldn’t have had that Phanodorm at 05.05. Everything I looked at seemed to blur and ripple like a radiator giving off heat.

  Led by 1 armed guard (all right it was Staff Sergeant Palitzsch, but 1 armed guard?), the Poles, in columns of 5, began to fill the space. And I could hardly believe my senses. These Haftlinge were built like bears or gorillas, their striped uniforms were taut with bulk and muscle, their broad faces were tanned and glowing (and they even wore real shoes!). They were galvanic with esprit, too – like some crack brigade of motorised Waffen (and a sector of my heart duly if briefly ached to lead them in battle). On and on they kept sternly massing, 100, 200, 250, 300 – followed, if you please, by another casual soloist, the reviled ‘ex-Pole’ and long-time collaborator, Lageraltester Bruno Brodniewitsch!

  Mobius frowned and nodded. ‘Strammstehen!’ he said with a slap of his folder on the tabletop. ‘First the Kommandant will say a few words.’

  This was news to me. I looked out at them. We officers had our holstered Lugers, of course, and Palitzsch and Brodniewitsch were there with light machine guns slung over their shoulders. But I knew beyond doubt that if this battalion of bruisers scented danger – a twitch was all they’d need – there was no possibility of a single German getting out alive.

  ‘Thank you, Untersturmfuhrer,’ I said, and recleared my throat. ‘Now, men, you’ll doubtlessly want to know . . . You’ll want to know why you were detached from your various Kommandos this morning. Ja, there’ll be no work for you today.’ There was a lightly appreciative murmur; and I almost went ahead and mentioned the double ration (the double ration, quite honestly, is a complete giveaway). ‘So you’ll have your lunch and then some free time to yourselves. Well and good. Untersturmfuhrer Mobius will explain why.’

  ‘. . . Thank you, Sturmbannfuhrer. Now listen. You Poles. I’m not going to pull the wool over your eyes.’

  And here I couldn’t quite suppress a somewhat queasy smile. For Fritz Mobius was consummate Gestapo. Watch, listen, I thought – here comes the subterfuge. He’ll play them like a lute . . .

  ‘At some point this afternoon, probably around 5,’ he said, looking at his watch, ‘each and every 1 of you is going to be shot.’

  I tasted vomit (and I might even have let out a cry) . . . But all that answered Mobius was silence: the silence of 300 men who had ceased to breathe.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. I’m talking to you like soldiers,’ he loudly continued, ‘because that’s what you are. You’re Home Army, the lot of you. And shall I tell you why you’ve been holding back? Because you can’t convince your Centre that the KZ’s an active asset. They think you’re all bags of bones. And who’d believe there are men like you in a place like this? I can hardly believe it myself.’

  The Untersturmfuhrer consulted his green file, whilst Hauptsturmfuhrer Eltz topped up the 7 glasses of soda water with a mesmerisingly steady hand.

  ‘I shudder to think what you must’ve been getting away with. If you heard the word from Warsaw you’d be up our fundaments before we could blink. Men, it’s over. You know full well what’ll happen if there’s any monkeyshines this afternoon. As I took the trouble to remind you yesterday, we have the parish registers. And you don’t want your mothers and fathers and your grandparents clubbed on to the cattle wagons, you don’t want your wives and children and nephews and nieces frying in the crema. Come on. You know what we’re like.’

  The silence gained in depth. Mobius sucked his tongue and said,

  ‘All you can do is die like warriors. So let’s keep it orderly. You show us some Polish pride and courage. And we’ll show you some German respect. Oh, and you’ll get your last supper. You’ll get your double ration of warm bilge. Now raus! Hauptscharfuhrer? If you please.’

  At 22.07 that night I was obliged to get out of bed and receive Prufer’s oral report. From Bunker 3 I’d gone straight to the Krankenbau, where Professor Zulz gave me a vitamin shot and 2 cc’s of chloropromazine, which is supposedly an anti-emetic as well as a sedative. It didn’t stop me practically sicking my ring out in the recovery bay, and I was sure I’d collapse in the slush as I stumbled home (no question of meeting the midday transport).

  Now I said to Wolfram Prufer, ‘Excuse the dressing gown. Come on through.’ All right, I’d sworn off alcohol for the nonce, but I reckoned Prufer was due a gulp, after that kind of day, and it would’ve seemed unmanly not to join him. ‘Ihre Gesundheit. How’d it go?’

  ‘Pretty smooth, sir.’

  In the yard of Bunker 3 a small fraction of the Polish contingent chose to die fighting (a barricade, quickly overrun), but the rest of them, 291 men, were uneventfully shot between 17.10 and 17.45.

  ‘
Quite exemplary,’ said Prufer, with no expression on his unreadable face. ‘In its way.’

  I refilled our glasses, and we talked on, dispensing, late as it was, with the usual formalities. I said,

  ‘Weren’t you surprised Mobius was so . . . unsubtle about it? I was expecting a stratagem of some kind. You know, some form of deceit.’

  ‘The deceit came yesterday. He told them they’d have to be taught a lesson, and he threatened to round up their families if they tried anything.’

  ‘What’s deceitful about that? That’s what we do, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, not any more. Apparently it isn’t worth the bother, so we stopped. Costs too much tracking them down. See, they’ve all been evicted and shuffled about. And besides . . .’

  He proceeded to say that in any case these families, in large part, had already been bombed or strafed or hanged or starved or frozen – or, for that matter, shot in the course of earlier mass reprisals. Prufer drawled on,

  ‘And those children he mentioned, ½ of them, all the 1s that’re any good, have been packed off to the Reich and Germanised. So it’s just not worth the sweat.’

  ‘And those men,’ I said. ‘They simply . . .?’

  ‘No trouble at all. They had their soup and spent an hour or 2 writing postcards. When the time came a lot of them were singing. Patriotic stuff. And nearly all of them yelled out something like Long live Poland last thing. But that was all.’

  ‘Long live Poland. That’s a funny 1.’

  Prufer stretched his neck and said, ‘There was almost another cock-up – ferrying the bodies away before their mates got back from work. We covered the carts but we couldn’t do anything about the blood of course. Wasn’t time. The men saw. It was tense. It was tense, mein Kommandant. Mobius thinks we may have to do another batch. Repeat the whole palaver.’

  ‘. . . Na. How’s your brother, Prufer?’

  ‘Which 1?’

  ‘The 1 in Stalingrad. Freiherr? No. Irmfried.’