The Zone of Interest (19 page)

Out in the night we saw the yellow eye of the 2nd train.

‘You know,’ I mused, ‘you know, I think we ought to make a special effort for November the 9th.’

Wolfram Prufer’s round face attentively blinked and pouted.

‘A proper ceremony,’ I mulled on, ‘and a rousing speech.’

‘Good idea, Sturmbannfuhrer. Where? The church?’

‘No.’ I folded my arms. He meant St Andrew’s in the Old Town. ‘No. In the open air,’ I conjured. ‘After all,
they
did what they did in the open air, the Old Fighters . . .’

‘But that was in Munich, and Munich’s practically in Italy. This is East Poland, Sturmbannfuhrer. St Andrew’s is like a fridge as it is.’

‘Come on, there’s actually not much in it, in terms of latitude. Anyway, let it snow. We’ll sling up some tarps. By the orchestra stand. More bracing. It’ll stiffen morale.’ I smiled. ‘Your brother on the Volga, Hauptsturmfuhrer. Irmfried. I trust he foresees no undue difficulties?’

‘None, mein Kommandant. Losing in Russia is a biological impossibility.’

I raised my eyebrows. ‘You know, Prufer, that’s rather well put . . . Now what’ll we do for urns?’

On Sunday evening I attended a function in the Old Town at the Rathof Bierkeller (considerably refurbished, in recent months, thanks to heavy IG custom). Yech, it was another Farben ‘do’, basically – we were bidding farewell to Wolfgang Bolz, who was about to return to Frankfurt after his tour. The atmosphere was pretty grim, quite frankly, and I had some trouble containing my good cheer (Alisz Seisser’s visit having been an unqualified success).

Anyway, I was talking, or listening, to 3 mid-stratum engineers, Richter, Rudiger, and Wolz. The conversation centred as usual on the low levels of endeavour (and the sorry underachievement) of the Buna workforce, and how quickly they became part of the curse of my entire existence – pieces, Stucke: spitefully massive, uncompromisingly ponderous and unwieldy, mephitic sacs or stinkbombs just raring to explode.

‘The Haftlinge are done in as it is, sir. Why’d they have to lug the bloody things all the way back to the Stammlager?’ said Wolz.

‘Why can’t the Leichekommando come and pick them up, sir? Either at night or 1st thing in the morning?’ said Rudiger.

‘They say it’s for the roll call, sir. But can’t they get the numbers from the Leichekommando and just do their damned sums?’ said Richter.

‘Regrettable,’ I absent-mindedly allowed.

‘They’re having to give them piggybacks, for pity’s sake.’

‘Because they keep running out of stretchers.’

‘And there are never enough bloody wheelbarrows.’

‘Additional wheelbarrows,’ I put in (it was time to leave). ‘Good point.’

Thomsen was present, in front of the exit – he was superciliously holding forth to Mobius and Seedig. Our eyes met, and he showed me his feminine teeth in a smile or a sneer. He drew back in dismay, and I saw the glint of fear in his white eyes, as I roughly shouldered my way out into the air.

19.51. Prufer, doubtlessly, would have been happy to run me back on his motorbike; as the frost was holding off and it was still quite light, however, I elected to walk.

During the period 1936–9, in Munich, there was an annual procession, sponsored and smiled on by the State – ‘Night of the Amazons’ they called it (this memory came to me as I strode through the site of the synagogue we blew up 2 years ago): columns of German damsels paraded on horseback, stripped to the waist. Tastefully choreographed, these virgins re-enacted historical scenes – celebrations of the Teuton heritage. It’s said, too, that the Deliverer himself once tolerantly attended a famous nude ballet in that same city. This is the German way, do you see. The German male is in complete control of his desires. He can go at a woman like a purple genius; when the occasion demands it, on the other hand, he is happy to cast a cultured glance – yet feels no impulsion to touch . . .

I paused as I entered the Zone, steadying myself with a few stiffeners from my flask. Whatever the temperature I do like a good tramp. That’s my upbringing, I suppose. I’m like Alisz. A country boy at heart.

Biggish Titten, such as those belonging to my wife, can be described as ‘beautiful’, smallish Titten, like Waltraut’s and Xondra’s, can be characterised as ‘pretty’, and Titten of the middlish persuasion can be designated as – what? ‘Prettiful’ Titten? Such are Alisz’s Titten. ‘Prettiful’. And her Brustwarten are excitingly dark. And see what a playful mood she’s put me in!

I shall look. I shall not touch. The penalties for Rassenschande, albeit erratically imposed, can be fairly severe (up to and including decapitation) – but in any case Alisz has never stirred in me anything but the tenderest and most exalted emotions. I think of her as I would a ‘grown-up’ daughter – to be protected, cherished, and humbly revered.

As I passed the old crema and approached the garden gate, I contemplated my imminent rendezvous with Frau Doll; and I felt that lovely glow of surety that heats and tickles you when you’re playing 2-card brag (a game far more complicated than it at 1st appears): you look round the table, and count the pips, and you’re satisfied for a mathematical fact that victory is yours. She doesn’t know I know about the letter she passed to Thomsen. She doesn’t know I know about the missive he handed to her. I’m going ‘to tie her up in knots’. I just want to see the look on her face.

Meinrad, the pony, neighed feebly whilst I ascended the steps.

Hannah was on the couch before the fire, reading
Vom Winde Verweht
to the twins. No one looked up as I settled on the revolvable stool.

‘Hear me, Sybil, hear me, Paulette.’ I said, ‘Your mother’s a very wicked woman. Very wicked indeed.’

‘Don’t say that!’

‘An evil woman.’

‘Oh what d’you
mean
, Vati?’

I slowly let my frown darken. ‘Go to bed, girls.’

Hannah clapped her hands. ‘Off with you. I’ll be up in 5 minutes.’

‘
3
minutes!’

‘Promise.’

As they were getting up and moving off I said, ‘Ho ho. Ho ho ho. I think it’ll take a bit longer than
that
.’

In the firelight Hannah’s eyes seemed to have the colour and texture of the skin of crème brûlée.

‘I know something you don’t know,’ I said with my chin going lazily from side to side. ‘I know something you don’t know I know. Ho ho. Ho ho ho. I know you don’t know I—’

‘You mean Herr Thomsen?’ she said brightly.

For a moment, I admit, I could think of nothing to say. ‘. . . Yes. Herr
Thomsen
. Come on, Hannah, whats your game? Listen. If you don’t—’

‘What are you talking about? I’ve got no reason to see him again. And I was sorry to impose in the 1st place. He was polite enough, but I could tell he rather resents anything that gets in the way of his mission.’

Again it was a while before I said, ‘Oh really? What “mission” is this?’

‘He’s obsessed by the Buna-Werke. He thinks it could decide the war.’

‘Well he’s not wrong there.’ I folded my arms. ‘No, hang on. Not so fast, my girl. The letter you had Humilia give him. Yes, oh yes, she told me all about it. Some people know what morality is, you see. That letter. Perhaps you’d care to satisfy me as to its contents?’

‘If you like. I asked for a meeting by the Summer Huts. At the playground. Where he reluctantly agreed to trace Dieter Kruger for me. I finally had a chance to apply to someone high up. Someone really important.’

I stood suddenly, giving my crown a glancing cuff on the mantelpiece.

‘You keep a civil tongue in your mouth when you talk to me young lady!’

After a moment her head gave a penitent bow. But I didn’t like the way this was going 1 bit. I said,

‘And the 2nd missive – the 1 he slipped you at the riding school?’

‘That was his reply, of course. His full report.’

3 minutes later Hannah said,

‘I’m not telling you. Do you understand? I’m not telling you. And now, if you don’t mind, I’ll keep my promise to the girls.’

And with that she sashayed from the room . . . No. Our little exchange didn’t go at all as I’d planned. For a while I stared into the grate – at the punily lashing flamelets. Then I picked up a bottle of something or other and went off for some testing cogitations in my ‘lair’.

That night I woke up and my face was completely numb – my chin, my lips, my cheeks. As if drenched in novocaine. I rolled off the divan and dipped my head beneath my knees for an hour and a ½. It didn’t help. And I thought, If any girl or woman kissed my rubbery cheeks or my rubbery lips then I wouldn’t feel anything at all.

Like a dead leg or a dead arm. A dead face.

3. SZMUL: BREATHE DEEPLY

In addition we are being mocked, which is not very nice either, so to say. Mocked, and profaned. There is a Star of David on the ceiling of the airtight chamber. The foot rags they issue us with are scraps of prayer shawls. Transit Route IV, the slave-built highway from Przemsyl to Tarnopol, is laid out on the crushed rubble of synagogues and Jewish gravestones. Then there is the ‘Goebbels Calendar’: no holy day passes without an Aktion. The sharpest ‘measures’ are reserved for Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashana – our Days of Awe.

The eating. I believe I can explain the eating.

Of the five senses, taste is the only one that we, the Sonders, can partly control. The other senses are ruined and dead. It is strange about touch. I carry, drag, shove, seize – I do these things all night long. But the sense of connection is no longer there. I feel like a man with prosthetic hands – a man with false hands.

And when you consider what we see, what we hear, and what we smell, you won’t deny that we do badly need to control what we taste. What would it be, the taste in our mouths, in the absence of food? As soon as you swallow and the food is gone, it comes, it returns: the taste of our defeat, the taste of wormwood.

I mean the taste of our defeat in the war against the Jews. This war is in every conceivable sense
one-sided
. We did not expect it, and for far too long we gazed with real incredulity at the incredible anger of the Third Germany.

There is a transport from Theresienstadt which includes a number of Poles. During a three-hour delay caused by the non-appearance of the Disinfektoren, I fall into conversation with the family of a middle-aged industrial engineer (a one-time member of the Jewish Council in Lublin). I am reassuring his daughter and her children about the ample meals and snug lodgings, here at the KZ, and the man trustingly takes me aside and tells me a strange and terrible story about the recent events in Łódź. It turns out to be a story about the power of hunger.

September 4, and there is a thick crowd on Fireman’s Square. Rumkowski, weeping, reveals the latest German demand: the surrender, for deportation, of all adults over sixty-five and all children under ten. The next day the old will go, the young will go . . .

‘They’re probably all right,’ I manage to say. ‘You’ll be all right too. Look at me. Do I look half starved?’

But of course there is more. That same afternoon the people learn that a supply of potatoes is ready for distribution. And a wave of euphoria surges through the streets of the ghetto. Now the focus of talk and thought is not the disappearance of all adults over sixty-five and all children under ten, but the potatoes.

‘Don’t kill me, kill someone else,’ it increasingly amuses Doll to say. ‘I’m not a monster. I don’t torture people for the hell of it. Slay a monster, Sonderkommandofuhrer. Kill Palitzsch. Kill Brodniewitsch. Slay a monster.’

Sometimes he says (and I find, even in all this, that his diction still succeeds in offending me), ‘Kill someone powerful. I’m nothing. I’m not powerful. Me – powerful? No. I’m a cog in a vast machine. I’m rubbish. I’m just a cunt. I’m shit.

‘Why don’t you wait for the next visit of the Reichsfuhrer? If you don’t get him, try Mobius. His rank’s lower than mine but he’s far more weighty. Or Standartenfuhrer Blobel. Or Odilo Globocnik when he’s next here.

‘But don’t kill Paul Doll – though of course you’re welcome to try. Doll’s nothing. He’s shit. He’s just a cunt.’

*

The thought I find hardest to avoid is the thought of returning home to my wife. I can avoid the thought, more or less. But I can’t avoid the dream.

In the dream I enter the kitchen and she swivels in her chair and says, ‘You’re back. What happened?’ And when I begin my story she listens for a while and then turns away, shaking her head. And that is all. It’s not as if I tell her about my first thirty days in the Lager (spent in full-time exploration of the orifices of the recently dead, in collaboration with the German quest for valuables). It’s not as if I tell her about the time of the silent boys.

That is all, but the dream is unendurable, and the dream knows this, and humanely grants me the power to rouse myself from it. By now I am bolt upright the instant it starts. Then I climb from my bedding and pace the floor no matter how tired I am, because I’m afraid to go to sleep.

This morning, in another of our comradely debates, we return yet again to the matter of
alleviation
. Here are a few of the things that are said.

‘Every time, with every transport, we should sow panic. Every time. We should all move along the ramp whispering of murder.’

‘Futile? No, not futile. It would
slow them down
. And corrode their nerves. The
Szwaby
, the
Zabójcy
– they’re mortal.’

This speaker – like ninety per cent of all the Jews in the Sonderkommando – became an atheist about half an hour after starting work. But certain tenets linger. Judaism, unlike the other monotheisms, does not hold that the Devil takes human form. All are mortal. But this is another doctrine I am starting to doubt. The German is not something supernatural, but neither is he something human. He is not the Devil. He is Death.

‘They’re mortal. They tremble too. But when there’s panic. Nightmare!’