The Zone of Interest (2 page)

‘I’ve got a kind of plan.’

Boris sighed and looked vacant.

‘First I’ll need to hear from Uncle Martin. Then I’ll make my opening move. Pawn to queen four.’

After a while Boris said, ‘I think that pawn’s for it.’

‘Probably. But there’s no harm in having a good look.’

Boris Eltz took his leave: he was expected on the ramp. A month of staggered ramp duty was his punishment within a punishment for yet another fistfight. The ramp – the detrainment, the selection, then the drive through the birch wood to the Little Brown Bower, in Kat Zet II.

‘The most eerie bit’s the selection,’ said Boris. ‘You ought to come along one day. For the experience.’

I ate lunch alone in the Officers’ Mess (half a chicken, peaches and custard. No wine) and went on to my office at the Buna-Werke. There was a two-hour meeting with Burckl and Seedig, mostly concerning itself with the slow progress of the carbide production halls; but it also became clear that I was losing my battle about the relocation of our labour force.

At dusk I betook myself to the cubicle of Ilse Grese, back in Kat Zet I.

Ilse Grese loved it here.

I knocked on the gently swinging tin door and entered.

Like the teenager she still was (twenty next month), Ilse sat hunched and cross-ankled halfway down the cot, reading an illustrated magazine; she did not choose to look up from its pages. Her uniform was hooked on the nail in the metal beam, under which I now ducked; she was wearing a fibrous dark-blue housecoat and baggy grey socks. Without turning round she said,

‘Aha. I smell Icelander. I smell arsehole.’

Ilse’s habitual manner with me, and perhaps with all her menfriends, was one of sneering languor. My habitual manner with her, and with every woman, at least at first, was floridly donnish (I had evolved this style as a counterweight to my physical appearance, which some, for a while, found forbidding). On the floor lay Ilse’s gunbelt and also her oxhide whip, coiled like a slender serpent in sleep.

I took off my shoes. As I sat and made myself comfortable against the curve of her back I dangled over her shoulder an amulet of imported scent on a gilt chain.

‘It’s the Icelandic arsehole. What’s he want?’

‘Mm, Ilse, the state of your room. You always look impeccable when you’re going about your work – I’ll grant you that. But in the private sphere . . . And you’re quite a stickler for order and cleanliness in others.’

‘What’s the arsehole want?’

I said, ‘What is wanted?’ And I continued, with thoughtful lulls between the sentences. ‘What is wanted is that you, Ilse, should come to my place around ten. There I will ply you with brandy and chocolate and costly gifts. I will listen as you tell me about your most recent ups and downs. My generous sympathy will soon restore your sense of proportion. Because a sense of proportion, Ilse, is what you’ve been known, very occasionally, to lack. Or so Boris tells me.’

‘. . . Boris doesn’t love me any more.’

‘He was singing your praises just the other day. I’ll have a word with him if you like. You will come, I hope, at ten. After our talk and your treats, there will be a sentimental interlude. That is what is wanted.’

Ilse went on reading – an article strongly, indeed angrily arguing that women should on no account shave or otherwise depilate their legs or their armpits.

I got to my feet. She looked up. The wide and unusually crinkly and undulating mouth, the eye sockets of a woman three times her age, the abundance and energy of the dirty-blonde hair.

‘You’re an arsehole.’

‘Come at ten. Will you?’

‘Maybe,’ she said, turning the page. ‘And maybe not.’

In the Old Town the housing stock was so primitive that the Buna people had been obliged to build a kind of dormitory settlement in the rural eastern suburbs (it contained a lower and upper school, a clinic, several shops, a cafeteria, and a taproom, as well as scores of restive housewives). Nevertheless, I soon found a quite serviceable set of chintzily furnished rooms up a steep lane off the market square. 9, Dzilka Street.

There was one serious drawback: I had mice. After the forcible displacement of its owners, the property was used as a builders’ squat for nearly a year, and the infestation had become chronic. Although the little creatures managed to stay out of sight, I could almost constantly hear them as they busied themselves in the crannies and runnels, scurrying, squeaking, feeding, breeding . . .

On her second visit my charlady, young Agnes, deposited a large male feline, black with white trimmings, named Max, or Maksik (pronounced Makseech). Max was a legendary mouser. All I would be needing, said Agnes, was a fortnightly visit from Max; he would appreciate the odd saucer of milk, but there would be no need to give him anything solid.

It wasn’t long before I learned respect for this skilful and unobtrusive predator. Maksik had a tuxedoed appearance – charcoal suit, perfectly triangular white dickey, white spats. When he dipped low and stretched his front legs, his paws fanned out prettily, like daisies. And every time Agnes scooped him up and took him away with her, Max – having weekended with me – left behind him an established silence.

In such a silence I drew, or rather amassed, a hot bath (kettle, pots, buckets), and rendered myself particularly trim and handsome for Ilse Grese. I laid out her cognac and candies, plus four sealed pairs of hardy pantihose (for she disdained stockings), and I waited, looking out at the old ducal castle, as black as Max against the evening sky.

Ilse was punctual. All she said, and she said it faintly sneeringly, and deeply languidly, as soon as the door closed behind her: all she said was – ‘Quick.’

So far as I could determine, the wife of the Commandant, Hannah Doll, took her daughters to school, and brought them back again, but otherwise she hardly left the house.

She did not attend either of the two experimental
thés dansants
; she did not attend the cocktail party in the Political Department thrown by Fritz Mobius; and she did not attend the gala screening of the romantic comedy
Two Happy People
.

On each of these occasions Paul Doll could not but put in an appearance. He did so always with the same expression on his face: that of a man heroically mastering his hurt pride . . . He had a way of tubing his lips, as if planning to whistle – until (or so it seemed) some bourgeois scruple assailed him, and the mouth recomposed itself into a beak.

Mobius said, ‘No Hannah, Paul?’

I moved closer.

‘Indisposed,’ said Doll. ‘You know how it is. The proverbial time of the month?’

‘Dear oh dear.’

On the other hand, I
did
get a pretty good view of her, and for several minutes, through the threadbare hedge at the far end of the sports ground (as I was walking by I paused, and pretended to consult my notebook). Hannah was on the lawn, supervising a picnic for her two daughters and one of their friends – the daughter of the Seedigs, I was fairly sure. The wickerwork basket was still being unpacked. She didn’t settle down with them on the red rug but occasionally dropped into a crouch and then re-erected herself with a vigorous swivel of her haunches.

If not in dress then certainly in silhouette (with her face occluded), Hannah Doll conformed to the national ideal of young femininity, stolid, countrified, and built for procreation and heavy work. Thanks to my physical appearance, I was the beneficiary of extensive carnal knowledge of this type. I had hoiked up and unfurled many a three-ply dirndl, I had eased off many a pair of furry bloomers, I had tossed over my shoulder many a hobnailed clog.

I? I was six foot three. The colour of my hair was a frosty white. The Flemish chute of the nose, the disdainful pleat of the mouth, the shapely pugnacity of the chin; the right-angled hinges of the jaw seemed to be riveted into place beneath the minimal curlicues of the ears. My shoulders were flat and broad, my chest slablike, my waist slender; the extensile penis, classically compact in repose (with pronounced prepuce), the thighs as solid as hewn masts, the kneecaps square, the calves Michelangelan, the feet hardly less pliant and shapely than the great tentacled blades of the hands. To round out the panoply of these timely and opportune attractions, my arctic eyes were a cobalt blue.

All I needed was word from Uncle Martin, a specific order from Uncle Martin in the capital – and I would act.

‘Good evening.’

‘Yes?’

On the steps of the orange villa I found myself confronted by an unsettling little character in thickly knitted woollens (jerkin and skirt) and with bright silver buckles on her shoes.

‘Is the master of the house at home?’ I asked. I knew perfectly well that Doll was elsewhere. He was out on the ramp with the doctors, and with Boris and many others, to receive Special Train 105 (and Special Train 105 was expected to be troublesome). ‘You see, I have a high-priority—’

‘Humilia?’ said a voice. ‘What is it, Humilia?’

A displacement of air further back and there she was, Hannah Doll, again in white, shimmering in the shadows. Humilia coughed politely and withdrew.

‘Madam, I’m so sorry to impose,’ I said. ‘My name is Golo Thomsen. It is a pleasure to meet you.’

Finger by finger I briskly plucked off the chamois glove and held out my hand, which she took. She said,

‘“Golo”?’

‘Yes. Well, it was my first attempt to say Angelus. I made a mess of it, as you see. But it stuck. Our blunders haunt us all our lives, don’t you think?’

‘. . . How can I help you, Mr Thomsen?’

‘Mrs Doll, I have some rather urgent news for the Commandant.’

‘Oh?’

‘I don’t want to be melodramatic, but a decision has been reached in the Chancellery on a matter that I know is his paramount concern.’

She continued to look at me in frank appraisal.

‘I saw you once,’ she said. ‘I remember because you weren’t in uniform. Are you ever in uniform? What is it you do exactly?’

‘I liaise,’ I said and gave a shallow bow.

‘If it’s important then I suppose you’d better wait. I’ve no idea where he is.’ She shrugged. ‘Would you care for some lemonade?’