The Zone of Interest (20 page)

‘
Good
. So it should be.’

‘Why make it worse for our people? Why make their last minutes worse?’

‘They’re not their last minutes. Their last minutes are spent jammed solid and dying. And there are fifteen of them. Fifteen minutes.’

‘They’re going to die anyway. We want it to cost the
Szwaby
.’

Another says, ‘The fact is we
don’t
sow panic. Do we. We smile and lie. Because we’re human beings.’

Another says, ‘We lie because when there’s panic we get killed quicker.’

Another says, ‘We lie because we fear the bloodlust and the rage.’

Another says, ‘We lie for our lousy selves.’

And I say, ‘
Ihr seit achzen johr alt, und ihr hott a fach
. That’s all there is. There’s nothing else.’

With his shirt off and gasmask on, Doll looks like a fat and hairy old housefly (a housefly that is nearing the end of its span). He sounds like a housefly too, as he repeats the number I have given him: a sizzling whine. He asks me something else.

‘I can’t make you out, sir.’

We are in the ‘ossuary’ – a broad concavity upwind of the pyre. I am counting charred hipbones before their transfer to the grinding teams.

‘Still can’t hear you, sir.’

He gives a jerk of his head, and I follow him up the slope.

On level ground he frees his mouth with a gasp and says, ‘So we must be nearly there, nicht?’

‘We’re definitely past half way, sir.’

‘Half
way
?’

The pyre is sixty metres from where we stand, and the heat, though still immense, is now seamed with autumn cold.

‘Well fucking get on with it . . . I know what’s worrying you. Fear not, hero. When we’re done here the whole squad’s for it. But you and your best fifty will proudly live on.’

‘Which fifty, sir?’

‘Oh, you choose.’

‘. . . I select, sir?’

‘Yes, you select. Go on, you’ve seen it done a thousand times. Select . . . You know, Sonder, I never nursed any particular hatred for the Jews. Something had to be done about them, obviously. But I’d’ve been content with the Madagascar solution. Or having you all neutered. Like with the Rhineland Bastards, nicht? The by-blows of the French Araber und Neger. Nicht? No killing. Just snipping. But you lot – you’re neutered already, ne? You’ve already lost what made you men.’

‘Sir.’

‘I didn’t decide all this.’

‘No, sir.’

‘I just said zu Befehl, zu Befehl. I just said ja, ja, yech, ja. Sie wissen doch, nicht? I didn’t decide. Berlin decided. Berlin.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘. . . You know that white-haired streak of piss who’s always in civvies? You must’ve heard talk of Thomsen, Sonder. Thomsen’s the nephew of Martin Bormann – the Reichsleiter, the Sekretar. Thomsen’s Berlin.’ Doll laughs and says, ‘So kill Berlin. Kill Berlin. Before Berlin kills you.’ He laughs again. ‘Kill Berlin.’

As he starts off back to the jeep Doll turns and says, ‘You live on, Sonder.’ Again he laughs. ‘I’m best of friends with the appropriate authority in Litzmannstadt. Maybe I can arrange a reunion. You and uh, “Shulamith”. She hasn’t got enough vitamin P, Sonder.
Protektsye
, nicht?

‘She’s still there, you know. In the attic above the bakery. She’s still there. But where’s her vitamin P?’

*

One morning I am in the lane passing the Kommandant’s garden, and I see Frau Doll setting off for school with her daughters. She looks in my direction and she says something quite extraordinary to me. And I recoil from it as if I have smoke in my eyes. Five minutes later, standing bent behind the main guardroom, I am able to shed tears for the first time since Chełmno.

‘Guten Tag,’ she says.

The urge to kill is like the bore of a river, a steepsided wave coming up against the flow. Against the flow of what I am or what I was. Part of me hopes the urge is there at the end.

But if it should happen that I go to the gas (in fact I am probably too conspicuous for that, and they’ll just take me aside for the shot to the nape – but imagine): if it should happen that I go to the gas, I will weave among them.

I will weave among them, saying, to the old man in the astrakhan coat, ‘Stand as close to the meshed shaft as you can, sir.’

Saying, to the boy in the sailor suit, ‘Breathe deeply, my child.’

CHAPTER IV. BROWN SNOW

1. THOMSEN: TOUCH THE OLD WOUND

THERE WAS A
big sick bird, a kite I think it was – there was a big sick bird that hovered over the oak beyond the scaffold on the well-tended lawn (mown in stripes) facing the Appellplatz of the Farben Kat Zet.

It hovered there, in all weathers, brownish, yellowish, the colour of the healing eyes of the Commandant; and it never seemed to use its wings. It dangled – it just hung.

Now I knew a bird could do this, given a lucky confluence of currents, of rising thermals; but the sick bird did it all day long. Perhaps all night, too.

Would it
like
the upper air, you wondered? Sometimes the wind got in under its pinions, and they stirred, and you sensed effort, and you felt you could hear a distant groan of aspiration. Yet it failed to rise. The bird was aloft, merely; it couldn’t fly.

Sometimes it abruptly dropped three or four metres, it lurched downwards, as if tugged by a cord. It seemed inorganic, manmade – like a
kite
, in fact, directed by a boy’s inexperienced hand.

Perhaps it was mad, this ponderous predator of the air. Perhaps it was dying. You sometimes felt it was not a bird but a fish, a ray, floating, drowning, in the ocean of the sky.

I understood the bird, I absorbed it, I contained it within me.

This is what I passed to her at the riding school.

Dear Hannah:

Events oblige me to start with yet more bad news. Professor Szozeck’s Pikkolo, Dov Cohn, has also been ‘transferred’ (along with a Kapo called Stumpfegger, who took an interest in him and was possibly his confidant). And this six weeks after the event. It’s particularly hard to take, because I thought – didn’t you? – that Dov was very well equipped to survive.

After what you told me about the circumstances of your marriage, I no longer feel the need to pay your husband even the minimal respect due to the father of Paulette and Sybil. He is what he is, and he is getting worse. If he thought he had the right to eliminate three people, one of them a child, over a single instance of compromised prestige, which in truth was an act of kindness – well. I have a measure of protection, through my uncle. You have none.

It is urgently necessary, then, that we retroactively ‘normalise’ our past dealings, you and I. As a qualified Referendar, I have given the thing a good deal of plodding thought, and here is the version, and the sequence, I think we should stick to. It sounds complicated but it’s really very simple. The key is your certainty that Doll no longer knows the status or whereabouts of Dieter Kruger.

Now memorise this.

In the letter brought to me by Humilia, you asked me to do you a service, and said you could be found on Fridays at the Summer Huts. At our meeting there, I agreed to make inquiries about DK – reluctantly, because (of course) I resent anything that distracts me from my sacred mission at the Buna-Werke.

This second communication, the one you hold in your hand, is my report. Doll knows about the first letter, and it’s likely he knows about the second (again, we were observed). If he starts to question you – then be quick to open up, freely. And when he asks you what I discovered, you should simply announce that you’re not going to tell him. I will now inquire about DK (and so no doubt will your husband).

From here on we cannot meet, except communally – and no more letters. I have to say that I am deeply uneasy about what you propose for your side of it: your plan, so to speak, for the home front. As things stand, Doll will have no reason to strike out at you. But if your plan works, he won’t need a reason. Still, you seem resolved, and this decision is of course yours to make.

Let me now say something from the heart.

The letter continued for another two pages.

Her plan, it should be noted, was to do everything in her power to hasten the psychological collapse of the Commandant.

‘Take that look off your face, Golo. It’s absolutely nauseating.’

‘. . . What?’

‘The meek smile. Like an altruistic schoolboy . . . I see. So there’s been some kind of breakthrough, has there. And that’s why you’ve clammed up on me.’

I was in the kitchen making breakfast. Boris had spent the night (under a heap of old curtains on the sitting-room floor) and was now crouched down rebuilding the fire, using crunched-up pages of
The Racial Observer
and
The Stormer
. Outside, the fourth week of uncompromising October weather, with low, heavy clouds, constant rain and wet mist, and, underfoot, a boundless latrine of purplish brown slime.

Referring to
The Stormer
(an illiterate hate-sheet run by Julius Streicher, the child-molesting Gauleiter of Franconia), Boris said, ‘Why do you take this wank mag? Old Yid Drugs Teen Blonde. Officers aren’t supposed to read
The Stormer
in camp. It’s the Old Boozer’s personal directive. He’s that refined. Well, Golo?’

‘. . . Don’t worry, I won’t be laying a finger on her here. Ruled out.’

‘The Hotel Zotar and all that?’

‘Ruled out.’ I asked him how many eggs he wanted and how he wanted them (six, fried). ‘Nothing clandestine. I’ll only be seeing her in company.’

‘You’ll be seeing her on the ninth of course.’

‘The ninth? Oh yeah, the ninth. Why do they go on about November the ninth?’

‘I know. You’d think they’d murder anyone who dared mention it.’

‘I know. But they go on about it . . . Doll and the Poles, Boris.’

‘Bunker 3?’ Boris laughed happily and said, ‘Oh, Golo, the state of old fat-arse. Christ. With his wall-eyed hangover. And his fluttering hands.’

‘Not everyone’s brave, my dear.’

‘True, Golo. Excellent coffee, this. Mm, the Poles. Well, even I thought it was a bit on the sporty side. Telling three hundred circus strongmen they’re about to be topped.’

‘Still, you assumed . . .’

‘That Mobius had done the necessary. Which he had. But Doll. We mustn’t be mean, Golo. Let’s just say Doll was beholden to his brown trousers.’

‘And everyone could tell.’

‘He gave out a whimper and sort of waggled his arms in the air. Like this. Mobius went,
Commandant!
And Doll’s breath smelled of sick.’

‘Anyway.’ I refilled our cups, adding Boris’s three sugars and stirring them in. ‘Anyway, you went ahead with it.’

‘They were Home Army. It was the first sensible order I’d had in months . . . Mm, they certainly knew how to die. Chest out, head up.’

We ate in silence.

‘Oh, stop it, Golo. That look.’

I said, ‘Indulge your old friend. I won’t do it often. Most of the time I’m in agony.’

‘About what? The waiting? About what?’

‘Being here. This is . . . This is no place for delicate feelings, Boris.’ Yes, I thought. I used to be numb; now I’m raw. ‘Being here.’

‘Mm. Here.’

After some thought I said, ‘I’m going to take a vow of silence on Hannah. But before I do I just want you to . . . I’m in love.’

Boris’s shoulders went slack. ‘Oh,
no
.’

I gathered the plates and the cutlery. ‘All right, I don’t disagree, brother. It’s hard to imagine it ending well. Now. That’ll do.’

We sat smoking in the other room. The illustrious mouser, Maksik (newly arrived), his undercarriage an inch from the floor, was nosing round the low kitchen shelves; abruptly he sat and, in incensed irritation, scratched his ear with a violent hindpaw.