The Zone of Interest (22 page)

Walking reasonably steadily but unbelievably slowly, his stride somewhere between a parade march and a goose step, and with neck tipped back as if monitoring a distant aeroplane, Paul Doll came down the aisle between the two halves of the standing audience and climbed the little staircase to the low stage. It was minus fourteen Celsius, and snow, tinged brown by the pyre and the smokestacks, was purposefully falling. I looked to my right at Boris, and then to my more distant left at Hannah. We were all bundled up to the thickness of mattresses, like experienced tramps in a wintry northern town.

Doll jolted to a halt in front of the banner-draped podium. Behind him, ranged out over the boards, fourteen wreaths leaned against fourteen ‘urns’ (tar-blackened flowerpots), which weakly flickered and fumed. The Commandant extended his tubed lips and paused. And for a moment it really did seem as if he had gathered us there, that murky noon, to listen to him whistle . . . But now he reached into the folds of his fleeced greatcoat and wrenched out a typescript of inauspicious bulk. The grey sky went from oyster to mackerel. Doll looked out and said loudly,

‘Jawohl . . . Well might the firmament darken. Jawohl. Well might the heavens sob their burden to the ground. On this, the Reich Day of Mourning! . . . November the ninth, my friends. November the ninth.’

Although everyone knew that Doll was not wholly sober, he seemed, for now, to have dosed himself with some care. Those judicious shots of liquor had rendered him calorific (and deepened his voice); and his teeth had already stopped chattering. He now produced from a nook beneath the sloped wooden surface a large glass of colourless liquid; it gave off a faint vapour as he raised it to his mouth.

‘Yech, November the ninth. A holy day of threefold import for this – for this irresistible movement of ours . . . On November 9, 1918, 1918, the Jewish war profiteers, in their crowning swindle, effectively
auctioned off
our beloved fatherland to their co-religionists in Wall Street, in the Bank of England, and in the Bourse . . . On November 9, 1938, 1938, after the cowardly murder of our ambassador to Paris by a man with the interesting name of uh, “Herschel Grynszpan”? – Reichskristallnacht! Reichskristallnacht, when the German folk, after so many years of unbearable provocation, spontaneously rose up in their simple quest for justice . . . But I want to talk to you about November 9, 1923. 1923 – as we duly honour this, the Reich Day of Mourning.’

Boris nudged me with his padded elbow. November 9, 1923, saw the ridiculous debacle of the Pub Putsch in Bavaria. On that date, about nineteen hundred assorted tub-thumpers and layabouts, cranks and freebooters, embittered militiamen, power-mad ploughboys, disillusioned seminary students, and ruined storekeepers (all shapes and sizes, and of all ages, all armed and all in ill-fitting brown uniforms, and each of them paid two billion marks, which, on that particular day, equalled three dollars and four or five cents) gathered in and around the Burgerbraukeller, near the Odeonplatz in Munich. At the appointed hour, led by a triumvirate of eccentric celebrities (the de facto military dictator of 1916–18, Erich von Ludendorff, the Biggles-style Luftwaffe ace, Hermann Goring, and, in the van, the boss of the NSDAP, the fiery corporal from Austria), they dribbled out of the basement and began their advance on the Feldherrhalle. This was to be the first leg of the revolutionary March on Berlin.

‘Off they stepped,’ said Doll, ‘grave yet gay, iron-willed but easy-hearted, laughing but full of moist emotion as they shivered to the joyous cries of the crowd. Before them shone the inspiring example of Mussolini – and his triumphant march on Rome! Still joking, still singing – ja, even whilst they jeered and spat at the raised carbines of the Republican State Police! . . . A gunshot, a volley, a fusillade! General Ludendorff shouldered his way on, trembling with righteous fury. Goring fell, grievously wounded in the leg. And the Deliverer, the future Reichskanzler himself? Ach, despite his two broken arms he braved the flying bullets to carry a helpless child to safety! . . . And when the acrid smell of cordite at last dispersed, fourteen men, fourteen brothers, fourteen warrior-poets lay sprawled in the dust! . . . Fourteen widows. Fourteen widows, and three score fatherless bairns. Jawohl, that is what we are here to honour today. German sacrifice. They laid down their lives that we should have hope – hope of rebirth and the promise of a brighter morn.’

The brown snow had long been thinning and now quite suddenly and silently ceased. Doll looked up and smiled with gratitude at the sky. And then in the space of a few heartbeats he seemed to falter, to tire, to tire and age; he slumped forward and took the whole lectern roughly in his arms.

‘. . . Now I unfurl . . . this sacred banner – our very own Blood Flag.’ He held it up for all to see. ‘Symbolically stained – with Rotwein . . . Trans uh, transubstantiation. Like the Eucharist, nicht?’

Again I turned to my left – coming into disastrous contact with Hannah’s eyes. She resteadied her gaze forward with a mittened hand clamped to her nose. And for the next passage of time I urgently and strenuously contended with the pressure in my chest, trying not to follow Doll’s voice as it slewed and skidded on, about medals, signet rings, coats of arms, brooches, torches, chants, vows, oaths, rites, clans, crypts, shrines . . .

At last I straightened my neck. Doll, whose face now looked like a huge and unwashed strawberry, was coming to the end.

‘Can a man cry?’ he asked. ‘Oh, ja, ja! Ach, ever and anon he must! Ever and anon he cannot but keen . . . You see me wipe away my tears. Tears of grief. Tears of pride. As I kiss this flag, badged with the blood of our hallowed heroes . . . Now. You will soon be joining me . . . in renditions of “Das Horst Wessel Lied” and “Ich Hatt’ Einen Kameraden”. But yet firstly, however . . . there will be a three-minute silence for . . . each of our lost martyrs. For each of the
Old
Fighters, the
fallen
. Ach, at the going down of the sun, and again in the dawn, we will remember them. To the last, to the last, they endure.

‘One . . . Claus Schmitz.’

And after ten or twelve seconds it began – the diagonal blizzard of strafing hail.

There was then an instantly and maximally drunken lunch in the Officers’ Club, and I moved through it, after the first half-hour (by which point Doll was laid out flat on a deep settee), as if in a mellifluous dream of peace and freedom, and there was music from the gramophone and some people danced, and although she and I kept our distance we were, I felt, intensely and continuously aware of one another, and it was hard not to submit to pressures of a different kind, different pressures on the chest, hard not to laugh and also hard not to crumple at the naively ardent lovesongs (from sentimental operettas), ‘Wer Wird denn Weinen, Wenn Man Auseinandergeht?’ and ‘Sag’ zum Abschied leise Servus’.

‘Who Will Weep, As We Two Sunder?’. ‘Say So Long Softly When We Part’.

Ten days went by before Konrad Peters called again from Berlin.

‘Sorry, Thomsen, it’s going to take longer than I thought. The atmosphere around this case – it’s unusual. There’s a certain uh, opacity. And a settled silence.’

‘I was thinking,’ I said. ‘He couldn’t have been drafted, could he, sir? Have they begun emptying the prisons?’

‘Yes, but they’re not conscripting politicals. Only criminals. Your man would still be considered uh, unwurdig . . . I’ll keep at it. My guess is he’s a red triangle somewhere. Somewhere queer – you know, like Croatia.’

For reasons that might seem more transparent than they actually were, I was ill-disposed towards Dieter Kruger. I felt scorn for what he represented – and it was a scorn long shared by all Germans of non-dependent mind. He personified the national surrender of March 1933. Obedient Kremlinites like Kruger (who
always insisted
, said Hannah,
that the Social Democrats were as bad as the fascists
) saw to it that there would be no unity, and no potency, on the Left. The whole thing seemed to have been calibrated by malign yet artistic fingers. For years the Communists had done enough, and blustered enough (about their ‘readiness’), to lend a kind of legitimacy to their own immediate suppression; and after the Reichstag Fire and the passage, the next morning, of the Decree for the Protection of People and State, civil rights and the rule of law became things of the past. And what did the Communists do? They unclenched their raised fists, and limply waved goodbye.

But then, too, these thoughts led to other thoughts. For instance – why did I feel like the sick bird that couldn’t fly, that couldn’t rise?

Uncle Martin recently told me a story about Reinhard Heydrich – the blond paladin whose fate it was to be slowly killed by a car seat (the assassins’ grenade had forced leatherwork and horsehair into his diaphragm and spleen). One night, after a long session of solitary drinking, the Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia – ‘the Butcher of Prague’ – went upstairs and confronted his own reflection in the full-length bathroom mirror. He unholstered his revolver and fired two shots into the glass, saying,
At last I’ve got you, scum
. . .

The truth was that I had another reason to resent Dieter Kruger. Whatever else he might or might not have been (conceited, predatory, trust-abusing, heartless, wrong), he was capable of courage.

Hannah had loved him. And he was brave.

It could no longer be deferred. On the last day of November I stamped around the Yard at the Buna-Werke till I saw the thick shape of Captain Roland Bullard. I hung back and then lingeringly and watchfully followed him into one of the tool cabins between the Stalags. He had the components of a dismantled welding gun laid out on a pillowslip.

‘
Players
,’ I said. ‘
Senior Services. And – Woodbines.
’

‘
Woodbine! . . . They’re not the dearest, but they are the best. I take that very kindly, Mr Thomsen. Thank you.
’

‘
Rule Britannia. I made some research. Hark. “The nations not so blest as thee Must, in their turn, to tyrants fall, While thou shalt flourish great and free: The dread and envy of them all
.”’ I said, ‘
Do we understand?
’

He assessed me, he took me in for the second time, and his cuboid head inclined forward.

‘
Captain Bullard, I have been prying on you. Tomorrow I . . . Yesterday I saw your bending the blades of the cooling fan in the Polimerisations-Buro. And I liked it.
’

‘
You liked it?
’

‘
Yes. There are others as you?
’

‘
. . . There are. Twelve hundred others.
’

‘Now. For reasons that do not bother us, I am fed up completely of the Third Realm. They say they will last one thousand years. And we do not wish the buggers here till . . .’

‘
Till 2933. No. We don’t.
’

‘
You need information? I can be help?
’

‘
Certainly
.’

‘
Then do we understand?
’

He lit up a Woodbine and said, ‘
Hark. “Thee, haughty tyrants ne’er shall tame; All their attempts to bend thee down Will but arouse thy generous flame, But work their woe and thy renown.” Yes, Mr Thomsen. We understand.
’