The Zone of Interest (26 page)

Hannah said, ‘Where does Willi work again?’

‘The Ministry of Public Enlightenment,’ I said moodily.

Kurt
: What are you saying? Does that really happen?

Willi
: Well. It does happen.

Kurt
: But why? What’s the point? A little lady – part of the war effort? It’s totally unnecessary!

Willi
: No, Kurt. It is necessary. Why? To instil the fear of defeat. The fear of punishment.

Kurt
: But what’s that got to do with the Jews?

Willi
: Mensch, don’t you understand? The fear of retribution! Every German is implicated in the largest mass murder that has ever—’

‘
Feindlicher Rundfunk
,’ I burst out. ‘Enemy radio! Zweifel am Sieg! Doubting victory! Feindlicher Rundfunk!’

‘. . . Oh, don’t blame Kurt and Willi,’ she said with exaggerated torpor. ‘Poor Willi. Poor
Kurt
. Listen. They’re ordering more brandy. They’re feeling rather sick.’

Now Hannah did something that quite dismayed me. She stood; she unfurled her sash; and she shrugged off the kimono’s sapphirine folds – revealing her Unterkleid! From Kehle to Oberschenkel her body seemed to be coated in icing sugar, and I could clearly see the outlines of her Bruste, the concavity of her Bauchnabel, and the triangle of her Geschlechtsorgane . . .

‘Do you know’, she said, plucking at the collar, ‘which dead woman you stole this from?’ She smoothed it with her hands, up and down. ‘Do you know?’

Hannah took up a hairbrush and went at it with arrogant eyes.

‘You’re . . . you’re mad,’ I said, and backed my way out.

And whilst we’re on the subject of wives, what price ‘Pani Szmul’?

To locate a Jew in a Polish ghetto one casually turns to the Uberwachungsstelle zur Bekampfung des Schleichhandels und der Preiswucherei im judischen Wohnbezirk. This used to be a subdivision of the Jewish Order Police, recruited from the pre-war underworld, and responsible to the Gestapo; but natural selection has done its work, and the spies, narks, pimps, and skankers are now running the whole show. Criminalising the gendarmerie:
that’s
how you ‘squeeze’ a subject people, and gain access to its hoarded wealth!

Casually, limply, I turn to the Control Office to Combat Black-Marketeering and Profiteering in the Jewish Residential District – ja, die Uberwachungsstelle zur Bekampfung des Schleichhandels und der Preiswucherei im judischen Wohnbezirk.

It wouldn’t have looked so scandalous in Berlin, ne? In the days when that profoundly unGerman contraption, ‘democracy’, was falling apart. Or in Munich, nicht? A blushful beauty of 18, as dew-bright as the fresh cornflower in her buttonhole, trailing after a burly ‘intellectual’ virtually twice her age?

All right in Berlin or Munich, no? But there they were in mannerly Rosenheim, with its parks, its cobblestones, its onion domes. Everybody could tell that friend Kruger was making a swine of himself with his childish ward; and it pains me to say that Hannah, for her part, was no less brazen – ach, she could barely keep her tongue out of his ear (her fingers fidgety, her colour hectic, her thighs glueyly asquirm). It was also common knowledge that they’d taken adjacent rooms at an especially disreputable boarding house in Bergerstrasse . . .

My protective instincts were sorely roused. Hannah and myself were by this juncture on the most cordial terms; friend Kruger was, as they say, a busy man, and she was nearly always ‘on’ for a ramble in the public gardens or a glass of tea in 1 of the many elegant cafés. I think she knew she was doing wrong, and was drawn to my air of probity and calm. Na, 1 thing was clear: she was a middle-class girl with no taste at all for the radical. This was hardly a meeting of
minds
– nicht? On a number of occasions I quietly ascended the stairs to her attic, and became aware of the most alarming ululations – they were
not
the modest coos, trills, and warbles of healthy and hygienic Geschlechtlichkeit! They were sounds of excruciation and woe; indeed, they took me back to that time in the parsonage, when I was 13, and had to listen all night to Auntie Tini giving birth to the twins.

You could feel it. These dark acts. The growing void in the moral order.

It seems, these days, these nights, that whenever I go to the ramp something dreadful happens – I mean to me personally.

‘Wear that,’ she said.

At 1st it seemed to be 1 of the softer transports. A smooth debouchment, an inductionary address (from Dr Rauke), a brisk selection, and a short drive through the forest, the docile evacuees, with a leaderless but competent team of Sonders discreetly murmuring among them . . . I had taken up position in the hallway between the outer door and the undressing room when a prematurely white-haired Judin approached me with a smile of polite inquiry; and I even inclined my head to attend to her question. In a spasm of animal violence she reached up and smeared something on my face – on my upper lip, my nose, the orbit of my left eye.

‘Wear that,’ she said.

Lice.

Of course I went straight to Baldemar Zulz.

‘This could’ve been serious. You’re lucky, my Kommandant.’

I frowned up at him (they had me lying flat on a table under a strong light). ‘Fleckfieber?’ I asked.

‘Mm. But I know a Kamchatka louse when I see 1,’ he said, showing me the filthy little crab in the pinch of his tweezers, ‘and this critter’s a European.’

‘Na. The transport was Dutch. From Westerbork, ne?’

‘You know, Paul, the Haftlinge, they’ll pluck the nits off a Russian corpse and slip them under the collars of our uniforms. In the Laundry Block. Exanthematic typhus. Very nasty.’

‘Yech, that’s what did for Untersturmfuhrer Kranefuss. Prufer’s meant to be dealing with it. Some hope there I don’t think.’

Zulz said, ‘Off with your togs. Fold them tidily and remember where they are.’

‘What for?’

He tensed as if ready to pounce. ‘. . . Disinfection!’

So we had a crazed cackle about that.

‘Paul, come on. Just to be on the safe side.’

Well then. A considerable relief all round!

‘Wear that,’ she said.

*

Ever since I fixed things so that Alisz Seisser got shifted to the facility in the basement of the MAB, it has been possible for she and myself to spend some precious hours together.

When my hard day’s toil is done (you know, I’m sometimes in my office till well past midnight?), I consistently look in on little Alisz, bearing a ‘snack’, more often than not – a prune or a cube of cheese – which she then appreciatively devours!

And what do we do? Why, we simply talk. About the past, about the springtime of our lives and the experiences we share – the arbours and spinneys of our beloved German countryside. She amuses me with tales of her summer frolics on the golden sands of Pomerania, whilst I divert her with stories about the Haardt Forest and my coal-black gelding, Jonti – his flowing mane, his glittering eyes!

Of course, the arrangement is not ideal.

‘But you’re safe here, Alisz. At least until it passes – this mania for selections.
Wild
selections, and not just in the Ka Be. I can’t be everywhere, you know.’

Her respectful gratitude knows no bounds.

‘Oh, I trust you, Paul.’

There is never the slightest question of any impropriety. I regard her with the veneration due to the simple widow of a fallen comrade. More than this, I see Alisz as a kind of charge, or protégée, whom I must unswervingly guide.

She sits, rather primly, on her narrow cot with her hands folded on her lap. I myself prefer to pace, or swivel, in the little tract between the footstool and the chemical toilet.

‘. . . I sometimes miss the open air, Paul.’

‘Ah, but there it is, Alisz. Protective custody, nicht?’

Yech, the ‘Gruppe’, the weekly meetings in the cellar of the seedy Selbstbedienungsrestaurant, the interminable Dialektik!
The conversion of product into value, the superstructure above the economic base, the law of increasing immiseration . . .
Originally a theocrat, then a monarchist, then a militarist, I succumbed to the spell of Marxism – till I set
Das Kapital
aside and turned, rather, to an intensive study of
Mein Kampf
. Enlightenment was not slow in coming. Page 382: ‘Marxism is only the transference, by the Jew, Karl Marx, of a philosophical attitude . . . into the form of a definite political creed . . . And all this in the service of his race . . . Marxism itself systematically plans to hand the world over to the Jews.’ Well, you can’t argue with logic of that calibre. No:
quod erat demonstrandum
. Next question, please.

. . . You know, there was a sort of tumbling gracelessness about Hannah in those days; she had not yet acquired the poise and bearing she would gain as Frau Paul Doll, first lady of the KL. And let’s be honest – there’s nothing more sick-making, in the end, than adolescent adoration: the awful way they lay themselves open, and the puppy fat, and the hot breath. I simply waited for friend Kruger to tire of her, which he eventually did (he moved out and moved on). But then what happens?

Picture, if you will, the communal lounge at the boarding house – the doilies, the cuckoo clock, the fat dachshund dozing (and silently breaking wind) in the corner. All very ‘gemutlich’, ne? Lovelorn Hannah and myself are seated at a little round table, and steady progress is being made by my tactful commiserations, my
petits cadeaux
, my avuncular hand-patting, und so weiter. And then the bell would sound, and, jawohl, friend Kruger would stick his snout round the parlour door. He didn’t even have to snap his fingers. Hannah would lead the way upstairs for another of their groaning, shuddering trysts. This happened time after time after time.

Ah, but then fate came to my aid. On a certain night, after 1 of his sweat-soaked reunions with that fundamentally innocent child, our Marxist lion was surprised on Bergerstrasse by a crew of gaunt lads from the Sturmabteilung (Cell H). And the crunchy beating he received was so severe that his people from the KP and the Workers’ Trust smuggled him off to Berlin. Our paths didn’t cross for another 4½ years. And when I next saw him, friend Kruger was face down on the floor of a punishment cell in Dachau. A moment to relish to the full, no? I went on in, with a couple of comrades, and I locked the door behind us.

That was in March 1933, when it all came good, after the Reichstag Fire. After the Reichstag Fire, do you see, we took the simple step of illegalising all opposition. And the autobahn to autocracy lay clear.

Who started the Reichstag Fire?

Was it started by the fuddled lone-wolf Dutch Kommunist, van der Lubbe, with his matches and faggots and his lavish ID? No. Was it started by us? No. The Reichstag Fire was started by destiny, by providence.

On the night of February 27 the Reichstag was torched by Gott!

Hannah asked me, ‘Who’s that wiry man I see coming down the slope every day?’

‘You must mean Szmul.’

‘He’s got the saddest face I’ve ever seen. And he never meets my eye. Never.’

‘Yes, well, he’s the Klempnerkommandofuhrer. Drains.’

SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Eichmann is on the whole boyishly meticulous with his choo-choos and his chuff-chuffs; it does sometimes eventuate, however, that transports (every Kommandant’s nightmare)
overlap
. And so it was in the small hours of this morning.

My hands are still aflutter and I have just washed down 3 Phanodorms.

I insisted on wielding the bullhorn, and it has to be conceded that things soon . . . But I simply don’t accept that I’m getting worse at deceiving the evacuees. What’s happened is that
they’ve
got better at not being taken in. And (come to think of it) it’s easy to see why. Yes, we should have anticipated this difficulty – but you can only live and learn. The people in the target communities are drawing their own conclusions from an obvious and irrefutable truth: Nobody Has Ever Come Back. Thus they’ve put 2 and 2 together, and we have lost the ‘element of surprise’ . . . All right, I’ll phrase that slightly differently: in the matter of what awaits these ‘settlers’ in the eastern territories, we no longer have the advantage of being unbelievable. The decisive asset of being
beyond belief
.

This afternoon the first draft collapsed pretty well immediately – they were barely out of the cattle cars. Professor Zulz and his chaps hadn’t even begun the selection; there were 800 men, women, and children slewing around in the slush; and it began. A questing whimper that seems to seek and grope and probe, then the first real scream, then a whiplash, then a bodyblow, then a gunshot.

90 minutes later a kind of order had re-established itself: the 600-odd survivors had been variously bashed, flogged, and goosed by bayonet into the Red Cross vans and the ambulances. I stood on the platform, my arms akimbo, wondering just how long it was going to take to clean up
this
little lot. Somebody yelled and pointed with a truncheon. And there, 4 hours early, was the appalling apparition of Sonderzug 319, tacking its way up the slope towards us.

I will not soon forget what followed – though in fact Lady Luck, that day, smiled on we Praetorians. At 1st I thought it was 1 of those cases where Protective Custody intermeshed with another campaign for the furtherance of national hygiene, namely T4, or the Euthanasia Drive. The 2nd train was carrying a light contingent of ‘incurables’: in this case, the organically insane. But these weren’t defective Germans: they were defective Jews – a load of nutters from the mental homes of Utrecht. Assisted by their pretty young nurses, the evacuees processed quite equably along the corpse-strewn, blood-drenched siding, with its dozen pyramids of sodden bags. To the usual sound effects were added peals of horrifying laughter.

2 old men with silver curls – twins – caught and held my eye. Their smiles expressing broad satisfaction with all they saw, they resembled a pair of hardy and even quite prosperous farmers strolling to a village fete. Up ahead a lanky, ponytailed teenager in a green canvas straitjacket tripped over a bundle of clothing and fell on her chin with a sickening snap. She rolled over and the stark white noodles of her legs kicked up and out. People looked on contentedly, and then applauded when Aufseherin Grese stepped in and yanked her up by the hair.