The Zone of Interest (29 page)

When the light was thinning Major Lange led the boys to the pits and shot them one by one – and you could hear that. Towards the end he ran out of ammunition and used the butt of his pistol on their skulls. And you could hear that. But the boys, jockeying and jostling to be next in line, didn’t make a sound.

And after that, this.

‘She has black hair, your wife, with a white stripe down the middle. Like a skunk. Nicht?’

I shrug.

‘She is gainfully employed, your Shulamith. A skilled seamstress, she adorns Wehrmacht uniforms with swastikas. In Factory 104. At night she repairs to the attic above the bakery on Tlomackie Street. Not so, Sonder?’

I shrug.

‘She will be taken on May the first. A
good
date, that, Sonder – the third anniversary of the sealing’, he says, with his furry upper teeth on view, ‘of the Jewish slum. She will be taken on May the first and she will wend her way here. Are you impatient to see your Shulamith?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Well I’ll spare you. Soppy old fool that I am. I’ll have her killed that day in Łódź. May one. It will happen unless I countermand my order that morning. Understood?’

I say, ‘Sir.’

‘Tell me. Were you happy with your Shulamith? Was it a love whose month was ever May?’

I shrug.

‘Mm, I suppose you’d have to explain why, in her absence, you’ve rather gone downhill. Let yourself go a bit. Ach, there’s nothing worse than the contempt of a woman. Your one, Shulamith, she’s a big girl, isn’t she. Did Shulamith like you fucking her, Sonder?’

August 31, 1939, was a Thursday.

I walked home from school with my sons, in flawless and not quite serious sunshine. Then the family had a supper of chicken soup and brown bread. Friends and relatives looked in briefly, and everyone was asking the question, Had we mobilised too late? There was an atmosphere of great anxiety and even dread, but also feelings of solidarity and resilience (after all, we were the nation that, nineteen years earlier, had defeated the Red Army). There was also a long game of chess and the usual small talk, the usual smiles and glances, and that night in bed I defiantly embraced my wife. Six days later the flattened city was full of rotting horses.

When I went on that first transport, to Deutschland supposedly, expecting to find paid work, I took my sons with me – Chaim, fifteen, Schol, sixteen, both of them tall and broad like their mother.

They were among the silent boys.

And after all that, all this.

‘Fret not, Sonder. I’ll tell you who to kill.’

CHAPTER V. DEAD AND ALIVE

1. THOMSEN: PRIORITIES IN THE REICH

‘
NO, I LOVE
it here, Tantchen – it’s like a holiday from reality.’

‘Just plain old family life.’

‘Quite.’

There was Adolf, twelve (named after his godfather), Rudi, nine (named after his godfather, ex-Deputy Leader Rudolf Hess), and Heinie, seven (named after his godfather, Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler). There were also three daughters, Ilse (eleven), Irmgard (four), and Eva (two), and another boy, Hartmut (one). And Frau Bormann, that Christmas, had special news to announce: she was pregnant.

‘Which will make eight, Tante,’ I said as I followed her into the kitchen – the bare pine, the dressers, the kaleidoscopic crockery. ‘Are you going to have any more?’

‘Well I need ten. Then they give you the best medal. Anyway it’ll make nine, not eight. I’ve already got eight. There was Ehrengard.’

‘Indeed there was.’ I went on boldly (Gerda being Gerda), ‘Sorry, old thing, but does Ehrengard count? Can I help with that?’

‘Oh yes.’ With gloved hands and quivering forearms Gerda hoisted a tureen the size of a bidet from oven to hob. ‘Oh yes, the dead ones count. They don’t have to be alive. When Hartmut was born and I applied for the gold Mutterkreuz – what were they going to say?
No gold Mutterkreuz for you. One of them died so you’ve only got seven
?’

I stretched in my chair and said, ‘Now I remember. When you moved from silver to gold, Tantchen. With Hartmut. It was a proud day. Here, can I do anything?’

‘Stop being ridiculous, Neffe. Stay where you are. A nice glass of – what’s this? – Trockenbeerenauslese. There. Have a rollmop. What are you giving them?’

‘The children? Cold cash as usual. Strictly calibrated by age.’

‘You always give them too much, Neffe. It goes to their heads.’

‘. . . I was thinking, dear, that there might be a slight difficulty if your tenth is a boy,’ I said (such babies were automatically called Adolf, and assigned the same godfather). ‘You’ll have two Adolfs.’

‘That’s all right. We’re already calling Adolf Kronzi. In case.’

‘Very wise. By the way I’m sorry I called Rudi Rudi. I mean I’m sorry I called Helmut Rudi.’

Rudi’s name was changed, by court order, after Rudolf Hess, the noted mesmerist and clairvoyant (and number three in the Reich), flew alone to Scotland in May 1941, hoping to negotiate a truce with somebody he’d vaguely heard of called the Duke of Hamilton.

‘Don’t apologise,’ said Gerda. ‘I call Rudi Rudi all the time. Call Helmut Rudi, I mean. Oh and remember. Don’t call Ilse Ilse. Ilse’s now called Eike. Named for Frau Hess, so Ilse’s now
Eike
.’

While she laid a table for seven and readied two highchairs Aunt Gerda told anecdotes about various members of her domestic staff – the (scatter-brained) governess, the (shifty) gardener, the (sluttish) housemaid, and the (thieving) nanny. Then she went still and grew thoughtful.

‘They don’t have to be alive,’ she said. ‘The dead ones count.’

Meanwhile, Gerda’s husband, the Director of the Party Chancellery, the mastermind of the Wilhelmstrasse, was on his way to join us here at the old family home at Pullach in southern Bavaria. And where was he coming from? From the mountain retreat at the Obersalzberg in the Bavarian alps – from the official residence known as Berchtesgaden, or the Berghof, or the Kehlsteinhaus. Bards and dreamers called it the Eagle’s Nest . . .

With sudden indignation Gerda said, ‘Of course they count. Especially these days. Nobody would ever
get
to ten if they didn’t.’ She laughed scoffingly. ‘Of course the dead ones count.’

It was mid morning. Uncle Martin stood bent over the hall table, sorting and stacking the vast accumulations of his mail.

‘You’ve a good memory for the skirted staff on the third floor of the Sicherheitsdienst, haven’t you, Neffe? Knowing you. You dog. I need some help.’

‘How may I oblige?’

‘There’s a girl there I . . . Here, carry some of this, Golo. Put your arms out. I’ll load you up.’

With the world war now turning on its hinges, with the geohistorical future of Germany in question, and with the very existence of National Socialism itself under threat, the Reichsleiter had much to attend to.

‘Priorities, Neffe. First things first. See,’ he said forgivingly, ‘the Chief loves his vegetable soups. You could almost say he’s become
dependent
on his vegetable soups. And so might you, Golo, if you’d sworn off all meat, fish, and fowl. Well then. It transpires that his dietary cook at the Berghof is tricked out with a Jewish grandmother. And you can’t have someone of that sort cooking for the Chief.’

‘Obviously not.’

‘I fired her. And what happens? He rescinds it – and she’s back!’

‘It’s the vegetable soups, Onkel. Does his uh, does his companion ever cook?’

‘Fraulein Braun? No. All she ever does is pick the movies. And take photographs.’

‘Those two, Onkel, does he, do they actually . . .?’

‘Good question.’ He quickly held an envelope up to the light. ‘They certainly disappear together . . . You know, Golo, the Chief won’t take his clothes off even for his personal physician? Plus he’s fanatical about cleanliness. And so’s she. And when it comes to the bedroom, you have to . . . you can’t . . . you have to roll up your . . .’

‘Of course you do, Onkel.’

‘Steady it. Use your chin . . . Consider the matter from this angle, Neffe. The Chief went on from a Viennese dosshouse to become the king of Europe. It’s fatuous, it’s
frivolous
to expect him to be as other men are. I’d love some actual details – but who can I ask? . . . Gerda.’

‘Yes, Papi,’ she said, moving nearer as she passed by.

‘I want an explanation.’

‘Yes, Papi?’ she said, backing away.

In physical outline, the Bormanns resembled the Dolls. Gerda, my age, and a grand-looking woman, with many shades of painterly beauty in her face, was just over six foot in her clogs. And Uncle Martin was an even more compressed and therefore widened version of the Commandant – but darkly and sleekly attractive in his way, with a playful air and stimulating eyes. There was something juicy about his mouth; it was always ripening for a smile. Indicatively, too, Martin never seemed at all daunted by Gerda’s height; he strode along as if she made him taller, and this despite his proud paunch and his desk-job backside. He said,

‘The Christmas tree.’

‘They ganged up on me, Papi. They went behind my back to Hans.’

‘Gerda, I thought we saw eye to eye on religion at least. One drop of that gets into them and they’re poisoned for life.’

‘Exactly. I blame Charlemagne. For bringing it to Germany.’

‘Don’t blame Charlemagne. Blame Hans. Never again. Clear?’

‘Yes, Papi,’ we heard her whisper as we moved on.

Uncle Martin’s workroom, in Pullach: the ranks of gunmetal filing cabinets, the index-card consoles, the acres of sectioned table space, the stocky strongbox. I again thought of Doll, and Doll’s office and study – those two shameful poems of irresolution and neglect.

‘Onkel. What are you doing about Speer? The man’s a menace.’ For once I spoke feelingly: the youthful Minister of Armaments and War Production, with his startling simplifications (rationalising, standardising), was capable, as I then saw it, of postponing defeat by at least a year. ‘Why haven’t you acted?’

‘It’s too soon,’ said Uncle Martin, lighting a cigarette. ‘The Cripple’ – Goebbels (der Kruppel) – ‘is up Speer’s rump for now. And he has the ear of the Transvestite’ – Goring (der Transvestit). ‘But Speer will soon find out how weak he is against the Party. Which is code for me.’

Also smoking, I lay sprawled on a leather sofa to his right. I said,

‘Do you know why the Chief’s so sweet on him, Onkel? I’ll tell you. It’s not because he – I don’t know – streamlined the production of prismatic glass. No, he looks at Speer and he thinks, I would’ve been like that, I would have been
him
– an architect, a free creator – if I hadn’t been summoned by providence.’

Martin’s swivel chair had slowly turned towards me. ‘Well?’

‘Just make him seem like any other grasping satrap, Onkel. You know, creating difficulties, whining about resources. The bloom’ll soon go off him.’

‘Give it time . . . All right, Golo. Buna.’

As we entered the drawing room for midday drinks Uncle Martin was saying, ‘I sympathise, son. It’s enough to drive you wild. I get the same endless hand-wringing about the POWs and the foreign labour.’

Rudi/Helmut, Ilse/Eike, Adolf/Kronzi, Heinie, and Eva were sitting round the tree (hung with lit candles, cookies, and apples), quietly gloating over their presents. Irmgard was at the piano; she sounded the highest key, using the mute.

‘Stop that, Irma! Ach, Golo, they’re saying, No corporal punishment! How can you get any work out of them otherwise?’

‘How? How? But it’s all right, Onkel, now Burckl’s gone. No more wet-nursing. We’re back to the tried and trusted.’

‘There are too many of them as it is. If we’re not careful, you know, we’ll win the war militarily and lose it racially. Dutch gin?’ Uncle Martin gave a snort and said, ‘The Chief made me laugh the other day. He’d just heard that someone was trying to ban contraception in the eastern territories. It must have been the Masturbator’ – Rosenberg (der Masturbator). ‘And the Chief said,
Anyone tries that and I’ll personally shoot them dead!
He was in a right taking. So to cheer him up I told him something I’d heard about the ghetto in Litzmannstadt. There, for their own use, they’re making condoms out of babies’ pacifiers. And he goes,
That’s the way round it’s
supposed
to be!
Salut!’

‘Salut. Or as the English say,
Cheers
.’

‘. . . Feast your eyes, lad. Ach. A good quiverful of kids. A crackling log fire. Outside, the snow. Over the soil. Over the Erde. And the helpmeet in the kitchen, never happier than when going about her appointed tasks. And those two guards by the gate. With cigarettes up their sleeves. Listen to this, Golo,’ he said. ‘It’s a good one.’

Uncle Martin was losing his hair along the usual male lines, but his peaked forelock had something artistic in its shape, and still glistened. He ran his knuckles over it.

‘Late October,’ he said, without lowering his voice. ‘I’d looked in at the SD to pick up some paperwork from Schneidhuber. I needed mimeographs, and I collared one of the girls from the pool. She’s standing there looking over my shoulder as I mark up the pages. And on impulse, Golo, I slipped my left hand between her calves. She didn’t even blink . . . Up and up I went, past the knees. Up and up. Up and up. And when I reached my destination, Neffe, she just – she just
smiled
. . . So I got my thumb and jammed it—’