The Zone of Interest (9 page)

Outside, the night was lined with something, something I had heard about but had yet to experience: the Silesian talent for winter. And it was September the third. I stood buttoning up my greatcoat, on the steps, under the coach-house lantern.

In Doll’s cluttered office all the men except Burckl and me talked shoutily about the wonders being worked by the Japanese in the Pacific (victories in Malaya, Burma, British Borneo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Manila, the Bataan Peninsula, the Solomon Islands, Sumatra, Korea, and West China) and lauded the generalship of Iida Shojiro, of Homma Masahuru, of Imamura Hitoshi, of Itagaki Seishiro. There was a quieter interlude, during which it was calmly agreed that the sclerotic empires and dithering democracies of the West were no match for the ascendant racial autocracies of the Axis. Things got noisier again while they discussed the forthcoming invasions of Turkey, Persia, India, Australia, and (of all places) Brazil . . .

At one point I felt Doll’s eyes on me. There was an unexpected silence and he said,

‘Looks a bit like Heydrich, nicht? There’s a resemblance.’

‘You’re not the first to see it, sir.’ Apart from Goring, who might have been a burgher out of
Buddenbrooks
, and apart from the ex-champagne salesman and aristocrat-impersonator, Ribbentrop (whom London society, during his absenteeist ambassadorship there, nicknamed the Wandering Aryan), Reinhard Heydrich was the only prominent Nazi who could pass for a pure Teuton, all the others being the usual Baltic/Alpine/Danubian mishmash. ‘Heydrich was in and out of the courts defending his ancestry,’ I said. ‘But all those rumours, Hauptsturmfuhrer, are quite baseless.’

Doll smiled. ‘Well let’s hope Thomsen here avoids the early death of the Protektor.’ He raised his voice, saying, ‘Winston Churchill is about to resign. He’s no choice. In favour of Eden, who’s less Jew-ridden. You know, when the Wehrmacht marches back victoriously from the Volga, and from what used to be Moscow and Leningrad, they’ll be disarmed by the SS at the border. From now on we’ll—’

The telephone rang. The telephone rang at eleven o’clock: a prearranged call from one of the Sekretar’s secretaries in Berlin (an obliging old girlfriend of mine). The room remained obediently still as I talked and listened.

‘Thank you, Miss Delmotte. Tell the Reichsleiter I understand.’ I rang off. ‘I’m sorry, gentlemen. You’ll have to excuse me. A courier is about to alight on my apartment in the Old Town. I must go and receive him.’

‘No rest for the wicked,’ said Doll.

‘None,’ I said with a bow.

In the sitting room Norberte Uhl lay like a toppled scarecrow on the sofa, attended to by Amalasand Burckl. Alisz Seisser sat rigid and staring on a low wooden bench, attended to by Trudel Zulz and Romhilde Seedig. Hannah Doll had just gone upstairs, and wasn’t expected to return. To no one in particular I said that I would see myself out, which I did, pausing for a minute or two in the passage at the foot of the stairs. The distant thunder of bathwater being run; the very slightly adhesive sound of bare feet; the scandalised creaking of the floorboards.

Out in the front garden I turned and looked up. I was hoping to see a naked or near-naked Hannah through the upstairs window, gazing down at me with parted lips (and inhaling huskily on a Davidoff). In this hope I was disappointed. Only the drawn curtains of fur or hide, and the trusting rectangular light from within. So I started out.

The arc lamps moved past in hundred-yard intervals. Huge black flies furred their grillwork. Yes, and a bat skittered past the creamy lens of the moon. From the Officers’ Club, I supposed, borne by the devious acoustics of the Kat Zet, came the sound of a popular ballad, ‘Say So Long Softly When We Part’. But I also detected footsteps behind me, and I turned again.

Almost hourly, here, you felt you were living in the grounds of a vast yet bursting madhouse. This was such a moment. A child of indeterminate sex in a floor-length nightgown was walking fast towards me – yes, fast, much too fast, they all moved much too fast.

The small shape strutted into the light. It was Humilia.

‘There,’ she said and handed me a blue envelope. ‘From Madam.’

Then she too turned, and walked quickly away.

Much have I struggled . . . I can no longer . . . Now I must . . . Sometimes a woman . . . My breasts ache when I . . . Meet me in the . . . I’ll come to you in your . . .

I walked for twenty minutes with such imaginings in my mind – past the outer boundary of the Zone of Interest, then through the empty lanes of the Old Town until I reached the square with its grey statue and the iron bench under the curving lamp post. There I sat and read.

‘Guess what she went and did,’ said Captain Eltz. ‘Esther.’

Boris had let himself in (with his own key) and was pacing the modest length of my sitting room, with a cigarette in one hand but no alcoholic glassful in the other. He was sober and restless and intent.

‘You know the postcard? Is she out of her mind?’

‘Wait. What?’

‘All that stuff about the nice food and the cleanliness and the bathtubs. She didn’t write down any of that.’ With indignation (at the size and directness of Esther’s transgression) Boris went on, ‘She said we were a load of lying murderers! She elaborated on it too. A load of thieving rats and witches and he-goats. Of vampires and graverobbers.’

‘And this went through the Postzensurstelle.’

‘Of course it did. In an envelope with both our names on it. What does she think? That I’d just drop it in a mailbox?’

‘So she’s back shovelling Scheisse with a mortar board.’

‘
No
, Golo. This is a political
crime
. Sabotage.’ Boris leaned forward. ‘When she came to the Kat Zet she said something to herself. She told me this. She said to herself,
I don’t
like
it here, and I’m
not
going to die here
. . . And
this
is how she behaves.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘They’ve slung her in Bunker 11. My first thought was – I’ve got to get her some food and water. Tonight. But now I think it’ll do her good. A couple of days in there. She’s got to learn.’

‘Have a drink, Boris.’

‘I will.’

‘Schnapps? What do they do to them in Bunker 11?’

‘Thanks. Nothing. That’s the point. Mobius puts it this way: we just let nature take its course. And you wouldn’t want to get in the way of nature, would you. Two weeks is the average if they’re young.’ He looked up. ‘You seem despondent, Golo. Did Hannah chuck?’

‘No no. Go on. Esther. How do we get her out?’

And I made the necessary effort, and tried to interest myself in mere matters of life and death.

2. DOLL: THE PROJEKT

Speaking quite honestly, I’m a trifle peeved about my black eyes.

Not that I mind the actual injury, needless to say. My record speaks for itself, I venture to assert, with regard to matters of physical resilience. On the Iraqi front in the last war (where, as a 17-year-old, and the youngest NCO in the entire Imperial Army, I was quite naturally barking out orders to men twice my age), I fought all day, all night, and, ja, again all day, with my left kneecap blown clean off and my face and scalp raked by shrapnel – and I still had the strength, come that 2nd dawn, to screw my bayonet into the guts of the English and Indian stragglers in the pillbox we finally overran.

It was at the hospital in Wilhelma (a German settlement off the road between Jerusalem and Jaffa), whilst recovering from 3 bullet wounds sustained in the 2nd Battle of the Jordan, that I fell under the ‘magic spell’ of amatory dalliance, with a fellow patient, the willowy Waltraut. Waltraut was being treated for various psychological complaints, chiefly depression; and I like to think that our glazed meldings helped seal the rifts in her mind, as surely as they closed the great gouges in the small of my back. Today, my memories of that time are predominantly recollections of
sounds
. And what a contrast they make – on the one hand, the grunting and retching of hand-to-hand combat, and on the other the billing and cooing (often accompanied by actual birdsong, in some grove or orchard) of young love! I’m a romantic. For myself there has to be romance.

No, the trouble with the black eyes is that they seriously detract from my aura of infallible authority. And I don’t just mean in the command centre or on the ramp or down at the pits. The day of the accident I hosted a brilliant dinner party for the Buna people here at my attractive villa, and for long periods I could scarcely keep countenance – I felt like a pirate or a clown in a pantomime, or a koala bear, or a raccoon. Early on I became completely mesmerised by my reflection in the soup tureen: a diagonal smear of pink with two ripe plums wobbling beneath the brow. Zulz and Uhl, I felt sure, were smirking at one another, and even Romhilde Seedig seemed to be suppressing a titter. With the commencement of general conversation, however, I revived, leading the talk with all my customary assurance (and putting Mr Angelus Thomsen squarely in his place).

Now – if I’m like that in my own home, amongst colleagues and acquaintances and their lady wives, how would I comport myself with people who really matter? What if Gruppenfuhrer Blobel were to return? What if Oberfuhrer Benzler of the Reich Central Security Office should make a sudden tour of inspection? What if, heaven forbid, we received another visit from the Reichsfuhrer-SS? Why, I don’t think I could even hold my head up in the company of the little Fahrkartenkontrolleur, Obersturmbannfuhrer Eichmann . . .

It was solely the fault of that bloody old fool of a gardener. Picture, if you will, a Sunday morning of flawless weather. I am at table in our pretty breakfast room, and in excellent fettle, after a strenuous albeit inconclusive ‘session’ with my better half. I ate the breakfast fondly prepared by Humilia (who was out at some blighted tabernacle in the Old Town). And after polishing off my 5 sausages (and draining as many mugs of capital coffee), I got up and headed for the French windows, fancying a thoughtful smoke in the garden.

Bohdan, with his back to me and a shovel over his shoulder, was on the path, stupidly staring at the tortoise as it gnawed on a cob of lettuce. And when I stepped from grass to gravel, he turned with a kind of spastic suddenness; the shovel’s thick blade described a swift half-circle in the air and struck me full on the bridge of my nose.

Hannah, when she eventually came downstairs, herself bathed the site of the contusion in cold water, and gently held the slab of raw meat to my brow with her warm Fingerspitzen . . .

And now, a whole week having passed, my eyes are the colour of a sick frog – a lurid yellowy green.

‘Impossible,’ said Prufer (very typically).

I sighed and said, ‘The order comes from Gruppenfuhrer Blobel, which means it comes from the Reichsfuhrer-SS. Understand, Haupsturmfuhrer?’

‘It’s impossible, Sturmbannfuhrer. It can’t be done.’

Prufer, preposterously, is my Lagerfuhrer, and thus my number 2. Wolfram Prufer, young (barely 30), vapidly handsome (with a round, toneless face), quite bereft of initiative, and, in general, a desperate sluggard. Some people claim that the Zone of Interest is a dumping ground for 2nd-rate blunderers. And I would agree (if it didn’t tend to reflect badly on myself). I said,

‘Excuse me, but I fail to recognise the word
impossible
, Prufer. It’s not in the SS lexicon. We rise above the objective conditions.’

‘But what’s the point, mein Kommandant?’

‘What’s the point? It’s politics, Prufer. We’re covering our tracks. We’ve even got to grind the ashes. In bone mills, nicht?’

‘Sorry, sir, but I ask again. What’s the point? It’ll only matter if we lose, which we won’t. When we win, which we will, it won’t matter at all.’

I must admit that the same thought had occurred to myself. ‘It’ll still matter a
bit
when we win,’ I reasoned. ‘You have to take the long view, Prufer. Awkward customers asking questions and poking about.’

‘The point still escapes me, Kommandant. I mean, when we win, we’re supposed to be doing a lot more of this kind of thing, aren’t we? The Gypsies and the Slavs and so on.’

‘Mm. That’s what I thought.’

‘Then why’re we getting all namby-pamby about it now?’ Prufer scratched his head. ‘How many pieces are there, Kommandant? Do we even have a vague idea?’

‘No. But there’s lots.’ I stood up and started pacing the floor. ‘You know, Blobel’s responsible for cleaning up the whole territory. Ach, he keeps nagging me for Sonders. And the rate he gets through them. I said,
Why d’you have to dispose of
all
your Sonders after
every
Aktion? Spin them out a bit, can’t you? They’re not going anywhere.
And does he listen?’ I regained my chair. ‘All right, Hauptsturmfuhrer. Taste this.’

‘What is it?’

‘What’s it look like? Water. Do you drink the water here?’

‘No fear, Sturmbannfuhrer. I drink the bottled stuff.’