The Zone of Interest (31 page)

‘Doll. He was a Communist too, wasn’t he? For a while.’

‘Never. Always a sound Nazi. You can say that for him. No, he was in the pay of the Browns. And he fingered Kruger to Cell H. The Knuckledusters . . . That Hannah – why’d she marry a little coon like him? Ooh, I could’ve done her some damage myself, back in the day. Marvellous figure. But her mouth. Her mouth’s too wide, don’t you think?’

‘It’s a very pretty mouth. Are you still seeing the tragedienne? Manja? Or is that off?’

‘No, it’s on. I want her to move in here. Between films at least. Gerda’s all for it – so long as I knock her up. I mean knock up Manja. As well as Gerda. Who wants ten for the Mutterkreuz. Come on, the lights. You do those ones over there.’

*

At five o’clock the next morning – on the last day of 1942 – Uncle Martin took his leave. Where was he going? First, to the mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden, by car; and thence to the field HQ in Rastenberg, East Prussia, by plane. From the Kehlsteinhaus to the Wolfsschanze – from the Eagle’s Nest to the Wolf’s Lair . . .

I said at breakfast, ‘No, I’ll be delighted to celebrate Silvester with you, my dear. But then alas I have to get back to town. Leaving early. Hans’ll give me a lift in the van. I’ve been entrusted with an urgent mission by the Reichsleiter.’

Gerda said abstractedly, ‘. . . I think Field Marshal Manstein’s Jewish. Don’t you? You can tell by the name . . . And after Berlin, Neffe?’

‘Back to Buna. The devil makes work for idle hands, Tante.’

‘What did you say?’ she asked, looking elsewhere, and as if expecting no answer.

Overnight it had rained, warmed, and begun to thaw. Now a sour yellow sun was playing on the eaves and the slopes of the rooftops. All the pipes were busy, sluicing, racing; it made me think of multitudes of stampeding mice. Gerda said,

‘Did Papi mention the war?’

‘Barely.’ I sipped tea and wiped my mouth. ‘Did he mention it to you?’

‘Barely. I don’t think the war especially interests him. Because it’s not his sphere.’

‘That’s true, Tante. You’re right. Buna doesn’t especially interest him either. Because it’s not his sphere. Buna – synthetic materiel, Tantchen.’

Rivulets of melting snow sparkled like bead curtains against the misty windowpanes. Somewhere a ledge of frozen slush flopped emphatically to the earth.

‘Why’s Buna important?’

‘Because it’ll win us autarky.’

‘That doesn’t sound very good.’

‘It’s not like anarchy, Tantchen. Autarky. We’ll be self-sufficient. And when the first five thousand tons of rubber roll out of the Werke, and when we’re converting coal to oil at a rate of seven hundred thousand tons a month, this war will take on a very different complexion, I can assure you of that.’

‘. . . Thank you, dearest. That’s given me heart. Thank you for saying that, Neffe.’

‘Is – is Uncle Martin especially interested in the Jews?’

‘Well he can’t very well not be, can he. And of course he’s very pro.’

‘Pro?’

‘Pro Endlosung of course. Wait,’ she said. ‘He
did
mention the war. He
did
mention the war.’ She frowned and said, ‘Apparently they now know why we underestimated the Red Army. They got to the bottom of it. Russia had a war of its own recently, didn’t it?’

‘You’re right as always, my love. The Winter War with Finland. Thirty-nine to forty.’

‘And they botched it, isn’t that right? Well they did that on purpose, Papi said. To lure us in. And another thing!’

‘What, Tante?’

‘Stalin was supposed to have killed half his officers. No?’

‘True again. The purges. Thirty-seven to thirty-eight. More than half. Probably seven-tenths.’

‘Well he didn’t really. That was just another Jewish lie. And we fell for it like the simple souls we are. They’re not dead. They’re alive.’

Just beyond the glass doors a ruptured drainpipe swung into view, drunkenly and loutishly spewing water, and then swung away again. Plump tears had gathered in Gerda’s eyes. The mice were racing and squeaking, tumbling over one another, going faster and faster.

‘They’re not dead, Neffe. The Judaeo-Bolsheviks. Neither disease nor filth will ever eradicate this scum. Why, dearest? Tell me. I’m not asking you why the Jews hate us. I’m asking you why they hate us so much. Why?’

‘I can’t think, Tantchen.’

‘. . . They’re not dead,’ she said hauntedly. ‘They’re all
alive
.’

On New Year’s Day, in my first-class carriage, ‘The Theory of the Cosmic Ice’ (a bulky dissertation by several hands) lay unattended on my lap. I looked out. First, the much-enlarged, seemingly interminable outskirts of Munich groaned by: untouched meadowland and woodland had now been replaced by foundries and factories, by pyramids of grit and gravel. We heard the city sirens, and the train crept into a tunnel and cowered there for over an hour. Then we picked up speed, and in harsh sunshine Germany was soon going past me like a torrent of earth tones, siennas, ambers, ochres . . .

The pitch of Uncle Martin’s laughter told me that Kruger was no longer breathing. And I naturally recalled that conversation with Konrad Peters.

Spirited away for special treatment. For
very
special treatment
.

Killed
.

Oh. At least
.

I needed to know the size of that
at least
.

It was difficult to be brave in the Third Germany. You had to be ready to die – and to die after preludial torture which, moreover, you had to withstand, naming no names. And that wasn’t all. In the occupied countries the lowest criminal could resist and then die like a martyr. Here, even the martyr died like the lowest criminal, in the kind of ignominy that a German would find peculiarly terrible to contemplate. And you left behind you nothing but a wake of fear.

In the occupied countries such a man would be an inspiration – but not in the Third Germany. Kruger’s mother and father, if he still had a mother and father, would not be talking of him, except between themselves and in whispers. His wife, if he had a wife, would remove his photograph from the mantelpiece. His children, if he had children, would be told to avert their faces from his memory.

So Dieter Kruger’s death served no one. No one except me.

2. DOLL: NIGHT LOGIC

It was back in November – November 9, the Reich Day of Mourning. I awoke, I came to, in the Officers’ Club. Hello, I thought, you must have nodded off, old boy. Must have taken 40 winks, no? The luncheon had long since come to an end, and that repast, embarked upon with a patriotic fervour much inflamed by my commemorative address, had clearly degenerated; around me, the dregs and leavings of a gangsters’ banquet – sicked-on serviettes, toppled bottles, dog-ends upright in the trifle; and, outside, the smudged dusk of Silesia. Dusk in November, dawn in February: that is the colour of the KL.

As I lay there, trying to free my tongue from the roof of my mouth, these questions came to me . . .

If what we’re doing is good, why does it smell so lancingly bad? On the ramp at night, why do we feel the ungainsayable need to get so brutishly drunk? Why did we make the meadow churn and spit? The flies as fat as blackberries, the vermin, the diseases, ach, scheusslich, schmierig – why? Why do rats fetch 5 bread rations per cob? Why did the lunatics, and only the lunatics, seem to like it here? Why, here, do conception and gestation promise not new life but certain death for both woman and child? Ach, why all der Dreck, der Sumpf, der Schleim? Why do we turn the snow brown? Why do we do that? Make the snow look like the shit of angels. Why do we do that?

The Reich Day of Mourning – back in
November
, last year, before Zhukov, before Alisz, before the new Hannah.

. . . There is a placard on the office wall that says,
My loyalty is my honour and my honour is my loyalty. Strive. Obey. JUST BELIEVE!
And I find it highly suggestive that our word for ideal obedience – Kadavergehorsam – has a corpse in it (which is doubly curious, because cadavers are the most refractory things on earth). The duteousness of the corpse. The conformity of the corpse. Here at the KL, in the cremas, in the pits:
they’re
dead. But then so are we, we who obey . . .

The questions I asked myself on the Reich Day of Mourning:
they must never recur
.

I must shut down a certain zone in my mind.

I must accept that we have mobilised the weapons, the wonder weapons, of darkness.

And I must take to my heart the potencies of death.

In any case, as we’ve always made clear, the Christian system of right and wrong, of good and bad, is 1 we categorically reject. Such values – relics of medieval barbarism – no longer apply. There are only positive outcomes and negative outcomes.

‘Now listen carefully. This is a matter of the gravest moment. I hope you understand that. Fraternising with a Haftling’s serious enough. But
Rassenschande
. . . Insult to the blood! A corporal might get away with a reprimand and a fine. But I’m the Kommandant. You realise, don’t you, that it’d be the end of my career?’

‘Oh, Paul . . .’

The cot, the footstool, the washbasin, the chemical toilet.

‘God have mercy on you if you tell anyone. Besides, it’ll just be my word against yours. And you’re a subhuman. Technically I mean.’

‘Then how come you did me without 1 of them Parisians on!’

‘. . . Because I ran out,’ I said broodingly. ‘Now watch it, my girl. Oy. Behave. Remember. Just your word against mine.’

‘But who else could it be?’

This stopped me short. Alisz had been in here for just over 3 months; and the custodial staff consisted of 2 buxom Aufseherinnen and 1 incredibly old Rottenfuhrer.

‘The end of your career,’ she snivelled. ‘What about the end of my life? You get storked up here and they go and bloody well—’

‘Not neccessarily, Alisz.’ I gave a brief lift of the chin. ‘Well. Crying won’t help you. Wha wha wha. Listen to her. Wha wha wha wha wha wha. Come on now, girl. I’m the Kommandant. I’ll think of
something
or other.’

‘Oh, Paul . . .’

I said, ‘Stop it. Stop it. You’re pregnant . . . Get
off
.’

Lately I have been applying my new mental attitude to a reconsideration of our war aims.

Objective number 1
. To acquire Lebensraum, or living space, or land empire.

Even if unquestioned supremacy eludes us, a compromise can doubtlessly be hammered out (and let’s ignore all that guff about ‘unconditional surrender’). We’ll probably have to give back France, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Belarus, Yugoslavia, and Greece, but with any luck they won’t mind if we hang on to Lithuania, say, the Sudetenland and the rest of the Czech entity, plus our half of Poland (I don’t think the matter of Austria will even come up).

So, objective number 1: mission accomplished!

‘Now Wolfram. That shemozzle in Block 33. Please explain.’

‘Well, Paul, there’d been a massive selection. And they crammed them all in Block 33. 2,500 of them.’

‘2,500 in 1 block? How long for?’

‘5 nights.’

‘Good God. Why the delay?’

‘No reason. They just didn’t get round to it.’

‘They let them out for roll call I assume?’

‘Naturally. There’s got to be
Zahlappell
, Paul. No, the trouble was they gave them some food. They don’t usually bother. And it was a great mistake.’

‘The food was?’

‘Yes. The Kapos intercepted it. All very predictable. They went off and swapped it for alcohol. Blah blah blah. But then they came back, Paul . . . And they messed with them. The Kapos messed with the prisoners.’

‘Mm. You see, that’s what comes of feather-bedding.
Food
, indeed. Whose bright idea was that?’

‘Probably Eikel.’

‘Na. How many Stucke did you say?’

‘19. Regrettable. And not to be tolerated. But it doesn’t really make much odds. They’d been selected anyway.’