The Zone of Interest (8 page)

‘And was our distinguished guest duly charmed?’ asked Professor Zulz (Zulz, an honorary SS colonel, had the sinister agelessness peculiar to certain medical men). ‘Was he tickled?’

‘Oh, the Reichsfuhrer was tickled pink. Why, he fairly beamed – he clapped his hands! And his entire entourage, you know, they, they clapped their hands. All for this Snowball. Who looked rather alarmed but just sat there begging!’

Of course with the ladies present the gentlemen were trying not to talk about the war effort (and also trying not to talk about its local component – the progress of the Buna-Werke). During this time I never met Hannah’s eye exactly, but our roundabout glances occasionally swished past one another in the candlelight . . . Elaborating on the arts of natural husbandry, the talk moved on – herbal remedies, the crossbreeding of vegetables, Mendelism, the controversial teachings of the Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko.

‘It should be more widely known’, said Professor Zulz, ‘that the Reichsfuhrer is highly distinguished in the field of ethnology. I’m referring to his work at the Ahnenerbe.’

‘Certainly,’ said Doll. ‘He’s assembled whole teams of anthropologists and archaeologists.’

‘Runologists, heraldists, and what have you.’

‘Expeditions to Mesopotamia, the Andes, Tibet.’

‘Expertise,’ said Zulz. ‘Brainpower. Which is why we’re the masters of Europe. Applied logic – that’s all it is. There’s no great mystery to it. Do you know, I wonder if there’s ever been a leadership, a chain of command, as intellectually evolved as our own.’

‘IQ,’ said Doll. ‘Mental capacity. There’s no great mystery to it.’

‘Yesterday morning I was clearing my desk,’ Zulz went on, ‘and I came across two memoranda clipped together. Hear this. Of the twenty-five leaders of the Einsatzgruppen in Poland and the USSR, who did some warm work I can tell you – fifteen doctorates. Now look at the Conference of State Secretaries in January. Of the fifteen attendees?
Eight
doctorates.’

‘What was this conference?’ asked Suitbert Seedig.

‘In Berlin,’ said Captain Uhl. ‘At Wannsee. To finalise—’

‘To finalise the proposed evacuations’, said Doll, raising his chin and tubing his lips, ‘to the liberated territories in the east.’

‘Mm. “Over the Bug”,’ said Drogo Uhl with a snort.

‘Eight doctorates,’ said Professor Zulz. ‘All right, Heydrich, rest in peace, convened and chaired. But him apart these were secondary or even tertiary functionaries. And yet. Eight doctorates. Strength in depth.
That’s
how you get the optimal decisions.’

‘Who was there?’ said Doll with a glance at his fingernails. ‘Heydrich. But who else? Lange. Gestapo Muller. Eichmann – the distinguished stationmaster. With his clipboard and his whistle.’

‘That’s exactly my point, Paul. Intellectual strength in depth. First-rate decisions all the way down.’

‘My dear Baldemar, nothing was “decided” at Wannsee. They merely rubber-stamped a decision taken months earlier. And taken at the most exalted level.’

It was time to introduce and emphasise my theme. Under the political system that here obtained, everyone had soon got used to the idea that where secrecy began, power began. Now,
power corrupts
: this was not a metaphor. But
power attracts
, luckily (for me), was not a metaphor either; and I had derived much sexual advantage from my proximity to power. In wartime, women especially felt the gravitational pull of it; they would be needing all their friends and admirers, all their protectors. I said, slightly teasingly,

‘Major. May I tell you one or two things that are not widely known?’

Doll gave a little upward bob on his buttocks and said, ‘Oh yes please.’

‘Thank you. The conference was a kind of experiment or pilot run. And the chairman foresaw very serious difficulties. But it was a great and unexpected success. When it was over, Heydrich, Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich, had a cigar and a glass of brandy. In the middle of the day. Heydrich, who only ever drank alone. A brandy in front of the fire. With the little ticket-puncher Eichmann curled up at his feet.’

‘. . . Were you there?’

I shrugged limply. I also leaned forward and, in an experimental spirit, placed my hand between Alisz Seisser’s knees; and her knees clenched and her hand found mine, and I made a further discovery. In addition to her other troubles, Alisz was mortally terrified. Her whole body quaked with it. Doll said,

‘Were you there? Or was it too low-level for you?’ He chewed and swallowed. ‘Doubtlessly you get all this from your Uncle Martin.’ The two black eyes toured the table. ‘Bormann,’ he said in a deeper voice. ‘The Reichsleiter . . . I knew your Uncle Martin, Thomsen. We were muckers in the time of struggle.’

This was a surprise to me, but I said, ‘Yes, sir. He often mentions you and the friendship you both enjoyed.’

‘Give him my best. And uh, do please go on.’

‘Where were we? Heydrich wanted to test the waters. To see—’

‘If you mean the Lake it’s bloody freezing.’

‘Suitbert, please,’ said Doll. ‘Herr Thomsen.’

‘To test the waters for administrative resistance. Resistance to what might seem to be a rather ambitious endeavour. To apply our conclusive racial strategy through the whole of Europe.’

‘And?’

‘As I said, unexpectedly smooth. There was no resistance. None.’

Zulz said, ‘What’s unexpected about that?’

‘Well, think of the scope, Professor. Spain, England, Portugal, Ireland. And the numbers involved. Ten million. Perhaps twelve.’

Now the lolling shape on my left, Norberte Uhl, dropped her fork on her plate and said with a splutter, ‘They’re only
Jews
.’

You could hear the gustation and ingestion of the civilians (Burckl methodically slurping gravy from his spoon, Seedig rinsing his mouth with Nuits-St-Georges). Everyone else had stopped chewing; and I felt I was not alone in becoming intensely conscious of Drogo Uhl, whose head now slowly described a figure eight as his mouth widened. He turned with bared upper teeth to Zulz and said,

‘No, let’s not fly off the handle, eh? Let’s be indulgent. The woman understands nothing.
Only
Jews?’

‘“Only” Jews,’ Doll sadly concurred (he was folding his napkin with a sagacious air). ‘A somewhat puzzling remark, don’t you think, Professor, given that their encirclement of the Reich is now complete?’

‘Very puzzling indeed.’

‘We didn’t undertake this lightly, madam. We know what we’re about, I believe.’

Zulz said, ‘Yes. You see, they’re especially dangerous, Mrs Uhl, because they’ve long understood a core biological principle. Racial purity equals racial might.’

‘You won’t catch them interbreeding,’ said Doll. ‘Oh no. They understood this long before we did.’

‘That’s what makes them so dire a foe,’ said Uhl. ‘And the cruelty. My God. Pardon me, ladies, you shouldn’t have to hear it, but . . .’

‘They flay our wounded.’

‘They strafe our field hospitals.’

‘They torpedo our lifeboats.’

‘They . . .’

I looked at Hannah. Her lips were compressed, and she was frowning down at her hands – her long-fingered hands, which slowly combined and twined and intertwined, as if being sluiced under a tap.

‘It’s an age-old planetary racket,’ said Doll. ‘And we’ve got the proof. We’ve got the minutes!’

‘
The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion
,’ said Uhl grimly.

I said, ‘Ah now, Commandant. One gathers that some people have their doubts about the
Protocols
.’

‘Oh do they,’ said Doll. ‘Well I hereby refer them to
Mein Kampf
, which makes the point quite brilliantly. I can’t remember it word for word, but this is the gist. Uh . . .
The
Times
of London says again and again that the document is a fabrication. That alone is proof of its authenticity . . . Devastating, nicht? Absolutely unanswerable.’

‘Yes – put that in your pipe and smoke it!’ said Zulz.

‘They’re bloodsuckers,’ said Zulz’s wife, Trudel, crinkling her nose. ‘They’re like bedbugs.’

Hannah said, ‘May I speak?’

Doll turned on her his highwayman’s stare.

‘Well, it’s a basic point,’ she said. ‘There’s no avoiding it. I mean the talent for deception. And the avarice. A child could see it.’ She breathed in and went on, ‘They promise you the earth, all smiles, they lead you down the garden path. And then they strip you of everything you have.’

Did I imagine it? This would have been quite standard talk from an SS Hausfrau; but the words seemed to equivocate in the candlelight.

‘. . . That’s all undeniable, Hannah,’ said Zulz, looking puzzled. Then his face cleared. ‘Now, however, we’re giving the Jew a taste of his own medicine.’

‘Now the boot is on the other foot,’ said Uhl.

‘Now we’re paying him back in his own coin,’ said Doll. ‘And he’s laughing on the other side of his face. No, Mrs Uhl. We didn’t undertake this lightly. We know what we’re about, I believe.’

While the salads and the cheese and the fruit and the cakes and the coffee and the port and the schnapps were being steered round the table, Hannah paid her third visit to the upper floor.

‘They’re going down like ninepins now,’ Doll was saying. ‘It’s almost a shame to take the money.’ He held up a bulbous hand and ticked them off – ‘Sevastopol. Voronezh. Kharkov. Rostov.’

‘Yes,’ said Uhl, ‘and wait till we’ve punched our way across the Volga. We’ve bombed the stuffing out of Stalingrad. And now it’s there for the taking.’

‘You chaps’, said Doll (referring to Seedig, Burckl, and me), ‘might as well pack up and go home. All right, we’ll still need your rubber. But we won’t need your fuel. Not with the oilfields of the Caucasus at our mercy. Well? Did you spank their bottoms blue?’

Doll’s question was directed at his wife, who was ducking in under the lintel and moving out of the shadows into the wriggling light. She sat and said,

‘They’re asleep.’

‘God and all his angels be praised! What a load of bloody
nonsense
.’ Doll’s head slewed back round and he said, ‘Judaeo-Bolshevism will be smashed by the end of the year. Then it’ll be the turn of the Americans.’

‘Their armed forces are
pathetic
,’ said Uhl. ‘Sixteen divisions. About the same as Bulgaria. How many B-17 bombers? Nineteen. It’s a joke.’

‘They’ve got trucks running around on manoeuvres,’ said Zulz, ‘with
Tank
painted on their sides.’

‘America will make no difference,’ said Uhl. ‘Nil. We won’t even feel its thumb on the scale.’

Frithuric Burckl, who had barely spoken, now said quietly, ‘That was very far from being our experience in the Great War. Once that economy gets going . . .’

I said, ‘Oh, incidentally. Did you know this, Major? There was another conference in Berlin on that same day in January. Chaired by Fritz Todt. Armaments. About restructuring the economy. About preparing for the long haul.’

‘Defatismus!’ laughed Doll. ‘Wehrkraftzersetzung!’

‘Not a bit of it, sir,’ I laughed back. ‘The German army. The German army is like a force of nature – irresistible. But it’s got to be equipped and supplied. The difficulty is manpower.’

‘As they empty the factories,’ said Burckl, ‘and put the lot of them in uniform.’ He tubbily folded his arms and crossed his legs. ‘In all the campaigns of ’40 we lost a hundred thousand. In the Ostland, now, we’re losing thirty thousand a month.’

I said, ‘Sixty. Thirty’s the official figure. It’s sixty. One must be a realist. National Socialism is applied logic. There’s no great mystery to it, as you say. So, my Commandant, may I make a controversial suggestion?’

‘All right. Let’s hear it.’

‘We have an untapped source of labour of twenty million. Here in the Reich.’

‘Where?’

‘Sitting on either side of you, sir. Women. Womanpower.’

‘Impossible,’ said Doll contentedly. ‘Women and war? It flies in the face of our most cherished convictions.’

Zulz, Uhl, and Seedig murmured their agreement.

I said, ‘I know. But everybody else does it. The Anglo-Saxons do it. The Russians do it.’

‘All the more reason why we shouldn’t,’ said Doll. ‘You aren’t going to turn my wife into some sweaty Olga digging ditches.’

‘They do more than dig ditches, Major. The battery, the anti-aircraft battery that held up Hube’s panzers to the north of Stalingrad, and fought to the death, they were all women. Students, girls . . .’ I gave Alisz’s thigh a final clasp, then raised my arms and laughed, saying, ‘I’m being very reckless. And terribly indiscreet. I’m sorry, everyone. My dear old Uncle Martin likes chatting on the telephone, and by the end of the day it’s coming out of my ears. Or out of my mouth. Well, what about it, ladies?’

‘What about what?’ said Doll.

‘Joining up.’

Doll stood. ‘Don’t answer. Time to spirit him away. Can’t have this “intellectual” corrupting the womenfolk! Now. In my house it’s the gents who withdraw after dinner. Not to the Salon but to my lowly Arbeitzimmer. Where there will be cognac and cigars and
serious
talk of war. Sirs – if you would.’