The Zone of Interest

  ‘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.’

  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 Blobe
l 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,