The Zone of Interest (3 page)

‘No – I wouldn’t put you to the bother.’

‘It’s no bother for me. Humilia?’

We now stood in the rosy glow of the main room, Mrs Doll standing with her back to the chimney piece, Mr Thomsen poised before the central window and gazing out over the perimeter watchtowers and the bits and pieces of the Old Town in the middle distance.

‘Charming. This is charming. Tell me,’ I said with a regretful smile. ‘Can you keep a secret?’

Her gaze steadied. Seen up close, she was more southern, more Latin in colouring; and her eyes were an unpatriotic dark brown, like moist caramel, with a viscid glisten. She said,

‘Well I
can
keep a secret. When I want to.’

‘Oh good. The thing is,’ I said, quite untruthfully, ‘the thing is I’m very interested in interiors, in furnishings and design. You can see why I wouldn’t want that to get about. Not very manly.’

‘No, I suppose not.’

‘So was it your idea – the marble surfaces?’

My hope was to distract her and also to set her in motion. Now Hannah Doll talked, gestured, moved from window to window; and I had the chance to assimilate. Yes, she was certainly built on a stupendous scale: a vast enterprise of aesthetic coordination. And the head, the span of the mouth, the might of the teeth and jaws, the supple finish of her cheeks – square-headed but shapely, with the bones curving upward and outward. I said,

‘And the covered veranda?’

‘It was either that or the—’

Humilia came through the open doors with the tray and the stone pitcher, and two platefuls of pastries and biscuits.

‘Thank you, Humilia dear.’

When we were again alone I said mildly, ‘Your maid, Mrs Doll. Is she by any chance a Witness?’

Hannah held back till some domestic vibration, undetectable by me, freed her to go on, not quite in a whisper, ‘Yes, she is. I don’t understand them. She has a religious face, don’t you think?’

‘Very much so.’ Humilia’s face was markedly indeterminate, indeterminate as to sex and indeterminate as to age (an unharmonious blend of female and male, of young and old); yet, under the solid quiff of her cress-like hair, she beamed with a terrible self-sufficiency. ‘It’s the rimless glasses.’

‘How old would you say she is?’

‘Uh – thirty-five?’

‘She’s fifty. I think she looks like that because she thinks she’s never going to die.’

‘Mm. Well, that would be very cheering.’

‘And it’s all so simple.’ She bent and poured, and we took our seats, Hannah on the quilted sofa, I on a rustic wooden chair. ‘All she’s got to do is sign a document, and that’s the end of it. She’s free.’

‘Mm. Just
abjure
, as they say.’

‘Yes, but you know . . . Humilia couldn’t be more devoted to my two girls. And she’s got a child of her own. A boy of twelve. Who’s in state care. And all she’s got to do is sign a form and she can go and get him. And she doesn’t. She won’t.’

‘It’s curious, isn’t it. I’m told they’re meant to
like
suffering.’ And I remembered Boris’s description of a Witness on the flogging post; but I would not be regaling Hannah with it – the way the Witness pleaded for more. ‘It gratifies their faith.’

‘Imagine.’

‘They love it.’

Seven o’clock was now nearing, and the room’s blushful light suddenly dropped and settled . . . I had had many remarkable successes at this phase of the day, many startling successes, when the dusk, as yet unopposed by lamp or lantern, seems to confer an impalpable licence – rumours of dream-strange possibilities. Would it be so unwelcome, really, if I quietly joined her on the sofa and, after some murmured compliments, took her hand, and (depending on how that went) gently smoothed my lips against the base of her neck? Would it?

‘My husband,’ she said – and stopped as if to listen.

The words hung in the air and for a moment I was jarred by this reminder: the ever more bewildering fact that her husband was the Commandant. But I endeavoured to go on looking serious and respectful. She said,

‘My husband thinks we have much to learn from them.’

‘From the Witnesses? What?’

‘Oh, you know,’ she said neutrally, almost sleepily. ‘Strength of belief. Unshakeable belief.’

‘The virtues of zeal.’

‘That’s what we’re all meant to have, isn’t it?’

I sat back and said, ‘One can see why your husband admires their zealotry. But what about their pacifism?’

‘No. Obviously.’ In her numbed voice she went on, ‘Humilia won’t clean his uniform. Or polish his boots. He doesn’t like that.’

‘No. I bet he doesn’t.’

At this point I was registering how thoroughly the invocation of the Commandant had lowered the tone of this very promising and indeed mildly enchanting encounter. So I softly clapped my hands and said,

‘Your garden, Mrs Doll. Could we? I’m afraid I have another rather shameful confession to make. I adore flowers.’

It was a space divided in two: on the right, a willow tree, partly screening the low outbuildings and the little network of paths and avenues where, no doubt, the daughters loved to play and hide; to the left, the rich beds, the striped lawn, the white fence – and, beyond, the Monopoly Building on its sandy rise, and beyond that the first pink smears of sunset.

‘A paradise. Such gorgeous tulips.’

‘They’re poppies,’ she said.

‘Poppies, of course. What are those ones over there?’

After a few more minutes of this, Mrs Doll, having not yet smiled in my company, gave a laugh of euphonious surprise and said,

‘You know
nothing
about flowers, do you? You don’t even . . . You know nothing about flowers.’

‘I
do
know something about flowers,’ I said, perhaps dangerously emboldened. ‘And it’s something not known to many men. Why do women love flowers so?’

‘Go on then.’

‘All right. Flowers make women feel beautiful. When I present a woman with a plush bouquet, I know it will make her feel beautiful.’

‘. . . Who told you that?’

‘My mother. God rest her.’

‘Well she was right. You feel like a film star. For days on end.’

Dizzily I said, ‘And this is to the credit of both of you. To the credit of flowers and to the credit of womankind.’

And Hannah asked me, ‘Can
you
keep a secret?’

‘Most assuredly.’

‘Come.’

There was, I believed, a hidden world that ran alongside the world we knew; it existed
in potentia
; to gain admission to it, you had to pass through the veil or film of the customary, and
act
. With a hurrying gait Hannah Doll led me down the cindery path to the greenhouse, and the light was holding, and would it be so strange, really, to urge her on inside and to lean into her and gather in my dropped hands the white folds of her dress? Would it? Here? Where everything was allowed?

She opened the half-glass door and, not quite entering, leaned over and rummaged in a flowerpot on a low shelf . . . To tell the truth, in my amatory transactions I hadn’t had a decent thought in my head for seven or eight years (earlier, I was something of a romantic. But I let that go). And as I watched Hannah curve her body forward, with her tensed rump and one mighty leg thrown up and out behind her for balance, I said to myself: This would be a
big
fuck. A
big
fuck: that was what I said to myself.

Now righting her body, she faced me and opened her palm. Revealing what? A crumpled packet of Davidoffs: a packet of five. There were three left.

‘Do you want one?’

‘I don’t smoke cigarettes,’ I said, and produced from my pockets an expensive lighter and a tin of Swiss cheroots. Moving nearer, I scraped the flint and raised the flame, protecting it from the breeze with my hand . . .

This little ritual was of high socio-sexual signifignance – for we dwelt in a land, she and I, where it amounted to an act of illicit collusion. In bars and restaurants, in hotels, railway stations, et cetera, you saw printed signs saying Women Asked Not To Use Tobacco; and in the streets it was incumbent on men of a certain type – many of them smokers – to upbraid wayward women and dash the cigarette from their fingers or even from their lips. She said,

‘I know I shouldn’t.’

‘Don’t listen to them, Mrs Doll. Heed our poet.
You shall abstain, shall abstain. That is the eternal song
.’

‘I find it helps a bit’, she said, ‘with the smell.’

That last word was still on her tongue when we heard something, something borne on the wind . . . It was a helpless, quavering chord, a fugal harmony of human horror and dismay. We stood quite still with our eyes swelling in our heads. I could feel my body clench itself for more and greater alarums. But then came a shrill silence, like a mosquito whirring in your ear, followed, half a minute later, by the hesitantly swerving upswell of violins.

There seemed to be no such thing as speech. We smoked on, with soundless inhalations.

Hannah placed the two butts in an empty bag of seeds which she then buried in the lidless rubbish barrel.

‘What’s your favourite pudding?’

‘Um. Semolina,’ I said.

‘Semolina? Semolina’s
ghastly
. What about trifle?’

‘Trifle has its points.’

‘Which would you rather be, be blind or deaf?’

‘Blind, Paulette,’ I said.

‘Blind? Blind’s
much
worse. Deaf!’

‘Blind, Sybil.’ I said. ‘Everyone feels sorry for blind people. But everyone
hates
deaf people.’

I reckoned I had done pretty well with the girls, on two counts – by producing several little sachets of French sweets and, more saliently, by dissimulating my surprise when told that they were twins. Being non-identical, Sybil and Paulette were just a pair of sisters born at the same time; but they looked not even distantly related, Sybil taking after her mother while Paulette, several inches shorter, helplessly fulfilled the grim promise of her forename.

‘Mummy,’ said Paulette, ‘what was that dreadful noise?’

‘Oh, just some people fooling about. Pretending it’s Walpurgis Night and trying to scare each other.’

‘Mummy,’ said Sybil, ‘why does Daddy always know whether I’ve cleaned my teeth?’

‘What?’

‘He’s always right. I ask him how and he says,
Daddy knows everything
. But how does he know?’

‘He’s just teasing you. Humilia, it’s a Friday but let’s get their bath going.’

‘Oh, Mummy. Can we have ten minutes with Bohdan and Torquil and Dov?’

‘Five minutes. Say goodnight to Mr Thomsen.’

Bohdan was the Polish gardener (old, tall, and of course very lean), Torquil was the pet tortoise, and Dov, it seemed, was Bohdan’s teenage helper. Under the swathes of the willow tree – the crouching twins, Bohdan, another helper (a local girl called Bronislawa), Dov, and tiny Humilia, the Witness . . .

As we looked on Hannah said, ‘He was a professor of zoology, Bohdan. In Cracow. Just think. He used to be there. And now he’s here.’

‘Mm. Mrs Doll, how often do you come to the Old Town?’

‘Oh. Most weekdays. Humilia sometimes does it, but I usually take them to school and back.’

‘My rooms there, I’m trying to improve them, and I’ve run out of ideas. It’s probably just a question of drapery. I was wondering if you might be able to look in one day and see what you thought.’

Profile to profile. Now face to face.

She folded her arms and said, ‘And how do you imagine that might be arranged?’

‘There’s not much to arrange, is there? Your husband would never know.’ I went this far because my hour with Hannah had wholly convinced me that somebody like her could have no fondness, none, for somebody like him. ‘Would you consider it?’

She stared at me long enough to see my smile begin to curdle.

‘No. Mr Thomsen, that’s a very reckless suggestion . . . And you don’t understand. Even if you think you do.’ She stepped back. ‘Let yourself in through the door there if you still want to wait. Go on. You can read Wednesday’s
Observer
.’

‘Thank you. Thank you for your hospitality, Hannah.’

‘It’s nothing, Mr Thomsen.’

‘I’ll be seeing you, won’t I, Mrs Doll, on Sunday week? The Commandant was kind enough to ask me to attend.’

She folded her arms and said, ‘Then I suppose I will be seeing you. So long.’

‘So long.’