The Zone of Interest (36 page)

‘Good, Onkel. Good. I knew you wouldn’t just sit there, sir, and be cheated out of what is rightfully yours.’

A little later, when I mentioned the time of my train, the Sekretar buzzed the car pool and announced that he would accompany me to the Ostbahnhof. In the courtyard I said,

‘This door. Incredibly heavy.’

‘Armour-plated, Golo. Chief’s orders.’

‘Better safe than sorry, eh Onkel?’

‘Get in . . . See? A limousine that feels almost cramped. That’s the price of power. So how was your New Year’s Eve?’

‘It was very nice. Tantchen and I sat in front of the fire till ten past twelve. Then we drank a toast to your health and sought our beds. How was yours?’

The crouched outriders sped forward to liberate the road ahead; we sailed through the crossings against the light; and then the bikes surged past us once again. Uncle Martin shook his head, as if in disbelief, saying,

‘Ten past twelve? Can you believe, Golo, I sat up till five in the morning. With the Chief. Three and three-quarter hours we had together. Have you ever seen him up close?’

‘Of course, Onkel, but just the once. At your wedding.’ That was in 1929 – when Gerda and I were both on the brink of our third decade. And the leader of the NSDAP looked so much like a pale, pouchy, and cruelly overworked head waiter that every civilian there, I felt, was trying very hard not to hand him a tip. ‘Such charisma. I would never dare imagine any kind of uh, tête-à-tête.’

‘You know, don’t you, for years people were willing to give their eyesight for five
minutes
alone with the Chief? And I get nearly four hours. Just him and me. In the Wolf’s Lair.’

‘So romantic, Onkel.’

He laughed and said, ‘It’s a funny thing. When I uh, renewed my acquaintance with Krista Groos, for whom many thanks, I felt the same excitement. Not that I . . . Nothing of that kind. Just the same
level
of elation. Have you noticed, Golo, that redheads smell stronger?’

For a quarter of an hour Uncle Martin talked of his doings with Krista Groos. Whenever I looked out through the tinted windows I instinctively expected to see a stream of raised fists and rancorous faces. But no. Women, women, women, of every age, and busy, busy, busy, not with the old Berlin busyness (getting and spending), just busy living, trying to buy an envelope, a pair of shoelaces, a toothbrush, a tube of glue, a button. All their husbands, brothers, sons, and fathers were hundreds or perhaps thousands of miles away; and at least a million of them were already dead.

‘I told you she was famous,’ I said as the car pulled up behind the Poland Station.

‘Justly celebrated, Golo. Justly celebrated. Mm, I’ve got you here early for a reason. Before you go I’m going to give you a little treat. The strange tale of Dieter Kruger. I shouldn’t, of course. But it can’t matter now.’

‘Oh you are a sport, Onkel.’

‘. . . On the night before his execution, we went on a little pilgrimage to Kruger’s cell. Me and a few mates. And you’ll never guess what we did.’

As the Sekretar was telling his story I wound down the window to taste the air. Yes, it was true. Like the Reichskanzler (much feared in this respect by all interlocutors, even Onkel), the city suffered from halitosis. Berlin had bad breath. This was because the food and the drink were being prepared, processed, and quite possibly invented by IG Farben (and Krupp, Siemens, Henkel, Flick, and the rest). Chemical bread, chemical sugar, chemical sausage, chemical beer, chemical wine. And what were the sequelae? Gases, botulism, scrofula, and boils. Where could you turn when even the soap and the toothpaste reeked? Yellow-eyed women were breaking wind openly now, but that was only half of it. They were farting through their mouths.

‘On his bare chest!’ concluded Uncle Martin with his juiciest smile. ‘On his bare chest. Don’t you think it’s a scream?’

‘That
is
hilarious, Onkel,’ I said, feeling faint. ‘As you promised – National Socialism at its most mordant.’

‘Priceless. Priceless. God how we laughed.’ He looked at his watch and went quiet for a moment. ‘Bloody awful place, the Wolfsschanze. It’s almost like a pocket KZ, except the walls are five metres thick. But the Chief – ach, the Chief’s cooking up a nasty surprise for our friends in the east. Keep an eye on the Kursk salient. When the ground hardens. Operation Citadel, Neffe. You just keep your eye on the salient at Kursk.’

‘I shall. Well, Onkel. It goes without saying that I’m eternally in your debt. Give my warmest love to Tantchen.’

He frowned and said, ‘Your Hannah. I have no objection to the scale of her. On the contrary. Why d’you think I married Fraulein Gerda Buch? But her lips, Golo – Hannah’s lips. They’re too wide. They go all the way round to her ears.’

My shoulders hunched. ‘It’s a very pretty mouth.’

‘Mm. Well I suppose it looks all right’, he said, ‘if you’ve got your cock in it. A joy as always, dear Golo. Take excellent care.’

Boris had gone to war with a full heart, and I too was gravid with emotion as I prepared to set out for my own front line in the east.

Express trains to and from Poland were never crowded – because Poles weren’t allowed on express trains. Or on any other trains, without special warrants, or on any trams, or on any buses. They were also banned from theatres, concerts, exhibitions, cinemas, museums, and libraries, and forbidden to own or use cameras, radios, musical instruments, gramophones, bicycles, boots, leather briefcases, and school textbooks. On top of that, any ethnic German could kill a Pole whenever he liked. As National Socialism saw it, Poles were of animal status, but they weren’t insects or bacteria, like the Russian POWs, the Jews, and now also the Roma and Sinti – the Alisz Seissers of this world.

So I had a compartment to myself and two berths to choose from. All such luxuries had long been seasoned with nausea (how humiliating, how curlike it was, active membership of the master race), and I took some comfort from the fact that every visible surface of the train’s interior bore a thick coating of grime. A half-centimetre of grime, in Germany: the war was lost, Germany was lost. I settled down to the eight-hour haul (and then there’d be the three hours to Cracow). But I would be back at the Kat Zet for Walpurgis Night.

There was a short delay while they attached the dining car. I would be relying, of course, on the hamper prepared for me by the heroic (and uncannily costly) kitchens of the Hotel Eden. A whistle blew.

And now Berlin started off on its journey, westward – Friedrichshain with its blocked sebaceous glands and pestilential cafeterias, the Ahnenerbe with its skeletons and skulls, its scurf and snot, the Potsdamer Platz with its smashed faces and half-empty uniforms.

I got back to the Old Town at four o’clock in the afternoon. It was my intention to have a bath, put on some fresh clothes, and go and present myself at the villa of the Commandant. Ah, a postcard from Oberfuhrer Eltz.
I’ve already picked up a knock
, wrote Boris,
a stab wound in the neck, which is a bore; but it won’t stop me joining in tomorrow’s assau
. . . The last two lines had been tidily blotted out.

Maksik, the storied mouser, was sitting with his eyes closed on a damp mat by the roped refrigerator. I supposed Agnes had dropped by the day before, and left Max to his work. He looked very well fed; and now, all his duties discharged, he had assumed the tea-cosy position, with his tail and all four paws tucked in under him.

Halfway across the sitting room I felt my steps slow. Something was different, altered. For the next ten minutes I scanned tabletops and quickly opened drawers and cupboards. My rooms, it was clear, had come in for scrutiny. The Gestapo approach in such matters could go one of two ways: an almost undetectably ghostlike visitation, or else an earthquake followed by a hurricane. The place hadn’t been searched; it had been casually and sloppily frisked.

I washed myself with extra will and vigour, because you always felt the taint – only mildly loathsome, in this case – of violation (I imagined Michael Off rolling a toothpick in his mouth as he poked through my toiletries). But as I sank back in the tub for a while before the final rinse, well, my best guess was that this was just a warning, or even a matter of routine, and that many people, perhaps the entire IG staff, had been given a once-over. I took from the closet my tweeds and twills.

When I went back into the kitchen Max was straightening up; he flexed his forepaws, and idled towards me. Although he was on the whole an unsentimental creature, occasionally, as now, he drew himself up to his full height, waited a beat, and then fainted back-first to the floor. I reached down and stroked his chin and throat, waiting for the gruff and breathy purr. But the cat did not purr. I looked at his eyes and they were the eyes of a quite different kind of feline, almost dried out with severity and animus. I whipped my hand away – but not fast enough; there was a thin red stripe on the base of my thumb, which in a minute or so, I knew, would start to seep.

‘You little shit,’ I said.

He didn’t flee, he didn’t hide. He lay there on his back staring at me with his claws unsheathed.

And it was doubly weird to see the beast in him. Because on the night train I had (prophetically) dreamt that the Zoo across the Budapesterstrasse from the Hotel Eden was being bombed by the English. SS men were running around the mangled cages shooting the lions and the tigers, the hippos and the rhinos, and they were trying to kill all the crocodiles before they slithered off into the River Spree.

It was five forty-five when I came down the steps and out into the square. I trudged through the rubble of the synagogue, followed the curving, dipping lanes to the flat road, and entered the Zone of Interest, getting closer and closer to the smell.

2. DOLL: THE SUPREME PENALTY

I’ve come to believe that it was all a tragic mistake.

Lying in bed at dawn, and readying myself for yet another immersion in the fierce rhythms of the KL (reveille, washroom, Dysenterie, foot rag, roll call, Stucke, yellow star, Kapo, black triangle, Prominenten, work teams, Arbeit Macht Frei, brass band, Selektion, fan blade, firebrick, teeth, hair), and facing 1,000 challenges to my rictus of cool command, I turn things over in my mind and, yes, I’ve come to believe that it was all a tragic mistake – marrying such a large woman.

And such a young woman, too. Because the bitter truth is . . .

Of course, I am not unfamiliar with hand-to-hand combat, as I showed, I think, on the Iraqi front in the Great War. However, in those cases my adversaries were nearly always gravely injured or else incapacitated by hunger or disease. And later, in my Rossbach period, whilst there were firefights und so, there was no rough stuff, no
wet
stuff, unless you count that business with the schoolteacher in Parchim, and in that instance I enjoyed a distinct numerical advantage (5 to 1, no?). Anyway, all that was 20 years ago, and since then I’ve just been a glorified bureaucrat, sitting at a desk with my bottom gradually oozing and seeping over the hardbacked chair.