The Zone of Interest Read online

  ‘So, great warrior, how does it go? Mm. I’d like to thank you for your efforts, Sonderkommandofuhrer. Your initiative and your dedication to our shared cause. You’ve been invaluable.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘But you know, I think we’ve got the hang of it now. We could probably muddle along without you.’

  My toolbag is down by his feet. I reach for it and slide it towards me.

  ‘Your men.’ He upends the bottle over his mouth. ‘Your men. What do they think is going to happen to them when the Aktion ends? Do they know?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He says sorrowfully, ‘Why d’you do it, Sonder. Why don’t you rise up? Where’s your pride?’

  Again the whiplash – the leap of the cord. And again. I have the thought that Doll is disciplining his own weapon: the metal-clad tip makes its distracted leap for freedom, only to be brought to heel with an imperious twitch of the wrist. I said,

  ‘The men still hope, sir.’

  ‘Hope for what?’ He briefly panted with laughter. ‘That we’ll suddenly change our minds?’

  ‘It’s human to hope, sir.’

  ‘Human. Human. And yourself, noble warrior?’

  In the canvas bag my fingers close round the shaft of the hammer; when he next tips his head back to drink I will bring it down, claw-first, on the white nakedness of his instep. He says levelly,

  ‘You lead a charmed life, Geheimnistrager. Because you’ve made yourself indispensable. We all know that dodge. Like the factories in Litzmannstadt, nicht?’ He took a draught that lasted several swallows. ‘Look at me. With your eyes. Look at me . . . Yes. Rightly do you find that difficult, Sonder.’

  He sluices his gums and spits skilfully between his lower teeth (the liquid ejected in a steady squirt, as if from the mouth of a ceramic fish in a municipal fountain).

  ‘Afraid to die. But not afraid to kill. I see it in the set of your lips. You’ve got murder in your mouth. Such people have their uses. Sonderkommandofuhrer, I’ll leave you. Work well for Germany.’

  I watched him go, listing slightly (curious that drunkenness, at least at first, makes Doll more fluent in thought and speech). Geheimnistrager: bearer of secrets. Secrets? What secrets? The whole county stops the nose at them.

  The snake that lives in Doll’s whip is a viper, perhaps, or a mamba or a puff adder. As for the snakes that live in Doll’s fire, they are pythons, boa constrictors, anacondas, every last one of them, ravenously trying to get hold of something solid in the night sky.

  *

  Is there companionship? When squads of heavily armed men come to the crematory and this or that section of the detail knows that it is time, the chosen Sonders take their leave with a nod or a word or a wave of the hand – or not even that. They take their leave with their eyes on the floor. And later, when I say Kaddish for the departed, they are already forgotten.

  If there is such a thing as mortal fear, then there is also such a thing as mortal love. And that is what incapacitates the men of the Kommando – mortal love.

  CHAPTER III. GREY SNOW

  1. THOMSEN: FINDING EVERYTHING OUT

  Herr Thomsen:

  I want to ask you to do me a service, if you would. You remember Bohdan, the gardener? I’m told he has been arbitrarilly transfered to Stutthof.

  He is also said to have been involved in a very shocking incedent, resulting in the death of poor Torquil (the tortoise), and this seemed to me so utterly out of charecter, so impossible in relation to him, that I began to doubt the truth of the story I was being given. His name is Professor Bohdan Szozeck. He was a great favourite of the girls, and of course they’re inconsolible about their pet tortoise, as I think you saw tonight. I told them Torquil had just gone missing. They plan to get up at dawn tomorrow to search the garden.

  I’m sorry to burden you with this but to be frank there’s no one else I can ask.

  Every Friday I may be found by the sandpit at the Summer Huts between the hours of four and five.

  Thank you. Yours sincerley, Hannah Doll

  PS. I apolagise for my spelling. They say I have a ‘condition’. But I think I’m just not up to it. And it’s funny, because the only thing I’ve ever been any good at is langauges. HD.

  SO, NO, IT was hardly the glazed summons or the desperate solicitation for which I had perhaps callowly yearned. But when after a day or two I showed the letter to Boris he tried to persuade me that it was, in its way, quietly encouraging.

  ‘She’s long lost all trust in the Old Boozer. That’s good.’

  ‘Yes, but yours sincerely,’ I said with some petulance. ‘And Herr Thomsen. And there’s no one else I can ask.’

  ‘You fool, that’s the best bit. Pull yourself together, Golo. She’s saying you’re her only friend. Her only friend in the whole world.’

  Still writhing slightly I said, ‘But I don’t want to be her friend.’

  ‘No, naturally. You just want to . . . Patience, Golo. Women are very impressed by patience. Wait till the war’s over.’

  ‘Oh, sure. Wars do not observe the unities, brother.’ The unities of time, place, and action. ‘Wait till the war’s over, indeed. Who knows what’ll be left? Anyway.’

  Boris obliged me and promised that he would interrogate Szozeck’s Block Leader. He added,

  ‘Adorable PS. And she’s got nice handwriting. Sexy. Unselfconscious. Flowing.’

  And in my solitary contemplations, with Boris’s inspiring words still fresh in my mind, I looked again at Hannah’s holograph – the lewd orbs of her ehs and ohs, those shamelessly plunging jays and whys, that truly unconscionable doubleyou.

  But then the whole thing froze over for nearly two weeks. Boris was sent to the subcamp of Goleschau (with orders to purge and reinvigorate its demoralised guardhouse). Before he left he had to get Esther out of Block 11; this took priority, reasonably enough, because she would have starved to death in his absence.

  As a political criminal, Esther was now in the custody of the Gestapo. The non-venal Fritz Mobius, luckily, was away on leave, and Jurgen Horder, his number two, was in the Dysentery Ward of the Ka Be. Boris therefore applied to Michael Off, who, he hoped, would be considerably cheaper than Jurgen Horder.

  *

  So when I saw Hannah, at the theatre on Saturday night, I could only mime my impotence and say glancingly, while Horst Eikel loudly joked with Norberte Uhl, ‘Friday next . . .’ At first I felt strangely numbed (And the Woods Sing For Ever was about a clan of mildly famished but stoutly anti-intellectual yokels in northern Pomerania); but this very quickly and sharply changed.

  A variety of physical forces seemed to be at work on me. Standing in a casual group with Hannah, I was electrically aware of her mass and body scent; she loomed huge, like a Jupiter of erotic gravity. By the time Doll took her off I was so unmoored, and so roused, that I almost pressed myself on the pale, limp, terrified figure of Alisz Seisser, and later on, as I lay in bed and stared at the darkness, it took a long time before I eventually ruled out a surprise visit to Ilse Grese.

  And now I had another letter in front of me, as I sat drinking synthetic coffee in Frithuric Burckl’s office at the Buna-Werke. ‘Esteemed Sir,’ it began. The correspondent was the chief personnel officer at Bayer, the pharmaceutical firm (a subsidiary of IG Farben), and the addressee was Paul Doll.

  The transport of 150 women arrived in good condition. However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results as they all died during the experiments. We would kindly request that you send us another group of women to the same number and at the same price.

  I looked up and said, ‘How much are women?’

  ‘One seventy RM each. Doll wanted two hundred, but Bayer gypped him down to one seventy.’

  ‘And what were Bayer testing?’

  ‘A new anaesthetic. Overdid it a bit. Obviously.’ Burckl sat back and folded his arms (the tonsured black hair, the thick-framed spectacles). ‘I showed you that because I think it’s indicative. Indicative of a faul
ty attitude.’

  ‘Faulty, Mr Burckl?’

  ‘Yes, faulty, Mr Thomsen. Did the women all die at once? Were they all given the same dose? That’s the least idiotic explanation. Did the women die in batches? Did they die one by one? The point is that Bayer were repeating their mistakes. And that’s what we’re doing.’

  ‘What mistakes?’

  ‘All right. Yesterday I came through the Yard, and one of the work teams was lugging a mass of cables to the substation. At the usual swift stagger. And one of them fell down. He didn’t drop anything or break anything. He just fell down. So the Kapo started clubbing the life out of him, and this Britisher from the Stalag intervened. Next thing we know a noncom got involved. Net result? The POW loses an eye, the Haftling’s shot in the head, and the Kapo gets a broken jaw. And it’s another two hours before the cables get lugged to the substation.’

  ‘So what do you suggest?’

  ‘Treating the workforce as disposable, Mr Thomsen, is hugely counterproductive. My God, those Kapos! What’s the matter with them?’

  I said, ‘Well. If a Kapo isn’t pulling his weight, in the noncom’s opinion, then he loses his status.’

  ‘Mm. Reduced rations and whatnot.’

  ‘It’s more serious than that. He gets beaten to death later the same day.’

  Burckl frowned. He said, ‘Does he? Who by? The noncoms?’

  ‘No. The prisoners.’

  Burckl went still. Then he said, ‘You see, that shores up my point. The chain of violence – everyone’s aquiver with it. The whole atmosphere’s psychotic. And it doesn’t work. We’re not getting there, are we, Mr Thomsen.’

  Our deadline was the middle of next year.

  ‘Oh I don’t know,’ I said. ‘We chug along.’

  ‘The Chancellery is bulldozing the Vorstand. The Vorstand is bulldozing us. And we’re bulldozing . . . Jesus Christ, look at it out there.’

  I looked at it out there. The figures that held my attention, as always (I too had an office at Buna, and spent many hours in front of its window), the figures that held my attention were not the men in stripes, as they queued or scurried in lines or entangled one another in a kind of centipedal scrum, moving at an unnatural speed, like extras in a silent film, moving faster than their strength or build could bear, as if in obedience to a frantic crank swivelled by a furious hand; the figures that held my attention were not the Kapos who screamed at the prisoners, nor the SS noncoms who screamed at the Kapos, nor the overalled company foremen who screamed at the SS noncoms. No. What held my eye were the figures in city business suits, designers, engineers, administrators from IG Farben plants in Frankfurt, Leverkusen, Ludwigshafen, with leather-bound notebooks and retractable yellow measuring tapes, daintily picking their way past the bodies of the wounded, the unconscious, and the dead.

  ‘I have a proposition. Oh, it’s pretty radical, I admit. Will you hear me out at least?’

  He righted the low stack of papers in front of him and took out his fountain pen.

  ‘Let’s go through this one step at a time. Now. Mr Thomsen, how long – what’s the longest our workers last?’

  I said wearily, ‘Three months.’

  ‘So every three months we’re having to induct their successors. Tell me.’

  From outside there came a volley of inarticulate bawling, plus two pistol shots and then the familiar rhythm of the whip. Burckl said,

  ‘How many calories does an adult need daily in conditions of complete repose?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Two and a half thousand. In some of the Polish ghettoes, it’s three hundred. That’s dry execution. In the Stammlager it’s eight. And here it’s eleven, if they’re lucky. Eleven, for penal labour. On eleven hundred calories, I can tell you, a heavy worker loses about three kilos a week. Do your sums. Mr Thomsen, we need to give them an incentive.’

  ‘How’re you going to do that? They know they’re here to die, Mr Burckl.’

  He narrowed his eyes and said, ‘Have you heard tell of Szmul?’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘What’s his incentive?’

  I recrossed my legs. Old Frithuric was beginning to impress me.

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘A thought experiment. We do some sifting and settle on a core of perhaps twenty-five hundred workers. We stop beating them. We stop making them do everything at the double, unverzuglich, unverzuglich – that terrible swaying trot. We feed and house them decently, within reason. And they work. As Szmul works. And efficiently collaborates.’ He opened out his hands towards me. ‘The incentive is just the full belly and the night’s rest.’

  ‘What does Dr Seedig say?’

  ‘I can carry him.’

  ‘And Doll?’

  ‘Doll? Doll’s nothing. It’ll be a hell of a battle, but I think the two of us together, Suitbert and I, can sway the Vorstand. Then Max Faust himself will take it to the top.’

  ‘The top. You’ll never convince the Reichsfuhrer.’

  ‘I don’t mean the Reichsfuhrer.’

  ‘Then who do you mean? Surely not the Reichsmarschall.’

  ‘Of course not. I mean the Reichsleiter.’

  The Reichsfuhrer was Himmler, and the Reichsmarschall was Goring. The Reichsleiter was Uncle Martin.

  ‘Well, Mr Thomsen?’

  In my considered opinion the changes Burckl was suggesting would improve the Buna performance by two or three hundred per cent, maybe more. I coughed, politely (as if alerting him to my presence), and said,

  ‘With respect, I fear there are certain things you don’t understand. Let me—’

  There was a knock on the door and Burckl’s (male) secretary leaned in for a moment with a flat smile of apology. ‘He’s outside, sir.’

  ‘Scheisse.’ Burckl got to his feet. ‘Can you give me an hour on Monday morning? You won’t credit this, Thomsen – I can hardly credit it myself. Wolfram Prufer’s taking me hunting. In Russia. Deer.’

  Outside the perimeter of the Buna-Werke, separated by about a kilometre, were the two British Kriegsgefangnisse. Between them gaped a cavernous loading bay strewn with planks and ladders, heaps of bricks and timber balks. There I saw an inmate, a burly officer in a padded overcoat and, remarkably, leather boots; he was having a sly breather, slumped against an upended wheelbarrow. I had noticed him many times before.

  ‘Rule Britannica,’ I cried. ‘Britain shall never never . . .’

  ‘Rule Britannia. Britons never never never shall be slaves. And look at me now.’

  ‘Where were you took prisoner?’

  ‘Libya.’

  ‘. . . It says Englishmen love flowers. Do you love flowers?’

  ‘They’re all right. I don’t mind them. Funnily enough, I was just thinking about woodbine.’

  ‘You like “woodbine”?’

  ‘It’s a flower. Like a honeysuckle. It’s also a brand of cigarettes. That’s what I was thinking about.’

  ‘Woodbine. I do not know this. Do you like Senior Services?’

  ‘Senior Service. Very much.’

  ‘And Players?’

  ‘Players are good.’

  ‘Your name?’

  ‘Bullard. Captain Roland Bullard. And yours?’

  ‘Thomsen. Lieutenant Angelus Thomsen. My English I hope is not too worse?’

  ‘It’ll do.’

  ‘I shall bring you Players or Senior Service. I shall bring them yesterday.’

  ‘. . . You already brought them tomorrow.’

  I walked on for another ten minutes; then I turned and looked. The Buna-Werke – the size of a city. Like Magnetigorsk (a city called Sparkplug) in the USSR. It was due to become the largest and most advanced factory in Europe. When the whole operation came on line, said Burckl, it would need more electricity than Berlin.

  So far as the Reich leadership was concerned, Buna promised not just synthetic rubber, not just synthetic fuel. It promised autarky; and autarky, it had been decided, would in turn decide the war.

&nb
sp; Early evening in the anteroom (and bar) of the Officers’ Mess: sofas, armchairs, and coffee tables pillaged from the ten thousand Jews and Slavs we booted out of the Old Town two years ago, a handsome kitchen dresser with bottles of wine and spirits ranked up together with the fruit and the flowers, prisoner servants with white smocks over their mattress ticking, various lieutenants and captains, either in the early stages of insobriety or the late stages of recuperation, and a noisy guest contingent of Helferinnen and Special Supervisors, among them Ilse Grese and her new fifteen-year-old protégée, freckly Hedwig, with her pigtails coiled up under her cap.

  You could eat here as well as in the dining room, and Boris was opposite me at our low table for two. We were finishing the second and ordering the third round of aperitifs (Russian vodka) and deciding on our appetisers (eighteen oysters each).

  He laughed quietly and said, ‘Are you surprised that Ilse’s gone queer on us? I’m not. Tout s’explique. She always said schnell. “Schnell.” Did she say it to you?’

  ‘Yes. Always. “Schnell.” Now come on, Boris. Schnell.’

  ‘Well here’s what happened. I know the old prof wouldn’t think so, but it’s really quite funny. What happened was, Bohdan gave the Old Boozer a clout with a gardening tool. That’s how he got his black eyes. An accident, but still.’

  ‘This is according to who?’

  ‘According to Bohdan’s Blockaltester. Who got it from Prufer’s adju. Who got it from Prufer. Who got it from the Old Boozer.’

  ‘So. This is all according to the Old Boozer. And what became of Bohdan?’