The Zone of Interest (12 page)

*

The Czech Jew from Brno, Josef, who is gone now, wrote his testimony and buried it in a child’s galosh under the hedgerow that borders Doll’s garden. After a lot of disputation, and a show of hands, we resolve to exhume this document (temporarily) and acquaint ourselves with its contents. I myself am instinctively and perhaps superstitiously opposed. And as things turn out it is one of the episodes in the Lager that I would least soon relive.

Written in Yiddish, in black ink, the manuscript consisted of eight pages.

‘
And there
’, I began, ‘
a girl of five stood and
. . . Wait. I think it’s a bit mixed up.’

‘Read!’ said one of the men. Others seconded him. ‘Just read.’

‘
And there a girl of five stood and undressed her brother who was one year old. One from the Kommando came to take off the boy’s clothes. The girl shouted loudly, “Be gone, you Jewish murderer! Don’t lay your hand, dripping with Jewish blood, upon my lovely brother! I am his good mummy, he will die in my arms, together with me.” A boy of seven or eight . . .
’ I hesitated, and swallowed. ‘Shall I go on?’

‘No.’

‘No. Yes. Go on.’

‘Go on. No. Yes.’

‘
A boy of seven or eight
’, I read, ‘
stood beside her and spoke thus, “Why, you are a Jew and you lead such dear children to the gas – only in order to live? Is your life among the band of murderers really dearer to you than the lives of so many Jewish victims?”
. . .
A certain young Polish woman made a very short but fiery speech in the
—’

‘Stop.’

Many of the men had tears in their eyes – but they weren’t tears of grief or guilt.

‘Stop. She “made a very short but fiery speech”. Like hell she did. Stop.’

‘Stop. He lies.’

‘Silence would be better than this. Stop.’

‘Stop. And don’t put it back in the earth. Destroy it – unread. Stop.’

I stopped. And the men turned away, they moved away, and slackly sought their bedding.

Josef, the chemist from Brno, was known to me here at the Lager, and I considered him a serious man . . . I am a serious man, and I am writing my testimony. Am I writing like this? Will I be able to control my pen, or will it just come out –
like this
? Josef’s intentions, I’m sure, were of the best, even the highest; but what he writes is untrue. And unclean. A girl of five, a boy of eight: was there ever a child so fiendishly experienced that it could grasp the situation of the Sonder?

For a few moments I read on in silence, or I dragged my sight down the rest of the page . . .

A certain young Polish woman made a very short but fiery speech in the gas chamber . . . She condemned the Nazi crimes and oppression and ended with the words, ‘We shall not die now, the history of our nation will immortalise us, our initiative and spirit are alive and flourishing . . .’ Then the Poles knelt on the ground and solemnly said a certain prayer, in a posture that made an immense impression, then they arose and all together in chorus sang the Polish anthem, the Jews sang the ‘Hatikvah’. The cruel common fate in this accursed spot merged the lyric tones of these diverse anthems into one whole. They expressed in this way their last feelings with a deeply moving warmth and their hopes for, and belief in, the future of their . . .

Will I lie? Will I need to deceive? I understand that I am disgusting. But will I
write
disgustingly?

Anyway, I nonetheless make sure that Josef’s pages are duly reinterred.

It sometimes happens that when I pass the Kommandant’s house I see his daughters – on their way to school or on their way back. Now and then the little housekeeper accompanies them, but usually the mother does – a tall, strong-looking woman, still young.

Seeing Doll’s wife naturally makes me think of mine.

The Polish Jews are not coming to the Lager en masse, or not yet, but some of them find their way here by a twisted road, as I did, and of course I seek them out and question them. The Jews of Lublin went to a death camp called Belzec; a great number of Jews from Warsaw went to a death camp called Treblinka.

In Łódź the ghetto is still standing. Three months ago I even got news of Shulamith: she is still in the attic above the bakery. I love my wife with all my heart, and I wish her every happiness, but as things now stand I’m glad I’ll never see her again.

How would I tell her about the selections and the disrobing room? How would I tell her about Chełmno and the time of the silent boys?

Shula’s brother, Maček, is safe in Hungary, and he has vowed that he will come for Shula and take her to Budapest. May it be so. I love my wife, but I’m glad I’ll never see her again.

At dawn we discuss the
extraterritorial
nature of the Lager, and everything is back to normal in the bunkroom, we talk, we use each other’s names, we gesticulate, we raise and lower our voices; and I like to think that there is companionship. But something is missing and is always missing; something intrinsic to human interchange has absented itself.

The eyes. When you start out in the detail, you think, ‘It’s me, it’s just me. I keep my head dropped or averted because I don’t want anyone to see my eyes.’ Then after a time you realise that all the Sonders do it: they try to hide their eyes. And who would have guessed how foundationally necessary it is, in human dealings, to see the eyes? Yes. But the eyes are the windows to the soul, and when the soul is gone the eyes too are untenanted.

Is it companionship – or helpless volubility? Are we capable of listening to – or even hearing – what others say?

This night at the pyre two hoist-frame plinths collapse, and I am down on all fours in a dent in the dunes banging bits of it together again when Doll’s open-topped jeep draws up, thirty metres away, on the gravel road. After some rummaging around he emerges (with the engine ticking over) and moves towards me.

Doll wears thick-looped leather sandals and brown shorts, and nothing else; in his left hand he has a half-f quart of labelled Russian vodka, in his right an oxhide whip which he now playfully cracks. His spongy red chest hair is dotted with beads of sweat that sparkle in the overwhelming glare of the fire. He drinks, and wipes his mouth.

‘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
eh
s and
oh
s, those shamelessly plunging
jay
s and
why
s, 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.