The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis Read Free Book Online Page A

How to describe life in the agricultural station question mark . You’re pleased, though, so far.’
    ‘Oh, yes. Thrilled. I even made a kind of verbal pass, and I gave her my address. I wish I hadn’t in a way, because I’m always thinking she’s about to knock on my door. You couldn’t say she leapt at it, no, but she heard me out.’
    ‘ The work is pretty strenuous comma. You can’t have her to your place – not with that nosey bitch downstairs. But I love the countryside and the open air full stop. ’
    ‘Anyway. She’s magnificent.’
    ‘Yes, she is, but there’s too much of her. The conditions are really very decent colon. I like them smaller. They try harder. Our bedrooms are plain but comfy open brackets . And you can fling them about the place. And in October they’ll be giving out . . . You’re mad, you know.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Him. And in October they’ll be giving out these gorgeous eiderdowns. For the colder nights close brackets semicolon . Him. The Old Boozer.’
    ‘He’s nothing.’ And I used a Yiddish expression – pronouncing it accurately enough to give Miss Kubis’s pencil a momentary pause. ‘He’s a grubbe tuchus . A fat-arse. He’s weak.’
    ‘ The food is simple comma true comma but wholesome and plentiful semicolon . Old fat-arse is vicious, Golo. And everything is immaculately clean full stop . And he has cunning. The cunning of the weak. Huge , underline that, please, huge farmstead bathrooms . . . with great big free-standing tubs full stop. Cleanliness comma cleanliness dash. You know those Germans exclamation mark .’ Boris sighed and said with adolescent or even childish petulance, ‘ Miss Kubis. Please look up now and then so at least I can see your face!’
    *
     
    Smoking cigarillos, and drinking kir from conical glasses, we looked out at Kalifornia, which resembled, simultaneously and on a massive compass, an emptied block-long department store, a wide-spectrum jumble sale, an auction room, customs house, trade fair, agora, mart, soukh, chowk – a planetary, a terminal Lost and Found.
    Beetling heaps of rucksacks, kitbags, holdalls, cases and trunks (these last adorned with enticing labels of travel – redolent of frontier posts, misty cities), like a vast bonfire awaiting the torch. A stack of blankets as high as a three-storey building: no princess, be she never so delicate, would feel a pea beneath twenty, thirty thousand thicknesses. And all around fat hillocks of pots and pans, of hairbrushes, shirts, coats, dresses, handkerchiefs – also watches, spectacles, and all kinds of prostheses, wigs, dentures, deaf-aids, surgical boots, spinal supports. The eye came last to the mound of children’s shoes, and the sprawling mountain of prams, some of them just wooden troughs on wheels, some of them all curve and contour, carriages for little dukes, little duchesses. I said,
    ‘What’s she doing over there, your Esther? It’s a bit unGerman, isn’t it? What use is a bucket of toothpaste?’
    ‘She’s looking for precious stones . . . You know how she won my heart, Golo? They made her dance for me. She was like liquid. I almost burst into tears. It was my birthday and she danced for me.’
    ‘Oh yes. Happy birthday, Boris.’
    ‘Thanks. Better late than never.’
    ‘How does it feel to be thirty-two?’
    ‘All right, I suppose. So far. You’ll find out yourself in a minute.’ He ran his tongue over his lips. ‘You know they pay for their own tickets? They pay their own way here, Golo. I don’t know how it went with those Parisians, but the norm is . . .’ He bent to wipe a wisp of smoke from his eye. ‘The norm is a flat third-class fare. One-way. Half price for children under twelve. One-way.’ He straightened up. ‘It’s good, isn’t it.’
    ‘You could say that.’
    ‘. . . The Jews had to come down from their high horse. Which was accomplished by 1934. But this – this is fucking ridiculous.’
     

     
    Yes, and Suitbert and