Guided Tours of Hell

by Francine Prose

  “Mr. Resurrected-Saint,” hisses Natalie. “Mr. God-the-Survivor. When the whole world knows how he survived, all those confessions—boasts, really—paraded in his memoirs, how he traded soggy matches and leaky shoes for extra rations of bread, how he hardened himself to shaft everyone else, and we’re supposed to think: Bravo! Good for him! That’s what I would have done! Well, maybe we would have given the bread to the dying boy who Jiri knew he had to refuse in that famous chapter from our hero’s brilliant memoir—”

  “Then you wouldn’t have survived,” Landau says. “Isn’t that the point?”

  Natalie’s face implodes like a puffy doughnut, bitten into, leaving only her increasingly self-conscious and rigid smile.

  “Is it?” she says. “Is that the point?”

  “Sure it is,” says Landau harshly. “The point is: We don’t know what we’d do. Nobody knows what accident of fate or DNA or character will determine how we act when the shit hits the fan.”

  “I guess,” agrees Natalie, retreating, and as she turns away, her eyes, magnified by thick lenses, film with gelid tears.

  Landau feels awful! Terrible! How badly he has behaved, here where every cobblestone should be teaching him a lesson about cruelty and kindness. Oh, really? Is that the lesson? What is Landau thinking? The ethical lesson of these stones is that it’s smart to withhold your stale crust of bread from a little boy dying of hunger.

  What did Jiri do to survive? Landau would rather not know, though he suspects that Jiri’s confessions in print are only the tip of the iceberg. There have been some moments since the start of the conference when Jiri has acted in ways that must have distressed even his acolytes and fawning devotees.

  Yesterday they were on the tram, headed for yet another reception that would begin with yet another minor official conveying the apologies of a slightly less minor official who was scheduled to greet them but was called away at the last minute. On the tram—because the tour bus scheduled to convey them there had also been called away at the last minute, a scenario so familiar by now that Landau wonders if the Congress budget is lower than Eva will admit, so that she stages these charades in which they wait twenty minutes for a nonexistent bus and then give up and wait another twenty minutes (or more) for the tram. Everything requires waiting, punitively protracted, sometimes an hour for breakfast, though they all get the same plate of slimy flamingo-colored bologna, rubbery gherkins, and pewter-ringed slices of egg, so it’s not as if the kitchen has to cook fifty separate orders. The budget must be rock-bottom, judging from the hotel, a grisly state socialist dump untouched by the cushiony strokings of the Velvet Revolution, staffed by a chilly sadistic crew unschooled in the decadent good manners bourgeois tourists expect, a dank prison to which the conferees are returned each night to bash their aching heads against granite pillows encased in cold damp linen, on beds no wider than coffins.

  The grim hotel, the elusive officials, the buses that never come—Hey, welcome to the Kafka Congress (this is the sort of thing that Natalie Zigbaum sidles up to Landau to whisper, along with the news that Jiri isn’t staying at their hotel but at a five-star palace not far from Eva’s apartment), where, fittingly, they’ve come to honor the spirit of a man who wrote the book on claustrophobic living quarters, on thuggish servants of the state refusing to show their faces, and on mysterious obstacles that make it hard to get from place to place.

  During the long hot wait for the tram, several conferees suggested taking taxis, to which Eva replied that the Russian mob now controls the taxi business; last week a German tourist was stabbed for the gold fillings in his teeth. A rebellious ripple stirred the group, a disturbance that Jiri quieted with the observation that compared to a boxcar, the tram would do just fine. Besides, he said, what camp life taught you was the dangerous folly of simply waiting, of not living in the moment, an idea that Jiri has discussed with the Dalai Lama, who shares Jiri’s opinion completely. Jiri name-drops constantly: Milos Forman. Vaclav Havel. Still, Landau couldn’t believe that Jiri could name-drop the Dalai Lama, whom Landau has always wanted to meet. Oh, unfair! Unfair!

  At last the tram arrived, packed full, so it was quickly arranged that half the Kafka conferees would board and the other half would wait another twenty minutes (or more) for another tram. Mr. Every-Man-for-Himself leaped onto the first tram while everyone else was still negotiating, and Eva boarded after Jiri, irresponsibly leaving the remaining conferees to find the right tram and the reception. Landau was swept onto the tram, along with Natalie Zigbaum. As it lurched forward, she fell against him and giggled and stepped away, readjusting her upholstery. Landau had thought—just as he thinks now, walking up the path to the camp—that he and Natalie (squat, bespectacled, American) are a parody couple, a cruel parody of tall, handsome, clear-eyed, European Jiri and Eva.

  More people got on the tram at each stop. “Another boxcar!” boomed Jiri. Did none of the Czechs speak English? Everyone stared straight ahead. At the stop in front of the Prague Kmart, three Gypsy women got on, and the other passengers shifted as far as possible from that trio of cackling birds with their bright ruffled plumage. The Czechs emitted clucking noises and muted syllables of threat and warning, and mimed—for the benefit of the Kafka conferees, whom until then they hadn’t acknowledged—the wary sensible safeguarding of wallets, pockets, and purses.

  Then Jiri went to the front of the tram and spoke to the driver, who was unaware of the crisis. The driver came back and yelled at the Gypsies, who yelled at him, everyone yelled, then the Gypsies got off. The Czechs resumed their blank stares, as if nothing had happened, as did the Kafka conferees, though perhaps for different reasons.

  “Did you see that?” Natalie had shouted into Landau’s ear. “It took Jiri about five seconds to make the tram Gypsy free.”

  Landau’s only answer was an irritated shrug, as if Natalie were a stinging bug that had gotten under his collar.

  Natalie keeps on nipping at him, even now as they walk up the cobblestone road to the camp, and worse, she seems to have read Landau’s mind, to know what he’s been thinking. How else to explain it—it couldn’t be coincidence—when she says, “Did you believe how Mr. Human-Rights treated those Gypsies on the tram!”

  Again Landau shrugs, just one shoulder this time. “What were the choices?” he says. “Sit there grinning like liberal schmucks and get our passports stolen?” Why is he defending Jiri for doing something morally vile (although, to be perfectly frank, Landau had felt relieved). Because the people who disapprove of him are people like Landau and Natalie Zigbaum!

  “The choices?” Natalie Zigbaum snarls. “Liberal schmucks…or Nazis?”

  Suddenly fearing that he’s bullied Natalie to the point at which her fragile crush (or whatever) on him has been blasted out of existence, Landau feels bereft. Her attention is better than nothing. There is so little sexual buzz going around this conference, Natalie’s choosing Landau must mean that he is its second most attractive man.

  “Watch your step,” warns Landau. “These cobblestones are murder.” In fact they are like vicious stone eggs, pressing into Landau’s tender arches. Natalie’s shoes have thicker soles than his, but she smiles so gratefully, leans so pliantly against him that she could be clicking over the stones in the thinnest highest heels. Landau grasps her elbow and guides her up the path as they approach the dark looming archway in which Jiri stands with outstretched arms, welcoming them all.

  What does the camp remind Landau of? A zoo without animals, maybe. A wide pebbled path lined with overgrown borders and inviting park benches, without the parklike promise of plea sure and relaxation, but rather the zoolike reminder that one is here on a mission, there is something to see here, a fixed route to be taken. And how could they go anywhere except where Jiri steers them? Jiri stands off to one side and bows, waving them on. The conferees smile and nod at him, a tiny bit nervous, but jolly….

  As Landau and Natalie Zigbaum pass, Jiri whispers, “This way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen
.”

  Landau stops, as does Natalie. The others squeeze timidly past them. Landau says, “What an amazing book! This Way for the Gas. Have you read Borowski?” he asks Natalie. “What an astonishing life! Borowski and his girlfriend were sent to Auschwitz for distributing anti-Nazi poetry and miraculously they both survive, are separated, reunited, they get married, and she gets pregnant, has a daughter, he visits them at the hospital and that night goes home and turns on the gas and kills himself.”

  Some instinct is kicking in here, Landau’s showing off for a woman. So what if it’s Natalie? She’s the only one here to compete for. In one of the letters Landau wrote for Felice, she scolds Kafka for showing off the first time they met at Max Brod’s, for bringing along the manuscript of his first book of stories and photos from a trip that he and Max made to Weimar, including pictures of a beautiful girl with whom Kafka had a flirtation. In Landau’s letter, Felice scolds Kafka and then confesses that it made her happy; she knew he was showing off for her. But Landau has no plans for a long neurotic engagement to Natalie. Maybe it’s Jiri he wants to impress….

  “Lying shit,” says Jiri. “Borowski was never at Auschwitz.”

  “He wasn’t?” says Landau. But Jiri’s gaze skims over their heads, and Natalie and Landau turn to see Eva rushing up the path. Eva is wearing high heels, and her stumbling run reminds Landau of postwar Italian films in which beautiful actresses spill out of their ripped flimsy dresses as they flee the smoldering ruins of villages ravaged by battle.

  “Jiri,” Eva says. “Where did you disappear to?” A thorn of panic snags Eva’s throaty voice.

  Jiri laughs. “I couldn’t wait to get back to this place!” Then Mr. Joie-de-Vivre puts his arm around Eva and sweeps her along, while Landau and Natalie must dazedly pick themselves up and follow. The entire Kafka Congress straggles into the dusty sunbaked courtyard, yet Landau feels that he and Natalie are alone with Jiri and Eva: the homely couple, the beautiful couple, double-dating at the death camp.

  “Achtung!” Natalie whispers to Landau as Jiri whisks them through a lot surrounded by faded brick walls pocked with dark low entrances without doors, like the holes in a birdhouse.

  Tourists rouse themselves from their dreamy sight-seeing just long enough to observe the ragtag parade of Kafka Congress conferees. Then they resume popping in and out of doorways like figures on a cuckoo clock, blinking and bent double.

  Jiri points out the high spots.

  “Brooks Brothers!” He waves and shouts.

  “The clothing depot,” translates Eva. “That’s where the prisoners picked up their monthly changes of clothing.”

  “Bastards!” says Jiri. “Bastards!” They pass empty rooms with wooden chairs and desks. Offices? Interrogation rooms? Jiri isn’t saying, and they’re moving too fast for Landau to consult the map he grabbed as they rushed past the ticket booth. Mr. Live-for-Today had insisted on paying for the whole group, though Eva said, “Jiri, you mustn’t do that!” Let the guy pay, thought Landau. Save the money for the Congress. Next time—if there is a next time—they could be put up in a halfway decent hotel and even hire a real bus and skip the charades with the trams.

  They turn into a courtyard, a narrow alley lined on one side with cagelike cells and on the other with larger stalls crammed with wooden bunks. Landau thinks again of a zoo, of a decrepit roadside animal park with a pair of big cats pacing their boxes and a few starved monkeys shivering in the corners.

  “Here you have your single rooms,” Jiri declares. “And here you have your accommodations for five hundred skeletons rubbing together in fifty narrow beds.”

  “The guy drives me nuts!” says Natalie, clinging to Landau like one of those birds that peck the bugs off the backs of bison. “I will just throw up if I hear him tell one more time about Ottla Kafka leading the children’s transport to Auschwitz.”

  Jiri raises both arms, Mr. Human-Candelabra, flicking one wrist, then the other at the tiny cages on one side, the large holding pens opposite. His face is crimson, streaked with sweat, and the glaring August sun turns his white hair incandescent.

  Natalie whispers to Landau, “Eva’s got her hands full with him. The guy’s had two serious coronaries and a triple bypass. The woman’s a wreck. Did you see her face when she came running up to us? She’s afraid he’ll die on her. Right here in Prague, at the camp! Fabulous for her career at the Kafka Foundation!”

  Apparently, sexless Natalie Zigbaum has no idea that Eva’s preoccupation and strain is all about Eros, not Thanatos, about her affair with Jiri and not his imminent death! Natalie wouldn’t know Eros if it crept up behind her and pinched her ass!

  “Don’t kid yourself,” says Landau. “He’s in better shape than we are!”

  This time Natalie backs off, and it’s just as well. Landau doesn’t need her pecking at him as he peeks into the rooms, which he tries in vain to populate with jammed-together skeletal Jews, then peers into the cells on the other side, in which he tries to picture political prisoners in solitary confinement. What efficient cruelty to border one yard with two opposite tortures!

  But the ghosts are hiding from Landau. All he sees are walls, scratched paint, bare bunks. No one’s staring at him with raccoon eyes, and frankly, Landau’s just as glad. The whole trip is filthy, filthy. What people will do for sensation!

  Jiri nearly mows Landau down, hurrying out of the courtyard. The group rushes after Jiri, who is standing outside a weathered wooden shack.

  “The KB,” says Jiri. “The Krankenbauer. Everything in order! First they have to cure us so afterwards they can kill us. My home away from home!” Jiri has written about the ruses he came up with to get himself sent to the hospital, where he could rest and eat slightly thicker gruel before being sent back to work, duties which, as his readers and every literary prize committee know, included pulling wedding rings from the fingers of the dead.

  The feminist from Zagreb, who has a gift for investing the most banal utterances with urgent meaning, pushes forward and grabs Jiri’s arm. “Did the doctors…experiment…?

  Oh, please, thinks Landau, then notices Eva Kaprova watching. Is there a triangle forming? Jiri, Eva, the Croatian…

  Jiri glares at the twiglike novelist. How can she ask him this? Hasn’t she read his work? He roars at her, he blows her away. “The whole camp was an experiment!”

  And now, holding her proud head higher, Eva runs after Jiri, again leaving the rest of the group (how fitting that the Kafka Congress should spend so much time chasing blindly after each other) to inspect the hospital and catch up with her and Jiri.

  The sick bay is the most decorated, the most elaborately furnished. A certain wax museum aesthetic prevails, Dr. Adolf’s Chamber of Horrors, with charming period details, examining tables with real stirrups, leather straps, no sterile chrome imitations, a dental chair, and cabinets with many tiny drawers the perfect size for torture implements: toenail extractors neatly divided from testicle squeezers.

  Landau can hardly endure it, but something compels him to look. He finds himself remembering the ophthalmologist he was taken to as a boy, the gloomy office, the shelves of reference books, graphic instructions for tortures involving the eye, the pool-table-green carpet, the leather couches permeated with a sugary alcohol smell, the clunking apparatus that held the prescriptive lenses, looming over you, pressing into your face.

  Landaus eye doctor had an accent. Was he German-Jewish? German-German? Landau’s parents wouldn’t have gone to a German, not in 1950. But there is no one for Landau to ask, his parents are both dead, one heart attack, one cancer, neither much older than Landau is now and unavailable for Landau to ask if there was, as he remembers, a large reproduction Hieronymus Bosch in the doctor’s waiting room, so that on the day when Landau finally got his glasses he realized that the framed red blur was crawling with freakish monsters and demons having an orgy.

  On Landau’s first night in Prague, he’d dreamed that his parents, his grandparents, all his dead loved on
es were seated in folding chairs, and Landau went around kissing them, tears of grief soaking his face, and at last he kissed his mother who said, “None of us are alive, but we aren’t dead, either.”

  Even in the dream Landau knew he should be having one of those moments of profound revelation, of overpowering comfort and peace, but in fact he felt lousy, and then violently worse as he moved from the waiting room of the dead to the next phase of the dream, his childhood house, with the whole ground floor redone as a grassy graveyard with rows of tombstones that flipped back and forth, clacking like cheap false teeth.

  The doorway where Jiri awaits them is an important doorway. Anyone could tell that, even without Jiri standing outside. An intense inaudible buzz jazzes up the pace as tourists swarm toward the door like pilgrims nearing a shrine.

  Landau unfolds his map of the camp, then refolds it without looking. He will know what he is seeing, or, rest assured, Jiri will tell him. He’ll tell the world what fresh horror they are about to behold, what new nightmare was the daily routine of Jiri’s adolescence. And Eva Kaprova will translate Jiri’s blowsy figures of speech into simple damning statements of fact such as Kafka might have written.

  The Kafka Congress enters a long tiled hall lined with rows of sinks. Above each sink is a mirror, veined with hairline cracks, missing most of its silver.

  “Our beauty parlor!” shouts Jiri.

  “The shaving room,” explains Eva. “This is where they brought the Red Cross observers on their biannual inspections to show them that the prisoners were maintaining high standards of personal hygiene. Otherwise the sinks were never used—”

  “This was where I learned to shave,” Jiri interrupts. “And for me it was perfect. My first year in the camp, I only had to shave once every six months!”

  Landau watches several women gaze tenderly at Jiri until grizzled old Mr. Character-Face disappears and turns, in those damp female eyes, back into Pretty-Boy-Prisoner Jiri, a strapping Adonis with creamy skin and soft down on his upper lip.