Guided Tours of Hell

by Francine Prose

  “You know…,” Natalie tells Jiri, “you can be a real shit. You know that?”

  Jiri’s look of dazed annoyance reminds Landau of a cat, distracted by another cat and fooled into losing his mouse.

  Jiri and Natalie regard each other. Something primal is transpiring. Natalie and Jiri facing off are the cobra and the mongoose, the shoot-out at high noon, lightning bolts zinging back and forth between the sorcerer and the witch. Natalie’s crashing her broomstick right into Jiri’s face, and Landau watches with new respect as the staring contest continues until—amazingly—Jiri surrenders by smacking the table and laughing.

  “Very good,” says Jiri. “I like this babe. Who is she?”

  “I’m Natalie Zigbaum,” she replies. “We’ve met. Several times, Mr. Krakauer.”

  “Of course!” says Jiri. “I remember. Can’t a guy make a joke?”

  “Hilarious,” Natalie says.

  “What’s her problem?” Jiri asks the group.

  Landau’s plastic placemat is red and white, checked bistro-tablecloth style, dabbed with smears of dried gravy. A fly crawls out of a dish of salt and lumbers unsteadily from square to square of the Albanian’s placemat. Landau thinks: I know that fly, he’s followed me from the toilet.

  Meanwhile Jiri’s eyes widen with mock or genuine wonder as he seeks an explanation for Natalie Zigbaum’s problem, silently asking the conferees and finally turning to Eva, who is not about to explain that Natalie’s problem is how Jiri treats Eva. Natalie Zigbaum—Eva’s defender. How humiliating that must be!

  Distress exerts its downward pull on Eva’s attractive features, a gravity lost on no one, not even Jiri. He smiles forgivingly, though he’s the one who should be asking forgiveness, and, taking Eva’s chin in his hand, he gently prods and squeezes her cheeks like a peach he’s testing for ripeness.

  “God,” he says. “This place. This place. None of you know what it’s like for me. This was the SS Canteen.”

  “I told them,” Eva interjects nervously.

  “Told them what?” says Jiri. “That being sent on an errand here was a risky mission? Listen: The only way to survive in this camp was by forgetting your former life, blotting out what you used to have, what you used to love. It was much too dangerous, a death sentence if you remembered. Memory lowered your resistance, made you vulnerable and weak, remembering and hoping were the worst things you could do. That was the reason for what happened to me. Is that what you told them, Eva?”

  “No,” murmurs Eva, looking down.

  “What happened to you?” breathes the Croatian feminist.

  Scornfully, Jiri puckers his lips and plants a loud smacky kiss on the air. “It was safer to forget you’d ever been anywhere but hell. And the trouble was that the SS Canteen was a vision of heaven. Walking in the kitchen door brought back sensations deeper than words, memories of another world with warm stoves, hot soup, a world of tiny potatoes baked in their jackets, duck and chestnuts, Linzer torte, pear tarts with frangipane.

  “That was what they ate here—and not only on holidays! Where did they get such ingredients? I wondered then, and I still wonder today. The Camp Kommandant was Viennese! He insisted on his pastry!”

  Ah, the Kommandant, thinks Landau. He and I have shared a toilet.

  “I too ate Viennese pastry,” Jiri says. “With my mother, before the War. In this lovely little café, just the two of us, Mama and me. But if I’d let myself remember that, I never would have made it….”

  Landau’s disturbed by a vague sense of something not quite right…. Then suddenly he realizes: All this business about forgetting the past in order to survive—It’s from Survival in Auschwitz! Jiri’s ripping off Primo Levi!

  And now Landau can’t control himself, the words burble out of his mouth. “Come on. Viennese pastry? Are you asking us to believe that there was a gourmet restaurant in a concentration camp in wartime Northern Bohemia?”

  Instantly, he’s sorry. Has he lost his mind? Jiri turns on him with the same stagey outrage, the precise same slow burn he did on Natalie Zigbaum. It strikes Landau that Jiri has a narrow repertoire of gestures and facial expressions. But who can blame him for trying to simplify? The pressures he must be subjected to, the demands, the expectations! Why bother learning new tricks if the old ones work, getting the laugh or the tear or the victory over the pitiful heckler?

  But is it just Jiri stealing from Primo Levi or is it a…full-blown déjà vu, a little tug at the edge of that silky tablecloth, Time, rattling Landau like a saucer. Did something like this happen before? It didn’t happen to Landau. It’s Jiri who was here in the camp. Is this what Mimi means when she talks about clients losing their ego boundaries?

  Jiri stares at Landau with his watery basset hound eyes, which visibly dry and brighten as they register Landau’s discomfort. Anger resurrects him, reminding him of his stature, the historical experience that authorizes him to tell Landau to go fuck himself with such smug uninflected politeness.

  “I wouldn’t say gourmet,” Jiri says. “Let’s just say they ate well. Another one of their little jokes.” As Jiri resumes his story, Landau can’t help thinking he sounds…rehearsed. Isn’t there something monstrous about Jiri telling this over and over, the Holocaust as a party piece to amuse one’s dinner companions! But isn’t that the point, in a way: to tell it again and again and never stop repeating…. It’s Landau who’s the monster, judging Jiri for sounding practiced.

  Jiri says, “You took your chances when some SS bastard asked you to get him coffee and a slice of Apfelkuchen. It was always the biggest shitheads who sent you to the canteen. What they liked more than the coffee was to drink it in front of the prisoners. So you had to watch yourself when you’d just been in the canteen, dipping into that bright world that tricked you into remembering a life in which you ate when you were hungry. You had to make sure this old self didn’t sneak into your face and give it the wrong expression while you watched the SS eat.”

  “What could the right expression have been?” Eva Kaprova mutters, as if to herself.

  “My point exactly!” cries Jiri. “Okay. I met a pretty girl who worked in the canteen kitchen. She was Jewish, a pastry chef, also Viennese. Her other qualification was that she was the Kommandant’s girlfriend. And very pretty. Did I say that?”

  “You did,” says Natalie Zigbaum. “Several times.”

  “Just once,” says the Croatian feminist.

  “So,” says Jiri, “I began to like going to the canteen. I’d enter through the kitchen, where my girl always had something for me, some days a pastry horn stuffed with cream, some days almond custard. Not exactly what you want on an empty stomach. Did I say empty stomach? I was starving to death! But as my cute little pastry chef stuffed eclairs into my mouth, I persuaded myself that this was dessert, that I’d already eaten the whole fabulous meal that came before it.

  “This girl and I would smooch all over the kitchen. We’d fuck leaning back against the shelves of the pantry. Once a box of powdered sugar fell down, and we licked it off each other….”

  Landau has never heard such sexual boasting in his life! He can’t look at Natalie Zigbaum. If he catches her eye, he’ll laugh. And then he sees: Natalie’s leaning forward, drawn in by the story. Even as Landau was making plans to exchange a covert smirk at Mr. Camp-Casanova’s expense, Natalie has been falling under Jiri’s spell.

  Okay, so the guy has charisma! It’s unfair, but some people do, and not always good guys, not always Gandhi or the Dalai Lama; obviously there was Hitler…. Once, at a party, Landau met a reporter who covered the Oliver North trial for a New Jersey paper. He described going into the courtroom prepared to hate the little fucker, and after listening to him for ten minutes, thinking maybe he wasn’t so bad.

  But Jiri isn’t Hitler. He isn’t Ollie North. He’s a guy who lived through hell and has every reason to be bitter and filled with hate, and instead embraces life, food and sex and women. And Landau’s sitting here hating him, so who is the
hateful person? It’s not exactly surprising that no one, not even Natalie, is staring into Landau’s eyes and hanging on his every word.

  The color is back in Jiri’s cheeks. In fact, he looks flushed, warmed by his own spicy story. Once more something’s ringing a bell; it’s clanging inside Landau’s head. What does this scene remind him of? Has Jiri already written this? Jiri sounds so practiced he might as well be reading aloud:

  “The whole kitchen knew what was going on, but they looked the other way, even though, believe me, we were giving them something to look at. My girlfriend was a good pastry chef, a hard worker, uncomplaining. And who wanted to tell the Kommandant what she was doing with me? It was easy to kill the messenger. They were killing everyone else. If the Kommandant learned the truth, all our lives would change, and the first rule of camp life was that change was never for the better.

  “But this girl made me forget everything I’d learned in the camp. Not to hope and not to plan and not to trust in anything or anyone but yourself.”

  And now Jiri has the whole table—and half the restaurant—gazing at him like disciples at the feet of a master.

  “I forgot myself,” he says. “I hoped. I planned. I believed that no one would have the balls to tell the Kommandant. We got more and more outrageous. Our big thrill was having sex in the kitchen while the Kommandant was out in the canteen, nibbling chocolate cream puffs. We were young—what did we have to lose? We were going to die anyway.”

  The waiters bring small glass bowls of wilted salad, iceberg lettuce and soft tomatoes glued together with white cheese. Jiri makes a face at his salad and pushes it away.

  Eva catches a waiter’s eye—Landau’s waiter, as it happens. Landau wonders if the waiter too feels he’s heard this story before. Possibly he’s worked in this joint since he used to bring the Kommandant’s Sacher torte. Though probably his wartime duties were worse—unspeakably worse—than serving coffee and cake.

  “Did we order this salad?” asks Eva. She and the waiter bark at each other in Czech, and then the waiter shrugs and begins to clear the salad bowls from the table. Landau stares after the salad that, a minute ago, seemed disgusting. Now he feels like Tantalus watching the grapes fly out of his reach and all the water in hell drain away as he bends to drink. When did Landau eat last? He truly can’t remember. The ghost of the vanished salad lingers on the table, filmy shreds of green and red under a gooey white caul, lost now because of Eva Kaprova saving a couple of pennies at the expense of their happiness, their health. This is what Landau’s worried about, here in this crummy café where, if one believes Jiri, the devil dined on lemon cream pie in the center of an inferno packed with the starving and the dead.

  “Rabbit food!” shouts Jiri. “Who eats that shit, I ask you?”

  “It’s good for you,” says Natalie Zigbaum, with a coyness bordering on flirtation that plunges like an ice pick straight into Landau’s heart. You’d think Landau was in love with her, that’s how grief-stricken he is now that she has shifted her burdensome affection from Landau onto Jiri’s capable shoulders. When Landau found out that Lynn was sleeping with the lighting director (everyone but Landau knew and assumed he did, too) he used to look at the guy’s twenty-five-year-old muscles squirming under his T-shirt and ask himself how a bright mature woman like Lynn could choose a…back…over Landau, with his talent, his experience. He was the fucking playwright! He’d met Mimi at a loft where a group of left-wing actors performed his play about Stephen Biko, a better version of the story that, years later, another playwright trashed and got onto Broadway.

  “Good for old ladies!” Jiri booms back at Natalie, jolting Landau out of his reverie. Will Natalie take this personally?

  “Good for everyone,” she answers sweetly. Eva Kaprova nods, twice. So what if she’s just sent the salad away? They’re united in this, two women allied in a noble attempt to make Mr. Juicy-Carnivorous-Blood-Lust eat fiber and live forever.

  “Where was I?” Jiri asks, and from down the table the Toronto critic calls, “Your little pastry chef in the kitchen!”

  “Thank you, my good man,” says Jiri. “Right. My little pastry chef. One day I showed up, she wasn’t there. She’d been taken away. Two SS guys had finished their coffee and crullers up front and then come back to the kitchen and got her. I took the place apart. I went nuts! I raged like a bull. I threw pots, pans, flour. The cook looked like a snowman.

  “Someone stepped in front of me. It was the Kommandant. He had flour on his overcoat sleeve, on his evil Hitler mustache, on the big red wart at the tip of his nose. I used to think about that wart, burrowing into my girlfriend. And now there he was, the son of a bitch. He looked at me, cool as a cucumber.

  “‘Are you hungry?’ he said.

  “I also was a son of a bitch. You had to be to survive. I stared right into his squinty eyes. I said to him, ‘Fuck you.’”

  Jiri translates into Czech what can only mean fuck you. Loud, in case the whole room missed his heroic act.

  Wait! thinks Landau. None of this is true! There was no Viennese bakery, no Kommandant patiently playing games with some Jewish kid…. It all leads back to the question of what Jiri Krakauer did to survive, not just survive but triumph and come out the other side seeing himself as the kind of guy who could sleep with the Kommandant’s girlfriend, trash the SS kitchen, and live to tell (or invent) the tale.

  “What happened then?” Eva asks.

  “When?” Jiri smiles an odd half-smile.

  “You know,” Eva says girlishly.

  “Say it,” Jiri insists. “Say what I said.”

  Eva takes a deep breath. “When you told the Kommandant: Fuck you.”

  She might as well have said: Fuck me. That’s how turned on Landau is by this intimate scenario of power and compliance.

  “What happened next?” says Natalie. “Please! Don’t leave us hanging!”

  Jiri says, “Nothing happened next.” Is his story over? He covers his eyes and shakes his head. Is he thinking about the dead girl? This is how he ends his stories: with the pretty pastry chef vanishing, the tiny art student marching off to Auschwitz, with great gushes of sentimentality, like coming all over his audience. And Jiri can get away with it because his subject is beyond literary criticism, beyond plausibility, kitsch, way beyond good or bad taste.

  “Where’s the food?” shouts Jiri. “We’re dying here!” And once more Landau is shaken by what must be the world’s most protracted déjà vu. Did he read this scene? Did he live through it? It’s all so bizarrely familiar.

  A pair of waiters—not Jiri’s or Landau’s—appear with several orders, ready ahead of the rest. No doubt they’d been sitting there cooling off until Jiri asked. Landau peeks over the top of the plates. Well, better the rabbi’s noodle soup be a little cool. Don’t want the old guy scalded as he sloshes soup all over himself, offering Jiri his bowl.

  “No thank you!” Jiri scowls at the rabbi’s soup. A few more plates of food arrive, though not for Jiri or Landau. It must be taking longer to cook the vast hunks of meat they’ve ordered.

  It turns out not to matter who has been served and who hasn’t. Jiri won’t let anyone eat, won’t let them escape into their slippery duck or the rubbery potato croquettes spurting geysers of grease.

  “Excuse me!” he says. “It’s not over. Listen, please, while I finish!” Forks drift down as gently as snow.

  “Years later I saw the Kommandant. This was in the Catskills. Many years after the War.” He turns to Eva Kaprova. “Do they know about the Catskills?”

  Eva knows the answer, but she’s lost the energy for translation.

  “The Catskills,” Natalie Zigbaum speaks up, addressing the crowd, the entire Tower of Babel they’ve erected in Kafka’s name. “Like Karlsbad. Karlovy Vary. Marienbad. Yalta. For the health.”

  Landau whispers to Natalie, “You’re right. The same healthy chopped liver diet, though without the healing waters, unless you count the Olympic pools….” It’s the kind of thin
g that Natalie would have whispered to Landau in that lost golden age before she just ignored him and kept listening, enraptured, to Jiri.

  “I was with a girl in the Catskills,” Jiri says. “On vacation. From my wife.”

  Ah ha ha, the Toronto critic gets this, and the Croatian feminist, even the Albanian novelist emits his depressive snort. Only Landau, the chump, considers Jiri’s wife, left home so that Jiri can have his Borscht Belt fling. Why is Landau taking the wife’s side? He might as well be Mimi, always siding with the wife, especially when Mimi was the wife…. Did Mimi know about the nights Landau waited till she was asleep and, under the cover of Ted Koppel’s drone, crept into the living room and lay on the couch and thought about Lynn and jerked off. It was all so embarrassing, how easily he—at his age—could become obsessed with a woman. And was it any more or less depressing that he could forget so fast? He hardly feels anything anymore…. Did he think it would last forever? Nothing that embarrassing will ever happen to him again, which, he thinks, may be the most depressing part of all.

  Mimi paid close attention whenever he mentioned Lynn and whenever he didn’t mention Lynn. And he captured the tremor of pain and rage he heard in Mimi’s voice and used it in the letter he wrote for Felice in the final week of rehearsal, the letter in which Felice describes the nights she lies awake, afraid that Kafka has stopped loving her and fallen for her go-between, her best friend, Grete Bloch.

  Landau understands women. The critics—and many women Landau knows—have always agreed on this. No one has ever said as much about the great work of Jiri Krakauer. Landau understands women so well he never gets laid, except once a decade by Mimi. And Jiri so misunderstands them that they plaster themselves all over him, even Natalie Zigbaum.

  And what’s the point of understanding women? Or anyone, for that matter? Kafka was the first to admit he didn’t understand himself. Yet he understood exactly what it was like to wake from a night of troubling dreams and discover that you had become a giant cockroach. Landau feels another twinge, another tug of déjà vu, announcing itself with an aura, like those displays of northern lights that precede Landau’s migraines.