Guided Tours of Hell

by Francine Prose

  “We were in love,” Jiri explains, in case his listeners have the wrong idea and imagine him betraying his wife just for hot sex at The Concord. “There was nowhere for us to go. Why was a very long story. I couldn’t believe it, I was out of the camp, and still I couldn’t find a place to take the woman I loved.”

  In other words, Jiri earned it. He had the right to take as many girls as he liked to love nests in the Catskills.

  Jiri says, “Our intellectual refugee crowd would never go to a vulgar resort hotel, so I thought my girl and I could relax there and feel safe. This was before my first book came out, before strangers recognized me…. I saved up my money. We took the bus. We got there Friday night. On Saturday morning we stayed in bed late—and then went down for breakfast.

  “And there, in a monkey suit, pouring coffee for our table, there he was, the Kommandant, big red wart and all!”

  A voice screams and screams inside Landau’s head: The son of a bitch is lying! This lousy café in a death camp was never a gourmet bistro! Its Kommandant never turned up as a waiter in the Catskills! Real life never dabbles in such corny absurdities, such perfect ironies, cheap coincidences…though Landau has to wonder: Who is the cornier writer—Jiri Krakauer, or real life? Probably Jiri got the idea when, like Landau, he saw the older waiters and speculated about what they did during the War. But unlike Landau, Jiri’s pretending that his fantasy happened.

  Landau’s on his own here, out here all alone. No one else thinks Jiri’s lying, not the Croatian feminist nor the Toronto critic. The Tel Aviv rabbi must question the Talmud more than Jiri’s story.

  “What happened next?” cries Natalie.

  “Nothing happened,” says Jiri. “What should have happened? What was I supposed to do? Shoot the guy? Beat the shit out of him? Go directly to jail? Devote my life to bringing him in, testify at his trial? Hey, I’m not Simon Wiesenthal. Please. I’m only a poor struggling writer. What happened? My girlfriend and I ate our bagels and lox. He poured us plenty of coffee.

  “Now listen. Here comes the juicy part: the dessert, so to speak. It was our waiter’s, the former Kommandant’s, job to bring round the pastry cart!”

  Jiri is sitting up very tall, recovered, alive and then some. He shakes his head and grabs the air, intoxicated by the gorgeousness of this detail. His mitts inscribing the very same curves he made earlier in the conference, encircling the yummy memory of Ottla Kafka’s hips. Hot sun streams in the window, backlighting his thick white hair.

  I know who he looks like! Landau thinks. He looks like Kafka’s father, except with longer hair!

  “The pastry cart!” says Jiri. “Can you believe it! Maybe the guy asked for that job. He was still a big lover of pastry….

  “So I had a little fun. I ordered the lemon cream pie. The Kommandant brought the lemon pie. I took a bite. I waited a minute. Two minutes. Then I asked for the chocolate chiffon. And I took one bite of that. And so on. The banana. The blueberry. The apple. Our table was covered with pies and cakes. My girlfriend couldn’t imagine what the hell was going on.”

  “Excuse me,” the Albanian interrupts in a gentle voice, slightly rusty from disuse. “Did this waiter, this Kommandant—did he recognize you?”

  Jiri pretends to think about it, as if he’s never wondered, as if he’s never been asked, as if he hasn’t told this story a thousand times before.

  “I guess so,” he answers at last. “I think you’d remember the little bastard who fucked your girlfriend! No?”

  For the first time, the Albanian laughs from the gut. Ho ho ho, the men love this, the critics, the rabbis, the professors, the scholars, and third-rate poets, they turn to Landau to gather him in this all-male embrace that includes all the men in the room, in the world, even those little bastards who poach on the next guy’s erotic preserve, even the little-bastard lighting director who turned out to be porking Lynn. If that little bastard walked in the door right now, Landau would like to imagine that he wouldn’t give a damn—though he might feel as if he’d instantly grown ten years older and ten pounds fatter.

  “We’re dying of hunger!” Jiri cries, alerting the whole café. In another minute he’ll storm the kitchen and fetch the remaining orders himself.

  “Please, trust me,” Eva says desperately. “You know this place. It is coming.”

  “Damn right I know this place!” Jiri says. “That’s what worries me.”

  Just then, a waiter brings Natalie’s food. Landau, Eva, and Jiri stare with curiosity and then longing at her plate of sliced roast pork with a trickle of brown gravy, nicely lumpy mashed potatoes, and some kind of berry relish. Food has come to Natalie, but she doesn’t look happy to see it. While Jiri was telling his story, he belonged to the whole group, but now that his story is over, he’s reverted to being just Eva’s.

  Landau clears his throat, then says, “That pastry chef—was she before or after Ottla?”

  People stop chewing and hold their breath, creating a silence that’s audible above the din of the café.

  “Excuse me?” says Jiri. “Excuse me? Before or after whom?”

  “Ottla Kafka,” says Landau. He can’t believe how crass he sounds, how crude and leering and slimy. He feels he’s been suckered into it by how the men were talking about little bastards fucking your girlfriend. Several times, as a schoolboy, Landau was taken in by classmates who said they would all play some trick on the teacher and then bailed out and left Landau to play it all by himself. That’s how he feels now, alone in his dirty trick. He’s guilty, and he deserves it when Jiri wheels on Landau.

  “What’s it to you?” Jiri says. “What’s it to you who I fucked, and in what order, while I was fighting to stay alive in the midst of a giant killing machine? Not just staying alive but stealing a moment for tenderness, for love. What difference does it make to you if I fucked one and then the other, or both at once, if I started fucking one girl two seconds after the other was sent to Auschwitz. What’s it to you, you little—”

  “Nothing,” says Landau. “It’s nothing at all. I’m sorry. I had no business…I don’t know what I was saying.”

  He can’t believe he’s done this; he’s finally got the attention he’s craved from Jiri and the others, but with a question that’s reduced this hallowed ground to dirt, reduced a saint, Ottla Kafka, the sister of a saint, to the kind of slut men joke about in the locker room.

  “You neurotic American guys,” Jiri says. “You shitty writers and academics and bloodsucking so-called intelligentsia. The dirty truth is, you envy us, you wish it had happened to you. You wish you’d gotten the chance to survive Auschwitz or the Gulag. History has picked up our lives and given them hard little kisses, while your generation has been left virgins, unkissed, on the shelf. And what have you done? Played cops and robbers during the Vietnam War? Then gone on, making money, not making money, writing your silly poems, your…plays, your bullshit. You know your lives have no meaning, so you distract yourself with sex. Did I say sex? I don’t mean having sex, I mean having sexual problems that you whine about in your books and…plays, no wonder nobody goes to see them! And you want to think that Kafka was a lonely guy with problems just like yours.

  “But guess what Ottla told me? Kafka fucked like a bunny!”

  Everyone’s looking at Landau now, or rather at Jiri and Landau, asking themselves which of the two is more important, more attractive, the better writer, more of a…man. Handsome old Mr. Spirit-of-Life with his flowing white hair, his gorilla’s shoulders and hands, his dramatic story? Or the middle-aged myopic golem with the migraines and diarrhea, the guy who gave the most boring reading of the entire conference, the pathetic yelpings of some babe Kafka didn’t want to marry?

  Which is what Jiri is saying: “The guy just didn’t want to get married. Meanwhile he was fucking every girl in Prague, society women, whores, going to health spas and fucking patients and nurses. Because that’s what you do in the face of death, and his sister was the same way. She had all her brother’s
genius, which she used, when I knew her, for finding ways we could be together…. Not like you pussies, you…creeps…having sex in your head, complaining because you had the bad luck to miss out on the great tragedies and get stuck in your boring lives—”

  So now it’s clear: Landau is Felice. No wonder he could write in her voice. Madame Bovary, c’est moi. He’s the dumpy woman with braces on her teeth, whom Kafka didn’t want to marry but got a kick out of torturing by mail, tormenting himself in the bargain. Landau’s the reject, the spinster, unworthy of being alive. So what if Mimi chose him? That was years ago. So what if a lousy critic or two said his plays weren’t too awful?

  But why should Landau feel this way? What has he done to deserve this flood of wrath and resentment and spite, of more venom than Jiri (if his story is true) spewed on the former Camp Kommandant? Landau tries, but can’t quite convince himself that Jiri doesn’t mean him, Jiri doesn’t know him, he shouldn’t take this personally, Jiri is enacting some primal battle, some generational father-son thing: Abraham and Isaac, Oedipus Rex, Kafka and his father.

  And now Landau figures out what’s been eluding him all along. He’s not having a déjà vu. They’re living a Kafka story, specifically, “The Judgment,” the passage in which the weakened babylike father suddenly recovers and swells into a giant and starts to shout and humiliate Georg, the son who has been carrying him in his arms.

  Feeling someone come up behind him, Landau swivels around and rams his elbow into the waiter bringing his lunch. His food has arrived on an individual wooden chopping block streaming with juices and grease. A modest dish of fried potatoes accompanies the largest piece of meat Landau has ever seen.

  The waiter slams it down before Landau so that the potato dish rattles. The meat bounces up in the air and lands with a daunting thud.

  Just what part of the pig was this? A whole shoulder or a haunch, a heart-shaped hunk of serious meat under a crispy foreskin of fat, shot through with an arrow of bone, thick as a human thighbone, but stubbier and more clublike. Treyf, Treyf, bad for you, unclean, in other words delicious, the caramel crust of meat and fat, the juicy meat smell in the air.

  Only now does Landau notice that Jiri and Eva haven’t gotten their food. It’s as if there is a God, watching over Landau, or as if the ex-Nazi waiters are angels who know that Landau has been abused and are tending to his needs first.

  But are they doing him a favor? Or is this a new and ingenious form of torture? Perhaps this prodigious piece of meat was meant for Jiri, the celebrity, and Landau got it by mistake, and now what should he do? He should pass his chopping block across the table, conveniently saving himself from having to eat in front of the others, from having to chew and swallow this slab of pork fat big as a grown man’s head, from subjecting his system to this, after all his poor stomach’s been through, diarrhea in the Kommandant’s toilet and now a cholesterol fest! Landau shouldn’t eat the meat, maybe just the potatoes. He should pass his food on to Jiri…or possibly Eva? Should he offer his meal to the sick man, or be gallant, ladies first…?

  Landau is still puzzling this out when Jiri rises out of his chair and plunges his fork into Landau’s meat and sails it, dripping, high over the table and plunks it down on his placemat.

  “Wait a minute…,” Landau says weakly.

  “Wait nothing,” Jiri says. “This—this!—is how I survived in the camp! Meat! You Americans don’t know what it’s like to not be able to have it. You get no pleasure from meat or food or sex or love or anything except making fine distinctions. I’ll have this and not that, thank you, this isn’t good for me, thank you, I don’t think I’d better, thank you….” Jiri’s voice is high and tremulous, his mouth twisted in a savage imitation of…Landau? Landau doesn’t sound like that, doesn’t look—

  “And here’s the most pathetic thing,” says Jiri. “How small you are, how microscopic…. Here you are, Mr. Landau, here you are in the death camp, tromping on the unmarked graves of innocent women and children, and you’re fighting some little fight in your head, squabbling with me, or maybe with Papa, some ridiculous ego drama about writing or women or who gets to sleep with Mama or something equally childish, and your smallness is so gigantic it blocks the whole horizon, blocks your view of history, of the world, and you won’t let go, you won’t let go, till you suck me into it, too—”

  Jiri’s fork is still stuck in the meat.

  Landau stands and glares at Jiri. He’s dimly conscious of Natalie’s steadying hand applying itself to his arm.

  “Liar,” Landau hears himself say.

  “Pardon me?” says Jiri.

  “You’re a liar,” Landau repeats. He can’t believe he’s doing this—he’s doing it for Kafka! This is what Kafka should have done, stood up to his father, that bully—and not just in a letter. Landau’s heart is pounding, a belt cinched round his chest. Is he having a heart attack? No, he feels terrific! He feels like a hero, gearing up to tell Jiri that his lies must stop, that having survived those years in the camp doesn’t put him above the truth, doesn’t let him appropriate and distort an event so profound and important, doesn’t let him turn the Holocaust into kitsch, into bad—terrible!—art….

  Jiri looks at Landau, long enough for Landau to shrink under Jiri’s chilly gaze.

  “And what have I lied about?” Jiri says evenly. “About the six million dead? Don’t tell me you’re one of those loonies who say the Jews are making it up, the whole thing never happened. Herr Professor Landau, the first Jewish Holocaust revisionist.”

  Of course, Landau doesn’t think that. But of course he can’t say so. He can’t say: I believe in the Holocaust. He’d feel like an absolute jerk. What did he think he was doing? Defending the six million against this dying mediocre writer? The dead no longer need Landau, nor do they need Jiri. They are way beyond caring about who’s telling the truth and who’s lying.

  As Jiri stares at Landau, blood rushes into his face: The bright red of a flashlight switched on beneath his skin. A blurry distraction fogs his eyes, as if he’s just remembered something; he opens his mouth, attempts to speak…and crashes forward onto his plate. Silverware clatters, tumblers spill. Landau jumps up to escape the rivulets of water and beer trickling toward him across the table. Eva also leaps to her feet and grabs Jiri’s wrist and starts screaming in Czech.

  Is she saying that she can’t find his pulse? Is Jiri dead? Landau backs away and nearly collides with a waiter, who curses at him and then joins the group of waiters converging on Jiri. The canteen’s patrons stand to watch this alarming drama in progress…. Landau backs farther away. No one turns to look. Eva doesn’t run after him the way she runs after Jiri. Not even Natalie notices or cares where Landau is going.

  Is his leaving an act of cowardice? Could Landau help save Jiri by staying? What is Landau thinking? He’s the one who may have killed him!

  Just outside the door, he stops. All right. Okay. What now? The sun has ignited the whole camp in a flare of nuclear white. Landau can’t go back in. He can’t go on. He can’t just stand here, frozen. His instinct is to get out of the camp. Okay. Fine. Follow that.

  But the camp isn’t making it easy. The heat and the cobblestone path conspire to make each step an effort. Imagine if there were guards here with orders to block his escape. But the guards are busy taking tickets, selling postcards and souvenirs.

  Landau was right not to want to come. This place truly is hell. Well, not hell, exactly. A former hell, remodeled. The smoldering pit where hell used to be has closed up like a wound, and crowds of people pay money to inspect the jagged scar. Jiri should have known better, too. He overestimated his powers if he allowed himself to think he was stronger than the camp. How foolish of him to imagine that he could outlive or outrun or outsmart it, when the camp was waiting all those years, biding time until it could claim him….

  Amazingly, Landau’s picking up speed, half-jogging toward the exit. The up-and-down motion is good for his brain. Slowly it eases the searing burn of
what Jiri Krakauer said, and of what Landau said—and couldn’t say. What could he have answered? There was nothing to say.

  Only now does it start to sink in: what has—what may have—happened. The deadweight of sorrow and loss and dread presses on Landau’s stomach. The grief that overcomes him is so intense, so shocking—Landau hasn’t felt like this since his parents died! He longs to go back and pull Jiri out of his chair and gather him in an embrace. The urge is so strong Landau groans aloud. But what would he tell Jiri? He wants to say: I prayed for you. I prayed you wouldn’t die.

  What did Jiri do to Landau to deserve the coup de grâce that Hitler and all his armies weren’t able to deliver? What was Landau so angry at? Jiri’s lies, his exaggerations? Who appointed Landau to be the righteous avenger, safeguarding the fragile honor of the dead? Did he imagine for one second that all six million were saints?

  Unlike Landau, the world knows better than to believe that all six million were heroes, the world isn’t fooled, the world doesn’t care if Jiri was less than perfect. They’ll mourn him, mourn this hero’s death, and they’ll be especially moved by the bitter irony of his returning to die in the death camp. Every magazine, every newspaper will carry Jiri’s story, and not one of them—Landau is sure—will note that his final attack was precipitated by an obscure, pathetic playwright, a worm so small that he’s still competing with Jiri, even after he’s killed him!

  But maybe Landau’s being too hasty, too quick to bury Jiri, maybe Mr. Survivor will live through this, too….

  Landau lowers his head and keeps going. He runs out onto the drawbridge, thinking: Now it’s just like “The Judgment.” After his father’s tirade, the son, Georg Bendemann, runs from the house and over a bridge streaming with heavy traffic. He shouts, “Dear Parents, I always loved you!” and vaults over the rails and into the water.

  This is perfect! It couldn’t be better! The stage is set for Landau to leave the death camp via the wooden bridge and fling himself into the deep trench that the Nazis dug to be flooded in case they needed a moat. Landau would land with a sickening crunch amid the Coke cans and brown paper bags, his head at that rag-doll angle in a tangle of thorny weeds.