Guided Tours of Hell (3 page)

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 ones 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.

“Seven years bad luck,” someone says. “Multiplied how many times?” Of course it’s Natalie Zigbaum, who has come up behind Landau with this stunning piece of humor. “
What
bad luck? The Germans have finally conquered the world. Why mess around with a sloppy war when you have corporate buyouts and take over all our supermarkets and half our publishing houses?”

Landau’s frosty stare slides over Natalie and past her toward the shaving room, then back at her, communicating with his eyes what he thinks of a person who could stoop, in a place like this, to xenophobic bitching. A place like this? What place like this? There is no place like it.

“If you don’t mind,” says Landau, “I’d like to be alone here.”

“Asshole!” mutters Natalie, and in their shock they stare at the space between them, as if the word has bubbled out of her mouth and is floating there, ready to burst.

Landau escapes from the lock of her gaze, but Natalie is still watching. This makes everything harder as he moves off into the room. What is he supposed to do now? Walk from one end to the other? Stop for a reverent mooning gaze at each nasty sink? Look at one sink, then move along? The possibilities are endless, and none of them seem right. What is the tourist etiquette for the shaving room at the death camp?

Then Landau has—well, forces—a vision: skeletons in mirrors, hollow-eyed male bags of bones reflected in rows of dark glass. Another phony metaphor: in fact they weren’t skeletons, not the prisoners here, who were kept above starving weight, again for the Red Cross inspectors.

Landau is overdramatizing, getting things wrong again. But isn’t that his problem: his falseness, his lack of depth, the reason why, he secretly fears, his play is basically garbage, idiotic, hysterical, just like poor Felice, who wasn’t pretty or sexy or smart, she was no match for Kafka, so what did Kafka possibly get out of that drawn-out tortured engagement…And how would Landau know, Landau, who doesn’t have a clue about why he married Mimi, what youthful vanity she tickled, a year or two of good sex, or why he fell in love with Lynn, the actress who starred in the off-off-Broadway production of his
To Kafka from Felice
. That had seemed like a sensible love. She was an artist, around his age, though not a sensible person, because, halfway through rehearsals, it turned out that Lynn was sleeping with the twenty-five-year-old lighting director.

Landau reaches back to Kafka for consoling proof that the soul food of the artist is sexual torment and deprivation, a theory to which Jiri clearly refuses to subscribe. But who is right? Who is the better writer: Kafka or Jiri Krakauer?

Landau finds himself staring into a mirror at a half-bald, severely myopic gnome with a wiry corolla of clown hair, big teeth, Natalie Zigbaum in drag—it takes forever for Landau to recognize his own face. Where is the chunky determined boy whom girls once found so charismatic, the campus radical known for his speeches at antiwar rallies? Where is the budding playwright surrounded at loft parties by pretty girls asking how Landau understood so much about women! Landau wants to howl in protest. Yet he knows that the cause of his grief is just vanity, egomania. How revolting all that is, here in a mirrored room where the doomed could make themselves presentable for their appointments with Death!

Jiri claps his hands, loud hollow pops that echo off the tiles. Something is coming up here, the next phase of the trip, and Jiri wants to be the one to tell them what to expect.

“Mesdames et Messieurs,”
says Jiri. “The tunnel to the gallows. Another amazing miracle of Nazi engineering.”

Meanwhile Eva Kaprova is going around to the older conferees, placing her hand on their stooped shoulders, leaning down to whisper in their ears.

Jiri comes up behind Landau. Landau sees him in the mirror, to which Landau has returned for another look, for reassurance that doesn’t come, especially not when Jiri appears over Landau’s shoulder in all his leonine splendor, thus exploding Landau’s last faint hope that the reason he looks so wretched is that the mirror is unflattering.