Guided Tours of Hell (4 page)

Gently Jiri turns Landau around to watch the elderly rabbi and critics thanking Eva and leaving the room.

“Another Ottla,” Jiri says. “Or…another selection. The old and weak get weeded out. And in this case it makes sense; they’re better off skipping the tunnel. The damn maze twists and turns underground for two miles, maybe more, and just when you think you’re dying, you can’t hold out another second, it brings you back up to ground level right smack in front of the gallows. The Nazi version of a cardiac stress test: an oven in summer, an icebox in winter, slanted uphill and so low you had to double over to keep from cracking your head. They’d make you run to your own execution…. Everyone heard rumors about all the guys they didn’t need to hang because their hearts gave out in the tunnel on the way to the gallows.”

“It sounds like a real…experience,” Landau mumbles stupidly.

Landau is game for the tunnel! He isn’t some withered old geezer, hanging on by a thread, some pussy academic afraid of the harder stuff! If Jiri’s braving the tunnel, Landau’s right behind him, though he’s feeling a little…well, clammy. Fifty-one-year-olds have heart attacks every day! In Manhattan they’re dropping like flies, a colleague of Mimi’s, last month. Suppose Landau fell ill in the tunnel underneath the camp? With Northern Bohemian medical care, Landau would be dead meat. He hasn’t had a checkup in years, though Mimi often urges him, Mimi, who spends half her life at the gynecologist’s office. And Landau hasn’t been well here, constant heartburn, constant cramps, his bowels an active volcano. What if he has to take a shit miles underground?

This is not exactly the sort of question he can ask Jiri, who is already loping off toward a low doorway, obviously the entrance to the corridor of death. Someone should save the man from himself! Jiri’s the one with the bad heart. But Jiri may be better off than Landau—that is, if Landau discovers in the depths of the tunnel that he too suffers from a cardiac condition that proves to be far deadlier for being undiagnosed.

Landau is already crouching as he jogs stiffly after Jiri. But again he is intercepted by the indefatigable Natalie Zigbaum, who has made it her mission to impede Landau’s painful progress, to pour vinegar on the wounds he is sustaining in this Calvary. Peering up through her glasses into Landau’s eyes, Natalie says, “Hey, I’m sorry I called you an asshole. Being here is tough on everybody’s nerves.”

“Not Jiri’s,” mutters Landau, meaning: Natalie is forgiven.

“He loves it,” says Natalie. “It’s a real homecoming for Mr. Professional-Survivor.” They stand there, silenced by guilt at their venom for this man who has lived through hell.

Landau moves to follow Jiri. Again Natalie restrains him.

“You’re not seriously going in there,” she says. “Honestly heading, of your own free will, into an underground maze, volunteering for a torture devised by the warped Nazi mind, a forced march, crouched, uphill, bent over. And for what? To have the macho experience of concentration camp survival?”

Has Landau lost his senses? Natalie’s perfectly right! It’s just posturing—ridiculous!—to follow Jiri into the tunnel. Landau feels a great wash of gratitude for female common sense, for the pure clear heights from which women look down on male games of power and competition, for their bravery in wading in and saving men from themselves.

“Come sit with me.” Natalie says, mischievous and faintly subversive, offering Landau an end run around some needless penance. “We can wait for them on those benches over there. The group will have to pass by us on their way back from the tunnel. Eva’s been telling the geriatric contingent to meet them on the benches in twenty minutes or so.”

Twenty minutes in a tunnel! Absolutely no way! Far better to be included among the geriatric contingent!

Landau follows Natalie to a bench along a cobblestone road lined with dusty plane trees and plots of half-dead zinnias. It’s the camp’s version of the Champs-Elysées, Fifth Avenue, Unter den Linden. Landau sinks down without thinking. Natalie sits beside him. Their arms almost touch, or maybe they touch, Landau can’t tell if some velvety tactile moisture is rising from Natalie’s arm and arcing over the space between them. Landau is very aware of her arm, but mostly he is recalling the tingling he used to feel as he sat beside some girl—any girl—in a darkened movie. The warmth and nearness of those arms was as good, maybe better, than sex. Was Mimi ever one of those girls? Landau can’t remember.

He and Natalie aren’t touching, and yet her body heat raises the temperature: It’s unspeakably hot. This is how the Albanian novelist must feel in his scratchy sweater. Landau’s stomach growls warningly, then so loudly that Natalie flinches.

Across from them, a line of people file in and out of an entrance. Actually there are two lines, a briskly moving column of men and a slower line of women. This is fantastic! Landau and Natalie have a scenic view of tourists waiting to use the toilet!

A few notice Landau watching, and look away. This is not a situation in which they want to be observed, trudging forward to adjust their clothes and sit, stand, grunt, sigh, piss, shit, wipe their asses, adjust their clothes, wash their hands or not. Better that everyone pretend not to know what is happening here, better glance at Landau and glance away, though Landau can’t stop staring at what, he feels, could be a scene staged just for him, at actors hired to reenact the degradations of camp life, the waiting, the exposed public nature of the most intimate bodily functions. This is dehumanizing enough—and it’s nothing like the real thing! The world needs writers like Jiri to keep describing what it
was
like. Jiri has a mission, a subject! Unlike
moi
, Landau thinks.

Near the end of the line, a small boy with a pale dirty face yanks his mother’s arm like the rope of a bell that won’t ring, a curtain that won’t open. His mother wears a turquoise miniskirt, a pink paisley blouse, 1970s clothing that goes with her bleached blond hair. Her lips tighten, she rolls her eyes, taps her foot, then smacks her kid on the head, hard enough so that everyone notices and pretends not to. Finally, with a theatrical shrug, she yanks the kid out of line and goes and asks the people up front if her boy can go before them. Her posture grows flirty, obsequious as she talks to her fellow adults, whom Landau and Natalie watch deciding whether to help the child or punish the mother for her garish clothes and what she did to the kid. Deciding against the mother, they don’t acknowledge her at all, staring ahead even as she yells one perfect curse and drags her yelping child to the end of the line.

“Did you see that?” cries Natalie. “These people are monsters!”

“See what?” lies Landau. “What did I miss?”

“Nothing,” Natalie says. “Forget it. There’s a cinema in that building.” She indicates the waiting line. “They show a documentary about daily life in the camp. Probably with John Gielgud or a Theo Bikel voice-over. I don’t think I could stand it. Just being here is traumatic enough.”

Natalie is hopeless! She thinks the toilet is the cinema! Just as she mistakes Eva’s passion for Jiri for concern about his health! The Final Solution almost succeeded partly thanks to morons like Natalie, believing against all evidence that the toilet is the movies, that the death camp was a bucolic resettlement farm somewhere in the East, that the washroom where dead men primped was a bracing Spartan health spa.

But for Landau it’s a lucky break. He would love to take a piss, maybe move his bowels. His stomach has been in such lousy shape that he’s become very toilet-conscious and registers the location of every stinking latrine like a truck driver noting gas stations at the edge of a desert. Probably he can use this toilet for as long as he likes without returning to the curious glance, the uneasy moment that can occur after someone has gone to the toilet and stayed a really long time. He can take forever, and Natalie will think he was watching a movie.

“I’ll go check,” says Landau. “See what the film’s like.”

“Have a ball,” says Natalie, whose pout reminds Landau of his own crestfallen face when he and the director of
To Kafka from Felice
went out drinking after rehearsals and Lynn—his actress, his distant star—claimed to be too tired. Later Landau learned that she was meeting her studmuffin lighting director.

“You might want to check on the old folks,” Natalie says. “I don’t know why they’re not here on the benches. I heard Eva suggesting they might want to catch a few minutes of the film. As if such a film were something you might watch to pass a little time, like those vile TVs they have now in airports. Is Madame Kaprova Jewish? That hasn’t been established.”

“I wouldn’t know,” says Landau, thinking: Wake up! There is no movie, Natalie. But in that case…where
are
the graybeards, the Tel Aviv rabbi, the rich Antwerp businessman-donor and fervent Kafka fan? Is that how it was, people disappeared, first the old and weak…Landau is an asshole! It wasn’t like that at all! Those old people were being slaughtered, while these must have found some nice leafy café for a snack and iced tea.

Landau joins the men’s line and waves limply at Natalie, who still doesn’t seem to wonder why the sexes must separate for the movies. Closer, he sees one guy at a time going in and out of the men’s room. They seem to be pissing at record speed, and soon it’s Landau’s turn to empty his bladder—thank God!—and give his colon a tentative squeeze to see how things are doing.

Not well, is the answer, not well at all; his bowels slide all too quickly, his shit is practically water, and only now does he check for the thin sheets of sandpaper with which these poor slobs wipe their asses. Did Kafka use such paper? Surely Jiri will tell them. Surely that was one of the subjects about which he debriefed Ottla.

The bathroom is buzzing with horseflies so slow and fat it’s no surprise that they can’t stay airborne but keep landing on Landau’s hands, his forehead, his lips. Disgusting! One hears that flies subsist on shit, and there’s no doubt about these guys, too sated to leave the kitchen. Landau longs to achieve that transcendental state that lifts us above the sights and smells of alien public bathrooms, an escape route blocked when he recalls Jiri’s famous chapter about the brutal choreographies of the camp latrines, the degrading lack of privacy that began on the boxcars.

Finally Landau finishes. Does he feel better or worse? His bowels burn slightly more than before, but at least—he hopes—they are empty. He’s sure his fingers must smell of shit. The thin gray paper is useless, but nothing can induce him to touch the common soap in its filthy string bag or the grimy towel resting on its hook after an encounter with some tourist’s armpits. Landau rubs his fingers gingerly under the icy trickle and is still shaking off water when he exits into the foyer, evading the glare of an old man waiting for him to emerge.

Only now does a more relaxed, less preoccupied Landau sidle up to the wall to read a plaque explaining in five languages that this is the former residence of the camp Kommandant, his wife and children, all of whom, Landau imagines, may have used the same toilet, beneath which Landau’s innocent excrement is mingling with the Devil’s, or at least with that of the demon who shit every day like a normal person, and went off, whistling, to his job of torture and mass murder.

Landau hears the grainy drone of a movie sound track coming from a darkened room. He crosses the hall and looks in. People are sitting on folding chairs, their chins lifted toward a screen, watching a film which is, just as Natalie threatened, about life in the camp, of course not about the toilet habits of the Kommandant and his brats, but about the cruel charades with which the Nazis pretended that the cultural life of their inmates was as tenderly monitored as their personal hygiene.

On screen a chorus of skinny terrified children dressed in fringed vests and cowboy hats are singing—Landau can’t believe this—“Don’t Fence Me In.” In English. The joke sends Landau reeling. Whose sense of humor was this? Or what encoded message were the chorus director and the filmmakers trying to slip past the Germans?

Landau feels a grinding in his gut, as if he’s swallowed pebbles. He almost returns to the toilet, but the men’s line has doubled—tripled—and with great misgivings he goes back outside.

“How was it?” asks Natalie snidely.

“Depressing,” Landau answers.

“What did you expect?” she says.

“
Brigadoon
,” says Landau.

“That’s not funny,” Natalie says.

“Oh, isn’t it?” sneers Landau. Then the energy drains out of him, from his fingertips down. Is he dehydrated? Anemic? Who cares what his diagnosis is! He has no strength for this quarrel with dull ugly Natalie Zigbaum. He feels that he’s back in his marriage: those long morbid Sundays with Mimi. To lose your desire for a woman is one thing—but to lose your taste for fighting! At night Mimi falls asleep, like one of Pavlov’s dogs, the minute Ted Koppel comes on. Lying beside her in bed, Landau sometimes wonders how often Kafka slept with Felice. Once? Twice? Never? The point wasn’t sex. For Kafka the ultimate turn-on was rucking with Felice’s head, insisting that she write him the details of everything she did, every thought she had, what she read, what she ate, why she didn’t write him more often—and then pulling back and having “doubts” about their love, their engagement, throwing Felice into despair, then feeling guilty, apologizing, and starting the whole gruesome process over and over again.

But where is the challenge with Natalie? You could drive her insane in five seconds. And their quarrel is so grotesque. What are they fighting about? Whether the former Kommandant’s house is now a cinema or a toilet?

Natalie pats the seat beside her. Landau gapes at her plump freckled hand. He could be a kid again, repelled by middle-aged flesh. So what if he’s middle-aged, too? He doesn’t have to like it. He can’t sit where Natalie’s hand has been. But what else should he do? Wander off for one more peek in the shaving-room mirror? Catch another round of the children’s choir doing great cowboy hits from the death camp?

Landau feels so much like a cornered rat that his breath comes in rodentlike wheezes. He’s overreacting, but face it: This is the camp. Even Natalie knows that, Natalie, who keeps patting the bench with a hand that separates from her body, a fat white grub with liver spots, five tentacles stroking the seat. If Landau parks his butt there, he will never get up again.