Guided Tours of Hell (6 page)

The waiter sighs and rolls his eyes as Landau scans the blurry menu. Could he borrow someone’s glasses? He and Mimi used to exchange reading glasses when they still pretended that growing old was a little joke between them and not (as it would soon become) a crime each blamed on the other. Poor Mimi, farsightedness isn’t her fault!

Natalie’s wearing reading glasses, smudged with fingerprints and flecked with tiny white dots. Landau wouldn’t borrow hers, not if he were starving and this menu listed the last food on earth! His starry explosion of sympathy for Mimi, back home in New York, has failed to rain droplets of charity down on Natalie Zigbaum.

Anyway, Natalie’s busy, speaking Czech with her handsome young waiter. Pointing at the menu, she’s debating her selection. She must think she’s in France or Italy, some country in which it makes sense to have informative chats on the subject of food for which you will soon pay tons of money. She must have forgotten that she’s here, where the only choice is between the deep-fried pork and the deep-fried chicken. Landau can hear his arteries wheeze, strangling along with his bowels. The minute he gets back to New York, he’ll go in for an angioplasty—forget the stress test, the heart monitors, cut directly to the chase.

“Yes?” says Landau’s waiter. Landau looks across the table, thus bringing to four the number of men—Jiri, his waiter, Landau and his—boring into Eva with impatient hostile stares.

Eva implores the waiter in Czech, touching her stomach and breast in the universal language for whatever a culture believes the sick and weakened can eat. Eva too must imagine herself in a country in which a cook can conceive of anything edible prepared without gobs of salt and duck fat.

“Meat,” Jiri whispers. “I need meat. Not water! Not gruel! This bitch is trying to starve me.”

Jiri is speaking English, but the waiters understand and are glad to be able to cut the bitch loose and deal directly with Jiri. Several talk at once in Czech, no doubt listing a selection of animal organs, available charred or deep-fried. Jiri’s too ill to care. Again he covers his face with his freckled truck driver’s hands, covers everything but his ears, with which he listens until at last he raises his chin and nods, still without looking up.

Now both waiters focus on Landau.

“The same,” says Landau, his teeth clenched so tight that he has to repeat it. “The same.”
These
will be his last words now: I’ll have what that other guy has. “The same” translates into Czech, it seems, and the waiters trudge toward the kitchen.

Eva has to call them back to say that she too will have the same thing as Jiri and Mr. Landau.

Then urgently she tells Jiri, “What you’ve ordered is terribly heavy. Very hard to digest. Do you really think you should—?”

Jiri slowly peels back his fingers and rotates his face toward Eva. “Is this about money?” he says. “The conference saving a couple of kopecks? That’s all right! Thanks! We’ll skip the meat course! Grandpa will just have the soup.”

“Jiri!” cries Eva. “Calm yourself! Please!”

“I’m calm!” says Jiri. “Calm enough to see through your rucking plans. Persuading Jiri Krakauer to pimp for the Kafka Foundation, if there
is
a Foundation, if it isn’t the private account of Madame Eva Kaprova, maybe toward a hot new car or a week at some nudist beach in Dalmatia—”

Eva covers Jiri’s mouth with her hand, which he promptly pulls away, and the lovers struggle while the conferees stare. Landau feels a sort of vibratory hum rising from Natalie Zigbaum, an energy that builds and builds until it rockets her out of her chair. Grabbing the table edge, she leans across toward Jiri. From Landau’s perspective—looking up—she’s the figurehead on a ship’s prow, an avenging mermaid with shelflike breasts plowing through the water.

“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.