Guided Tours of Hell (8 page)

“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.

Landau’s not going to jump, no way! He knows what he’s going to do:

He’ll wait near the bus for the rest of the group. He won’t even leave Prague early. He’ll stay the last two days, grinning, eating shit, mourning Jiri—if he’s dead—or else pretending nothing happened, as if anyone cares what Landau pretends, not even Natalie now. Then he’ll board the plane and travel ten hours in a flying anchovy can with foul air, lousy food, someone’s screaming baby. He’ll take the bus from JFK to Grand Central and splurge on a ride home in some maniac’s taxi, and let himself into the apartment, where maybe Mimi will be asleep, or maybe she’ll be at the shelter. On his desk he’ll find stacks of bills, requests for letters of recommendation from students he can’t remember, notes from theater directors explaining why they can’t consider
To Kafka from Felice
for the upcoming season.

Landau stops and stares into the chasm, at a grape-colored plastic bag turning ashen in the sun. The parking lot is before him, and just beyond, the cemetery with its silver cross gleaming over the orderly rows of the dead.

Landau will join them soon enough, and none of this will matter, just as it no longer matters to those already there. But for now, it’s all that counts, and for now, Jiri is right: Landau would feel better, he would have been better off if something or someone had picked him up and thrown him into the abyss.

E
VERY TIME SHE TURNED
on the TV, someone was killing a pig. Tonight it was an elderly Provençal couple, like Russian nesting dolls, the farmer who would have fit so neatly inside his bowling pin of a wife. Their pig was a very docile pig, unlike the pig last night, which the elderly Alsatian couple had slaughtered, also on TV.

When the Provençal farmer bopped his pig on the head with a mallet, the pig nodded, as if remembering, then sank to its knees and died. The Alsatian pig had struggled and squealed and bled all over the snow, and the Alsatian couple had also yelled as they ran around lunging and grabbing.

But even that was quiet compared with the woman next door to Nina whose all-night screaming orgasm had kept the hotel awake all last night. Nina slept between crescendos and woke in fits of grief or rage, though it had never bothered her, all her other times in Paris. Screaming was something Frenchwomen did, or else there was a sex tape that French hotel owners put on to impress American tourists.

Nina had said that to Leo, the last time they were in Paris. They’d heard a woman that time, too. They’d both known she was faking. Because they knew what the real thing was. Intense, the opposite of noise, it made the whole world get quiet.

That time in Paris they’d hardly gone outside except to change hotels, the five—or was it six?—hotels the famous dead had slept in, Oscar Wilde, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Edith Piaf, supposedly in the same rooms Nina was writing about for
Allo!