Guided Tours of Hell Read Free

himself it would be worth it for the free ticket to Prague, and—let’s be honest—he was flattered that he’d been invited, that the news of his little play had somehow crossed the ocean.
    The bus squeezes into a parking space; its passengers don’t notice. They go on staring at Jiri until he collapses his arms and laughs. The moment’s over, they too can laugh and be released to stand and gather their things and follow Jiri off the bus and up the road to the camp.
    The Kafka Congress flocks around Eva Kaprova, who collects them on the drawbridge and invites them to look down at the moat that the Nazi engineers designed so they could flood it in an emergency with water from the nearby river.
    Landau stares down into the weedy moat, which is dry, of course, and littered with paper, broken glass: Eastern European landscaping. The parching sun sears the back of his neck. He lifts his head too quickly, and tiny black spots swim before his eyes. Oh God, what if he faints here?
    “Kafka’s castle,” says Eva, with a bitter actressy chuckle. But no one’s paying attention. Once more they’re watching Jiri, who has gone ahead of them and is heading into the camp.
    What is it like for Jiri to walk up that cobblestone road and under that soot-blackened stone arch? Could this be the first time since…? Landau can’t help wondering. But Jiri’s beyond cheap psychology or sentimental melodrama. He enters the camp like its owner, a hero or messenger storming the fortress with urgent news for the king.
    The Kafka Congress ditches poor Eva and rushes ducklinglike up the path, scurrying after Mr. Pied-Piper. Even the elderly rabbi lifts his cuffs and hurries. Landau lingers, watching Eva’s generous sullen mouth droop even lower as she shades her eyes with her hand and watches the others run away. Landau, her solace, her gallant knight, is drifting in her direction when he nearly falls over Natalie Zigbaum, the Slavic languages professor from Vassar.
    It’s like tripping over an armchair, an armchair in a brown dress blotched with cruelly girlish pink tea roses, an armchair with long canines, thick spectacles, a helmet of gray hair and a grimly determined smile for Landau, who all through the conference has noticed Natalie finding reasons to be near him, noticed Natalie eyeing him even as he eyes Eva Kaprova, who has been eyeing Jiri Krakauer. In other words, the usual daisy chain, even here in the death camp.
    “Look at Mr. Full-of-Shit,” Natalie says, jerking her head toward Jiri. She was the one who started it—making up names for Jiri—and now Landau can’t help doing it; it’s become a new habit, a tic.
    “Mr. Resurrected-Saint,” hisses Natalie. “Mr. God-the-Survivor. When the whole world knows how he survived, all those confessions—boasts, really—paraded in his memoirs, how he traded soggy matches and leaky shoes for extra rations of bread, how he hardened himself to shaft everyone else, and we’re supposed to think: Bravo! Good for him! That’s what I would have done! Well, maybe we would have given the bread to the dying boy who Jiri knew he had to refuse in that famous chapter from our hero’s brilliant memoir—”
    “Then you wouldn’t have survived,” Landau says. “Isn’t that the point?”
    Natalie’s face implodes like a puffy doughnut, bitten into, leaving only her increasingly self-conscious and rigid smile.
    “Is it?” she says. “Is that the point?”
    “Sure it is,” says Landau harshly. “The point is: We don’t know what we’d do. Nobody knows what accident of fate or DNA or character will determine how we act when the shit hits the fan.”
    “I guess,” agrees Natalie, retreating, and as she turns away, her eyes, magnified by thick lenses, film with gelid tears.
    Landau feels awful! Terrible! How badly he has behaved, here where every cobblestone should be teaching him a lesson about cruelty and kindness. Oh, really? Is that the lesson? What is Landau thinking ? The