Guided Tours of Hell Read Free Page A

ethical lesson of these stones is that it’s smart to withhold your stale crust of bread from a little boy dying of hunger.
    What did Jiri do to survive? Landau would rather not know, though he suspects that Jiri’s confessions in print are only the tip of the iceberg. There have been some moments since the start of the conference when Jiri has acted in ways that must have distressed even his acolytes and fawning devotees.
    Yesterday they were on the tram, headed for yet another reception that would begin with yet another minor official conveying the apologies of a slightly less minor official who was scheduled to greet them but was called away at the last minute. On the tram—because the tour bus scheduled to convey them there had also been called away at the last minute, a scenario so familiar by now that Landau wonders if the Congress budget is lower than Eva will admit, so that she stages these charades in which they wait twenty minutes for a nonexistent bus and then give up and wait another twenty minutes (or more) for the tram. Everything requires waiting, punitively protracted, sometimes an hour for breakfast, though they all get the same plate of slimy flamingo-colored bologna, rubbery gherkins, and pewter-ringed slices of egg, so it’s not as if the kitchen has to cook fifty separate orders. The budget must be rock-bottom, judging from the hotel, a grisly state socialist dump untouched by the cushiony strokings of the Velvet Revolution, staffed by a chilly sadistic crew unschooled in the decadent good manners bourgeois tourists expect, a dank prison to which the conferees are returned each night to bash their aching heads against granite pillows encased in cold damp linen, on beds no wider than coffins.
    The grim hotel, the elusive officials, the buses that never come—Hey, welcome to the Kafka Congress (this is the sort of thing that Natalie Zigbaum sidles up to Landau to whisper, along with the news that Jiri isn’t staying at their hotel but at a five-star palace not far from Eva’s apartment), where, fittingly, they’ve come to honor the spirit of a man who wrote the book on claustrophobic living quarters, on thuggish servants of the state refusing to show their faces, and on mysterious obstacles that make it hard to get from place to place.
    During the long hot wait for the tram, several conferees suggested taking taxis, to which Eva replied that the Russian mob now controls the taxi business; last week a German tourist was stabbed for the gold fillings in his teeth. A rebellious ripple stirred the group, a disturbance that Jiri quieted with the observation that compared to a boxcar, the tram would do just fine. Besides, he said, what camp life taught you was the dangerous folly of simply waiting, of not living in the moment, an idea that Jiri has discussed with the Dalai Lama, who shares Jiri’s opinion completely. Jiri name-drops constantly: Milos Forman. Vaclav Havel. Still, Landau couldn’t believe that Jiri could name-drop the Dalai Lama, whom Landau has always wanted to meet. Oh, unfair! Unfair!
    At last the tram arrived, packed full, so it was quickly arranged that half the Kafka conferees would board and the other half would wait another twenty minutes (or more) for another tram. Mr. Every-Man-for-Himself leaped onto the first tram while everyone else was still negotiating, and Eva boarded after Jiri, irresponsibly leaving the remaining conferees to find the right tram and the reception. Landau was swept onto the tram, along with Natalie Zigbaum. As it lurched forward, she fell against him and giggled and stepped away, readjusting her upholstery. Landau had thought—just as he thinks now, walking up the path to the camp—that he and Natalie (squat, bespectacled, American) are a parody couple, a cruel parody of tall, handsome, clear-eyed, European Jiri and Eva.
    More people got on the tram at each stop. “Another boxcar!” boomed Jiri. Did none of the Czechs speak English? Everyone stared