Guided Tours of Hell (2 page)

Now traffic stalls in a stagnant pool of exhaust that makes Landau’s eyes burn. Outside the window, a roadside stand sells huge stuffed animals, plush neon-pink panthers with black button noses sucking up pollution. Landau nudges his seatmate, a depressed Albanian novelist. The Albanian glances over and nods and emits a tragic snort.

Even in the August heat, the Albanian wears a scratchy brown cardigan; a muffler of the same fabric bandages his throat. At the welcome cocktail party, the whole Congress overheard Jiri complimenting the Albanian’s outfit, recalling how in the camps he’d worn every scrap of scrounged clothing. If you “slipped into something more comfortable,” everything else you owned was stolen. The Albanian had made the same melancholy snort with which he’s just responded to Landau. And what is Jiri wearing? An expensive pale blue silk shirt with the top buttons undone, revealing a freckled chest, thatched with white hair, and, even, Christ, a gold chain!

Landau hadn’t wanted to go to the camp; he changed his mind ten times, erasing and rewriting his name until he dug a hole in the sign-up sheet. He hates to think of the Holocaust, or rather he feels it too deeply, unlike all those slobs who take dates to
Schindler’s List
so they can provide a manly shoulder for their girls to burrow their faces in during the scene in which the naked female prisoners don’t know if the shower will spray water or poison gas.

Isn’t there something by definition obscene about guided tours of hell—except, of course, if you’re Dante? Yet plenty of people visit the camp, for as many different reasons. At the last minute Landau decided to go, to shut up and take his medicine, maybe it would do him good, just as working with children was supposed to be good for Felice. And it isn’t as if he’s making a special effort, going out of his way to satisfy a ghoulish curiosity. The whole Kafka Congress is making the trip, so it must be perfectly normal. Landau will probably feel left out if he doesn’t go. Also he’d hate to look like a coward who can’t even visit the camp where Jiri spent three hellish years, which is another reason not to go: The camp is Jiri’s kingdom.

They turn a corner, and there it is: a solid brick fortress, not unlike the state colleges built after the Vietnam War, after students like Landau ran around smashing windows. And there is the sign over the gate,
Arbeit Macht Frei
, Work Makes You Free. Oh, the fabulous ironies of the German sense of humor, and how amazing, how incredible that you can see it from a tour bus, which for the first time since they left Prague hits a reasonable speed and zips past the camp, then past parking lots crammed with dusty cars, campers, and fully loaded German-made RVs.

The passengers murmur anxiously. Could they have missed their stop? Wait, this bus was hired to take them where they are going! Eva Kaprova holds up a calming hand. The bus is just going to park—miles away from the camp. How will the frail Israeli rabbi manage the long hike back?

But first they must drive past another tourist attraction. Eva Kaprova points out the National Memorial Cemetery, the tidy straight rows of pale identical markers, over which the state has recently erected a monumental gleaming silver cross. The passengers fall silent and gaze dully at the cross.

Then something startling happens. Jiri lopes to the front of the bus. He turns to mug at his colleagues and, with broad clownish gestures, spreads his arms out wide, as if he is hanging on the cross. But he doesn’t look like Jesus. Jiri’s in much better shape, a condor about to flap its wings and fly up through the bus ceiling. The conferees gaze at him worshipfully. Why did Landau come here? He’d told 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 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 straight ahead. At the stop in front of the Prague Kmart, three Gypsy women got on, and the other passengers shifted as far as possible from that trio of cackling birds with their bright ruffled plumage. The Czechs emitted clucking noises and muted syllables of threat and warning, and mimed—for the benefit of the Kafka conferees, whom until then they hadn’t acknowledged—the wary sensible safeguarding of wallets, pockets, and purses.

Then Jiri went to the front of the tram and spoke to the driver, who was unaware of the crisis. The driver came back and yelled at the Gypsies, who yelled at him, everyone yelled, then the Gypsies got off. The Czechs resumed their blank stares, as if nothing had happened, as did the Kafka conferees, though perhaps for different reasons.

“Did you see that?” Natalie had shouted into Landau’s ear. “It took Jiri about five seconds to make the tram Gypsy free.”

Landau’s only answer was an irritated shrug, as if Natalie were a stinging bug that had gotten under his collar.

Natalie keeps on nipping at him, even now as they walk up the cobblestone road to the camp, and worse, she seems to have read Landau’s mind, to know what he’s been thinking. How else to explain it—it couldn’t be coincidence—when she says, “Did you believe how Mr. Human-Rights treated those Gypsies on the tram!”

Again Landau shrugs, just one shoulder this time. “What were the choices?” he says. “Sit there grinning like liberal schmucks and get our passports stolen?” Why is he defending Jiri for doing something morally vile (although, to be perfectly frank, Landau had felt relieved). Because the people who disapprove of him are people like Landau and Natalie Zigbaum!

“The choices?” Natalie Zigbaum snarls. “Liberal schmucks…or Nazis?”

Suddenly fearing that he’s bullied Natalie to the point at which her fragile crush (or whatever) on him has been blasted out of existence, Landau feels bereft. Her attention is better than nothing. There is so little sexual buzz going around this conference, Natalie’s choosing Landau must mean that he is its second most attractive man.

“Watch your step,” warns Landau. “These cobblestones are murder.” In fact they are like vicious stone eggs, pressing into Landau’s tender arches. Natalie’s shoes have thicker soles than his, but she smiles so gratefully, leans so pliantly against him that she could be clicking over the stones in the thinnest highest heels. Landau grasps her elbow and guides her up the path as they approach the dark looming archway in which Jiri stands with outstretched arms, welcoming them all.

What does the camp remind Landau of? A zoo without animals, maybe. A wide pebbled path lined with overgrown borders and inviting park benches, without the parklike promise of plea sure and relaxation, but rather the zoolike reminder that one is here on a mission, there is something to see here, a fixed route to be taken. And how could they go anywhere except where Jiri steers them? Jiri stands off to one side and bows, waving them on. The conferees smile and nod at him, a tiny bit nervous, but jolly….