Guided Tours of Hell (7 page)

“Rabbit food!” shouts Jiri. “Who eats that shit, I ask you?”

“It’s good for you,” says Natalie Zigbaum, with a coyness bordering on flirtation that plunges like an ice pick straight into Landau’s heart. You’d think Landau was in love with her, that’s how grief-stricken he is now that she has shifted her burdensome affection from Landau onto Jiri’s capable shoulders. When Landau found out that Lynn was sleeping with the lighting director (everyone but Landau knew and assumed he did, too) he used to look at the guy’s twenty-five-year-old muscles squirming under his T-shirt and ask himself how a bright mature woman like Lynn could choose a…
back
…over Landau, with his talent, his experience. He was the fucking playwright! He’d met Mimi at a loft where a group of left-wing actors performed his play about Stephen Biko, a better version of the story that, years later, another playwright trashed and got onto Broadway.

“Good for old ladies!” Jiri booms back at Natalie, jolting Landau out of his reverie. Will Natalie take this personally?

“Good for everyone,” she answers sweetly. Eva Kaprova nods, twice. So what if she’s just sent the salad away? They’re united in this, two women allied in a noble attempt to make Mr. Juicy-Carnivorous-Blood-Lust eat fiber and live forever.

“Where was I?” Jiri asks, and from down the table the Toronto critic calls, “Your little pastry chef in the kitchen!”

“Thank you, my good man,” says Jiri. “Right. My little pastry chef. One day I showed up, she wasn’t there. She’d been taken away. Two SS guys had finished their coffee and crullers up front and then come back to the kitchen and got her. I took the place apart. I went nuts! I raged like a bull. I threw pots, pans, flour. The cook looked like a snowman.

“Someone stepped in front of me. It was the Kommandant. He had flour on his overcoat sleeve, on his evil Hitler mustache, on the big red wart at the tip of his nose. I used to think about that wart, burrowing into my girlfriend. And now there he was, the son of a bitch. He looked at me, cool as a cucumber.

“‘Are you hungry?’ he said.

“I also was a son of a bitch. You had to be to survive. I stared right into his squinty eyes. I said to him, ‘Fuck you.’”

Jiri translates into Czech what can only mean
fuck you
. Loud, in case the whole room missed his heroic act.

Wait! thinks Landau. None of this is true! There was no Viennese bakery, no Kommandant patiently playing games with some Jewish kid…. It all leads back to the question of what Jiri Krakauer did to survive, not just survive but triumph and come out the other side seeing himself as the kind of guy who could sleep with the Kommandant’s girlfriend, trash the SS kitchen, and live to tell (or invent) the tale.

“What happened then?” Eva asks.

“When?” Jiri smiles an odd half-smile.

“You know,” Eva says girlishly.

“Say it,” Jiri insists. “Say what I said.”

Eva takes a deep breath. “When you told the Kommandant: Fuck you.”

She might as well have said: Fuck me. That’s how turned on Landau is by this intimate scenario of power and compliance.

“What happened next?” says Natalie. “Please! Don’t leave us hanging!”

Jiri says, “Nothing happened next.” Is his story over? He covers his eyes and shakes his head. Is he thinking about the dead girl? This is how he ends his stories: with the pretty pastry chef vanishing, the tiny art student marching off to Auschwitz, with great gushes of sentimentality, like coming all over his audience. And Jiri can get away with it because his subject is beyond literary criticism, beyond plausibility, kitsch, way beyond good or bad taste.

“Where’s the food?” shouts Jiri. “We’re dying here!” And once more Landau is shaken by what must be the world’s most protracted déjà vu. Did he read this scene? Did he live through it? It’s all so bizarrely familiar.

A pair of waiters—not Jiri’s or Landau’s—appear with several orders, ready ahead of the rest. No doubt they’d been sitting there cooling off until Jiri asked. Landau peeks over the top of the plates. Well, better the rabbi’s noodle soup be a little cool. Don’t want the old guy scalded as he sloshes soup all over himself, offering Jiri his bowl.

“No thank you!” Jiri scowls at the rabbi’s soup. A few more plates of food arrive, though not for Jiri or Landau. It must be taking longer to cook the vast hunks of meat they’ve ordered.

It turns out not to matter who has been served and who hasn’t. Jiri won’t let anyone eat, won’t let them escape into their slippery duck or the rubbery potato croquettes spurting geysers of grease.

“Excuse me!” he says. “It’s not over. Listen, please, while I finish!” Forks drift down as gently as snow.

“Years later I saw the Kommandant. This was in the Catskills. Many years after the War.” He turns to Eva Kaprova. “Do they know about the Catskills?”

Eva knows the answer, but she’s lost the energy for translation.

“The Catskills,” Natalie Zigbaum speaks up, addressing the crowd, the entire Tower of Babel they’ve erected in Kafka’s name. “Like Karlsbad. Karlovy Vary. Marienbad. Yalta. For the health.”

Landau whispers to Natalie, “You’re right. The same healthy chopped liver diet, though without the healing waters, unless you count the Olympic pools….” It’s the kind of thing that Natalie would have whispered to Landau in that lost golden age before she just ignored him and kept listening, enraptured, to Jiri.

“I was with a girl in the Catskills,” Jiri says. “On vacation. From my wife.”

Ah ha ha, the Toronto critic gets this, and the Croatian feminist, even the Albanian novelist emits his depressive snort. Only Landau, the chump, considers Jiri’s wife, left home so that Jiri can have his Borscht Belt fling. Why is Landau taking the wife’s side? He might as well be Mimi, always siding with the wife, especially when Mimi
was
the wife…. Did Mimi know about the nights Landau waited till she was asleep and, under the cover of Ted Koppel’s drone, crept into the living room and lay on the couch and thought about Lynn and jerked off. It was all so embarrassing, how easily he—at his age—could become obsessed with a woman. And was it any more or less depressing that he could forget so fast? He hardly feels anything anymore…. Did he think it would last forever? Nothing that embarrassing will ever happen to him again, which, he thinks, may be the most depressing part of all.

Mimi paid close attention whenever he mentioned Lynn and whenever he didn’t mention Lynn. And he captured the tremor of pain and rage he heard in Mimi’s voice and used it in the letter he wrote for Felice in the final week of rehearsal, the letter in which Felice describes the nights she lies awake, afraid that Kafka has stopped loving her and fallen for her go-between, her best friend, Grete Bloch.

Landau understands women. The critics—and many women Landau knows—have always agreed on this. No one has ever said as much about the great work of Jiri Krakauer. Landau understands women so well he never gets laid, except once a decade by Mimi. And Jiri so misunderstands them that they plaster themselves all over him, even Natalie Zigbaum.

And what’s the point of understanding women? Or anyone, for that matter? Kafka was the first to admit he didn’t understand himself. Yet he understood exactly what it was like to wake from a night of troubling dreams and discover that you had become a giant cockroach. Landau feels another twinge, another tug of déjà vu, announcing itself with an aura, like those displays of northern lights that precede Landau’s migraines.

“We were in love,” Jiri explains, in case his listeners have the wrong idea and imagine him betraying his wife just for hot sex at The Concord. “There was nowhere for us to go.
Why
was a very long story. I couldn’t believe it, I was out of the camp, and still I couldn’t find a place to take the woman I loved.”

In other words, Jiri earned it. He had the right to take as many girls as he liked to love nests in the Catskills.

Jiri says, “Our intellectual refugee crowd would never go to a vulgar resort hotel, so I thought my girl and I could relax there and feel safe. This was before my first book came out, before strangers recognized me…. I saved up my money. We took the bus. We got there Friday night. On Saturday morning we stayed in bed late—and then went down for breakfast.

“And there, in a monkey suit, pouring coffee for our table, there he was, the Kommandant, big red wart and all!”

A voice screams and screams inside Landau’s head:
The son of a bitch is lying!
This lousy café in a death camp was never a gourmet bistro! Its Kommandant never turned up as a waiter in the Catskills! Real life never dabbles in such corny absurdities, such perfect ironies, cheap coincidences…though Landau has to wonder: Who is the cornier writer—Jiri Krakauer, or real life? Probably Jiri got the idea when, like Landau, he saw the older waiters and speculated about what they did during the War. But unlike Landau, Jiri’s pretending that his fantasy happened.

Landau’s on his own here, out here all alone. No one else thinks Jiri’s lying, not the Croatian feminist nor the Toronto critic. The Tel Aviv rabbi must question the Talmud more than Jiri’s story.

“What happened next?” cries Natalie.

“Nothing happened,” says Jiri. “What should have happened? What was I supposed to do? Shoot the guy? Beat the shit out of him? Go directly to jail? Devote my life to bringing him in, testify at his trial? Hey, I’m not Simon Wiesenthal. Please. I’m only a poor struggling writer. What happened? My girlfriend and I ate our bagels and lox. He poured us plenty of coffee.

“Now listen. Here comes the juicy part: the dessert, so to speak. It was our waiter’s, the former Kommandant’s, job to bring round the pastry cart!”

Jiri is sitting up very tall, recovered, alive and then some. He shakes his head and grabs the air, intoxicated by the gorgeousness of this detail. His mitts inscribing the very same curves he made earlier in the conference, encircling the yummy memory of Ottla Kafka’s hips. Hot sun streams in the window, backlighting his thick white hair.

I know who he looks like!
Landau thinks.
He looks like Kafka’s father, except with longer hair!

“The pastry cart!” says Jiri. “Can you believe it! Maybe the guy asked for that job. He was still a big lover of pastry….

“So I had a little fun. I ordered the lemon cream pie. The Kommandant brought the lemon pie. I took a bite. I waited a minute. Two minutes. Then I asked for the chocolate chiffon. And I took one bite of that. And so on. The banana. The blueberry. The apple. Our table was covered with pies and cakes. My girlfriend couldn’t imagine what the hell was going on.”

“Excuse me,” the Albanian interrupts in a gentle voice, slightly rusty from disuse. “Did this waiter, this Kommandant—did he recognize you?”

Jiri pretends to think about it, as if he’s never wondered, as if he’s never been asked, as if he hasn’t told this story a thousand times before.

“I guess so,” he answers at last. “I think you’d remember the little bastard who fucked your girlfriend! No?”

For the first time, the Albanian laughs from the gut. Ho ho ho, the men love this, the critics, the rabbis, the professors, the scholars, and third-rate poets, they turn to Landau to gather him in this all-male embrace that includes all the men in the room, in the world, even those little bastards who poach on the next guy’s erotic preserve, even the little-bastard lighting director who turned out to be porking Lynn. If that little bastard walked in the door right now, Landau would like to imagine that he wouldn’t give a damn—though he might feel as if he’d instantly grown ten years older and ten pounds fatter.

“We’re dying of hunger!” Jiri cries, alerting the whole café. In another minute he’ll storm the kitchen and fetch the remaining orders himself.

“Please, trust me,” Eva says desperately. “You know this place. It is coming.”

“Damn right I know this place!” Jiri says. “That’s what worries me.”

Just then, a waiter brings Natalie’s food. Landau, Eva, and Jiri stare with curiosity and then longing at her plate of sliced roast pork with a trickle of brown gravy, nicely lumpy mashed potatoes, and some kind of berry relish. Food has come to Natalie, but she doesn’t look happy to see it. While Jiri was telling his story, he belonged to the whole group, but now that his story is over, he’s reverted to being just Eva’s.

Landau clears his throat, then says, “That pastry chef—was she before or after Ottla?”

People stop chewing and hold their breath, creating a silence that’s audible above the din of the café.

“Excuse me?” says Jiri. “Excuse me? Before or after
whom
?”

“Ottla Kafka,” says Landau. He can’t believe how crass he sounds, how crude and leering and slimy. He feels he’s been suckered into it by how the men were talking about little bastards fucking your girlfriend. Several times, as a schoolboy, Landau was taken in by classmates who said they would all play some trick on the teacher and then bailed out and left Landau to play it all by himself. That’s how he feels now, alone in his dirty trick. He’s guilty, and he deserves it when Jiri wheels on Landau.

“What’s it to you?” Jiri says. “What’s it to you who I fucked, and in what order, while I was fighting to stay alive in the midst of a giant killing machine? Not just staying alive but stealing a moment for tenderness, for love. What difference does it make to you if I fucked one and then the other, or both at once, if I started fucking one girl two seconds after the other was sent to Auschwitz. What’s it to you, you little—”

“Nothing,” says Landau. “It’s nothing at all. I’m sorry. I had no business…I don’t know what I was saying.”

He can’t believe he’s done this; he’s finally got the attention he’s craved from Jiri and the others, but with a question that’s reduced this hallowed ground to dirt, reduced a saint, Ottla Kafka, the sister of a saint, to the kind of slut men joke about in the locker room.

“You neurotic American guys,” Jiri says. “You shitty writers and academics and bloodsucking so-called intelligentsia. The dirty truth is, you envy us, you wish it had happened to you. You wish you’d gotten the chance to survive Auschwitz or the Gulag. History has picked up our lives and given them hard little kisses, while your generation has been left virgins, unkissed, on the shelf. And what have you done? Played cops and robbers during the Vietnam War? Then gone on, making money, not making money, writing your silly poems, your…plays, your bullshit. You know your lives have no meaning, so you distract yourself with sex. Did I say sex? I don’t mean
having
sex, I mean having sexual
problems
that you whine about in your books and…plays, no wonder nobody goes to see them! And you want to think that Kafka was a lonely guy with problems just like yours.