Guided Tours of Hell (5 page)

And then—suddenly!—help arrives. Landau is saved by the Kafka Congress, erupting through the archway that must mark the end of the tunnel. Landau can see from a distance: The little flock is very upset. Tottering on her spiked heels, Eva Kaprova runs sheepdoglike circles around the conferees, shepherding them forward while they stumble over each other, encircling Jiri Krakauer. Some of them walk backward to keep an eye on Jiri, who is also stumbling, dragging himself along, leaning his meaty slab of an arm on the stooped shoulders of the Albanian novelist.

“God in heaven!” cries Natalie. “A heart attack! I knew it!”

“Oh, shut up,” mutters Landau, but not so that Natalie can hear. Liberated by disaster from the constraints that normally make him shy around Eva Kaprova, he rushes up to her and suddenly sees that his most repressive inhibitions have been wisdom in disguise. Because now for the first time he truly
gets
the myth of the Medusa, how a woman’s face can freeze your blood, turn you into stone. Mimi Landau’s darkest looks were girlish mugging compared with the raging furious mask that Eva Kaprova is wearing.

“Chest pains!” Eva hisses.

“Did they start in the tunnel?” Landau’s question is too stupid for Eva to dignify with a reply.

As Eva brushes past him, Landau pauses a beat, then ducks beneath Jiri’s free arm and takes half the weight from the Albanian, who thanks him with a pained smile. Does Jiri even know Landau’s there? Yes! He claps him on the back with a hearty smack that reassures Landau about the state of Jiri’s health.

A briny smell comes off Jiri, mixed with floral cologne, and Landau feels slightly woozy, especially when Jiri bears down on his shoulder. How grotesquely ironic if Landau were to die while helping Mr. Unkillable survive, once again on the backs of his comrades.

Landau can’t afford these thoughts. What matters is not dropping Jiri and not losing sight of Eva’s red hair above her black silk blouse, the rare glimpses of those swaying hips stretching her tight summer skirt. Jiri is very heavy, but they can’t stop walking, and the physical strain is turning Landau into a different—a calmer—person. The chatter in his brain has stopped. The only thing, the critical thing, is putting one foot in front of the other, which, as Landau recalls, is a state that Jiri has described as essential for survival in the camp.

The tourists in line for the toilet are staring at the Kafka conferees like extras in some epic costume drama about the aftermath of war, like peasants lining the road to watch the wounded army retreat. Landau is one of those soldiers, supporting his fallen comrade….

Eva collars strangers for swift panicky consultations and runs, then walks, then runs again. Is there a doctor in the camp? After a while she goes one way, and Landau, Jiri, and the Albanian take off in the opposite direction. Is some ghostly magnetic race-memory pulling them toward the camp’s former hospital? Or is Jiri guiding them like a glass on a Ouija board?

“No, please, here,” Eva shouts crossly at Landau, who has done nothing to deserve her impatience and contempt. Let
her
carry this two-hundred-pound ox all the way back to Prague!

Eva enters a doorway, waving for them to follow. Landau hears the clatter of dishes, and his glasses fog with the steamy school-lunch aroma of cabbage, fried meat, and detergent.

So it’s not an infirmary, but some sort of restaurant. What does it say about Eastern European medical care that Eva has decided to bring a sick man to a café? In which case shouldn’t Landau be more alarmed about the state of his own health? What if—just what if—his stomach complaints should be masking something more serious, and he too has a fatal attack?

Seated at one long table are the elderly Kafka conferees, eating and making merry, the Tel Aviv rabbi waving his fork as he argues some point with the Toronto critic. The Cambridge don spots Jiri and alerts the others, who turn and stare, alarmed.

Jiri leans down to whisper to Landau.

“Couldn’t you vomit?” Jiri says. Reflexively, Landau edges away. But Jiri’s referring to the restaurant patrons, their mouths and chins gleaming with grease, wispy beer-foam mustaches lightly frothing their lips. Or maybe he means the room itself, or whatever it used to be when Jiri knew this tourist paradise in an earlier incarnation. The café is twice, three times as hot as the courtyard outside!

Jiri murmurs something else, spraying Landau’s ear with spit, but Landau doesn’t mind. Finally, he is feeling a hint of that transcendence that has eluded him before, that swooning sense of rising above the grubby and the small to a place where a saintly version of yourself lets a sick man spit in his ear.

Jiri beckons Eva over, and Landau must perform the complex ballet of moving aside so Jiri can whisper to Eva while Landau stays close enough so that Jiri doesn’t keel over; the only way is for Eva to wedge her hip against Landau’s groin. Landau feels the faint stirrings of an erection. Well, it’s been a dry time since he got to Prague. In fact it’s been a dry time for a long while before that. He and Mimi hardly ever have sex, and his affair with the actress, Lynn, was entirely in his head, hungry gazes across the theater, daydreams, and jerking off.

“This was the SS Canteen,” says Eva, briefly reverting to her duties as tour guide, briefly forgetting her new role as emergency nurse. Then, remembering, she yells in Czech and, ever the conscientious translator, in English for the conferees: “This man is sick! Someone get us some chairs, a table, a cold rag, and hot tea!”

Eva makes such a ruckus that the other diners give up sawing at their schnitzel and lift their noses out of their beer steins.

The Kafka conferees shift seats, sliding over as fast as they can, an undignified rout requiring much groping for chairs and rearranging of skirts. They make room, lots of room for Jiri. Eva nearly tackles him, pushing him into the nearest chair.

In fact there are several empty chairs, and after many clumsy mistakes, a seating plan emerges: Jiri is in the middle with Eva Kaprova on one side and the Albanian on the other, while Landau is directly across from Jiri, flanked by the Croatian feminist and, of course, Natalie Zigbaum.

They rest for a moment, panting, as if they’ve all run a long way. Then Eva snakes her nicotine-stained fingers into Jiri’s shirt pocket and frisks him, shamelessly intimate, until she snaps her head impatiently and grabs her purse and takes out a bottle of pills. So Eva is carrying Jiri’s pills—they might as well be married!

Eva shakes out a pill and fills a glass with cloudy water from a pitcher. Stop! Landau longs to cry out. But surely Jiri must be immune to whatever fiendish microbes have been frolicking in Landau’s intestines. Will Eva be hurt if Landau implies that her country’s water isn’t safe to drink?

Jiri wraps his huge fat hand around Eva’s thin one, brings her hand to his mouth and eats the pill out of her palm in a gesture that combines lecherous suggestiveness with pathetic dependence. He takes a sip of water and swallows with great effort; his Adam’s apple squirms in his neck like a kitten trapped in a sack. Then he coughs, stops, and coughs again, a bout that lasts long enough for Landau to hear in Jiri’s cough the rasping of the dead sunflowers shaking in the hot wind. Jiri coughs for so long that Landau runs out of metaphors and just listens, paralyzed like everyone else, to the sick man’s wheeze, which rasps on so interminably they fear it will never end.

They watch the cough consuming Jiri, eating him cell by cell, so that he appears to be shrinking before their eyes, and if there’s an ounce of strength left in him, Jiri needs it to push away the water glass that Eva Kaprova slides toward him, now tenderly, now aggressively, while Landau looks on, needing all his own strength to ward off certain images, to keep certain terrible memories from worming into his mind, clearly remembered wrenching scenes from the deaths of his parents: phone calls, doctors, hospital beds, bedpans, sponge baths, glimpses of wasted aging flesh Landau wishes he’d never seen.

As soon as Landau gets back to his hotel, he will telephone Mimi, to whom he hasn’t spoken since he got to Prague, unless he counts the answering machine he informed of his safe arrival. Even if it takes hours to get through, Landau will call his wife and tell her every thought he’s had, what’s he’s seen, what he’s eaten, what he’s heard, his worries about his health. Isn’t that what Kafka wanted from Felice? Mimi and Landau will talk with a candor they haven’t shared in years. Mimi knew Landau’s parents, she knows who he really is…he’ll censor only tiny bits, like Natalie Zigbaum’s crush on him and his attraction to Eva Kaprova. If he doesn’t reach Mimi at home, he’ll track her down at the shelter and pour out his heart while women shriek and babies cry and dishes crash in the background.

But even as he imagines this, Landau fears it is useless; he is sure that the world he imagines has somehow ceased to exist. There is no Mimi, no shelter, no Upper West Side, no New York. He will never get to his hotel or beyond this moment of watching Jiri Krakauer cough his lungs out in a café at the death camp.

“Jiri,” Eva is nearly sobbing with grief, “Jiri Jiri Jiri!” telling the whole conference they’re on a first-name basis, no Rabbi this or Professor that, no Miss Zigbaum or Mister Landau.

Jiri’s coughing slacks off a bit, then reaches another crescendo that drives Eva to slam down the water glass and rake her fingers through her hair, a signal for the conferees to ascend to new heights of alarm.

Natalie leans toward Landau and whispers,
“La Traviata
.
”

Jiri gasps and sputters, and just when it seems that the crisis might be abating, he slumps forward onto the table.

Landau’s shocked to find a prayer buzzing through his mind, a plea to no one in particular: Please don’t let anything happen to him. Please don’t let him die.

When was the last time Landau prayed? When his plane made a rocky landing in Prague. He wants to think he’s praying for Jiri, but he knows it’s for himself. If Jiri recovers, they can all go home and forget this. But if Jiri dies here, if he’s come back to die in the death camp, Landau feels that some part of himself will be stuck here forever and ever.

Eva half-rises out of her chair and flings herself on Jiri’s back, but Jiri ripples his shoulders and shrugs her off.

Back from the dead, Jiri raises his hand. It will take more than this to kill him.

“Please,” croaks Jiri. “Everyone eat!”

On cue, a gang of waiters rush over. A menu is slapped down in front of Landau, while more menus sail past him like Frisbees. Rushing waiters? Flying menus? In this country where waiters scurry away if you happen to catch their eye and hide in the kitchen and move only in the slow-motion crawl of scuba divers?

One day the conferees went to a café in Old Town Square, where the waitress ignored them for so long that they twice got to see the astronomical clock put on its hourly performance. Finally Jiri stood and began to follow their waitress, duckwalking behind her like Groucho Marx. The waitress ignored him for a while and then turned on her heel and gave Jiri a long cold stare and came over and took their orders.

Maybe these waiters are just relieved that Jiri has stopped coughing and isn’t dying. Or is he? “Everyone eat!”—what perfect last words for Mr. Zest-for-Life, campaigning with his final breath for a posthumous Nobel Prize, while Landau, that worthless flea, that grub, begrudges the last unselfish thought of this man who plumbed the depths of darkness and bobbed up to the surface and is going down one last time, thinking only of his comrades.

Dying, Kafka begged his doctor not to leave him and then reconsidered and said, “But I am leaving you.” Felice’s dying words went unrecorded, of course, so Landau had to invent them: “All I wanted was your happiness, Franz.” He can still hear Lynn whispering that sultry
Liebestod
, and the audiences’ quiet gasps, and the sounds of sniffling. Those sniffles couldn’t have been faked! They didn’t know Landau was watching!

What if Landau died right now? What would his final words be? He hasn’t spoken since he asked Eva Kaprova if Jiri’s chest pains began in the tunnel. How lame and moronic he’d sounded! Oh God, he’d better say something quick or be remembered (by whom?) for that.

Jiri opens his menu. Covered with imitation leather, big as the Magna Carta, the menu trembles in his hands and falls onto the table. Eva picks it up and holds it in front of Jiri, who clumsily bats it away.

“You decide. Please,” he gasps. “Can’t you do anything right?”

Eva looks at him and looks away. The intimacy with which she’d stared into his eyes as they’d planned their forthcoming Kafka Congress à deux has entirely disappeared. Who is this man? What does he need? Eva hardly knows him.

“Give us a minute,” she tells the waiter, who grimaces with scorn and then resumes staring impatiently at her.

Someone taps Landau’s shoulder hard, and he turns around. His waiter is a stocky old man with tiny porcine eyes, a semicircle of cropped white hair outlining his shiny head. He looks like Nikita Khrushchev, he looks like…every former concentration camp guard whose photo Landau has ever seen in the papers. What was this sweaty old sadist doing during the war? Landau pictures him stepping out of his black tie and tails—the poor schmuck wears a tuxedo at a tourist joint in a death camp—and putting on his old uniform and going to work at the camp, maybe as a switchman, waving in the trains.

The old man sneers at Landau and points disdainfully at the menu. Landau forces a brittle smile and turns the heavy pages. Columns of letters hold still for an instant, then swim off in every direction. Landau needs his reading glasses—unless he wants to remove his regular glasses and press the menu against his nose. He pats his pockets—they aren’t there! Where the hell could he have lost them?

Not in the toilet, he certainly hopes. When did he have them last? He’s horrified to think of his glasses left in the camp without him: like fingernail clippings, a lock of hair left on the voodoo priest’s doorstep. He should leave at once and start searching—how will he replace them in Prague?—but he’s reluctant to make a scene or even explain his wimpy problems: farsightedness, forgetfulness, misplacing his pitiful specs while Mr. Historical-Tragedy is having a coronary and dying.