Guided Tours of Hell Read Online Free

they met at Max Brod’s, for bringing along the manuscript of his first book of stories and photos from a trip that he and Max made to Weimar, including pictures of a beautiful girl with whom Kafka had a flirtation. In Landau’s letter, Felice scolds Kafka and then confesses that it made her happy; she knew he was showing off for her. But Landau has no plans for a long neurotic engagement to Natalie. Maybe it’s Jiri he wants to impress….
    “Lying shit,” says Jiri. “Borowski was never at Auschwitz.”
    “He wasn’t?” says Landau. But Jiri’s gaze skims over their heads, and Natalie and Landau turn to see Eva rushing up the path. Eva is wearing high heels, and her stumbling run reminds Landau of postwar Italian films in which beautiful actresses spill out of their ripped flimsy dresses as they flee the smoldering ruins of villages ravaged by battle.
    “Jiri,” Eva says. “Where did you disappear to?” A thorn of panic snags Eva’s throaty voice.
    Jiri laughs. “I couldn’t wait to get back to this place!” Then Mr. Joie-de-Vivre puts his arm around Eva and sweeps her along, while Landau and Natalie must dazedly pick themselves up and follow. The entire Kafka Congress straggles into the dusty sunbaked courtyard, yet Landau feels that he and Natalie are alone with Jiri and Eva: the homely couple, the beautiful couple, double-dating at the death camp.
    “Achtung!” Natalie whispers to Landau as Jiri whisks them through a lot surrounded by faded brick walls pocked with dark low entrances without doors, like the holes in a birdhouse.
    Tourists rouse themselves from their dreamy sight-seeing just long enough to observe the ragtag parade of Kafka Congress conferees. Then they resume popping in and out of doorways like figures on a cuckoo clock, blinking and bent double.
    Jiri points out the high spots.
    “Brooks Brothers!” He waves and shouts.
    “The clothing depot,” translates Eva. “That’s where the prisoners picked up their monthly changes of clothing.”
    “Bastards!” says Jiri. “Bastards!” They pass empty rooms with wooden chairs and desks. Offices? Interrogation rooms? Jiri isn’t saying, and they’re moving too fast for Landau to consult the map he grabbed as they rushed past the ticket booth. Mr. Live-for-Today had insisted on paying for the whole group, though Eva said, “Jiri, you mustn’t do that!” Let the guy pay, thought Landau. Save the money for the Congress. Next time—if there is a next time—they could be put up in a halfway decent hotel and even hire a real bus and skip the charades with the trams.
    They turn into a courtyard, a narrow alley lined on one side with cagelike cells and on the other with larger stalls crammed with wooden bunks. Landau thinks again of a zoo, of a decrepit roadside animal park with a pair of big cats pacing their boxes and a few starved monkeys shivering in the corners.
    “Here you have your single rooms,” Jiri declares. “And here you have your accommodations for five hundred skeletons rubbing together in fifty narrow beds.”
    “The guy drives me nuts!” says Natalie, clinging to Landau like one of those birds that peck the bugs off the backs of bison. “I will just throw up if I hear him tell one more time about Ottla Kafka leading the children’s transport to Auschwitz.”
    Jiri raises both arms, Mr. Human-Candelabra, flicking one wrist, then the other at the tiny cages on one side, the large holding pens opposite. His face is crimson, streaked with sweat, and the glaring August sun turns his white hair incandescent.
    Natalie whispers to Landau, “Eva’s got her hands full with him. The guy’s had two serious coronaries and a triple bypass. The woman’s a wreck. Did you see her face when she came running up to us? She’s afraid he’ll die on her. Right here in Prague, at the camp! Fabulous for her career at the Kafka Foundation!”
    Apparently, sexless Natalie Zigbaum has no idea that Eva’s preoccupation and strain is