Guided Tours of Hell Read Online Free Page A

all about Eros, not Thanatos, about her affair with Jiri and not his imminent death! Natalie wouldn’t know Eros if it crept up behind her and pinched her ass!
    “Don’t kid yourself,” says Landau. “He’s in better shape than we are!”
    This time Natalie backs off, and it’s just as well. Landau doesn’t need her pecking at him as he peeks into the rooms, which he tries in vain to populate with jammed-together skeletal Jews, then peers into the cells on the other side, in which he tries to picture political prisoners in solitary confinement. What efficient cruelty to border one yard with two opposite tortures!
    But the ghosts are hiding from Landau. All he sees are walls, scratched paint, bare bunks. No one’s staring at him with raccoon eyes, and frankly, Landau’s just as glad. The whole trip is filthy, filthy. What people will do for sensation!
    Jiri nearly mows Landau down, hurrying out of the courtyard. The group rushes after Jiri, who is standing outside a weathered wooden shack.
    “The KB,” says Jiri. “The Krankenbauer. Everything in order! First they have to cure us so afterwards they can kill us. My home away from home!” Jiri has written about the ruses he came up with to get himself sent to the hospital, where he could rest and eat slightly thicker gruel before being sent back to work, duties which, as his readers and every literary prize committee know, included pulling wedding rings from the fingers of the dead.
    The feminist from Zagreb, who has a gift for investing the most banal utterances with urgent meaning, pushes forward and grabs Jiri’s arm. “Did the doctors… experiment …?
    Oh, please , thinks Landau, then notices Eva Kaprova watching. Is there a triangle forming? Jiri, Eva, the Croatian…
    Jiri glares at the twiglike novelist. How can she ask him this? Hasn’t she read his work? He roars at her, he blows her away. “The whole camp was an experiment!”
    And now, holding her proud head higher, Eva runs after Jiri, again leaving the rest of the group (how fitting that the Kafka Congress should spend so much time chasing blindly after each other) to inspect the hospital and catch up with her and Jiri.
    The sick bay is the most decorated, the most elaborately furnished. A certain wax museum aesthetic prevails, Dr. Adolf’s Chamber of Horrors, with charming period details, examining tables with real stirrups, leather straps, no sterile chrome imitations, a dental chair, and cabinets with many tiny drawers the perfect size for torture implements: toenail extractors neatly divided from testicle squeezers.
    Landau can hardly endure it, but something compels him to look. He finds himself remembering the ophthalmologist he was taken to as a boy, the gloomy office, the shelves of reference books, graphic instructions for tortures involving the eye, the pool-table-green carpet, the leather couches permeated with a sugary alcohol smell, the clunking apparatus that held the prescriptive lenses, looming over you, pressing into your face.
    Landaus eye doctor had an accent. Was he German-Jewish? German-German? Landau’s parents wouldn’t have gone to a German, not in 1950. But there is no one for Landau to ask, his parents are both dead, one heart attack, one cancer, neither much older than Landau is now and unavailable for Landau to ask if there was, as he remembers, a large reproduction Hieronymus Bosch in the doctor’s waiting room, so that on the day when Landau finally got his glasses he realized that the framed red blur was crawling with freakish monsters and demons having an orgy.
    On Landau’s first night in Prague, he’d dreamed that his parents, his grandparents, all his dead loved ones were seated in folding chairs, and Landau went around kissing them, tears of grief soaking his face, and at last he kissed his mother who said, “None of us are alive, but we aren’t dead, either.”
    Even in the dream Landau knew he should be having one of those moments of profound