Guided Tours of Hell Read Online Free Page B

revelation, of overpowering comfort and peace, but in fact he felt lousy, and then violently worse as he moved from the waiting room of the dead to the next phase of the dream, his childhood house, with the whole ground floor redone as a grassy graveyard with rows of tombstones that flipped back and forth, clacking like cheap false teeth.
    The doorway where Jiri awaits them is an important doorway. Anyone could tell that, even without Jiri standing outside. An intense inaudible buzz jazzes up the pace as tourists swarm toward the door like pilgrims nearing a shrine.
    Landau unfolds his map of the camp, then refolds it without looking. He will know what he is seeing, or, rest assured, Jiri will tell him. He’ll tell the world what fresh horror they are about to behold, what new nightmare was the daily routine of Jiri’s adolescence. And Eva Kaprova will translate Jiri’s blowsy figures of speech into simple damning statements of fact such as Kafka might have written.
    The Kafka Congress enters a long tiled hall lined with rows of sinks. Above each sink is a mirror, veined with hairline cracks, missing most of its silver.
    “Our beauty parlor!” shouts Jiri.
    “The shaving room,” explains Eva. “This is where they brought the Red Cross observers on their biannual inspections to show them that the prisoners were maintaining high standards of personal hygiene. Otherwise the sinks were never used—”
    “This was where I learned to shave,” Jiri interrupts. “And for me it was perfect. My first year in the camp, I only had to shave once every six months!”
    Landau watches several women gaze tenderly at Jiri until grizzled old Mr. Character-Face disappears and turns, in those damp female eyes, back into Pretty-Boy-Prisoner Jiri, a strapping Adonis with creamy skin and soft down on his upper lip.
    “Seven years bad luck,” someone says. “Multiplied how many times?” Of course it’s Natalie Zigbaum, who has come up behind Landau with this stunning piece of humor. “ What bad luck? The Germans have finally conquered the world. Why mess around with a sloppy war when you have corporate buyouts and take over all our supermarkets and half our publishing houses?”
    Landau’s frosty stare slides over Natalie and past her toward the shaving room, then back at her, communicating with his eyes what he thinks of a person who could stoop, in a place like this, to xenophobic bitching. A place like this? What place like this? There is no place like it.
    “If you don’t mind,” says Landau, “I’d like to be alone here.”
    “Asshole!” mutters Natalie, and in their shock they stare at the space between them, as if the word has bubbled out of her mouth and is floating there, ready to burst.
    Landau escapes from the lock of her gaze, but Natalie is still watching. This makes everything harder as he moves off into the room. What is he supposed to do now? Walk from one end to the other? Stop for a reverent mooning gaze at each nasty sink? Look at one sink, then move along? The possibilities are endless, and none of them seem right. What is the tourist etiquette for the shaving room at the death camp?
    Then Landau has—well, forces—a vision: skeletons in mirrors, hollow-eyed male bags of bones reflected in rows of dark glass. Another phony metaphor: in fact they weren’t skeletons, not the prisoners here, who were kept above starving weight, again for the Red Cross inspectors.
    Landau is overdramatizing, getting things wrong again. But isn’t that his problem: his falseness, his lack of depth, the reason why, he secretly fears, his play is basically garbage, idiotic, hysterical, just like poor Felice, who wasn’t pretty or sexy or smart, she was no match for Kafka, so what did Kafka possibly get out of that drawn-out tortured engagement…And how would Landau know, Landau, who doesn’t have a clue about why he married Mimi, what youthful vanity she tickled, a year or two of good sex, or why he fell in love with Lynn,