Guided Tours of Hell by Francine Prose Read Free Book Online

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