Guided Tours of Hell by Francine Prose Read Free Book Online Page A

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,