Free Guided Tours of Hell by Francine Prose

telling his story, he belonged to the whole group, but now that his story is over, he’s reverted to being just Eva’s.
    Landau clears his throat, then says, “That pastry chef—was she before or after Ottla?”
    People stop chewing and hold their breath, creating a silence that’s audible above the din of the café.
    “Excuse me?” says Jiri. “Excuse me? Before or after whom ?”
    “Ottla Kafka,” says Landau. He can’t believe how crass he sounds, how crude and leering and slimy. He feels he’s been suckered into it by how the men were talking about little bastards fucking your girlfriend. Several times, as a schoolboy, Landau was taken in by classmates who said they would all play some trick on the teacher and then bailed out and left Landau to play it all by himself. That’s how he feels now, alone in his dirty trick. He’s guilty, and he deserves it when Jiri wheels on Landau.
    “What’s it to you?” Jiri says. “What’s it to you who I fucked, and in what order, while I was fighting to stay alive in the midst of a giant killing machine? Not just staying alive but stealing a moment for tenderness, for love. What difference does it make to you if I fucked one and then the other, or both at once, if I started fucking one girl two seconds after the other was sent to Auschwitz. What’s it to you, you little—”
    “Nothing,” says Landau. “It’s nothing at all. I’m sorry. I had no business…I don’t know what I was saying.”
    He can’t believe he’s done this; he’s finally got the attention he’s craved from Jiri and the others, but with a question that’s reduced this hallowed ground to dirt, reduced a saint, Ottla Kafka, the sister of a saint, to the kind of slut men joke about in the locker room.
    “You neurotic American guys,” Jiri says. “You shitty writers and academics and bloodsucking so-called intelligentsia. The dirty truth is, you envy us, you wish it had happened to you. You wish you’d gotten the chance to survive Auschwitz or the Gulag. History has picked up our lives and given them hard little kisses, while your generation has been left virgins, unkissed, on the shelf. And what have you done? Played cops and robbers during the Vietnam War? Then gone on, making money, not making money, writing your silly poems, your…plays, your bullshit. You know your lives have no meaning, so you distract yourself with sex. Did I say sex? I don’t mean having sex, I mean having sexual problems that you whine about in your books and…plays, no wonder nobody goes to see them! And you want to think that Kafka was a lonely guy with problems just like yours.
    “But guess what Ottla told me? Kafka fucked like a bunny! ”
    Everyone’s looking at Landau now, or rather at Jiri and Landau, asking themselves which of the two is more important, more attractive, the better writer, more of a…man. Handsome old Mr. Spirit-of-Life with his flowing white hair, his gorilla’s shoulders and hands, his dramatic story? Or the middle-aged myopic golem with the migraines and diarrhea, the guy who gave the most boring reading of the entire conference, the pathetic yelpings of some babe Kafka didn’t want to marry?
    Which is what Jiri is saying: “The guy just didn’t want to get married. Meanwhile he was fucking every girl in Prague, society women, whores, going to health spas and fucking patients and nurses. Because that’s what you do in the face of death, and his sister was the same way. She had all her brother’s genius, which she used, when I knew her, for finding ways we could be together…. Not like you pussies, you…creeps…having sex in your head, complaining because you had the bad luck to miss out on the great tragedies and get stuck in your boring lives—”
    So now it’s clear: Landau is Felice. No wonder he could write in her voice. Madame Bovary , c’est moi . He’s the dumpy woman with braces on her teeth, whom Kafka didn’t want to marry but got a kick out of torturing