Free Guided Tours of Hell by Francine Prose Page A

by mail, tormenting himself in the bargain. Landau’s the reject, the spinster, unworthy of being alive. So what if Mimi chose him? That was years ago. So what if a lousy critic or two said his plays weren’t too awful?
    But why should Landau feel this way? What has he done to deserve this flood of wrath and resentment and spite, of more venom than Jiri (if his story is true) spewed on the former Camp Kommandant? Landau tries, but can’t quite convince himself that Jiri doesn’t mean him, Jiri doesn’t know him, he shouldn’t take this personally, Jiri is enacting some primal battle, some generational father-son thing: Abraham and Isaac, Oedipus Rex, Kafka and his father.
    And now Landau figures out what’s been eluding him all along. He’s not having a déjà vu. They’re living a Kafka story, specifically, “The Judgment,” the passage in which the weakened babylike father suddenly recovers and swells into a giant and starts to shout and humiliate Georg, the son who has been carrying him in his arms.
    Feeling someone come up behind him, Landau swivels around and rams his elbow into the waiter bringing his lunch. His food has arrived on an individual wooden chopping block streaming with juices and grease. A modest dish of fried potatoes accompanies the largest piece of meat Landau has ever seen.
    The waiter slams it down before Landau so that the potato dish rattles. The meat bounces up in the air and lands with a daunting thud.
    Just what part of the pig was this ? A whole shoulder or a haunch, a heart-shaped hunk of serious meat under a crispy foreskin of fat, shot through with an arrow of bone, thick as a human thighbone, but stubbier and more clublike. Treyf , Treyf , bad for you, unclean, in other words delicious, the caramel crust of meat and fat, the juicy meat smell in the air.
    Only now does Landau notice that Jiri and Eva haven’t gotten their food. It’s as if there is a God, watching over Landau, or as if the ex-Nazi waiters are angels who know that Landau has been abused and are tending to his needs first.
    But are they doing him a favor? Or is this a new and ingenious form of torture? Perhaps this prodigious piece of meat was meant for Jiri, the celebrity, and Landau got it by mistake, and now what should he do? He should pass his chopping block across the table, conveniently saving himself from having to eat in front of the others, from having to chew and swallow this slab of pork fat big as a grown man’s head, from subjecting his system to this, after all his poor stomach’s been through, diarrhea in the Kommandant’s toilet and now a cholesterol fest! Landau shouldn’t eat the meat, maybe just the potatoes. He should pass his food on to Jiri…or possibly Eva? Should he offer his meal to the sick man, or be gallant, ladies first…?
    Landau is still puzzling this out when Jiri rises out of his chair and plunges his fork into Landau’s meat and sails it, dripping, high over the table and plunks it down on his placemat.
    “Wait a minute…,” Landau says weakly.
    “Wait nothing,” Jiri says. “This—this!—is how I survived in the camp! Meat! You Americans don’t know what it’s like to not be able to have it. You get no pleasure from meat or food or sex or love or anything except making fine distinctions. I’ll have this and not that, thank you, this isn’t good for me, thank you, I don’t think I’d better, thank you….” Jiri’s voice is high and tremulous, his mouth twisted in a savage imitation of…Landau? Landau doesn’t sound like that, doesn’t look—
    “And here’s the most pathetic thing,” says Jiri. “How small you are, how microscopic…. Here you are, Mr. Landau, here you are in the death camp, tromping on the unmarked graves of innocent women and children, and you’re fighting some little fight in your head, squabbling with me, or maybe with Papa, some ridiculous ego drama about writing or women or who gets to sleep with Mama or something equally