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the actress who starred in the off-off-Broadway production of his To Kafka from Felice . That had seemed like a sensible love. She was an artist, around his age, though not a sensible person, because, halfway through rehearsals, it turned out that Lynn was sleeping with the twenty-five-year-old lighting director.
    Landau reaches back to Kafka for consoling proof that the soul food of the artist is sexual torment and deprivation, a theory to which Jiri clearly refuses to subscribe. But who is right? Who is the better writer: Kafka or Jiri Krakauer?
    Landau finds himself staring into a mirror at a half-bald, severely myopic gnome with a wiry corolla of clown hair, big teeth, Natalie Zigbaum in drag—it takes forever for Landau to recognize his own face. Where is the chunky determined boy whom girls once found so charismatic, the campus radical known for his speeches at antiwar rallies? Where is the budding playwright surrounded at loft parties by pretty girls asking how Landau understood so much about women! Landau wants to howl in protest. Yet he knows that the cause of his grief is just vanity, egomania. How revolting all that is, here in a mirrored room where the doomed could make themselves presentable for their appointments with Death!
    Jiri claps his hands, loud hollow pops that echo off the tiles. Something is coming up here, the next phase of the trip, and Jiri wants to be the one to tell them what to expect.
    “Mesdames et Messieurs,” says Jiri. “The tunnel to the gallows. Another amazing miracle of Nazi engineering.”
    Meanwhile Eva Kaprova is going around to the older conferees, placing her hand on their stooped shoulders, leaning down to whisper in their ears.
    Jiri comes up behind Landau. Landau sees him in the mirror, to which Landau has returned for another look, for reassurance that doesn’t come, especially not when Jiri appears over Landau’s shoulder in all his leonine splendor, thus exploding Landau’s last faint hope that the reason he looks so wretched is that the mirror is unflattering.
    Gently Jiri turns Landau around to watch the elderly rabbi and critics thanking Eva and leaving the room.
    “Another Ottla,” Jiri says. “Or…another selection. The old and weak get weeded out. And in this case it makes sense; they’re better off skipping the tunnel. The damn maze twists and turns underground for two miles, maybe more, and just when you think you’re dying, you can’t hold out another second, it brings you back up to ground level right smack in front of the gallows. The Nazi version of a cardiac stress test: an oven in summer, an icebox in winter, slanted uphill and so low you had to double over to keep from cracking your head. They’d make you run to your own execution…. Everyone heard rumors about all the guys they didn’t need to hang because their hearts gave out in the tunnel on the way to the gallows.”
    “It sounds like a real…experience,” Landau mumbles stupidly.
    Landau is game for the tunnel! He isn’t some withered old geezer, hanging on by a thread, some pussy academic afraid of the harder stuff! If Jiri’s braving the tunnel, Landau’s right behind him, though he’s feeling a little…well, clammy. Fifty-one-year-olds have heart attacks every day! In Manhattan they’re dropping like flies, a colleague of Mimi’s, last month. Suppose Landau fell ill in the tunnel underneath the camp? With Northern Bohemian medical care, Landau would be dead meat. He hasn’t had a checkup in years, though Mimi often urges him, Mimi, who spends half her life at the gynecologist’s office. And Landau hasn’t been well here, constant heartburn, constant cramps, his bowels an active volcano. What if he has to take a shit miles underground?
    This is not exactly the sort of question he can ask Jiri, who is already loping off toward a low doorway, obviously the entrance to the corridor of death. Someone should save the man from himself! Jiri’s the one with the bad heart. But Jiri