Guided Tours of Hell Read Online Free PDF

may be better off than Landau—that is, if Landau discovers in the depths of the tunnel that he too suffers from a cardiac condition that proves to be far deadlier for being undiagnosed.
    Landau is already crouching as he jogs stiffly after Jiri. But again he is intercepted by the indefatigable Natalie Zigbaum, who has made it her mission to impede Landau’s painful progress, to pour vinegar on the wounds he is sustaining in this Calvary. Peering up through her glasses into Landau’s eyes, Natalie says, “Hey, I’m sorry I called you an asshole. Being here is tough on everybody’s nerves.”
    “Not Jiri’s,” mutters Landau, meaning: Natalie is forgiven.
    “He loves it,” says Natalie. “It’s a real homecoming for Mr. Professional-Survivor.” They stand there, silenced by guilt at their venom for this man who has lived through hell.
    Landau moves to follow Jiri. Again Natalie restrains him.
    “You’re not seriously going in there,” she says. “Honestly heading, of your own free will, into an underground maze, volunteering for a torture devised by the warped Nazi mind, a forced march, crouched, uphill, bent over. And for what? To have the macho experience of concentration camp survival?”
    Has Landau lost his senses? Natalie’s perfectly right! It’s just posturing—ridiculous!—to follow Jiri into the tunnel. Landau feels a great wash of gratitude for female common sense, for the pure clear heights from which women look down on male games of power and competition, for their bravery in wading in and saving men from themselves.
    “Come sit with me.” Natalie says, mischievous and faintly subversive, offering Landau an end run around some needless penance. “We can wait for them on those benches over there. The group will have to pass by us on their way back from the tunnel. Eva’s been telling the geriatric contingent to meet them on the benches in twenty minutes or so.”
    Twenty minutes in a tunnel! Absolutely no way! Far better to be included among the geriatric contingent!
    Landau follows Natalie to a bench along a cobblestone road lined with dusty plane trees and plots of half-dead zinnias. It’s the camp’s version of the Champs-Elysées, Fifth Avenue, Unter den Linden. Landau sinks down without thinking. Natalie sits beside him. Their arms almost touch, or maybe they touch, Landau can’t tell if some velvety tactile moisture is rising from Natalie’s arm and arcing over the space between them. Landau is very aware of her arm, but mostly he is recalling the tingling he used to feel as he sat beside some girl—any girl—in a darkened movie. The warmth and nearness of those arms was as good, maybe better, than sex. Was Mimi ever one of those girls? Landau can’t remember.
    He and Natalie aren’t touching, and yet her body heat raises the temperature: It’s unspeakably hot. This is how the Albanian novelist must feel in his scratchy sweater. Landau’s stomach growls warningly, then so loudly that Natalie flinches.
    Across from them, a line of people file in and out of an entrance. Actually there are two lines, a briskly moving column of men and a slower line of women. This is fantastic! Landau and Natalie have a scenic view of tourists waiting to use the toilet!
    A few notice Landau watching, and look away. This is not a situation in which they want to be observed, trudging forward to adjust their clothes and sit, stand, grunt, sigh, piss, shit, wipe their asses, adjust their clothes, wash their hands or not. Better that everyone pretend not to know what is happening here, better glance at Landau and glance away, though Landau can’t stop staring at what, he feels, could be a scene staged just for him, at actors hired to reenact the degradations of camp life, the waiting, the exposed public nature of the most intimate bodily functions. This is dehumanizing enough—and it’s nothing like the real thing! The world needs writers like Jiri to keep describing what it was like. Jiri has a