Guided Tours of Hell Read Online Free PDF Page B

mission, a subject! Unlike moi , Landau thinks.
    Near the end of the line, a small boy with a pale dirty face yanks his mother’s arm like the rope of a bell that won’t ring, a curtain that won’t open. His mother wears a turquoise miniskirt, a pink paisley blouse, 1970s clothing that goes with her bleached blond hair. Her lips tighten, she rolls her eyes, taps her foot, then smacks her kid on the head, hard enough so that everyone notices and pretends not to. Finally, with a theatrical shrug, she yanks the kid out of line and goes and asks the people up front if her boy can go before them. Her posture grows flirty, obsequious as she talks to her fellow adults, whom Landau and Natalie watch deciding whether to help the child or punish the mother for her garish clothes and what she did to the kid. Deciding against the mother, they don’t acknowledge her at all, staring ahead even as she yells one perfect curse and drags her yelping child to the end of the line.
    “Did you see that?” cries Natalie. “These people are monsters!”
    “See what?” lies Landau. “What did I miss?”
    “Nothing,” Natalie says. “Forget it. There’s a cinema in that building.” She indicates the waiting line. “They show a documentary about daily life in the camp. Probably with John Gielgud or a Theo Bikel voice-over. I don’t think I could stand it. Just being here is traumatic enough.”
    Natalie is hopeless! She thinks the toilet is the cinema! Just as she mistakes Eva’s passion for Jiri for concern about his health! The Final Solution almost succeeded partly thanks to morons like Natalie, believing against all evidence that the toilet is the movies, that the death camp was a bucolic resettlement farm somewhere in the East, that the washroom where dead men primped was a bracing Spartan health spa.
    But for Landau it’s a lucky break. He would love to take a piss, maybe move his bowels. His stomach has been in such lousy shape that he’s become very toilet-conscious and registers the location of every stinking latrine like a truck driver noting gas stations at the edge of a desert. Probably he can use this toilet for as long as he likes without returning to the curious glance, the uneasy moment that can occur after someone has gone to the toilet and stayed a really long time. He can take forever, and Natalie will think he was watching a movie.
    “I’ll go check,” says Landau. “See what the film’s like.”
    “Have a ball,” says Natalie, whose pout reminds Landau of his own crestfallen face when he and the director of To Kafka from Felice went out drinking after rehearsals and Lynn—his actress, his distant star—claimed to be too tired. Later Landau learned that she was meeting her studmuffin lighting director.
    “You might want to check on the old folks,” Natalie says. “I don’t know why they’re not here on the benches. I heard Eva suggesting they might want to catch a few minutes of the film. As if such a film were something you might watch to pass a little time, like those vile TVs they have now in airports. Is Madame Kaprova Jewish? That hasn’t been established.”
    “I wouldn’t know,” says Landau, thinking: Wake up! There is no movie, Natalie. But in that case…where are the graybeards, the Tel Aviv rabbi, the rich Antwerp businessman-donor and fervent Kafka fan? Is that how it was, people disappeared, first the old and weak…Landau is an asshole! It wasn’t like that at all! Those old people were being slaughtered, while these must have found some nice leafy café for a snack and iced tea.
    Landau joins the men’s line and waves limply at Natalie, who still doesn’t seem to wonder why the sexes must separate for the movies. Closer, he sees one guy at a time going in and out of the men’s room. They seem to be pissing at record speed, and soon it’s Landau’s turn to empty his bladder—thank God!—and give his colon a tentative squeeze to see how things are doing.
    Not well, is the