Read Online Guided Tours of Hell by Francine Prose - Free Book Online

experience. He was the fucking playwright! He’d met Mimi at a loft where a group of left-wing actors performed his play about Stephen Biko, a better version of the story that, years later, another playwright trashed and got onto Broadway.
    “Good for old ladies!” Jiri booms back at Natalie, jolting Landau out of his reverie. Will Natalie take this personally?
    “Good for everyone,” she answers sweetly. Eva Kaprova nods, twice. So what if she’s just sent the salad away? They’re united in this, two women allied in a noble attempt to make Mr. Juicy-Carnivorous-Blood-Lust eat fiber and live forever.
    “Where was I?” Jiri asks, and from down the table the Toronto critic calls, “Your little pastry chef in the kitchen!”
    “Thank you, my good man,” says Jiri. “Right. My little pastry chef. One day I showed up, she wasn’t there. She’d been taken away. Two SS guys had finished their coffee and crullers up front and then come back to the kitchen and got her. I took the place apart. I went nuts! I raged like a bull. I threw pots, pans, flour. The cook looked like a snowman.
    “Someone stepped in front of me. It was the Kommandant. He had flour on his overcoat sleeve, on his evil Hitler mustache, on the big red wart at the tip of his nose. I used to think about that wart, burrowing into my girlfriend. And now there he was, the son of a bitch. He looked at me, cool as a cucumber.
    “‘Are you hungry?’ he said.
    “I also was a son of a bitch. You had to be to survive. I stared right into his squinty eyes. I said to him, ‘Fuck you.’”
    Jiri translates into Czech what can only mean fuck you . Loud, in case the whole room missed his heroic act.
    Wait! thinks Landau. None of this is true! There was no Viennese bakery, no Kommandant patiently playing games with some Jewish kid…. It all leads back to the question of what Jiri Krakauer did to survive, not just survive but triumph and come out the other side seeing himself as the kind of guy who could sleep with the Kommandant’s girlfriend, trash the SS kitchen, and live to tell (or invent) the tale.
    “What happened then?” Eva asks.
    “When?” Jiri smiles an odd half-smile.
    “You know,” Eva says girlishly.
    “Say it,” Jiri insists. “Say what I said.”
    Eva takes a deep breath. “When you told the Kommandant: Fuck you.”
    She might as well have said: Fuck me. That’s how turned on Landau is by this intimate scenario of power and compliance.
    “What happened next?” says Natalie. “Please! Don’t leave us hanging!”
    Jiri says, “Nothing happened next.” Is his story over? He covers his eyes and shakes his head. Is he thinking about the dead girl? This is how he ends his stories: with the pretty pastry chef vanishing, the tiny art student marching off to Auschwitz, with great gushes of sentimentality, like coming all over his audience. And Jiri can get away with it because his subject is beyond literary criticism, beyond plausibility, kitsch, way beyond good or bad taste.
    “Where’s the food?” shouts Jiri. “We’re dying here!” And once more Landau is shaken by what must be the world’s most protracted déjà vu. Did he read this scene? Did he live through it? It’s all so bizarrely familiar.
    A pair of waiters—not Jiri’s or Landau’s—appear with several orders, ready ahead of the rest. No doubt they’d been sitting there cooling off until Jiri asked. Landau peeks over the top of the plates. Well, better the rabbi’s noodle soup be a little cool. Don’t want the old guy scalded as he sloshes soup all over himself, offering Jiri his bowl.
    “No thank you!” Jiri scowls at the rabbi’s soup. A few more plates of food arrive, though not for Jiri or Landau. It must be taking longer to cook the vast hunks of meat they’ve ordered.
    It turns out not to matter who has been served and who hasn’t. Jiri won’t let anyone eat, won’t let them escape into their slippery duck or the rubbery potato croquettes spurting