The Dictator

by David Layton

  “Is that her boyfriend?” It rankled that he had to ask.

  “She told me that there is someone she likes.”

  How did his father even feign interest? The man who had never listened to a single story of his and who in turn had never expected him to listen to one of his own was talking to his sixteen-year-old daughter about boys?

  Petra and the boy suddenly came into view, his arm around her waist. It was obviously not the first time he’d done this. And the kid was large. Not fat, just big, in a way that suggested he was easily a year or two older than Petra.

  “Go easy on her. She’s had a hard time of it.”

  His father stood up and announced that he needed to use the toilet. He did not say “bathroom,” because he’d never lost the clipped precision that came from acquiring English as a second language. As far as his father was concerned, he wasn’t going to take a bath, so why say it? As he walked away, Karl looked out of place amid the reflective sheen of polished floors and gleaming storefronts, like some cobblestone that hadn’t been tarred over. He was, in an intense way, a stranger to Canada.

  Aaron, alone at the table, took another sip of his hot chocolate. His father had a sister. This was news to him. But what of it? His father was a dark star, some form of antimatter from which no light could escape.

  Feeling a sharp stab in his stomach, Aaron set his hot chocolate on the table and bent over in pain. This wasn’t the first time he’d felt a stab in his gut, but the symptoms had been worsening since his father had moved into the apartment. Did he have an ulcer? Was it something worse? Whatever the problem was, his father wasn’t making the ache in Aaron’s stomach feel any better. It was as if Karl had taken residence inside his gut. A man can live through the Holocaust and still be an asshole. It certainly didn’t make Karl a saint. In the meantime, it wasn’t doing Aaron any good thinking about lost skating rinks.

  Something touched his arm, and when he looked up, he saw that it was Karl’s hand. His first thought was that his father was reaching out to steady himself, but then it dawned on him that Karl was touching him out of concern.

  “I think we should head out of here,” Aaron said.

  His father raised his right leg and brought the heel of his foot down on the marble floor as if trying to break into the lost ice below.

  “Maybe,” he said, “we can skate home.”

  5

  SKATING HOME. THAT’S WHAT HE AND HIS best friend, Erich Nussbaum, used to do in the purpling light of a winter’s day, when the setting sun caught the icy surface of the river, turning it into a rainbow of colours. Nussbaum could skate much better than any of their friends, but he always made a show of flailing and falling on his behind, banging into snow piles at the side of the frozen river especially when there were pretty girls nearby. Karl supposed it was because he knew he was so good that he could afford to pretend not to be.

  Nussbaum was modest about other things too. He lived in a much larger apartment, and unlike members of Karl’s family who had ridden in on the collapsing borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Nussbaums’ Austrian heritage stretched back many generations.

  And then one day, they weren’t allowed to skate anymore.

  Karl sat around the table with his family discussing whether they were even permitted to own skates, let alone use them, as if the authorities might find it intolerable for Jews to have the slightest means of gliding past Aryans and possibly sliding away. Jews were meant to shuffle now, to be hobbled, said his father.

  But not his friend. Not Nussbaum. When the day came for Jews to be rounded up and dragged away, Nussbaum went down to the river, strapped on his skates and, without once pretending to fall, sped along the ice in great long strides, never to be seen again.

  At least that’s how Karl remembered it, but he couldn’t be sure if he had actually seen Nussbaum skate down the river or had conjured the whole thing up in the same way he supposed his son had conjured up the lost ice rink, as if for both of them there would always be a patch of ice hidden beneath their feet.

  They hadn’t skated home but had walked, and it wasn’t his home or even a home, just a temporary space inhabited by him, his son and his granddaughter.

  Karl looked at his watch without registering the time, so he looked at it again. It was past eight. His son was still sick, some pain in his gut that hadn’t gone away, and he heard Petra from the other bedroom, a low rumble like constant wind as she spoke on the phone. She’d told him that kids didn’t talk on the phone anymore—they texted each other. She said this as if he needed a lesson in modernity, when in fact, no one had talked on the phone when he was growing up. If you wanted to reach someone, you wrote a letter. Not that he’d written many. Letters needed to have an address, and the only one whose reply he could be sure about belonged to him.

  Lying on the bed, thinking about Nussbaum: wasn’t that like writing a letter and addressing it to himself? His granddaughter had told him they’d go back and collect the candelabra he’d seen displayed in the window, but he knew it would not be waiting for him, not now, not ever. There’d been a gold candelabra just like it at his family’s home in Vienna, and it came with a story. Karl’s great-grandfather, a dirt-poor peasant who lived in lower Silesia, had obtained it from a starving French soldier retreating from the Russian front, in exchange for a sack of potatoes.

  He still had vivid memories of his great-grandfather’s scars, the purpled hairless knots of skin running like a polluted river down his chest. It had happened when the boy’s mother accidentally knocked over a scalding pot of coffee. Karl could barely remember anything else about his great-grandfather except those terrible scars and the gold candelabra he’d brought into the house, which had remained with them ever since. There’d been masses of starving soldiers willing to exchange their plunder for food, and with the profits, his great-grandfather had opened a store. So began the ascent of Kaufmann & Sons. Karl understood that such beginnings had been the basis for his family’s eventual rise to respectability, a respectability that ended the day his father entered the bank, service medal pinned to his chest, and was denied his money.

  It was the candelabra, passed down from one generation to the next, that illuminated the darkened corridors of their family’s past. It had looked strangely out of place in the window, as if, like him, it should have been somewhere else. There must be an inner ear for location, thought Karl, just as there was for balance, something he was losing but that his own family never had.

  Now Karl had a plan in place, or the beginning of one. He had left other families. He’d leave this one, too, because that was how he survived. The trick was to keep an open mind and wait until a way out offered itself. Then he’d make his move.

  FROM THE WEST Station in Vienna, Karl had taken the train to Feldkirch and Hohenems, then crossed the river into Switzerland with only a small bag of possessions and no identification papers. He arrived at a small land crossing, having walked for several hours from the nearest train station. It was dark, and he feared bandits as much as the police. Everything and everyone was a thief, even the air that stole warmth from him.

  He gave the border guard the gold necklace stolen from his parents, the delicate chain looking grotesquely out of place in the guard’s raw, meaty hand.

  The guard, pocketing his family’s heirloom, stepped to one side. “Go on, then,” he said.

  The road was dark beyond the puddle of light at the border crossing. Karl had not planned past this moment and did not know what lay beyond the darkness. He’d envisioned almost everything but this matter-of-fact exchange. His greatest concern had been crossing the border. Now he hesitated in walking away from it.

  “There’s a camp for people like you,” said the guard. “Just keep walking, and you’ll find it. Do you have any food?”

  “No,” Karl answered.

  “Too bad, then. It’s a long way, but you’re young and will make it.”

  Karl walked all that night and continued walking long afte
r the sky brightened. People on the road were neither hostile nor welcoming, walking or driving past him with a purposeful lack of curiosity. He was something other than a visitor and brought the sort of news people weren’t interested in hearing. He asked a few passersby about a camp, but they either didn’t know or wouldn’t tell him.

  Finally a male voice said, “Follow me. I’m going there myself.”

  A tap on his shoulder instructed Karl to turn around. The man who stared back at him had wary eyes. He was a few years older than Karl and taller than him, but from the beginning, Karl never felt he was being looked down upon.

  “It was good luck for you that you found a border guard with the proper combination of greed and sympathy,” he said, after learning about Karl’s crossing the night before.

  Felix Ziegler was German, from Frankfurt, and like Karl had crossed the border alone. There was no mention of Felix’s family, and as they walked to the camp, he asked nothing about Karl’s.

  “Remember, it’s not the strong who’ll save us,” said Felix, “but the weak and the compromised. If you’d arrived an hour later or an hour before . . .” Felix took hold of Karl’s shoulders and shoved him backwards. “It’d be back to Austria for you.”

  After another three hours of trudging, they passed through the barbed-wire gates of Diepoldsau, the Swiss refugee camp that he, Felix and about 150 men and women would now call home.

  Karl and Felix along with the other men were accommodated in an empty embroidery factory and slept on straw sacks, while the women were housed in an old schoolroom that had long ago lost its schoolmaster.

  “It’s cold here, and there’s not really enough food, but it’s better than where we came from,” Felix said.

  The menu consisted primarily of potatoes and cheese and wasn’t bad as far as such things went, but Karl noticed that Felix always ate with ravenous dedication, as if he weren’t sure there’d be a next meal. Karl had never gone hungry before, even during the last months before he escaped Vienna. His family might not have had the best furniture to sit on, but there was always something to eat, and when Karl made money on the black market, there was even a treat of some kind for him and his sister.

  Felix, on the other hand, must have known hunger before his escape. He talked about hot soup and steaming wieners with sauerkraut long after the weather warmed. Maybe this was because there wasn’t much else to talk about inside the camp. People could be divided into two groups, those who wanted to talk about left-behind family and those who didn’t, and it was clear from the start that he and Felix belonged to the latter. If Karl thought about it, that’s what bound them together.

  Not to say he didn’t think about his parents and Trude, but mail between the two countries was mercifully slow. After sending a letter to say that he’d safely made it across the Swiss border, he’d received only two replies, the first from the family expressing relief, the other from his father articulating his outrage over the stolen valuables. Karl replied that they might try to get across the border themselves, but it was months before he received a reply, and then it was to say that the family were relocating to another apartment in Vienna, that they were all right, and that he was not to worry. No mention was made of coming across, either because his father did not wish to acknowledge the advice or because, as was just as likely, he’d never received the letter.

  Besides, it was too late. With each passing month, the border was more tightly sealed, with news that officials high and low, for reasons of altruism or greed, were being fired for helping Jews.

  It would have been impossible, but even if he had managed to get Trude across the border, she would not have been allowed to stay in Diepoldsau. There were only two children in the camp, a young girl and a boy who at age nine was a year younger than Trude. Their parents had been told by the Swiss authorities to return to Austria or give up the children to foster parents who could properly feed, house, clothe and educate them. The parents refused, and the Swiss, unsure how to proceed, let the matter go, though Karl had seen another family recently turned away from the front gates.

  Trude, too, would have been refused entry. Then what would have Karl done? He was too old to be considered a child, too young to take care of his sister. What did he know of anything?

  The two children in the camp were educated in ways practical and impossible. A man not much older than Felix knew all of Faust by heart, and he recited it to the boy, who was urged to memorize entire passages and recite them back.

  Wild dreams torment me as I lie. And though a god lives in my heart, though all my power waken at his word, though he can move my every inmost part—yet nothing in the outer world is stirred, thus by existence tortured and oppressed I crave for death, I long for rest.

  Karl, whose education had also been halted, listened in, wondering what, if anything, he could offer the boy. Felix, on the other hand, wasn’t impressed.

  “Faust should make up his mind. If he wants death, he’ll get it soon enough in Germany. C’mon, we have our own things to worry about. Faust isn’t going to help us.”

  It wasn’t just the boy who was getting an education. He and Felix took lessons from other men in the camp who taught sewing and carpentry and other useful skills. They needed skills, things they could do with their hands, something that up until this moment in his life, Karl had never considered. He was to have taken over his father’s company. But that was before the Nazis. It was a different world now. He slept on straw, with dozens of other men, with a warm enough blanket to keep out the cold but not much else to comfort him. It was a rough life, but many of the men, like Karl, were not rough at all. If they didn’t talk of home, it was because they were as frightened by their circumstances as Karl was and sensed at the same time that they needed to be even stronger if they were to survive the years ahead. Survival required different skills, including learning how to steal from your parents and break promises to your sister.

  Eventually the two children were taken away, the boy’s head filled with Faust, the parents weeping by the front gates, where a banner put up by the refugees read, “Thanks to the Swiss People.”

  “What are we thanking them for?” asked Felix. “We sleep on straw sacks like animals, and except for taking the children, they won’t let us leave here, for fear we’ll contaminate their country.”

  Felix’s chatter was beginning to get on Karl’s nerves. We’re safe, thought Karl, that’s why we’re thanking them. And again he wondered if Trude wouldn’t have been better off taken away by the Swiss authorities and given to another family, rather than the one she had.

  Occasionally they were assigned jobs outside the fence, and they passed through the gates just as the two children had, to spend their days digging ditches and then, when the summer came, repairing roads in the hot sun. They did it for better rations and the opportunity to remain strong and active.

  ONE EVENING, WHEN the early darkness of returning winter was once again upon them, an American showed up at the camp. Noticing the men’s work clothes, which, despite the cold, were dampened by sweat, he said, “I bet you’d like to put that hard labour toward making a better life for yourself.”

  Mr. Solomon Trone represented an organization called the Dominican Republic Settlement Association. He had come to explain to the camp that there’d been an international conference in Evian, France, to deal with the problem of Jewish refugees. Most countries, he’d informed them, had been unwilling to help—a fact that came as no surprise to the refugees—but there was an important exception. To the astonishment not only of those listening to Mr. Trone but also, Mr. Trone suggested, to everyone who’d attended the conference, the president of the Dominican Republic, Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, was willing, even eager to take in Jews. He wanted strong, healthy men with agricultural experience to settle land in a country Karl had never heard of.

  “This is our chance,” Felix said later, while raking hot tar on roads that neither of them, he pointed out, would ever use.

 
“But I don’t know anything about farming.”

  “No one does. We’re all from Berlin, Vienna, Munich, what do we know of farming? My father spent eighteen years as an insurance agent, before they took his job away from him.”

  When Karl told him that his father had been the owner of a leather glove factory, he claimed it was perfect. “He worked with leather, so here’s your story. Your father was a successful cattle dealer, and he taught you animal husbandry.” Felix caught the look of doubt on Karl’s face. “No? Then what would you prefer to be? A refugee? You think that makes more sense than being a farmer?”

  Karl was young and strong, and despite his initial hesitation, he did what needed to be done. He lied to Mr. Trone about his background and experience, adding two years to his age. He needed to lie in order to survive. Mr. Trone handed him a pen, and Karl signed a statement declaring, “I herewith confirm that I am going to permanently remain in the settlement of the Dominican Republic Settlement Association (DORSA) and under no condition for a temporary stay only.” It was a strange statement, unclear to Karl but memorable for its mention of permanence, a condition Karl knew had been lost to him forever.

  “Where is the Dominican Republic?” asked one of the other men accepted by Mr. Trone as a farmer. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Who is this Trujillo?” asked another. “And why is he taking in Jews?”

  Karl had not been to school for over a year, and apart from some remembered passages from Goethe and what felt like a few other scraps—learned so long ago, it seemed—he couldn’t recall much, and the gaps in his knowledge had begun to disturb him. He was relieved to know that he wasn’t the only one who was lacking.

  It was Felix who put an end to the speculation. “Who cares where it is? Or what it is. Or who runs it. All that matters is that there is a man who has opened the cage of Europe. We’re all going to leave this place.”