The Dictator

by David Layton

  ILSA SHOWED HIM a postcard she’d brought back with her. It was a picture of a broad palm-lined thoroughfare stretching toward the capital building, where Trujillo’s government assembled. The picture seemed to mesmerize Ilsa, offering proof of how sophisticated, how kultiviert the city was. Telling him about her week away, she described the broad avenues, and the hotels where people sat in evening dress and drank cocktails, everything made of stone and concrete, the roads paved and smooth. There was shopping, she said. Shopping struck him as grown up, as something his mother would do and somehow against the interests and purpose of Sosua, which he suddenly felt needed defending.

  “What would you want to buy?” Even before finishing the question, he knew it to be a stupid one.

  “There’s lots of things,” she said. “We bought books.”

  Why hadn’t they brought him any books? The answer was obvious—because there was no need for him to improve himself. Instead, they’d brought him a work shirt made from American cotton, as if he’d won a prize for spending the week watering and feeding the livestock.

  Karl heard the condescension in Ilsa’s voice and rubbed his callused fingers over the shirt he’d been given, feeling a roughness that didn’t come from the cotton fabric.

  “And it’s not just about buying things, Karl. It’s a city, a real city with cars and shops and proper houses.”

  Shortly after their return, Karl helped to build his own bunkhouse, a world separate from the family he shared a table with.

  “You should have a place of your own,” Jacob counselled. “A man your age needs his privacy.”

  Karl heard the worry in Jacob’s voice. The way he masked it with false concern for Karl’s comfort and well-being made him furious. The family hadn’t appeared so worried about Karl’s privacy before going away to the city. This wasn’t about his privacy but theirs. Maybe Jacob found out Karl had slept in Ilsa’s bed, or noticed the way he looked at his daughter, which was really a way of trying to not look at his daughter. But Karl couldn’t help himself, and why should he? Ilsa was a woman, there was no denying the fact, especially after her return from Ciudad Trujillo. She’d brought back with her bras that she excitedly showed him when they shared a few minutes alone in her room, and Karl thought about the time he’d touched her breasts and wondered if this was some kind of invitation.

  After the bunkhouse was built, Jacob strung a separate clothesline for Karl, and the sight of his flapping sheets straining to touch Ilsa’s bras drying on another line struck him as demeaning and desperate. Hadn’t Jacob hinted that he’d be a worthy suitor for his daughter? Or had he used her as bait, to lure him out here as a farmhand? He would show Jacob that he was worthy enough to be a part of the family. Felix had written out the words of the song phonetically, and each night in the bunkhouse, he went over them, so that he’d be able to stand on his own two feet at the Passover table and sing the way Felix had done, with manic abandon. Privacy did have its advantages. And so did the pouring rain, which came upon them most days and nights, because it muffled his hopeful incantations.

  TABLES COVERED IN white cloths had been pushed together in order to accommodate the guests. Two candelabra standing on either end shimmered inside the Weinbergs’ house, enhancing the darkness surrounding them.

  Jacob wore a yarmulke and a white long-sleeved shirt, the underarms stained with sweat, as he poured wine into a silver cup engraved with images of the Wailing Wall and the twelve tribes of Israel. He must have brought the cup with him on the ship from Europe. Karl had brought nothing but the jewels he’d stolen from his family.

  “Slaves we were in the country of Egypt,” Jacob solemnly intoned from the Haggadah. “We have worked with mud and rocks, and we were inhumanly beaten and mistreated.”

  They still worked in mud, and if there was a god, Karl thought, his intentions must verge on the preposterous to have led them all to a patch of tropical land once owned by the United Fruit Company. It was, as one of the settlers had said, a land of promise but far from the Promised Land.

  “Slaves we were in the country of Egypt,” Jacob repeated, rising to his feet and inviting Karl and the other guests to rise with him. “At all times of our existence potential enemies arose who tried to exterminate the Hebrew people, but the Almighty has saved us. Although we were thrown out of one country, He has provided us with another country. Despised by one dictator, another has offered us his protective hand. So, in this historic moment, let us raise our cups and drink to the health of our protectors and pray that the Almighty blesses the generous people and the ruler of this sunny island.”

  These last words provoked wry smiles from the table, because it had rained almost continuously for the past three days. December was when the rainy season usually came to an end, but the last downpour had even the locals, who usually took what came to them with equanimity, expressing surprise. The road to Puerto Plata was flooded, and they were cut off from town. But Karl welcomed the severance from the outside world; it made him feel safe.

  And yet the matzohs, specially shipped to them from New York, had made it through to them for the Passover dinner. They were meant to make the colonists feel less isolated, to place them in the wider world, but their brittleness and fragility highlighted for Karl the precariousness of their position, of his position, not only in Sosua but in this household.

  To his intense disappointment, Ilsa had invited another man to sit beside her at the Passover table, an older man in his early twenties or so, whose name, Walter, should have been enough to dissuade anyone from having invited him. Somehow, like the matzoh, he had made it past the flooded roads.

  “Father, ask Walter to tell us how we came to be delivered, just like the Jews in Egypt.”

  Her suggestion was met with a smug smile from Walter, who seemed all too pleased to tell the tale. Jacob nodded his assent.

  “It’s a curious story,” said Walter. “Rafael Trujillo has a daughter, who he sent to finishing school in Switzerland. She was treated poorly by the other girls and was very lonely, until she met my first cousin Hannah. They became good friends and kept in touch, after she came back home. The General and his wife were so thankful for this kindness that when the troubles started, they gave our whole family visas. And that’s how we came to live here, but maybe it’s a reason why we are all here. He likes the Jews because my cousin was kind to his daughter.”

  So we should all be grateful to him, thought Karl. He spoke with a plodding, north German accent that Karl silently mocked but which he also respected for the manliness that seemed more suitable to their present environment. His own mother would have fainted if Karl had spoken like that, but she wasn’t here: he was alone, and the proper world of Vienna, with its effeminate, cultured German, sounded wrong to him in this place.

  Karl told himself that Vienna was larger than Hamburg, where Walter was from, and more important, but Karl still felt like a rube. Walter wore clean leather shoes with fresh laces and soles. His pants were creased. He wore an expensive watch that kept the pulsing beat of city time. It helped to be friends with the dictator. And Karl, what did he wear? Even on Passover dinner he, like most of the other colonists, wore a short-sleeved shirt, khaki pants and canvas shoes. The wide-brimmed hat they wore during the day had failed to keep the tropical sun from tanning their faces. Except for Walter. His face, his skin, was pale in comparison, and Karl sensed that this wasn’t by accident, that it was a mark of urbanity that Karl had long ago lost.

  Walter lived in the city. It turned out that not all Jews had to cluster in one small space on this island. Walter could come and go, while Karl was stuck here, at this table, on this farm, unable to venture beyond the roadway linking him to the outside world. Other Jews who had made it out of Europe earlier than Karl had been allowed to reside in the city, to live and work and trade, enjoying the pleasures of real shops and theatres and schools. It reminded him of Ilsa’s descriptions of how she’d found bookstores and clothing shops and places to stop for coffee and a
cold drink, served to your table by waiters wearing crisp white shirts.

  Walter’s family ran a commercial business that assisted in distributing commodities made in Sosua—made by Karl and the other colonists—throughout the island. They helped to place Sosuan cheese and pasteurized milk on the store shelves of Ciudad Trujillo. In turn, they brought valuable supplies to Sosua. The matzoh on the table, sign of a benevolent and thoughtful world beyond their shores, had more than likely been warehoused by Walter’s family. His seat beside Ilsa was no accident, nor was his journey up here. The Weinbergs wanted a proper match for their daughter, and clearly ever since their trip to the city, they no longer considered Karl good enough for her. Even Jacob seemed to be taken in by Walter. All three of them were fawning over him, because he came from a good family.

  But Karl’s family had been better. We had more money, thought Karl, more kultiviert, more of everything than the Weinbergs and Walter. Karl would show them how much better he really was.

  Jacob pulled one of the matzohs out of a small velvet bag embroidered in gold silk thread with the words Cohen, Levi and Israel. These were the names of families, and the bag another heirloom the Weinbergs had saved in the crossing from Europe, another piece of their past that could and would be passed down to their children.

  He broke the matzoh into small pieces and spread the bitter herbs over each one before distributing it to his guests, saying a prayer before eating it. Then he turned his attention to Karl.

  “We have a special moment before us. Karl is going to sing us a prayer, though he wouldn’t tell me which one. It’s a secret,” he said, and Karl heard something too jocular in the tone for his liking.

  Without clearing his throat, Karl began singing, but not as rhythmically or enchantingly as Felix, because he was nervous, and because he knew it wouldn’t help, not with Walter there at the table. It was a long prayer, repetitive in parts; Karl stopped halfway through, but no one seemed to notice. The table clapped.

  “That was very good,” said Jacob.

  And Karl, unable to help himself, looked at Ilsa with the same hope he had when putting a hand on the wall between their beds. But she and Walter were engaged in some private discussion, ignoring everyone else at the table not because they were children but because they were young and above the boring rituals and prayers that Felix had stupidly suggested would win her over.

  The women helped Mrs. Weinberg serve the traditional dinner, and shortly thereafter, solemnity gave way to the common concerns of the community. Accountants, housewives, industrialists, traders, chemists—these were past lives. All now spoke with avid concern about the coquillo weed, which they fought against daily in the melon fields, and they spoke about the new Presser Shop installed in one of the two kitchens, where tomato sauce and sauerkraut, beet salad, carrot puree, peppers filled with sauerkraut and spinach puree, along with kosher pickles, were prepared and preserved in Ball glass jars. These were the foods they knew how to make, the foods that came from the lands they’d all grown up in and been thrown out of. Most of the goods were sent every week to the capital, in a slow attempt to introduce these new products to the Dominicans.

  Their neighbour Mrs. Klamptra had recently hired a domestic labourer to help around the house. Karl had once ridden over to purchase some eggs from their chicken coop and found her berating the Dominican maid for failing to sweep the porch. “They’re primitive,” she had explained to him.

  Local labour was a constant topic of discussion, and even though it was Passover, tonight was no different. What, asked Mrs. Klamptra’s husband, was the point in working so long and hard at fencing pastures, digging drainage ditches, building homes, when such tasks could be better done by Dominicans? “The natives are better at these sorts of things.”

  “We didn’t come here to exploit them,” answered Jacob.

  Such talk, Karl knew, made him uncomfortable.

  “We’re not exploiting them. We’re giving them jobs.”

  Mr. Klamptra had actually laughed when he saw Jacob’s flooded fields after the downpour. “Build an ark!” he had said. “You’re going to need it.”

  “How can we of all people say such things?” asked Mrs. Weinberg. She did not like the Klamptras, who came from a lower station in life. Karl had heard her refer to them sarcastically as “shopkeepers,” and again he wondered what she secretly thought of him.

  “Because we come from a higher culture,” Mrs. Klamptra declared.

  “And that’s why we should treat them decently. Don’t you see? The natives are a very proud race. We mustn’t be shown to lord it over them. It will cause us trouble.”

  And no one, thought Karl, wanted to cause trouble; it’s what had led them to this place.

  Sensing the conversation becoming acrimonious, Jacob steered it back to the more mundane issues of weeds and tractors, saying, as if it were a prayer, “We must learn to use our hands, not always our heads.”

  For all of Jacob’s expressed concerns, he at times employed local labour, just like everyone else. He also employed Karl, who had helped to build his separate quarters so that he would no longer be a part of this house, a member of the family. Wasn’t he, too, just a labourer they were exploiting?

  “I think it’s important to help the locals,” Karl said. He directed this to Ilsa. He wanted her opinion. He wanted her to stop talking to Walter. “Don’t you think so, Ilsa?”

  There’d been a time when he and Ilsa could talk about things beyond the everyday. Karl still liked to ask her questions about what she’d learned in school, remembering the afternoon on the reef when they’d looked out at the ocean and beach and sky. He felt now that this was a mistake; it wasn’t exactly that she’d begun to lecture him, but impatience, like some nasty insect, had crept into her voice and built a nest there. He could see that there was something in his earnestness that irritated her, and the more irritated she became, the harder he tried.

  “Well, we certainly have no wish to harm them,” she answered dismissively.

  She resumed talking to Walter, who glanced at Karl with an expression verging on concern, as if he almost had time to consider Karl’s pain, but then he went back to looking at Ilsa, and Karl knew that he was forgotten.

  “Of course not,” said Karl.

  It wasn’t because he was no longer in school, or that he wasn’t smart or didn’t work hard enough. The reason he wasn’t good enough for Jacob Weinberg’s daughter was that he didn’t, like Walter, have a family. Thinking that he could become part of theirs had been a mistake. He might be invited in as a friend, certainly as a labourer, but he was alone, exiled without a tribe, because he’d rushed through the parting of the Red Sea without his family beside him. Hadn’t he left his sister on the wrong side of the shore?

  Jacob stood up once again. General conversation came to an end.

  “The Haggadah ends on a note of triumph,” he said. “Truth, justice and loving kindness are the enemies of slavery, tyranny and oppression. The weak may be overcome by the strong, but only for a while.”

  Everyone at the table began to speak in unison, and Karl found himself joining in, his voice mingling with theirs.

  This is the power of Passover.

  This is the lesson of history.

  This is the story of freedom.

  But Karl didn’t feel free. He felt trapped and alone and wished to get away, to rejoin Felix in Sosua and, like some of the other men in town, to stop working so hard.

  This wasn’t his land, it wasn’t his country, and it most certainly wasn’t his family.

  15

  AARON PUT HIS COFFEE CUP DOWN on the table and knocked on his daughter’s bedroom door. It was half past eleven in the morning. He’d left her watching television last night, unable to concentrate on the third episode of the fourth season of some television show that Petra couldn’t tear her eyes away from. His father had gone to sleep a little earlier, but he wasn’t awake either, which was unusual. Aaron had craved those lonely moments in the m
orning, when it was just him and a cup of coffee, but now that he was alone, he felt ill at ease, as if something was wrong.

  He waited another half hour before returning to her door. All he had to do was knock harder, and she would wake up. He tried again. Not hearing a response, he stepped inside.

  It was bizarrely immaculate, the bed made, curtains drawn, school books and pens carefully stacked on her desk. It looked a bit like a hotel room, except for the Obama poster up on the wall. The blanket and sheets were neatly folded and stacked. Even the pillows seemed to be plumped.

  “Petra?” he called out, as if he might find her with his voice.

  He rushed to his father’s room and opened the door. The bed was uncharacteristically messy, and clothes were scattered about the room. In contrast to his daughter’s, this room looked like someone had made a quick escape.

  He dialed Petra’s number. It went straight to voice mail.

  “Petra, what’s going on?”

  Without hanging up, Aaron got down on his knees to peer under his father’s bed. It wasn’t what he’d find that was important but what was missing. The old-fashioned suitcase of his father’s, with a strap straddling its perimeter like a pant belt, was gone.

  Aaron waited for another five minutes, maybe less, before calling again. He was forced to leave another message.

  “I’m seriously worried. Call me right now.”

  Aaron phoned his mother. There was a chance Karl had gone to her house again. He should have checked with her first thing, he thought, and not worried Petra or offered her ammunition for accusing him once again of being neglectful. How had they just walked out of the apartment?

  “Dad’s missing,” he said.

  “Again?”

  “You haven’t heard from him?”

  “No. I would have called.”

  “Petra seems to have gone missing as well.”