The Dictator

by David Layton

  Felix had never left that world but had brought it with him like a poison.

  “No one is going back,” Felix announced. “There’s nobody left. And we know it’s true, because we’re the ones who got out. We’re the ones who knew. We’re the survivors.”

  Felix popped a few more Chiclets into his mouth, and Karl was reminded of the sickly cows with their ribs sticking out in the field chewing cud.

  “I’ve never told you what I had to do to get here,” said Felix. “And I’ve never asked what you had to do. There’s a reason for our silence. It’s like that with all the colonists. No one speaks about the past because it has no future.”

  Karl wasn’t convinced this was true. If so, what about all the letter writers? They wanted to reach out and be found. They hoped for an ending. A future.

  It was as if Felix were trying to chew away all the flavour of what they’d done so he could spit it out without remorse. Karl wondered about the compulsion. Why speak of not speaking about their past?

  What would he, who’d never once sat down to write anything, have to say? Karl could speak about the machine-stitched American shirts, the good solid work boots he wore, the palm trees and tropical storms, and the babies born in Sosua who were proudly held aloft in their mothers’ arms like ripe fruit that might easily bruise.

  To actually address his family meant thinking about what might have happened to them. If they were dead, then he was truly alone; if they were alive, then he’d have to answer for his abandonment of them, especially his sister, who would no longer be a child. He wondered if he should write to her separately. She might understand what he’d done and why, but her tolerance—if that was what he was asking for—would be tempered by her experience.

  What would she say to him, provided she could say anything? His last image of Trude was of her saying goodbye to him, knowing that she was being abandoned. To think of his family was to picture his father sitting by the window, the apartment bare of furniture and hope, his mother beside him stitching jewels into the lining of his father’s coat, while Trude pleaded with her eyes that he take her with him, wherever he might be going. The worst of it was his own expression of reassurance that he’d look after her. Karl had saved himself. The jewels he’d stolen had brought him here to this tropical sanctuary. Now there was discussion of going home, of finding family, of a new life after the war.

  “I’ll stay here too,” Karl said to Felix, in what he hoped was the same tone of finality Felix had used.

  “No, this place isn’t for you. You’d be better off going to Canada,” said Felix.

  “Canada?”

  “It seems farther away, more removed and less important than America. I think there you could really escape.”

  Karl waited for him to elaborate on this unexpected thought, but Felix rubbed his hollow belly.

  “It’s lunchtime,” he said.

  Heading for the communal dining hall, they walked down the wooden steps of the colmado and onto the dirt road that had been so well trod over the years that, except for heavy storms, it no longer turned to pure mud after it rained. Farther from the sea, the soil was an oxidized red, as bright and boldly exotic as a tropical flower, but down here it was more the colour of the sand that was constantly being tracked into their sleeping quarters. Though it was common space and not hers, Mrs. Berbaum had scolded Karl more than once to take off his shoes and socks before entering their barracks. The soil of Sosua, which sustained and nourished them, managed to seep into everything, including their socks. Karl would rub his feet clean before getting into bed, but that didn’t stop his sheets from becoming gritty. This insidious infiltration of nature infuriated Mrs. Berbaum. “What sort of place is this?” she’d ask. As with so many of her questions, Karl knew that in her mind it was the sort of place that didn’t even deserve an answer.

  He pictured her home in Vienna with its starched tablecloths and polished furniture, her children always clean behind their ears. That spirit of order and cleanliness found its strongest expression in the communal dining room. The long tables were beautifully set and spotless, their plates and cups without a chip or stain.

  Some of the men here wore overalls, their sleeves rolled up as if eating, too, was work, while others wore shirts as spotless as the plates they ate off. Felix wore the same short-sleeved cotton top he used for the beach. “I’m on vacation” was how he would put it to Karl. Karl, who’d only just returned to the village and hadn’t as yet been assigned a steady job, was also dressed in an in-between way, but whereas Felix seemed to enjoy his stand-alone status, Karl recognized the part of himself that wished to fit in. He would either acquire some overalls or get himself a clean white shirt.

  In the dining hall, pretty women in light breezy dresses, their hair pulled back, served them. There was a rowdiness here that Karl always responded to. People complained and argued and laughed. At times like these, the community felt solid and strong, each person necessary for its continued survival.

  As they made their way to two empty seats, Felix nodded in the direction of the open kitchen, where several Dominican women were cleaning up after cooking lunch.

  “Hola, Maricel. Hola, Paloma,” Felix said.

  “Hola, Felix. Cómo estás?” one of the women answered back.

  Felix told the woman he was doing very well, which was a lie, because Felix was never doing very well, but he seemed genuinely happy to see her. “Éste es mi amigo. Su nombre es Karl.”

  Karl said hello.

  “How do you know her?” he asked, after they’d moved on.

  “Maricel? The question is how do you not know her? Don’t you think she’s beautiful?”

  “Yes, I suppose.”

  “You suppose?”

  “I’m not sure. I haven’t really looked.”

  He stopped, and Karl, following just behind, almost bumped into him.

  “I’m sorry about Ilsa. I know you like her.”

  “She’s found someone else,” Karl answered, trying to sound worldly.

  “Not found, but searched for,” said Felix. “Mr. Weinberg, you believe him to be a man of the past with his faith in God and traditions, but all he cares about is the future. Do you understand?”

  “Not really.”

  Felix sighed. It seemed always to be this way, Felix saying something and Karl not grasping it.

  “The stink of survival clings to us. It’s as odorous as Italian garlic. Speaking of which, what I wouldn’t do for a great plate of bolognese.” Felix inhaled deeply, as if he could suck in the fragrance from across the Atlantic. “The war isn’t ending just yet. You should get a woman,” he said. “There are plenty to see, if only you’d bother. How about Maricel?”

  Felix turned to glance at her, and Karl did too, but when she gazed back at him and smiled, Karl was deeply embarrassed.

  “Don’t be shy,” said Felix. “We know you’re not a virgin.”

  They may not have been served a good plate of spaghetti bolognese, but Karl enjoyed his heaping plate of rice and beans and chicken. As he ate, he had the sense that his own loneliness was a sweat stain he couldn’t wash off. When Ilsa brought Walter into the house, he had felt the weight of family, the heft of it. He didn’t belong to them, and he was happy to be back in town with people like Felix, who were also without family and alone. It was best to be with incomplete people, he thought.

  “Go and say hello to Maricel when you’ve finished eating,” said Felix.

  He wanted to. Felix was right, wasn’t he? The war wasn’t going to end any time soon, and besides, he couldn’t even imagine what would happen when it did. If every so often Karl felt the power of the outside world reach in and pinch him, if trucks could be confiscated, if Walter could come crashing through the front door of his happiness, if the General’s limousine prowled the countryside looking for virgins, if there was an even darker and more brutal world lurking behind the lush foliage Karl found so beautiful, then it still felt safer than anywhere else he could imagi
ne.

  Perhaps it was his time to search for a future. All he had to do was walk over and say hello to Maricel.

  Just then a great cloud of dust announced the arrival of the Jewish cattle ranchers, who rode in from the hills wearing wide-brimmed hats and stained shirts. They’d come to cool off in the sea and offered an excuse for Karl to postpone saying hello to the pretty woman. Slipping away from Felix, Karl followed the cattle ranchers and their horses to the beach. They were like cowboys in the American westerns he’d once seen as a boy at the Stadtkino cinema. They looked after nearly nine hundred head of cattle, the animals marked on one side of their haunches with SS for Sosua Settlement, an insignia that as Felix sarcastically pointed out was, by common consent, unmentioned by the colonists. Karl sometimes imagined the ranchers had come to assault and pillage this strange outpost in the sun.

  At the beach, Karl took off his shoes and walked along the sand. The view was clear and sharp, and the gauze of humidity that usually wrapped the horizon in a milky haze had been stripped away to reveal a brightly naked world.

  Floating out into water, the blazing sun overhead, the trees along the shore swaying in the breeze, Karl thought the land he’d left behind no longer seemed believable. How could he return, and what would there be to return to?

  His fellow colonists might write letters, never to be posted, to those they’d loved and left behind, and a few might even speak of reclaiming their wealth and past positions, but, in reality, nobody held much hope of returning. Most thought of finding a new life somewhere else. Felix had some strange idea of him going to Canada. Except for hearing of its soldiers battling in Italy and Normandy beaches, Karl knew little of it. He could list three of its cities, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, but he had no clear picture of them except that the last one was, like Vienna, surrounded by mountains. In school he’d learned about the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Perhaps he would go there. He couldn’t imagine living in a city again, walking down paved streets in search of employment and a life.

  He caught himself thinking about Ilsa, wondering if he could persuade her to come with him. But, of course, she would marry Walter and they would probably go to America after the war. They would leave this place. Karl was going to stay here, just like Felix, and this thought came to him at the precise moment he caught sight of Maricel and her friend, who after lunch had come down to play in the gentle waves that broke on the far side of the beach, where the Dominicans lived.

  He shouldn’t have been able to spot her so easily at such a distance, but it was one of those clear afternoons when sea and sky and all who inhabited the world in between stood out sharply. He was able to watch her in a way he could not, back in the dining hall. She was beautiful, her skin somewhat darker than that of her friend, as if she were marked out for something different, as if she were marked out for him, he thought. She was not wearing a bathing suit, something only the European women of Sosua could afford; she had on the same dress she’d worn in the kitchen, a blue cotton shift that clung to her body. It reminded Karl of his in-between clothes that weren’t quite right either for work or the dining hall and that were now draped over some sea-grape roots on the beach.

  Just then, Maricel waved at Karl and Karl waved back. Again, and against his will, he thought of Ilsa, because he had met her out here as well. Karl forced her from his thoughts. His future did not exist beyond this place, which he needed to make his own. Karl was a stranger; Maricel was not. Her wave to him was like a welcome to be a part of this place.

  Karl remained on the beach until the sun started its slide toward the horizon. Moshe Baum, the eldest of the Jewish cowboys, his greying head bobbing in the water, said almost in a whisper, “Who among us would have believed we’d be bathing at one of the most beautiful beaches in the world?”

  None of them, actually. But then, thought Karl, looking for Maricel in the emergent darkness, who would have believed any of it?

  17

  BECAUSE OF HIS PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE at the Weinbergs’ homestead, Karl was given semi-permanent work in the dairy factory. Since spotting the Jewish cowboys while eating his lunch, Karl had dreamed of joining them up in the mountains, but for now he milked cows and collected the milk that arrived from the various dairy farms along the north coast road. All the containers he pulled off the truck looked the same, so he couldn’t tell which of them belonged to the Weinbergs.

  The factory pasteurized and bottled the milk, which was used by the colony and sold to Dominicans. The colonists also used the milk to make their Sosuan cheese. For Karl, the excitement of creating the cheese had initially distracted him from its rather bland taste. His mother had adored a Tyrolean cheese so odorous it would stink up the entire apartment. His family could afford a more provocative taste back then, before everything became dangerous. The only thing anyone wanted to digest now was comfort, something that was bland and pleasant.

  Before work each morning, Karl filled his canteen with tea from a large receptacle at the entrance to the kitchen. Maricel was always there, and he received from her his rations of bread, cheese, butter, sardines, salami, sugar, oranges and bananas packed in the tin boxes that he carried in his backpack. He always said thank you, and she always smiled back. Karl knew—how, he wasn’t sure—that if he wanted her, he could have her. And after days of milking cows and pasteurizing milk, Karl realized he wanted her. Why should he bother with Ilsa when he could sleep with a Dominican woman? He didn’t need a white woman, a Jewish woman, to find contentment and pleasure. That would be like eating Sosuan cheese. Felix had told him as much, and the rabbi they’d brought down from New York had approved. Karl’s interest was sanctioned by the community.

  But he wasn’t sure how to get close to Maricel. With Ilsa, things had happened gradually. He’d travelled with her from Europe, and she was the one who’d taken his hand that first day down at the beach. He’d worked for her father. They were Jews and spoke German. They suffered from the same problems and at times avoided the same subjects.

  What of Maricel? He’d said hello to her and she’d smiled, but beyond that he didn’t know what else to do. There were always people around in the kitchen, even early in the morning.

  “She is always giving you extra food, so repay her in kind,” said Felix, who also gave him directions to Maricel’s family home.

  After work, Karl decided to purchase a bag of groceries at the colmado—cheese, pork, rice and chocolate—and he trekked across the beach and then up a steep rise to Cherimicos, the Dominican village located on the coral headland opposite Sosua. He passed a church on the corner and then a series of wooden houses perched on cinder blocks, the quivering light from the hurricane lamps casting shadows along the narrow, unpaved road.

  There was movement in both directions. Dominican women met settlers in Sosua, and Jewish settlers such as Karl came to Cherimicos. It was rumoured, too, that a few Jewish women had taken on Dominican lovers, but that was certainly not something Karl would have seen, because up until now he’d been on the other side of the beach and farther down the coast at the Weinbergs’.

  He was surprised by the size of Cherimicos, though he had already observed how tropical countries can hide whole villages behind foliage. In his own way, Karl had kept his distance from the locals. He worked with them, conversed with them in his poor but functional Spanish, but until now it had all been conducted on his turf.

  Karl followed Felix’s directions, which were precise—take the second road after the church, turn right and follow the path until you reach the second from last home on your right—and he saw Maricel through the uncurtained window of her bare family home.

  The door was open. He stood at threshold and offered the bag of food to Maricel’s father, who wordlessly took it from him and placed it on the table. The father offered him a chair and they both sat down.

  “Thank you for inviting me,” said Karl, though in fact he’d invited himself, which he hoped was good enough.

  “I have brought choc
olate,” he said, wanting to lay out its sweetness on the table.

  Maricel, who did not smile, eventually took the bag of groceries and disappeared behind a thin curtain. She returned with a glass for Karl. Her father poured him some white rum.

  “I don’t speak very good Spanish,” said Karl.

  “I can understand you,” said Maricel’s father.

  “I am Karl. Karl Kaufmann.”

  “I am Miguel.”

  Though there was already rum in his glass, Miguel poured himself some more and took a drink, not a large or aggressive gulp but a sip that indicated he might be searching for something to do with his hand. It occurred to Karl that he was shy.

  “Where do you work?” Karl asked. “I have not seen you in Sosua.”

  “I work on a farm east of here. But my daughter, she works with the Jews. You pay her well.”

  Miguel smiled for the first time, and Karl wondered if he believed that it was Karl who actually paid his daughter or if he’d misunderstood because of his flimsy Spanish. Karl didn’t know these people or how they thought. He was so far away from them that he felt dizzy and held in check a sudden urge to flee.

  It was good that he stayed. Maricel soon returned from behind the curtain with the chocolate, its tin foil peeled back as if it had been delicately undressed. She served the two men, never sitting down herself, and though nobody said very much, Karl was infused with a sense of contentment as he tasted the chocolate and rum and basked in Maricel’s attention.

  When it was time to leave, Miguel shook his hand.

  “Come back,” Maricel said.

  When he saw Maricel the next morning at the kitchen, he said hello to her as usual, and she smiled back. She gave him his rations, and after a day of labour, he went back to the barracks, showered, changed and returned, once again with groceries, to her home.