The Dictator

by David Layton

  “This is our father,” he said.

  How many times, and for how many years, Aaron wondered, had Abraham come here to stare at the two young men in bathing trunks with white belts, one of them bronzed and youthfully skinny with slicked-back hair that appeared polished. This man was Abraham’s father. Aaron was finding it difficult to imagine it was his father too.

  Standing behind them in the water, a young blond woman in a one-piece outfit smiled directly at the camera as if pleased that the two young men on the beach were unaware she’d joined them in the picture. Behind her, one could make out a reef with breaking waves, and beyond that, looming in faded, ghostly grandeur, was a mountain that rose to the uppermost edge of the frame.

  “He’s not here,” said Abraham. “But I think I know where we can find him.”

  19

  THEY FOUND FELIX’S BODY OUTSIDE a small village several miles away from Sosua. A woman a few years older than him had walked into town and then rode with Karl and several other men in a Ford flatbed to show them the spot where Felix lay, the blood from the self-inflicted stab wounds pooling like oil on the saturated, swampish soil. Even in his last moments, Felix had refused to entertain the slightest knowledge of the land around him. He hadn’t even bothered to find a better place to die.

  They took him back to Sosua on the truck, his body covered in a sheet pinned down with their feet, and then they drove up the hill to the cemetery.

  Felix wasn’t the first suicide of the colony. There’d been two others before him, and their tombstones, along with those of the Balmuds’ stillborn child and Otto Ruttenburg, whose death had inaugurated the cemetery’s grounds a year before Karl’s arrival in Sosua, comprised its occupants.

  Now there was Felix Ziegler.

  The cemetery was situated on a plot of land wedged between three homesteads. A low wall surrounded it to keep the animals out, and there was a high iron gate with half a Jewish star on either side, so that it was whole only when the gates were closed. Past the front entrance and to the right stood a wooden shed, its blue paint already fading in the sunlight. That was where the shovels were kept to dig the future graves. Like the wooden synagogue, the cemetery was a hopeful place in its claim of future deaths. The proof of the colony’s continuation would be chiselled into the gravestones.

  Karl counted at least fifty people at the cemetery, surrounding Felix’s grave as if to claim him in ways they might have found difficult when he was alive. The soil was bright red, which made the grass seem even greener. The cows lazily chewed cud, while men threw dirt over Felix’s body.

  “We are all strangers in this new land,” said the rabbi. “We have all witnessed great cruelty and suffered much sadness. Felix Ziegler lost his father and brother, both put up against a wall and shot for buying food on the black market, for trying to put food on their family’s table.”

  How did Karl not know this, and the rabbi did? Karl had always relied on Felix for the truth, but the biggest truth of all had been withheld. Not only the suicide but the violence of his death shocked him. He thought he knew Felix, but he hadn’t. And now, despite having Maricel, he was alone.

  “We are here not to forget or even to forgive, but to carry on and make a new life for ourselves. But for some the burden is too much. Jews do not stigmatize suicide. It is a tragedy but not a sin.”

  Hadn’t everything he and Felix done been in the service of their survival? Why end it just when the war was nearly over? Karl wouldn’t even be here if not for Felix. It was Felix who had first spoken of the Dominican Republic, Felix who’d told him what to say in order to get here. And now there he was. And here was Karl, standing over his friend’s dead body.

  The men passed him the shovel so that he could be the first to scatter soil over the coffin. They were protective not only of Felix Ziegler but also of his friend, Karl Kaufmann.

  “We know this must be hard for you,” said the rabbi, who spoke with the assurance of someone echoing a community’s voice. “He was a good friend of yours.”

  Yes, he had been. Karl saw in the eyes of everyone who surrounded him a measure of understanding but also pity. Felix had angered a great number of people over the years, and he thought that, if anything, he’d barely been tolerated. But Karl could see from the large turnout that Felix was one of them. All of them had kept their secrets. With everything that had happened to them, how could it be any different?

  But one secret that hadn’t been kept was Karl’s friendship with the man he had come to bury. Everyone understood how close they’d been, and that emphasized for Karl how far he was from all those around him. That was the reason for the pity he saw in their eye. Perhaps it was just sympathy. Whatever it was, he saw that he was, like Felix, one of the wounded young men of the town.

  At least he had Maricel. He’d come with no family and had received no formal education while living in Sosua. But he did have a Dominican woman. What did the men and women of Sosua think of that? What did Karl think of it?

  “He was a good man,” someone in the crowd said, and this was meant for all of them to hear, not just Karl.

  Without Felix, there was no fixed centre to the place. It did not feel real. What, wondered Karl, would he do here? Standing in the afternoon light, the edges of the clouds tinged pink, the land saturated in green as if the grass were a high tide come to drown them, he threw dirt over his friend’s grave and knew that he would leave this place.

  THEY WERE ENTWINED, her black skin a bruise in the darkness. Karl felt responsible for Maricel, not so much for what had happened to her—that was beyond his control and not of his doing—but for what might happen to her in the future.

  Rumours of war’s end, of murdered Jews and visas to America ensured perpetual and growing anxiety for the people who lived in both towns. Esther, the concert pianist who’d forlornly stared at the tall buildings of New York while they were interned at Ellis Island, said it was already too late for her. Seating herself next to Karl at the cinema, she raised her arm in the beam of light and projected her fingers onto the screen to show how they’d been ruined by malaria and the ceaseless mopping of canteen counters. The Dominicans living in Cherimicos, where Karl now slept most nights, wondered what would become of their jobs and livelihood if the town of Sosua were to fold up, as it had done once before when it was an American banana plantation.

  “Where will you go?” Maricel’s father asked one night, while they were seated in the chairs Karl had brought from Sosua.

  “I will stay here,” he said, but he wasn’t sure if Miguel accepted the lie.

  Karl didn’t know what was expected of him. He felt cut off, more so than when he’d lived on the homestead with the Weinbergs. He’d moved back into town then to feel less isolated. But now that Felix was dead, he wished only to please himself, to lie on the beach, to visit Maricel, to do as little work as possible, feeling all the while as if the quick-stroke arrows pointing toward Berlin were also coming for him. He floated, suspended, awaiting change. All he knew was that for the time being, he was safe and warm.

  One night he asked Maricel if she would ever think of converting to Judaism. He’d asked her out of curiosity, but her immediate answer of “Yes” caused him to panic. Why ask her such a question unless he meant something by it? Had he? If he did go away, would he consider taking her with him? And what did it matter to him if she converted or not?

  He found her pliancy disturbing and quickly changed the subject. “Have you ever seen snow?” he asked.

  Maricel shook her head. Of course she hadn’t. She would not even have experienced the cold of Mount Trujillo. He’d heard, from Felix and the others who’d convalesced from their bouts of malaria and dysentery and other tropical ailments Karl had managed to avoid, that there were pine trees up there, which Karl, sweating in the cot beside Maricel, found hard to believe. So how could she fathom snow? For some reason, he wanted her to understand.

  “It’s white. White cold flakes that fall from the sky.” He wiggled h
is fingertips as if to show her falling snow and dropped them on her warm body.

  He began to speak of Austria and the home he’d come from, something he had not done with Felix or Ilsa or anyone else since arriving in Sosua. He described the high alpine mountains, and skating with his friend Erich Nussbaum along a frozen river, of scarves and gloves, not just fashionable but—and here Karl removed his fingers from Maricel’s body and rubbed his hands together for effect—real winter gloves to keep your hands warm. That’s what his father did, he explained, he made gloves. Maricel listened with acceptance and incomprehension. It must have seemed to her gloriously impossible.

  And then Maricel told him she was pregnant.

  The heat beneath the covers became unbearable and Karl flung off the sheet, revealing Maricel’s belly. He looked at it. She was pregnant? The idea was preposterous; it was like imagining snow in the tropics.

  “When?” he asked.

  “Soon enough.”

  He’d meant when did she find out, not when would she give birth, but she took his hand and placed it on her belly, which he only now noticed was faintly swelled.

  Maricel did not ask him if he was excited or happy. Either she did not believe such emotions were relevant, or she knew he did not feel either of these things. For his part, Karl did not ask her if she was excited or happy. He suddenly felt like a stranger to her. He’d heard reports of women in Sosua getting abortions in Puerto Plata, but he didn’t know if it was true, and besides, Maricel was Catholic. Her Catholicism wasn’t much like that of Austria—if it was, he wouldn’t have found himself living in the family home of an unmarried woman pregnant with his child. Or maybe it was like that also in the small villages outside Vienna. He didn’t know. Anyway, abortion was out of the question. His hand, which she placed on her belly, was meant to support her child’s life, not end it.

  “When?” Karl asked again. Time seemed important.

  “Five months?”

  That she wasn’t entirely sure scared him. She seemed to know as little as he did about giving birth.

  “Have you seen a doctor?”

  Maricel shook her head.

  “It’s important,” he said. There was a small maternity ward in Sosua, all starched white sheets and pillows, with nurses who wore uniforms even whiter than the sheets and caps over their heads like birthing crowns. Maricel shouldn’t be lying here on a cot, sweating in the heat.

  “I’ll arrange something,” he said, because that sounded right.

  “I want the child,” she said.

  She’d misunderstood. Her directness surprised him and reminded Karl that he was, in many ways, out of his depth. Maricel wasn’t quiet or pliant; she did not inhabit some place far from his own. It was possible he just thought that way about her, because it made him feel better.

  MARICEL’S BELLY GREW inexorably, until it was impossible to ignore. Sometimes while they were in bed together, he would rub the tight drum of her belly and wonder how this could be happening.

  “What if it’s a boy?” she asked.

  Karl wasn’t sure what she was getting at.

  “What do you want to do?” she said.

  “About what?”

  “Would you like him to be Jewish?”

  His laughter surprised both of them. He realized he’d offended her, but what could he do? It was funny. Imagine what his family back home would think.

  “You can’t just choose like that,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  He didn’t have an answer. His Jewishness hadn’t meant nearly as much to him as it did to Hitler. It wasn’t something he’d chosen.

  “Other children become Jewish,” Maricel said. “They go to the synagogue.”

  It was a quick affair, nothing complicated or laborious. A few words spoken in Hebrew within the wooden synagogue, and then you became a Jew. Or Jewish enough, at least, to convert your children into Jews.

  “Yes, I suppose they do. But it’s not important.”

  “It isn’t?”

  He could tell that she saw neglect in his answer. In her eyes, he was already dismissing their child’s prospects.

  Karl was old enough to know that he was too young to have a child. For a moment he thought of talking to Mr. Weinberg, but the fact that what he sought was fatherly advice was what kept him away. Besides, any meeting with Ilsa under these circumstances would be embarrassing, as if he’d gone off and fulfilled her doubts about him.

  What he really wanted was to speak to Felix, who’d had doubts about everyone.

  THREE WEEKS AFTER the end of war in Europe, Maricel gave birth to a son. There were celebrations, and while Karl would never mistake one for the other, they commingled in his mind, until he was unsure how to react to either one.

  He did his best to avoid noticing how everything was changing. He still woke up each night to a sky that looked no different from before, though the clouds did seem, when he noticed them, to glide over him at a quickened pace. There were discussions in the community of expanding the single-dwelling guest house into a hotel. Petrol rationing would be abolished, and people would be on the move again. Tourists would want to come for the beach and cheeses and apple strudel, which were unique and worthy of a visit.

  His son arrived in this world with a patch of damp hair, his skin lighter than his mother’s or her family’s. Karl noted this without prejudice or favouritism but was fully aware that he was grading his son’s skin. His whitened child was a result of Trujillo’s darkest wishes.

  His mother chose to give him the name Abraham, which Karl found absurdly biblical and overwrought. “You can call him anything you like,” Karl had told her. “Give him a Spanish name, or a French one if you prefer.” Maricel had chosen a Hebrew name and used it as if it were an amulet.

  Eight days later, he was in the synagogue with Maricel and the rest of her family, who sat beside him watching with the awkward respect one exhibits in the midst of foreign rituals. His son, Abraham Kaufmann, was being circumcised. Maricel’s father wore a kippa while clutching his straw hat against his stomach.

  Karl stared at them, thinking that this was now his family, these black Christians who believed that a circumcised penis was the mark of a better life.

  Karl would have laughed if he hadn’t been so confused about what was happening. Hearing the howls of pain as his son’s foreskin was cut off, Karl wished that he had the strength of mind to resist this ancient bond being foisted upon his baby.

  “Children are a blessing,” Jacob Weinberg said to him after the ceremony.

  It was the obvious thing to say, and so it came out easily and with genuine enthusiasm, but Karl knew that Jacob would never wish this outcome for Ilsa. As if in understanding, no one in the community had spoken to Karl of marriage. All concern seemed to rest on his child, whose birth marked both the continuance of the community and its radical alteration.

  “Be sure to come visit us,” Jacob said, shaking Karl’s hand goodbye.

  “I will,” Karl answered, though both of them knew he wasn’t going to make the journey out to their homestead any time soon.

  “Ilsa is sorry she couldn’t make it, but she is in Ciudad Trujillo at the moment. She sends her best. She’s off to America to study,” Jacob added, and then, as if unsure such news would be welcome, he said that she hadn’t wanted to leave the homestead but that he’d insisted she go abroad. Karl accepted his explanation with a nod and felt as if once again he’d been left behind. It was possible he might never see her again.

  As new parents, he and Maricel were given private quarters in town. He packed up his meagre belongings and had no one to say goodbye to, because the barracks by then were practically emptied out. The Berbaums had been relocated to private quarters, and for the last few months there’d been no one to tell him that he needed to take his shoes and socks off at the front entrance. Yet even without Mrs. Berbaum’s steely orders, he had continued to carry them out.

  “You’ll be giving a lot of orders yourself. Yo
u’ll see!” she’d said to him at the circumcision. That was her way of introducing fatherhood. “Not that anyone will listen.” But Karl had listened, probably because he sometimes felt himself to be a child. He wasn’t sure if he was ready to be listened to.

  Plots of land were being developed along a new road cut past the synagogue, and the community gave him permission to build his own house, something he admitted would be beneficial and appropriate for his new family. A bulldozer was brought in to clear the area, but there was much more to do before his land would be ready for development. There was a question of proper surveyance, for instance, because his property line was triangular. After heavy rains, water tended to pool in the lower areas of his uneven land. That, too, needed to be studied, before he could even begin to imagine where to place the house. If he chopped down a tangle of trees and bush, he’d even have a view of the ocean.

  War’s end brought word of the slaughter in Europe. Karl was convinced his family had been murdered just like Maricel’s mother. And yet he never felt he could share this tragic fate with Maricel. How would he explain to this woman who had never seen snow or Nazis what had happened or the part Karl had played in saving himself? When she proffered a milky breast to Abraham, it only made Karl feel that he had nothing substantial to give. He had betrayed his sister. He feared he was about to do the same to his child, and to Maricel, who remained calm and sturdy against Abraham’s endless needs. Karl took to visiting his land, sometimes with a machete, others times with a shovel, in the hope of making a contribution toward his future home. He was determined to build that life, to start it now without delay, but instead he would stand there and listen to the sea, which he found calming.

  Away from wife and child, he made a small clearing for himself on his property and brought a flat board on which to place his paper. The letter to his parents wasn’t long, but it took him days to write. In it he spoke of where he’d been during the years he’d been away. He mentioned passage from Switzerland to Portugal, and the boat to New York and then onward to the Dominican Republic. He told them that he was a father. He said that he was in good health, pausing to consider whether he should ask the same of them. For Karl, it was as if he were throwing seeds onto soil flooded with rain. Every word he wrote seemed to be flushed away. He could see the ink dissolving before his eyes. “Your loving son,” he wrote, ending his letter.