The Dictator

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by David Layton


  “Where are you staying? Do you need help getting back?”

  Karl had no intention of telling him where he was staying. This man was most likely as untrustworthy and dangerous as the last one he’d spoken to. And then it occurred to him that he couldn’t have answered, even if he wanted to.

  He attempted to take his leave, but the man wanted to follow him out of a pretense of concern.

  “Are you looking for something?” he asked.

  Karl couldn’t walk any faster, so he decided to slow down and keep silent.

  Eventually the man gave up, peeling away from him after it was clear there would be no further conversation. Karl attempted to keep on even ground, so that he wouldn’t tire himself out, but he sensed the need for a deeper, more thorough, plan than this. He needed to stop somewhere and take stock but was fearful of getting into any other conversations. They all seemed to lead to the same questions: Where was he from? What was he looking for?

  There was a church to Karl’s left that he vaguely recognized—not the church itself, which was more prominent than the one he had in mind, but the path leading down to what he believed was the beach. If he was wrong, though, he would have to climb back up, a daunting task under current conditions. Karl decided to take the risk. Something about the light at the end of the path was familiar.

  The sun retreated behind a canopy of thick foliage. A cooling stone wall followed him down the path that eventually turned into steps, which he carefully took one by one, until the scene broke out before him. He stepped onto the white sand and saw the mountain Isabel de Torres rising over Puerto Plata, just as it had that first day. The reef where he and Ilsa had played jutted out of the water. It was low tide. Karl followed the ribbon of sand but found it slow-going with his shoes on. He sat on the root of a sea-grape tree and took them off. Then his socks. He planted his bare feet in the sand, digging in his toes where it was cooler. His body was ruined but not the beach. There was a breeze coming off the water, bringing with it the bright shouts of sea bathers.

  Then he took his clothes off and walked into the water.

  21

  ABRAHAM DROVE RIGHT DOWN TO the beach, though it appeared this was not quite legal. Stalls selling bright paintings, wooden sculptures, water and snorkelling equipment lined the road to his left. Tourists and locals alike moved out of his way.

  “When I was a kid there was nothing here,” he said.

  As he’d done when walking along the road, Abraham stopped at a few of the stalls and asked if they’d seen an old man shuffling by, perhaps on his way down to the beach. Aaron watched them shake their heads. Nobody had seen him. They parked the car in a sandy lot with puddles of water from recent rains and made their way on foot along a shaded path behind the beach. Many of the stalls had small kitchens and places to sit and eat. On the beach, hundreds of chairs lined the crescent of sand that stretched to the far cliff face. Dominicans, mainly kids, ran back and forth from the stalls to the chairs with drinks and food. Boats and sea jets bobbled close to shore.

  Abraham stayed on the path, while Aaron focused on the back part of the beach and Petra walked along the shoreline. It was beautiful, but why would Abraham think his father would be down here? Karl was not someone who particularly enjoyed the beach or craved sunshine. On their vacations when Aaron was young, his father seemed to stick to the shade and hardly ever went into the water. “Come join us!” his mother would call out, but Karl would remain where he was as if to punish himself—or them, perhaps. Aaron had never been sure.

  They carried on down the beach, and when they reached the end, Abraham pointed toward a narrow path with steps leading up to the houses that straddled the cliff.

  “Cherimicos,” he said. “This is the Dominican side of the beach.”

  “I don’t think he’s here,” said Aaron.

  “It’s a big beach. We will walk back and maybe see him.”

  Aaron found this unlikely and wondered what the next step should be. He was dependent on Abraham’s expertise, but then again, they were searching for a man Abraham hadn’t seen since he was a baby. Abraham wouldn’t recognize his father, even if he found him. What did this man know of Karl, of his movements and interests now or ever? If anything, Karl was sitting in some dark, air-conditioned room. Either that or he’d fallen into a ditch or manhole. Aaron stood beside Abraham waiting for him to make a move.

  “So you are his son,” he said.

  “Yes, I am. And it seems you are too.”

  “And your mother? Where is she?”

  “She’s at home, in Canada. We all live in Toronto,” Aaron said. “My mom and dad got divorced years ago.”

  “He was married?”

  That was generally the precondition for divorce, thought Aaron.

  “They were. I think the divorce might have had something to do with this place. With you. But to be honest, I’m not sure what they were doing together anyway. Dad was a bit absent after he left my mother. I saw him on and off. I guess for you, it’s just been off.”

  All Abraham had was a photograph of a man on a beach—this beach, it might have been. Maybe that was why Abraham had brought them here.

  “I found his clothes!” Petra shouted out.

  Aaron ran to where she stood over a shirt, pants, socks and shoes lying on some tree roots.

  “This was what he was wearing when I last saw him,” said Petra.

  Aaron was in search of a whole body and so had missed the clothing, which had been stashed with a measure of order—shoes lined up and facing the same direction, socks neatly tucked into the shoes—that indicated his father’s habits. He turned toward the ocean and squinted.

  “Where is he?” asked Petra. “I can’t see him.”

  He put his arm around her. His father was out there, thought Aaron. It might be a fitting end for him, even perhaps the right one, but he couldn’t bear how it would affect his daughter, who’d brought Karl down here. She would never forgive herself. For all their sakes, they needed to find him alive.

  From the evidence of his clothes, Karl would only be wearing his underwear. Nothing in his father’s character suggested he’d ever do such a thing, but Aaron needed to stop thinking that he really knew anything about Karl. It was Abraham who had been able to follow his father’s tracks, trace him down to this beach.

  “You see the reef?” asked Abraham. He pointed to a patch of darker blue some distance away from them. “There’s a man standing on the rocks.”

  The light was fading, and Aaron couldn’t really make out anything beyond a few bobbing heads out at sea, too far to realistically identify his father. Too far realistically to imagine his father ever swimming such a distance.

  “That might be him,” said Petra, heading straight for the water.

  Aaron stripped off his shirt and sandals and was about to join his daughter, when he considered that there was another family member with them. His father’s fate, if it actually was Karl on the reef, wasn’t his and Petra’s alone. He looked to his half-brother.

  “We’ll take a boat,” said Abraham, but Petra was already swimming out toward the reef, so Aaron stripped off his shirt and joined her, the two of them swimming side by side the way it was when they’d bicycled together, Petra with training wheels, but it was different now because she was a strong swimmer and didn’t need his help.

  Petra shouted, “What are you doing out here!”—not to him but to Karl, who was the man standing on the reef.

  Her grandfather didn’t answer.

  “What are you doing?” Aaron repeated.

  His father was shivering despite the heat, his skin wrinkled from his time in the sea. He looked tremendously old but also vital, like some grand, ancient barnacle that refused to let go.

  Abraham sped toward them in a boat, and when he arrived, Aaron and his daughter manoeuvred its tip against the reef and then planted themselves on it. They did this without need of discussion or explanation, he and his daughter working on common instinct, as the thre
e of them hauled Karl into the boat, doing their best not to scrape his skin or cause any bruising.

  “Dad, what the hell were you thinking?” Aaron meant all of it, the whole trip down, but Karl took a more limited view of the question.

  “I was looking for Maricel,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “She died eleven years ago,” answered Abraham, offering his father a towel.

  Petra took it from him and rubbed the towel on her grandfather’s back to get him warm. She was the only one who felt comfortable enough to touch him so intimately.

  Waiting for Karl to recover, Abraham silently handed his father a bottle of water, which he greedily drank. Aaron caught his daughter’s eye to confirm it wasn’t for them to interfere between father and son. This was something Abraham needed to do in his own time. But he hadn’t counted on Karl.

  “I would swim with your mother right here,” Karl said, looking at his son and then toward the shore.

  “She took me to this beach many times,” said Abraham.

  “You know who he is, Grandpa?” Petra asked.

  “Yes, of course. He looks like his mother.”

  Petra stared at Abraham’s face. “He looks like Dad.”

  Yes, he did, thought Aaron. It was as simple as that. His father’s two sons here, together, an impossibility that could only exist in this place that had saved him. Looming before them all was Isabel de Torres, and beyond that mountain lay the world that for Karl had been full of threat and shame.

  After drying off and putting Karl’s clothes back on, they climbed into the truck with a tentative and forced politeness. Aaron and Petra sat in the back. Karl was up front with his first-born son.

  “You will stay in my house,” said Abraham.

  He drove to Karl and Petra’s hotel, where they collected their belongings and checked out. The glistening bodies soaking up the sun poolside seemed so far from his own predicament that Aaron, walking along the corridor with the three of them, found himself questioning if any of this seemed plausible. Maybe Abraham was a complete stranger called up to answer some need they all had of him. He even wondered if this was some sort of scam, or at the least a terrible mistake.

  As they sped east of Sosua, the main road was busy with cars and taxis, motorcycles, delivery vans and buses of all sizes ferrying locals and sightseers, a constant rush of traffic servicing the tourists along the coastline.

  “That was the Fleischmanns’ farm,” said Abraham, pointing to his left. “And the Strausses’,” he added a moment later, pointing to his right. It went on like that for several miles, with him rattling off names. “That was the Katzes’, the Benjamins’, the Sichels’, the Eichens’.”

  The lush land had all been converted to hotels and seaside apartments, none of it seemingly recognizable to Karl from the speeding car. Clearly the original inhabitants had left the land, sold it off and moved away, or they were dead. How many of them were left? Aaron wondered. Abraham continued to overlay the present with the past, until he mentioned the name Weinberg.

  “Jacob,” Karl said.

  “Yes, Jacob Weinberg.”

  “I knew them,” he said.

  Abraham flicked on the right indicator and turned onto a poorly paved road that soon became a dirt path, the red soil looking bruised and angry at the truck’s assault. There were plump cows, and skinny children whose wooden shacks offered sad contrast to the fertile fields, open and sunlit, as they made their way ever more slowly toward the Weinbergs’ farm, which was no longer owned by the Weinbergs, said Abraham, all the family members having sold up and left the Dominican Republic over thirty years ago.

  They parked beside a dilapidated and long-abandoned house, and Aaron kept a watchful eye on Karl as he moved toward the front door, which was a double-hung door, the bottom half closed and the top open. Aaron noticed a metal cup resting on one of the windowsills to the left of the front door and a patch of curtain lace, and he wondered if someone was in fact living there, or at least using it for temporary shelter from the sun and rain, but he returned his attention to Karl, who he feared might do himself harm, if he tried to walk up the warped and rotten front steps.

  Instead, he walked around the side of the house, the rest of them following respectfully, not saying a word, until he stood beside a small window.

  “That was my room,” he said.

  “You lived here?” asked Petra.

  His father didn’t answer and slowly continued around the perimeter.

  Abraham pointed to an elevated patch of land behind the house, saying, “There’s the well,” and Karl responded, looking at the concrete drum with some interest.

  Unlike imagining the house at the hotel, it wasn’t too difficult to picture what life must have been like here back then. Even now it felt as if they were in some lost land, far away from all modern amenities. How had they survived out here? Not so much because of the practicalities of obtaining running water and electricity but rather the landscape, which was utterly exotic to a northerner’s eye and somewhat menacing and mysterious. Yet it was also magical, with palm trees rising out of the open fields, like shafts of light plucked from the sun and planted in the ochre soil. Aaron felt that if he moved only a few feet away, he’d be lost.

  Of course, that’s how an outsider would see it. But the refugees who’d come from Germany and Austria had been outsiders too, and Aaron tried to envision it from their point of view, through Mr. Hesse’s cobalt eyes, and through his own father’s. Was the land something to conquer and overcome? Was it threatening or nourishing, or were such questions overly romantic, if not for the refugees in general, then for his father, whose most imaginative act was to clamp down on his imagination. That had led to the earliest of misunderstandings between them.

  “There’s the orange tree,” said Karl.

  Either the enormous tree was too old to be fruit-bearing, or it was the wrong season—but Aaron didn’t see any fruit.

  “Ilsa planted this tree,” said his father. “She liked oranges.”

  Aaron didn’t know who Ilsa was and looked again to Abraham.

  “The Weinbergs were good to me,” said Abraham. “They accepted me and always made me feel welcome.”

  Abraham did the same, when they reached his home, not more than a fifteen-minute drive from the dilapidated place his father once lived in. This was a two-storey, located in a solidly built residential area. Ana, his wife, was there to greet them, and they walked on spotlessly clean white tile floors to a living room furnished with plush, oversized couches and chairs covered in florid colours. It was spacious, with open views of the sea half a mile away and below them.

  Ana explained their daughter was in Orlando, where she lived with her husband, but everyone would meet up, she assured them, as soon as it was possible.

  Abraham must have phoned ahead, because she knew who they were and what they were doing here. In quick order, food was laid out on the table—rice, beans, salad and meat, which Karl tucked into with animated relish.

  Aaron watched Abraham for any traits that might link him to his father and by extension to himself and his daughter. Despite what Petra had told him, he still didn’t see the resemblance. But there was, in the way Abraham physically expressed himself, a subtle but definable similarity. Aaron noticed a precision in his movements, a methodical plotting in the way he moved food to mouth, and a particularity about his clothes, which, while not new, were carefully put together and cared for, projecting, as did his father, a certain elegance.

  Afterwards, over coffee, Aaron was surprised to see Abraham take Karl’s hand. There was an emotional frugality in the way he held it, a light clasp that could be undone at a moment’s notice and that, precisely in its hesitancy, appeared to signify far more than if he’d taken a firmer hold.

  And Karl was letting his hand be held, however lightly, however delicately. They were linked, and Aaron wondered how long Abraham Kaufmann had waited for this day to arrive.

  “I have something to
show you,” Abraham said, getting up from the table. He returned with a paper document that he carefully pulled out of a cellophane cover. He unfolded it and spread it out on the table.

  “This is my birth certificate.” Abraham’s index finger hovered over one of the signatures and then, after a moment of hesitation, gently tapped it twice. “This is my father’s.”

  Aaron saw what he’d been trying to obtain from his father for the past two months, a simple signature of acknowledgement.

  Abraham slid his finger across the page. “My mother,” he said, stopping at another signature, this one less bold and sure of itself.

  “She was a good woman,” said Karl.

  “I have another document,” said Abraham. This one was framed and passed to him by his wife, who had taken it off the wall. “This is a Ketubah, a Jewish wedding certificate.”

  It was written in Hebrew, and again, there were two recognizable signatures.

  “Do you remember signing this?” Aaron asked his father.

  Karl acknowledged it was his signature on the document handed to him, but he did not remember signing it. The certificate was far more ornate than he could have imagined for a time when everything had been so stripped down. On either side of the Hebrew lettering, two trees were drawn, as if standing guard, their canopies joining at the top. It must have been handed to Karl at the synagogue and taken to their new home.

  “I’m sorry that your mother died,” said Petra.

  “There’s no need. She had a good life.”

  Aaron considered if he might ever be able to say that about his own mother. The wedding certificate before them meant that his father was a bigamist and Aaron a bastard. Such phrases seemed overwrought in this day and age, but for his mother they meant exactly as they sounded. The marriage had ended because in his mother’s eyes, it had never actually begun. It wasn’t just that Karl had once had another family—the man had always had this family. His half-brother was the legitimate son, the one with the signed contract. But for reasons he couldn’t explain, Aaron felt immensely relieved, as if a burden of some kind had been lifted.

 

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