The Dictator Read online

  Petra was wrong. There was him and there was her, and she looked like his sister.

  “You need to put on something warm,” she said.

  Karl bundled himself against the cold.

  “Dad always goes on about family, about how important it is and how it’s the only thing that matters, but if he really wanted a family, why did he leave Mom and move here?”

  It took a moment for Karl to realize that she was actually asking him, that she expected an answer.

  “I don’t know,” he finally said.

  “Mom says his thing about family is because he didn’t have one. Which I guess makes sense. Mom also says that I shouldn’t bother Dad. Irritate is the word she uses. Because he’s dealing with you. He wants to get rid of you,” she said. “He says there isn’t enough room.”

  His granddaughter expelled smoke from her cigarette as if, thought Karl, she wished to pollute the world.

  Karl tossed his cigar over the balcony.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” she said, looking pleased that he had.

  “You shouldn’t be smoking.”

  “I guess there are lots of things I shouldn’t be doing. But I do them anyway.”

  Petra leaned over and pulled one of her socks down. “See this?” She raised her leg, and Karl saw a red heart tattooed on her ankle. “Dad didn’t know about this for two months, and he went ballistic when he found out. I wonder what he’ll do when he finds out I have a pierced belly button.”

  Karl worried that she’d show him that as well, but thankfully she refrained.

  “Some things are best left hidden,” he said.

  He knew about secrets. They had this in common, he and his granddaughter, and they could share it.

  “The family motto,” she said.

  Karl nodded his acceptance. Then he remembered what he had to do.

  He wouldn’t be able or even allowed to do it alone.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” he said.

  “I’M SORRY, MR. Kaufmann, but you can’t take that much out.”

  “Is it the amount?” he asked. That may have raised some concerns. Perhaps he should have asked for less than twenty thousand dollars, but it was his money, wasn’t it?

  “No, it’s the account,” the woman behind the counter explained.

  “So how much can I withdraw?”

  The teller wrote the amount on a piece of paper and slipped it through the bars. She had a very precise, neat penmanship of the kind one didn’t see too often nowadays—his financial ruin was clear and all too legible.

  “You mean to tell me I have no money?”

  “You have three thousand, eight hundred and twenty-six dollars.”

  The teller swivelled her computer screen a few degrees to let him take a look. What Karl saw was a blinking cursor and a series of columns that seemed too active and dense for the impoverishment they were meant to proclaim.

  “I want to withdraw all my money,” Karl said, trying to keep his rising voice in check. Where was it, the money that he had worked hard for and accumulated over the years? The money he’d entrusted to the banks, because everyone knew that Canadian banks were reliable and trustworthy.

  “Would you like to close the account?”

  Karl stared down at his shoes, two black puddles staining the floor. His father had stood in just the same puddles all those years ago when they’d visited the bank together. Why had Bernard brought his son? Perhaps his father felt the sight of his child might elicit a flicker of sympathy in the bank manager? Had he been looking to bolster his claim of being a good citizen of Austria? Or had he up until that moment simply been oblivious to his fate? No explanation seemed entirely plausible, but then what part of Karl’s past did?

  “I’d like to speak to the manager.”

  “For what purpose?” asked the teller.

  “For the purpose of finding out where all my money went,” he almost shouted.

  The teller secured her till and stepped away from the counter. “I’ll get one of the branch managers.”

  When had it become the case that a small bank had more than one manager? Everyone was a manager nowadays, and everyone felt helpless.

  “Mr. Kaufmann, how can I help you today?”

  Spotting the manager’s approach, Karl reached up to take off his hat, only to realize he hadn’t worn a hat for many years and was grasping at nothing but air. Besides, the manager was impossibly young.

  “I am having difficulty withdrawing my money.”

  “What sort of difficulty?”

  “I don’t seem to have any.”

  “Would you like to take a seat in my office, Mr. Kaufmann?”

  “I don’t want to go to your office,” Karl said. Even when it was done out of friendliness, he still sensed the manipulation of being directed to places he did not wish to go. “What I want is my money.”

  Karl stared at this impossibly young man who was beginning to seem familiar, but he put that down to the fact that the young all looked the same to him now, in the way old people all looked the same to the young.

  “We discussed this when you were here a few weeks ago.”

  “I was here a few weeks ago?” asked Karl.

  “Yes, you wanted to make sure money was being sent to an overseas account.”

  And so Karl was reminded.

  He’d already talked to this impossibly young man about the loss of funds. How, after all the years of caution, had he let his guard down so badly? The monthly transfer to the Dominican Republic had always been conducted in the neutral silence of his bank, with nothing but the soft clacking of counting machines and the scribble of signatures to accompany his betrayal. It had all been done, and yet nothing had been done. Then he’d started to run out of money, or he had lost money during the housing slump. As he got older, Karl had done more investing than building, at one point owning six homes and a small apartment building in Toronto. He borrowed money and then was wiped out when real estate prices fell by fifty percent. He lost money with his investments and never really recovered. He had messed the whole thing up, but he’d muddled through.

  He remembered now. It was the shock of learning about the bank account from this young man that had sent him out to the intersection with loud pips for blind people. That’s what the doctor had missed in his diagnosis. Karl had wandered through the city before jumping into a taxi and going to Claire’s house, which had led him back to his son, which had led him here.

  “Do you wish to withdraw funds from another account?”

  Yes, the other account.

  “How much do I have?” Karl asked.

  This time it was the branch manager who wrote down the figure: $9,603.43.

  “Is money still being sent to the Dominican Republic?”

  “Yes, you were very clear on this point. Funds for Mrs. Kaufmann and her son are, as instructed, transferred each month.”

  Karl nodded.

  “As you know, the money left in your account won’t be sufficient to last the year.”

  Karl would be breaking the one promise he’d kept in his life. The longer things remained as they were, the worse they would become.

  The manager excused himself, and the teller he’d originally spoken with asked him for his preferred denominations. He watched her count out close to three thousand dollars, one bill after another, a thorough notation of his freedom. He was about to reach out for his money when he felt a tug on his arm. It was his granddaughter who’d accompanied him to the bank. He’d given her the map, and they’d walked together as if they were on a hunt for hidden treasure, which was not far from the truth.

  “Grandpa?” she asked, looking at the pile of money. “What are you doing?”

  He kept forgetting her and she kept appearing.

  “Everything is in order,” he said, inadvertently echoing the words spoken by his father after the disastrous day at the bank. Alles ist in ordnung. He hoped he didn’t sound as hollow.

  “Don’t forget your map,”
said his granddaughter.

  Karl folded up his map and stuffed it into his shirt pocket.

  “Come on, Grandpa. We need to go home before Dad gets back,” she said, this time less gently. Karl was in no mood to return—the whole purpose of his journey had been to escape—but suddenly he felt exhausted. He looked at the steady young hand resting over his own, which was spotted and wrinkled, and the images all rushed back—his left-handedness, the white-gloved waiters on the Nea Hellas, Ilsa’s soft hand in his. His wife and child, who could no longer rely upon his support.

  Yes, they needed to get back.

  AFTER HE SAT down in the living room, Petra brought him a coffee, dark and strong. She’d even placed the sugar cube on the edge of the saucer with the wrapping still on, just the way he liked it. Even with his clumsy arthritic fingers, he preferred to unveil the white block of sweetness himself.

  “This is very good,” said Karl, taking a sip. His son served weak, watery coffee that tasted of chlorine and bitterness. The coffee before him testified that a good cup could be made from the ingredients at hand.

  “What happened at the bank?” she asked.

  It had been wrong to make her bring him there, but what else could he have done? Whenever he was alone in the apartment, his son locked him in. The only way of getting to the bank was with Petra.

  “I was getting money.”

  “I know what a bank is for. Why do you need so much money?”

  “You always need money.”

  “Why are you sending money to the Dominican Republic?”

  “How many questions do you have?”

  “Just a minute.” Petra went to grab a device with a screen on it. “This is the country, right?” She placed the screen between them, so that they could both see the map of the Dominican Republic.

  Karl plucked the wrapped cube of sugar from the saucer with his thumb and forefinger and held it up to his eyes, as if it were a single atom ready to explode with all the misery and sweetness of the world.

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s the place.”

  “Dad once mentioned something about you living there.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Where, exactly?”

  Karl placed the sugar cube over the town of Puerto Plata. “That place is where my boat arrived.”

  “You took a boat?”

  “Yes. That’s how people travelled in those days.”

  Petra’s nod held a hint of impatience. They weren’t talking about a time fully in the past. He’d just been caught sending money to the place.

  “Is that where you lived?”

  “No, it was a smaller town down the coast.”

  “What was it called?”

  “Sosua,” said Karl. The name hadn’t tripped off his tongue for possibly fifty years. But he thought about it every day.

  “Is it still there?”

  “Of course it’s still there,” he said, but over the years he’d wondered. Was it? Had it ever been there?

  “Show me,” she said, handing him the screen.

  As with the sugar cube, which he dropped into his coffee, everything of importance could be grasped and compressed between thumb and forefinger, the whole world expanding and contracting on the screen with a mere flick of his fingers. Following his granddaughter’s encouragement, they sped across the north road that he’d first taken all those years ago, past the sugar cane fields, humped hills and small villages, until, just like that, they reached Sosua.

  “There,” he said.

  Karl touched the screen with his aged finger. Sosua came closer. He touched again and swooped through some light cloud cover. He saw rooftops. Homes. Roads. The beach. If he kept touching the screen, he’d catch the top of his son’s head as he walked down the street, as if Karl were some failed God looking at his creation.

  He turned the screen back to her.

  With the dexterity and delicacy of her slim fingers, they leaped into the town. Pictures popped up of hotels and restaurants and people sunning themselves on the beach. It was a place for holidays. Even if it had all remained the same—and how could that be if people went there for vacation?—he still wouldn’t be able to show her what it was like. He barely understood the place when he’d lived there.

  “And that’s where you send the money?”

  “Yes,” Karl admitted. That’s where he sent the money.

  “The guy at the bank said something about Mrs. Kaufmann and her son? Are you sending money to Grandma and Dad? I don’t get it.”

  He didn’t get it either. How could he begin to explain what had happened to him? He was the same age as Petra when he left his own family in Vienna. His granddaughter would never recognize the young man who had disembarked in Puerto Plata in 1938.

  “I met a woman and had a child with her. A son.”

  “You have another family?”

  Karl had never felt he’d had even one family, let alone two, but meeting the shocked eyes of his granddaughter, he had to concede that his feelings lacked validity.

  “Yes,” he said. “I have another family.”

  “You’ve been sending money to them?”

  “Every month.”

  “For how long?”

  “Over fifty years.”

  “Does Dad know?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “No wonder this family is so fucked up,” his granddaughter whispered as if in awe.

  Karl took a sip of his coffee. It was already cold.

  “When was the last time you saw them?” she asked.

  “I haven’t seen them since I left the Dominican Republic.”

  “Before you even met Grandma?”

  An inconceivably long time for a girl of her age, thought Karl. His first-born would have grown up, married and had children of his own. He would have grey hair. It was possible even Karl’s grandchildren had grey hair.

  “Does Grandma know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that why you aren’t together?”

  “There are many reasons, I suppose.”

  “But that’s one of them.”

  “Yes, that’s one of them.”

  “So you’ve been sending money to this other family, and now there’s not enough money, right? That’s what was happening in the bank?”

  “I lost a lot of money.”

  “You should go back to Sosua,” Petra said.

  “It’s impossible.”

  “Dad should take you.”

  “This has nothing to do with your father.”

  “I think it does. It has something to do with all of us.”

  “It’s very far away,” he said.

  “How long would it take to get there?”

  By plane, no more than five hours, perhaps less. People flew down to the Caribbean for short vacations all the time. He’d known people who had taken the week off and returned with suntans and mosquito bites. How was it possible that a place so far away could be reached so quickly? For Karl, it was no more possible than entering a time machine and travelling to the past. It seemed unimaginable that at this very moment—at any given moment—both worlds existed simultaneously.

  You can’t go back to people you’ve left behind, thought Karl.

  10

  THEY TOOK WALKS TOGETHER, ILSA reaching for his hand whenever they wandered into a forested area that was damp and dark and loudly silent. But it was on an empty stretch of beach, the caramel-coloured sand pockmarked with coconut rinds, driftwood and broken coral, that he first kissed her. He’d never touched her lips before, and he closed his eyes in fear and then relief when she didn’t push him away. Her hand was still and remained so, after he reopened his eyes and saw three boys and their father staring at them from the shoreline.

  No matter where he and Ilsa went, every inch of land was inhabited by natives. Karl wasn’t sure why this should surprise him, but it did, always. Yet Dominicans didn’t count, at least in that way, and on their walks, Ilsa stayed close beside him, s
omething she didn’t always do when they were in town.

  After six months in Sosua, he’d ventured only as far as his feet could take him. His home and sanctuary was nothing more than a small intrusion in a country that to Karl appeared enormous, because it included the ocean that surrounded and separated him from Europe. There were hills behind the town, and beyond the hills lay mountains that should have made him feel as if he were back home in Austria but instead made him feel remote and lost, because he knew of no path that led to them. Very few Jews had reason to leave the colony, and no one could legally remove themselves and settle in the city, by order of the dictator himself, Rafael Trujillo. They were meant to stay here, in this isolated but safe place, and wait.

  When it came to Ilsa, Karl was impatient. Her body was the only geography he really wanted to explore, but as with the mountains looming in the far distance, he didn’t know the proper path. He did know that her fingers, which she allowed Karl to fondle, had adapted themselves well to milking the engorged teats of dairy cows. Her father, like some of the other intact families in Sosua, had been given ten cows to tend by the Jewish agency responsible for their survival and Karl had visited their homestead, two kilometres east of Sosua, to help out a few times.

  Jacob, previously an accountant from Frankfurt, stood before the cows as if the first step to becoming a dairy farmer were to adopt a dignified posture in front of his animals. It was different with Ilsa.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she told Karl. “They want to be milked, because if they’re not their udders swell, and it hurts them.”

  She’d shown him how it was done, yanking at them with just the right balance of aggression and concern. When Karl rubbed his fingers along her naked, warm skin, he became light-headed.

  Despite his encounter with the prostitute in Lisbon, Karl was unfamiliar with breasts, either cow or human, and although he dismissed the notion that women’s breasts also needed to be milked, he couldn’t disregard it with a hundred percent certainty. The idea of milking Ilsa’s much smaller but still noticeable breasts stuck with him, and he wondered if she might be using the cows to train him. Perhaps only when he showed a certain dexterity would he be allowed to touch hers.