The Dictator Read online

  On orders of the dictator, Karl and the others formed a queue and one by one were led up to the podium, where the young women offered glasses of cold water. Up close, there was a fastidiousness to the General that Karl sensed was brutal. He was short, with a squat face that Karl was fairly certain had been covered in some sort of makeup designed to make his face look whiter than it was. He wore a moustache like Hitler’s, though the General’s was shorter and less bushy, a thick line connecting nostrils to upper lip.

  Karl had spotted Hitler being driven through the streets of Vienna, but this was the first dictator he had seen up close. Dazed, he shook the soft hand of his new benefactor and then ambled to a table and accepted his new-found citizenship. They were no longer visitors. In Karl’s hand was a piece of paper that claimed he was now a Dominican citizen, an act of national alchemy that was just short of magical.

  Clutching his new identity papers, which were already stained by the sweat seeping from his fingerstips, Karl was made to listen to a speech by Trujillo that he could not understand and that no one translated from Spanish. When the speech was over, the General speedily exited the platform and slipped back through the open door of his waiting limousine and, seconds later, was whisked away to the New World capital that he’d renamed after himself: the City of Trujillo.

  The translator moved to occupy the spot left by the dictator.

  “Shalom, everyone. My name is Joseph Stern. I’m from Sosua, a settlement of and for Jews located fifteen miles down the coast of this rich, fertile island. I know it has been a long journey for all of you and that you must have many questions, but first let us go to the bus and take you to your new home.”

  It may have been a long journey, but someone asked, “Why were they playing the German anthem?”

  “They think we like it,” said Stern.

  “Didn’t you tell them that we don’t?”

  “What to say and what not to say here is complicated” was how Stern left it.

  Karl stepped onto a wooden bus painted in bright colours, as if the homes he’d seen from the boat had been put on wheels. There was no glass in the windows, and from his bench-seat, Karl watched the passing scenery without obstruction.

  “Sugar cane,” Joseph Stern called out, as they passed row upon row of plants undulating like green waves over the land, so tall that at times they blocked the view of the mountains and sea. Some had large seed stalks that made Karl think of the feather plumes the Viennese Horse Guards wore on their helmets. For all of its difference, the mountain ranges and brilliant greens reminded Karl of everything he’d loved and lost in Austria. He was even beginning to feel strangely at home, when he spotted some men in the fields, black men. They held machetes in their hands and wore soiled shirts and pants held up with rope belts. Maybe these were the Haitians that Mr. Weinberg had talked about. They stared at the bus with barely a glimmer of curiosity. And then the sugar cane ended, the flat, expansive fields giving way to humped hills while the bus slowly wound its way along a narrow pot-holed road that carried not a single other vehicle. They were being taken farther and farther away from anyone who could harm them. Karl was lost, and felt lost, but that was the point, because if he didn’t know where he was, then neither did anyone else. No one in his family had ever seen anything like the world that now unfolded before him. He was truly alone.

  The bus passed through a village that was nothing more than a few wooden houses with thatched roofs, where the adult villagers returned their waves with a little more curiosity than the men in the fields. The children ran after the vehicle, excitedly shouting at them, and the scene repeated itself through several more villages, until finally the bus turned left toward the sea and they arrived at their destination. Sosua.

  The bus driver turned off the engine. It became very quiet, the metallic clicking of the bus radiator mingling with the swish of horse tails and clucking chickens. There were about a dozen buildings, some not fully built, scattered over a cleared field. They had stopped outside a small general store that Joseph Stern explained sold dry goods and fruits and vegetables, all grown by the colonists. Several horses were tied to a post, their heads slumped in rest.

  “Most of us are still out in the fields,” he said, adding proudly, “We have twenty-six thousand acres.”

  Karl had no idea what twenty-six thousand acres of land looked like, but it sounded a lot, and he suddenly became aware that when Joseph Stern said “we,” it included himself and all the other men, women and children who stepped off the bus. No one ran or shouted. No one said much of anything. They just stood around, close to the bus, as if unsure whether they were supposed to get back on it again. Rolling up his sleeves and draping his jacket over his bare arm, Karl was stunned to think that this strange, beautiful place was now his home.

  Four of the largest buildings in the cleared field were housing barracks, and he was directed toward the one at the far right. Inside, he discovered a total of sixty or so beds lined up on either side of the wall. Beside each bed were small shelves, many of them already filled with personal effects, books and a few photographs of mothers and children and families. Claiming one of the spare beds, Karl knew he didn’t have anything to put on his empty shelves, no books or photographs; all he had were two of his mother’s rings that he’d stolen and not yet sold. Mosquito nets fluttered in the breeze. After two long sea voyages without any ill effect, he felt vaguely seasick.

  News of the arrivals quickly spread through the colony, and soon a crowd of men appeared wearing white, wide-brimmed hats, their clothes stained by sweat and mud from working in the fields. They surrounded Karl and the others, clamouring for information. The colonists were bombarded with questions. Where had they come from? What was happening in Europe? Names were exchanged, identities sought, in the unlikely hope that someone might bring news of their families back home.

  Karl stepped back from the crowd, uncomfortable with this need of news and home. Besides, he and the new arrivals had questions of their own. What was this place? someone asked. What were they expected to do? Grow food, came the answer. Tend cattle. Build homes. There were almost five hundred of them now. Many more were hoped for, they said. Children in shorts and canvas lace-up shoes ran between the barracks. And there were women. Some of them were beautiful, tanned and healthy, most of them not much older than Karl.

  The Generalissimo had given them the land, said the colonists, it was theirs. The barracks, along with some of the other buildings, were from a long-abandoned plantation. They had no electricity, but they would have it soon, along with running water. That was another job for them to do. For now, each of the new colonists would be issued a hurricane lamp. And they would need work clothes. A cluster of men arrived on horseback and added their voices, saying that the newcomers would need to learn how to ride so that they could tend to the cattle in the hills. Felix, still dressed for the customs shed and Spanish colonnades, stared at them with incomprehension, as if to say that while he might have dug a few ditches in Switzerland for extra rations, he was not then and certainly not now—now that he was free—the sort of man who tended cows in the hills.

  “Let’s show them the beach!”

  Karl followed a group past the general store to a path at the edge of the cleared field. There he saw Jacob Weinberg and Ilsa walk down a wide path that sloped toward the sea, until they arrived on the edge of a white sand beach.

  “It’s paradise,” Mr. Weinberg said, gathering his family around him. He beckoned for Karl to join them, but he kept his distance.

  “This way!” someone shouted. Karl heard the splashes of plunging bodies. “Don’t be shy.”

  Karl didn’t have any bathing trunks—it was the last thing he had imagined taking with him—but following the lead of several colonists beckoning him from the sea, he draped his shirt over a tree root, took off his shoes and, even though he was wearing his best trousers, edged his feet forward toward the blue waters that deepened and darkened farther from the shore.


  He expected the water to be cold and braced himself; instead, a feeling of well-being spread through his body as he waded into the warm Caribbean Sea. Ilsa, who had never done anything more than smile shyly at him, joined him.

  “It’s been a long journey,” she said.

  “Yes, it has.”

  “And we’ve hardly ever spoken. You’ve been ignoring me,” she teased, taking his hand beneath the water so that no one else would see. It was an act both daring and timid, and it reflected how everyone, including Karl, felt about their arrival.

  Until that moment he’d hardly even noticed her. Despite all the days they’d spent together travelling from Lisbon, he’d only had eyes for the future he was sailing toward. It was Ilsa’s father who had spread out the map of their new home and shown him where he was heading. His fourteen-year-old daughter was someone to be ignored or humoured during the dinner service. Karl had sat beside her a number of times, and he’d even danced with her, but always his gaze was directed toward her father and the other men, seated at a table, studying maps or talking politics, while the ship plowed its way to their new home. When he was with Ilsa, he always felt like one of the children left behind, and so concerned had he been about what people might think of him, and the future awaiting him, that he’d never even considered the possibility of this moment in the water, when the flickering sunlight on Ilsa’s feet made it look as if she were dancing.

  Ilsa had waded into the water wearing a collared, long-sleeve shirt, which she’d rolled up. It wasn’t right for the beach, for this place. Without letting go of his hand, she sank down and dunked her hair beneath the water. He leaned down as well, so as not to sever the connection, and when she re-emerged, he noticed her breasts and the way her body curved and shimmered in ways that, like her dancing feet, seemed like an optical illusion.

  “I like it here,” she said.

  In the distance, the volcano-shaped mountain that loomed over Puerto Plata was clear and sharp in the late-afternoon light. It seemed like years had already passed since Karl stepped off the boat into his new home.

  8

  “I’M NOT SIGNING ANY PAPERS,” KARL SAID.

  His son slid the power of attorney document across the polished coffee table, turning it right side up, pen in hand in preparation for Karl’s signature.

  “I know it’s difficult and believe me when I say I wish this wasn’t happening, but it is and, unfortunately, we have to deal with it.” His son spoke with the unctuous tone of a lawyer.

  Karl stared hard enough and long enough at the legal document to ensure that his son was forced to examine it as well. It had coloured tabs jutting out the sides, little candy sweets for being a good boy. Karl had survived the murderous hands of dictators. He’d never allow some measly attorney to gain power over him.

  “I won’t sign this.”

  “Dad, it’s precautionary.”

  “That’s what they always say.”

  In need of fresh air and a view that extended beyond the walls of the apartment, Karl stood up and walked toward the sliding doors leading to the balcony.

  “It’s locked,” said his son.

  “Of course it is.”

  “It’s raining.”

  “Yes, I can see that it’s raining,” Karl said and imagined his son’s condescending reply. You might see that it’s raining, but you don’t understand that it’s raining. He pulled the handle; the door remained firmly in place.

  “We can go out for a walk a little later, if you like,” said Aaron.

  “But I want to go out now. You’re treating me like a dog.”

  “I don’t see a collar round your neck, Dad.”

  Karl pulled the door handle again and in his frustration felt as if the entire world beyond the windowpane was locked, the trees and sky, even the grass, all of it set rigidly into position, motionless and inaccessible for those who, like Karl, no longer held a key.

  How long was he expected to stay here, petulant and aggrieved like a child unable to control his own circumstances? He knew that his son kept the front door locked as well, for fear he’d wander off. Not too long ago, Aaron had gone off to the hospital, and Karl had paced the empty apartment in a panic over his need to escape, twisting and pulling the front door handle to no effect. It was illegal, locking a man inside a house, but he hadn’t called the police. He didn’t want them monitoring his predicament, putting things down in writing. It would work against him. Instead Karl had phoned his granddaughter, who came and slid the balcony door open and gave him the sense that someone gentle and kind was assisting him, easing his escape. She’d let him go outside to have a smoke, and that was when he began to calm down. They needed to look out for each other, Karl thought.

  The street his son lived on, with its conglomeration of apartment buildings, appeared to be an anomaly. Some of them were fairly tall. He had no recollection of their construction, though he had to acknowledge that he must have been a witness to it. Buildings had been built, communities formed, the maple and oak saplings planted in trust that they would grow into the trees that now towered over him and his son.

  He’d been one of the few refugees from Sosua to choose Canada over the United States, landing in Montreal and taking a train to Toronto. He’d travelled along a ribbon of steel that sliced through some of the most boring landscapes he’d ever set eyes upon. It was amazing how small the trees were in Canada, nothing more than twigs, except in the cities, where they grew to the height and stature he’d once imagined had covered the whole country. At first, he thought it was because of the weather, all that cold and darkness, and maybe the soil too, but later he found out that almost every tree in Canada had been felled and chopped to build the fleets of the British Navy, among other things, and what remained outside the train window was simply their orphaned offspring—an entire country reduced to a state of childhood.

  Karl had felt liberated by all that stored-up history that had been plundered and hauled away; it seemed only fitting that everything old should be taken down. Felix had been right. This was a land that wouldn’t make any grand demands on him, a place that was a kind of nothingness, an important, meaningful nothingness.

  Of course there was anti-Semitism in his new home, but where in the world was that not the case? What group of people didn’t exclude or reject other people? That came with the territory. If a country happened to like Jews, that only meant they’d found someone else to hate.

  Karl had deliberately stayed away from typical Jewish occupations, especially the shmatta trade on Spadina Avenue, along with the congregation of synagogues and kosher restaurants and furriers that had sprung up along it. There were other people like him, Jews who had made it out, but for Karl, they weren’t so much living in the city as lurking within it. It’s why he stayed away from Jews altogether. “We shall never forget,” they kept saying. All Karl wanted to do was not remember.

  Always with Jews the future would be about the past, and that was not the sort of future Karl was looking for, which is why he’d tried to make sure that Aaron would never have anything to remember in the first place. Karl had blond hair, he was European, and, even if there was substantial anti-German sentiment, he was quick to point out that he was Swiss, which, considering the time he’d spent at Diepoldsau, was a worthy enough lie and not too far from the truth; like Switzerland, he was neutral. It was what he’d wanted for his son. History was an ugly birthmark that, like Trujillo’s dark skin, could never be covered up with whitening powder. He’d wanted his son to have no history, no sides or convictions foisted upon him. What was the point of offering him a poisonous past? It had not done Karl, nor anyone who’d gotten close to him, any favours.

  Using some of the trades he’d learned in Sosua, he entered the construction industry, which was booming after the war with returning vets and people like him, foreigners flooding into Canada looking for a new life in a new country.

  It had taken time to piece it all together, to understand how the great abstract force
s of history had reached down and grabbed him. He wanted the struggle to be over, but he couldn’t even get onto the balcony. For that, too, he needed permission.

  “I’d like a smoke,” he said.

  “Speaking of which, would you please stop smoking your cigars inside the apartment? The place stinks. How can you even be smoking at your age? If nothing else, it’s a fire hazard.”

  “I promise to only set myself on fire.”

  They weren’t cigars. They were Davidoffs, a fine elegant smoke, less caustic in taste and smell than a cigar. His son had never picked up his father’s habits, which was a good thing, he supposed. Perhaps the only thing.

  “You’re not even wearing shoes, Dad.”

  Karl looked down at his feet before considering there was something compromising about the act; it was a bow of obedience.

  “I know Petra is smoking,” said Aaron accusingly.

  Recently when Petra let him out on the balcony, she’d joined him, lighting a cigarette while he enjoyed his cigarillo. It was the only unsettling aspect of her rescue of him. He found it repellent the way she sucked smoke into her lungs. He’d always been suspicious of cigarettes. Felix had smoked a pack a day. He’d never found it an acceptable habit for women.

  “I’ve told her it’s not a good idea,” Karl said.

  “Well, it’s not working. I think you’re encouraging her.”

  “How can you say that?” Karl did not like the way his son was fostering blame. “The opposite is true. I want her to stop.”

  Karl could still recall with clarity his son’s newborn howls, as if he’d been outraged by the sudden expulsion from his mother’s womb. It had scared Karl off. The boy was still screaming even after they cleaned him up and dropped him into his mother’s arms. And after he left the hospital. And after his first feeding as if, even then, his son had some allergic reaction to his mother’s milk. He developed a rash from the disposable diapers and howled some more, until they covered his delicate bottom with cloth. There was a plastic container with a clip-on lid that contained his son’s accumulated foulness. He had never gone near it, but he was aware of its presence, as if it were a vault containing incriminating documents.