The Dictator

by David Layton

  Karl noticed that his granddaughter’s reaction was to cross her arms, as if to protect herself from feeling any sympathy.

  “Dad moved into the apartment after he got divorced,” Petra said.

  “That was two years ago,” Aaron said.

  Karl had only the vaguest sense of Aaron’s ex-wife. She had a face that worried about things, and he remembered how she once told him that his son kept his distance and said it in a way that implied he might be the cause. He hadn’t been to his son’s new apartment, though after two years, perhaps “new” wasn’t the right way to describe it.

  “I need to get some more things,” Karl said, because at a certain point begging to stay meant a further loss of precious dignity. Right now the only thing he wished he could lose was his family.

  His granddaughter followed him down the hallway to the kitchen and opened the fridge door without asking his permission. “You know, you were the first person who ever made me eat a pickle.”

  “I’m not sure I could have ever made you do anything,” he said.

  “I still think they’re gross.” She peered at the brightly lit but empty shelves, opening the door wider, so he might take a look.

  “There’s no food in here.”

  “You’re letting all the cold out.”

  “But there’s nothing in here to be kept cold.”

  “More reason to close the fridge door.”

  “You told me they would grow hair on my chest,” his granddaughter said, returning to the pickles.

  Trude had hated pickles as well. He’d chop them up into small chunks and put them in his sister’s ice cream, and sometimes she’d pretend to be angry, and sometimes she really would be angry and break into tears. He’d been punished more than once, his mother sending him away without dessert. Regardless of his behaviour, Trude always sneaked something sweet into his room.

  “I only came here once, and there was some other place you lived. I visited you there too. That was before Mom and Dad split up. Do you remember?”

  Yes, he did. She was about ten years old at the time, the same age his sister had been before he lost her.

  Karl was irritated by her intransigence. He’d asked her to do something in his own apartment, and it was only right that she respect his wishes.

  “My cigars are in there,” he said, pointing not to the fridge but to the lower cabinet to the left of it.

  Without further instruction, she closed the fridge and stooped down to open the cabinet door.

  “They’re in the far back,” he said, because just like that, they’d come to an understanding.

  His granddaughter thrust her arm and shoulder into the back of the cupboard, rattling the pots and pans stacked like Russian dolls. Karl had stashed them far away from Sophia’s scornful eyes. He’d reluctantly promised to do away with the habit. The cigars he’d hidden meant he hadn’t been faithful.

  Petra pulled out the bundle and brought it to the tip of her nose. “They smell really cigary,” she said.

  “They shouldn’t,” said Karl. “But I guess they’ve been back there for too long. Tobacco should be properly stored to keep it fresh. That’s why I never liked smoking cigarettes. They sit neglected on store shelves for months, even years.”

  “Which is why you hide cigars in the kitchen cabinet?”

  Karl held out his hand. “Here, give them to me.”

  “Where are you going to put them?” she asked without releasing them. “Dad doesn’t smoke.” She raised an inquisitive eyebrow in the direction of the open cabinet door. “You’ll have to hide them from him too. I’ll just hold them. Dad won’t suspect anything. I’ll keep them out of sight until I can slip them to you, okay?”

  “Okay. Yes.”

  She took another sniff of Karl’s cigars as if to compare, but this time she appeared to take pleasure in their fragrance.

  “I know Dad, and he’s super freaked out right now.”

  “I’m just staying for the night,” Karl insisted, but even then, he could see it was a lie. The allotment of cigars in his granddaughter’s hand could not possibly be consumed in a single evening.

  Petra looked disappointed by his self-deception.

  They went back to his bedroom, where his son was busy packing up Karl’s clothes into two suitcases that sat open-mouthed on top of the mattress. The drawers were open, the closets emptied. Petra, cigars hidden behind her back, stood by the doorway and eyed her father, as if she’d seen this all before.

  Aaron zipped the suitcase closed. “Ready?” he asked Karl.

  “Ready,” Karl answered. But he wasn’t. He’d never been ready to leave, but somehow he’d always been forced to.

  3

  KARL’S CLOTHES AND SUITCASE HAD BEEN unpacked and put away in a chest of drawers and a closet. There was a window in his room, rectangular, that could slide open from left to right or, using the other panel, from right to left. He’d been ordered not to open the window—a note to that effect was posted on the glass pane, citing high heating bills—though he suspected the reason for keeping it closed had more to do with his perceived safety. Outside was a small parkette with a wooden bench that he would have sat down on, if he’d been allowed to walk out the door himself. There was a note about that too, posted on the locked front door. He tried to force the door anyway but couldn’t get out.

  He walked into the kitchen. His son—and now, by extension, Karl—lived in a condo-sized two-bedroom, two-bath. The apartment was clean, bright and modern, with varnished hardwood and granite countertops. Pleasant enough, thought Karl, but there wasn’t much else that was commendable about the place. It was a temporary home furnished and decorated with future vacancy in mind. He turned on the gas stove, heard the metallic click, click, click, caught a whiff of gas and watched the burner ignite into blue flame. It was one of the back burners. He wanted the one in front, so he started fiddling with the knobs—

  “What do you want?” Aaron said, edging him away from the stove.

  His son made a habit of startling him like this, of just appearing.

  “I’d like to go home.” The thought of being alone brought to mind the cracked bar of soap and its withering parchedness. And how had it come to pass that he was living here?

  “You can’t be on your own right now. Why did you turn the stove on?”

  “I’d like some tea,” he said.

  “I have an electric kettle for that.”

  It was made of glass, so Karl could see there was already water inside, which he would have liked to change. When his son turned on the kettle, it emitted a blue light. Karl sat down at the table and waited for the tea to be prepared and served.

  “I’d like some sugar,” he said.

  “There’s a sugar bowl on the table.”

  “Not that sugar. My sugar.”

  “Sugar is sugar, Dad.” With that insightful point made, his son fetched two cubes which Karl unwrapped, putting one into his cup and the other in his mouth, just as his own father had done, trapping its sweetness under his tongue. The trick was to use your tongue as a valve, allowing just the right amount of moisture to seep down into the basement of your mouth for two enjoyable cups. It took discipline to tease out the cube’s sweetness without dissolving it whole, something his father had taught him through example. Karl might have been drinking tea, but it was the rich, bitter scent of his father’s coffee that he smelled.

  “Why aren’t you at work?” Karl checked his watch. It told him that it was just past nine-thirty on a Tuesday morning.

  “Because you’re here.”

  “So you’re going to stop working and just stay with me?”

  “I never said anything about not working. I can work out of the house.”

  “It’s not a house. It’s an apartment. Where’s your wife?”

  “We’re divorced, Dad, separated. Have been for over two years.”

  Such an ugly word, separated, like serrated, snipped, snapped. A tearing away not from what was yours but what
was you. He and his son were like two pieces of the same puzzle that did not fit together, because they belonged to different parts of the picture. His son had always liked jigsaw puzzles, wanting to graduate beyond his age group to ever more complicated pictures of German castles, the Alps, sunlit meadows. He could never complete them and always ended up trying to force the hundreds of pieces together, as if through sheer will he could force a picture to emerge.

  “And now you aren’t working,” Karl said.

  “I am working.”

  Karl had never really understood the exact aspect of his son’s occupation. Aaron worked at a think-tank, so it had something to do with thinking, though he wasn’t a professor or a scientist. So far as he could surmise, his son was interested in bicycles.

  “Are you doing it now?” asked Karl.

  “Doing what?”

  “Working.”

  His son answered by getting up from the table and going to take a shower.

  Karl wanted to get some fresh air and the sense of a view, something beyond this apartment, so he went out to the balcony. He was prepared not just to ignore the cold and rain that puddled in the far corner but to embrace it. His son feared that the world was warming up and had told him, had actually said this to him, that global warming was the greatest danger facing humanity. He called it a “national security issue,” but his son didn’t know the first thing about danger, the real danger that came not from the sky but from the person seated right beside you.

  “You’ll catch cold.” It was his son again, his hair wet from the shower.

  It struck Karl as contemptible that his son was wrapped in bath towels during a workday. It wasn’t so much that a man should work but that he should always be prepared.

  “So will you,” said Karl.

  “Come back inside.”

  His son meant well, he supposed. He was trying, but Karl felt bullied and patronized. He clasped the handrailing as if he were about to be pulled back inside and stared down at the street.

  “Careful, Dad. It’s dangerous.”

  And it was dangerous but for reasons his son did not understand. He was on his family’s seventh-floor balcony overlooking a wide and elegant street, Mariahilferstrasse, the entrance to every building sized for giants and greatness. He shut his eyes and hoped that when he reopened them, he would see modern bland towers of glass and concrete, but as he feared, when he looked out again, he saw that the street was decked out with immense banners stretching from streetlamp to streetlamp, bearing three signs in endless repetition: “We Thank Our Führer,” “One Nation One Empire,” “Sieg Heil.”

  Jews were ordered to vacate their apartments for the duration of Hitler’s triumphant motorcade, and his family went to a friend’s apartment, one that didn’t overlook Mariahilferstrasse, yet they still huddled in one of the backrooms, afraid to approach even the windows that overlooked side streets. His mother had been assured that once Hitler came through Austria, a certain order would be installed. Even if it wasn’t a comfortable order, they would manage.

  If so, why cower in someone else’s apartment? Karl had slipped away and returned to his apartment to watch the parade from the balcony. It was a sea of red banners and noise and great crowds, one row of SS guards surveying the street, the other holding back the ecstatic surging crowds. Every three or four yards there was a white pillar that the Hitlerjugend had adorned with gold swastikas. Like everyone else, Karl was waiting for Hitler, when he felt a strong hand on his shoulder dragging him back inside. It was his father, in a panic. He’d never seen his father scared by anything before then.

  It wasn’t long afterwards that Jews on their street were forbidden not only from standing on their balconies but from looking through their windows. “We’re no longer Austrians,” his mother whispered, as if even in her own home she might be overheard.

  Karl had no desire to live among this diminished and disinherited family hiding inside their apartments. He wished to be part of that vast unyielding crowd, not because he was a Nazi or even because he didn’t want to be a Jew. During summer vacations in the mountains, Karl and his father dressed themselves in loden jackets, lederhosen, embroidered suspenders, high white socks and mountain boots, while Trude wore a flowered dirndl. She’d execute cartwheels across the alpine grass, when no one but Karl was watching, and Karl would make himself look stupid by crossing his eyes and telling her in a plodding country accent that she needed to milk the cows. “You don’t even know what cows look like,” she would tell him, and Karl would say, yes, of course he did, they looked just like his sister. Despite herself, Trude would start laughing again, and if, as usually happened, she fell to the ground, he would pull her back up and brush her off, so that no one would suspect what his little sister had been up to.

  If they found it funny to dress like Austrian peasants, it was not because they were Jewish but because they came from Vienna. Once, when he and Trude had been walking along the river—his parents had impressed upon Karl a fear that little Trude might stumble into the water and be swept away, so he always walked on the river side—they’d come across a farmer who asked to look at Karl’s hands, and he felt he had no choice but to present them to him. “Soft,” the farmer said, pressing his nail into his uncallused palm, deep enough to make Karl wince. Zimperlich was the word he’d used, which also implied that he was prissy and nervous. Karl was humiliated, especially after the farmer asked for Trude’s hands and examined her palms as he would some farm animal. Did the man expect his ten-year-old sister’s hands to be hardened as well? The farmer dismissed them with barely concealed contempt. Unable to defend his sister or fight back, Karl sensed he’d proven the farmer’s point. He was zimperlich.

  Nothing about Karl or Trude signalled they were in any way different from any other child born and raised in Vienna. Photographs in the apartment drawing-room proved it: one was of Karl playing in Rathauspark at the age of two, dressed in a double-breasted coat with velvet collar, leggings with straps and a little cap over his curly blond hair. A similar photo of Trude, when she was two, showed them standing side by side, respectful little Austrians. Yet there’d been something in the farmer’s attitude that suggested he saw in those soft city hands the very origins of the Kaufmann family.

  Karl’s grandfather had founded the leather glove factory that had sustained his family throughout two generations and that his father, Bernard, intended to pass on to his son, as his father had before him. Soon after Karl graduated from primary school, his father decided to show his son the workings of the family factory, the source of the family fortune. Karl had seen and smelled the hides, the flesh with fat and dung clinging to them before being stripped clean, salted and graded. And then, in the tannery, the stink of putrid chemicals softening the hides, turning flesh into leather. Fine leather, his father proclaimed. That’s what his father had wanted him to see, to understand: it was an issue of quality. Only the very best would do for his clientele, the discerning man and woman who knew and appreciated such differences, though, Karl guessed, not the grisly processes involved in getting to the final product.

  The idea that something ugly lurked behind every item of order and luxury—though it was not the lesson his father might have expected or wanted his son to take away with him—lingered with Karl. More than that, it lurked behind even the good, a lesson Karl’s own son, who seemed on a perpetual search for some way to help the world heal itself, seemed never to fully grasp.

  His father always returned from work at exactly half past six, when the dinner table was already set by the maid, with the silver cutlery, the china soup tureen, the linen serviettes, everything and everyone in their designated place. It wasn’t overly formal; there was light and engaging banter, nothing serious, or frivolous either. After dinner, his father retired to his study, where he would catch up on his correspondence with friends and associates for a further hour. Bernard’s moments of pleasure were carefully orchestrated. Then, and only then, did he come back out and light a cigaril
lo, seating himself at the small table in the drawing-room beside the window that overlooked their street. The window would be open if it was warm enough outside. This routine was so established that Karl, without having to be asked, opened the window minutes before his father exited his study.

  After the “disturbance”—that’s what his parents called it in front of their children, and, who knows, it might even have been what they called it themselves—his father took to sitting at all hours of the day and night smoking his cigarillos one after the other, abandoning a lifetime of careful discipline and control. Once cigarillos were no longer available, he switched to cheap cigarettes that stank of misfortune. His clothes grew ever shabbier, after the best of what he owned was sold along with the household furniture and linens. Soon there wasn’t much left but a table and a chair, his father sitting on it with the windows and curtains closed, as if he couldn’t accept what was happening outside yet still needed the illuminating light, however dim, of Vienna.

  When his father did go out, he never left without his Carinthian Cross service medal pinned to his chest, as if that small piece of metal earned for running munitions through heavy fire in the Dolomites during the First World War would help him or his family survive this too. He’d worn it one day when visiting his bank, asking to see the manager, hoping his decoration would signify that he and his family were respectable, prosperous and accepted citizens of Austria. He looked the part, with the military posture he’d kept up all his life, his waxed moustache and impeccable clothing. They all knew Herr Kaufmann at the bank; he’d been an important and valued customer there for more than twenty years. The manager had refused to see him, and he had walked out of the bank humiliated.

  His father took to writing cloying letters, sending copies to Field Marshal Hulgerth, asking him to respect the needs of a decorated war veteran. “I’m an ex-officer—nothing will happen to us. You can rely on that!” he’d shout at his family. To Karl, who’d always pictured his father as worldly, experienced and pragmatic, it seemed he had been broken in half.