The Dictator

by David Layton

  “We all need to leave here,” Karl told him, and it was the first time in his life that he’d found his voice when speaking to his father.

  “Where would we go?”

  Karl, caught off guard by his father’s question, said, “America.”

  “America?” His father posed it as a question, as if his son might provide, however improbably, an answer. “How can we go there?”

  Karl hadn’t thought through his answer. He knew he was being simplistic. He also knew something needed to be done.

  “How can we stay here?” he asked.

  “At least we’re together.”

  Karl joined him by the window, but unlike his father, he looked out over the city that was both menacing and promising. It was only out there, beyond the window, that help could be found. To stay here was to hide in a cave whose walls were about to collapse. His father was seated; Karl was standing, as if expressing the need to use his feet, to run. He suspected that part of the reason he and Trude hadn’t been sent away was that his father could not bring himself to break apart the family.

  “Then let’s get away together,” Karl said, and they were back to where they’d started, his father asking where they could go, and Karl not offering a proper answer, because he was only fifteen, and it wasn’t up to him to find one.

  Later that night, Karl overheard his parents whispering in a dark pocket of their apartment, trying to fathom the events that had overtaken them and for which, as it would turn out, they would never find an explanation. There was talk now of sending their children away, possibly to Belgium, where a branch of the family resided, or possibly to England. Unfortunately they had been too late in applying for residency permits, and now they’d run out of time and money, or so his father said.

  His mother was completely unable to keep up with the daily disasters. She’d tell Karl to go to bed, because it was late and he had to go to school next morning. “But I’m not allowed to go to school anymore,” he’d remind her. She was always tripping up that way, then reddening when her mistakes were pointed out to her. Hers was such a delicate response, thought Karl, like an organism whose defensive camouflage had been rendered useless against some vicious evolutionary terror.

  “They’ve gone crazy,” his mother would say, but what Karl thought was crazy was the behaviour of his own family, who’d observed the gathering storm clouds without preparing themselves for impending disaster.

  “We should do something,” Karl pleaded. “We need to help Trude.” Perhaps his mother might better be able to understand if he appealed to her fears for her youngest child.

  “What can we do?”

  Again the question was put to him, as if he might have an answer. And again, Karl could not offer one.

  The moment his mother had to stitch the Star of David onto their clothing, Karl knew they were doomed. He watched her fingers, red and raw in his imagination but in all likelihood pink and nimble, meticulously work their way along the yellow edges, pinning the star to his coat, an action Karl found unbearably intimate. Their daily maid had gone, after the law had been passed prohibiting Aryans from working for Jews. She hadn’t been with them for long, so there’d been no tears of regret or unexpected bursts of fury over years of servitude. Instead, a final payment was made, and she left, never to return.

  “It’s the law,” his father said, when Karl questioned him, as if that were a perfectly adequate answer.

  The law. Bernard Kaufmann had always upheld it, even when it turned against him, even when it contradicted the higher law of survival.

  He was absurd, thought Karl. Did his father think that his Corinthian Cross would cancel the stigma of the Star of David? Though Karl had pleaded with his parents not to go out of their way to mark themselves with the yellow star, his father had told him it was too dangerous to go against the authorities.

  When his father ran short of his prized cigarillos, it was because Karl had sold them. It was a testament to his father’s decline that he failed to notice the loss of his property, and it confirmed in Karl’s mind that what he was doing was, if not right, then certainly necessary.

  With some of the money he got, Karl bought pastries for Trude, who always loved the Austrian ritual of Gabelfrühstück, the second breakfast. He’d sit and watch her eat, taking delight in her enjoyment, and then they’d play Schnapsen, smacking their hands down hard on the pile of cards as if to smother the agitated hiccuping sobs of their mother and the wet heavy sighs of their father in the adjoining room.

  “What are we going to do?” Trude asked one day, dragging toward her a pile of cards he’d let her win.

  “Escape,” answered Karl.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Promise you’ll take me with you.”

  “I promise,” he said.

  He’d heard, while trading on the black market, that it was possible to cross the Swiss border, provided you had money or valuables to bribe the border guards. But there were reports of Jews being robbed, not just by bandits but by the guards themselves, who’d take the money and then deny the Jews safe passage. Even if you did manage to cross over, the Swiss authorities were known to send you back, and then you’d be beaten or taken away. Or maybe not. Some returning Jews had simply been allowed to go home, and they were the ones whose stories Karl heard. Nothing was predictable. Nothing made sense.

  Yet surely there were tricks, digressions, methods to ensure survival and escape. That’s what he kept attempting to impress upon his father, and also on his mother, who under the kitchen light sewed what was left of their valuables inside the lining of her husband’s jacket.

  “We can cross over to Switzerland,” Karl said to his father. “I’ve heard the border guards accept bribes.” This was a better plan than America, and he expected a more positive response.

  “We’re not allowed near the border,” said his father.

  “We’re not allowed many things,” Karl answered. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do them.”

  “They won’t even allow us on the trains.”

  “You mean they won’t allow Jews.”

  His father looked at him as if he were deficient in mind. As a child, Karl had found the look withering, but now it only induced contempt.

  “And what do you think we are?”

  “We’re what we want to be. So let’s not be Jews. We don’t have to wear the star.”

  “I won’t allow this family to get into danger.”

  “You won’t allow it? What do you think is happening right now? What is your plan?”

  “When the time comes, we’ll be safe,” his father said.

  “How?”

  “Don’t question me!”

  Trude, frightened by her father’s raised voice, began to cry. There was no room for secrets in the apartment, and his father, no longer able to understand the new order, could not extend a comforting arm and stop his daughter’s tears. She, too, and in her own way, had to stop respecting her father. Karl could not forgive him. His stupidity. His befuddling deficiency when it came to self-preservation. His own children’s preservation.

  As it was when they’d encountered the farmer, Karl couldn’t offer Trude any help when it mattered. Would he be able to take her to Switzerland with him? Could he save her? Afterwards, in the apartment hallway, he told her that if their parents wouldn’t leave, at least the two of them should, but Trude started sobbing again. The idea of leaving her mother and father, their familiar life, no matter how unfamiliar it had become, terrified her. She stifled her sobs, because she knew others in the apartment might hear her, and began to whisper. They’d all been reduced to whispers, thought Karl.

  “Don’t leave,” she said. “Promise me you’ll stay here with me.”

  Trude was probably too young to journey to the border, and once there, what would he do? What if he took her, and everything went wrong? Could he accept that responsibility?

  Perhaps his father really did have a plan, bu
t all Karl could properly calculate was what was best for him. He couldn’t protect Trude; it wasn’t his place to do so. Karl was only fifteen, a boy, he told himself.

  “I promise,” he said.

  The time came when the glove factory was declared Judenfrei, and the new Aryan owners were given a contract to supply dress gloves for the German navy, part of a goodwill economic package the expanded Reich was offering its newest acquisition. As the Reich went out to strangle the world with the fine-gloved hands of Kaufmann & Sons, Karl realized he couldn’t wait a moment longer.

  Late one night, after everyone had gone to bed, Karl slipped past his sister’s bedroom and tore open the lining of his father’s coat, taking out a gold necklace and two gold and diamond rings.

  “Are you leaving?” Trude’s silent approach had shown more stealth than Karl’s planned escape. She was in her nightgown, obviously unprepared to leave, as if she had always known that he would break his promise to her, that he was a liar.

  “Yes,” said Karl.

  Trude looked at the haul of jewellery in her brother’s hands.

  “If you go now, I’ll never see you again,” she said.

  “We’ll all be together again. I promise.”

  As if afraid of the draft, she stayed away from the front door as he closed it behind him for the last time. She was probably still standing there, clutching at her nightgown, as he hurried through the dark drizzly streets to the same West Station where Hitler had entered the city, passing the Vienna Opera House, which now displayed a huge banner reading “Jewishness Is a Crime.”

  Karl had left behind his parents. Worse, he’d left behind his little sister.

  Jewishness wasn’t his crime. Survival was.

  4

  AARON AND PETRA STOOD ON EITHER SIDE of Karl, waiting for the lights to change so they could cross onto Yorkville Avenue and stroll past the shops and restaurants. They’d all been cooped up in the apartment watching an Attenborough nature show about the appalling lack of interest male mammals have for their young. Most fathers in nature appeared to be not only neglectful but often hostile, eating their children when they were hungry or just trampling over them when they got in the way. Aaron had turned off the television, declaring it was time for a walk, and on his insistence, they’d all bundled up.

  Aaron had grasped the principles of survival long before listening to Attenborough or reading Darwin. The imperatives of natural selection had singled out his father, who’d done what he needed to do in order to survive. His father was born in Austria. He was a Jew. He’d fled and had saved himself. That much Aaron knew but little else. One did not ask a lion for an apology. If his father had been neglectful, then so be it. His father wasn’t a predator but a victim, someone who’d been attacked and now needed always to be on his guard. If Karl had trampled over him, it was because he was still running away. From an early age, Aaron had been on guard not only for predators but for victims. They could be just as dangerous.

  They crossed the street, he and Petra keeping a few steps back in some unspoken acknowledgement that Karl needed to regain a sense of autonomy and authority. Let him lead them rather than the other way around, but not too far ahead, because his father, withered down to his sinewy essentials, was astonishingly nimble for a man of his age. He might at any moment scuttle off, thought Aaron, and dash for a home he could no longer return to. They were both stuck here and with each other, Aaron no more at home than his father.

  They walked by plate-glass windows behind which people ate and drank without the slightest awareness of the family passing so close to their tables, before Karl stopped outside the display window of an antique furniture store, his attention fixed on a polished brass candelabra which sparkled beneath the halogen lights.

  “What’s it doing here?” his father asked. He meant the menorah in front of him, polished and shiny beneath the lights.

  Aaron could have explained this was a shop that sold antiques and that the items were for sale, but he sensed such a straightforward answer would not have assuaged the pain he heard in his father’s voice. It was as if he were staring at some lost possession that had been taken from him.

  “They’re holding it for you, Grandpa. To keep it safe.”

  Petra took his arm and let him stare at the candelabra for a little longer before gently leading him away from the window. Then she dropped back and resumed her place beside Aaron.

  “Grandpa was talking about his sister last night,” she said.

  “What sister?” Aaron asked.

  “You didn’t know Grandpa had a sister?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You mean you’re not sure?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Do you know how bizarre that sounds?”

  The night before, Aaron had heard them speaking behind the closed door of Karl’s bedroom as if concocting a conspiracy. Stupidly, he’d felt excluded like a child, as if they didn’t want to play with him.

  His father was like a thief, robbing him of who he was. Everything he might need to know was inside his father’s head. And his father’s head was failing, which may have been the best for both of them, because all Aaron wanted was for this time with his father to end, as cruel or insensitive as that may have sounded. He’d done his best to keep these desires hidden from Petra but without much success.

  “I think I remind him of her,” Petra said.

  Aaron found this alarming. “There’s a whole world scrambled inside your grandfather’s head. It’s making my head a bit scrambled as well.”

  “Your head has always been scrambled.”

  Petra did not say this in a kidding way, but he decided to take it as if she had. “That’s very kind of you.”

  “Well, you didn’t know about his sister, and you act like you don’t really care.”

  “I don’t.”

  His answer took Petra by surprise. She was trying to force him into saying things he didn’t feel, and it was important to draw a red line through her bullying. Why did she care so much? What was all this to her? She was trying to get under his skin. Karl was angry for being taken out of his apartment and had his own reasons for forging a relationship with Petra. But what was Karl’s point in telling her about a lost sister? Why her? Why now? Karl had never provided any links to his past, which was Aaron’s past too, of course. After Karl walked out when Aaron was eleven, his mother used to say the only time one should talk about the past was when it had a future. Since it was clear Karl was never coming back, they never talked about his leaving. Soon even his father became the past. There’d been nothing for Aaron to hold on to, no mementos and hardly any photographs. Karl had taken all of him with him.

  “Grandad is getting cold,” Aaron said, steering them toward the mall entrance on their right.

  There’d been an outdoor rink encircled by two floors of shops and restaurants. His mother had often taken him there as a child. They would sit down at one of the inside patio tables and order hot chocolate. Aaron had come back many times throughout the years, watching young women skate past the windows with the happy self-absorption of those who knew they were admired.

  One of those women had stepped off the rink, tiptoeing on the edge of her blades until collapsing on the seat next to his. He didn’t know her, but he knew her friends, who’d waved at them, while they drank hot chocolate and talked until it turned dark and the skating rink lit up.

  He’d married that young woman, and when Petra had turned into a good skater he’d brought her to the same spot, the laces of her white skates tied together and strung around her neck. He’d never been a good skater, and in years past the two of them would wobble along, until the day his daughter spun around him in an easy circle, having shaken off the clumsiness of childhood.

  But the rink had been replaced by an enclosed food court, bright and ugly, with a piano in the middle of the atrium, the lid open like a burglarized house. There was no more outdoors, no more fairy lights, and the air, vigorously s
ucked clean of dust, smelled barren, as if the nutrients had been taken out. He’d dragged Petra through the mall as if maybe the rink had moved, in search of that magical place his mother had taken him to and where he’d met her mother. Petra must have sensed in him something more than anger, because she’d given him her hand, still so small Aaron needed to remind himself not to crush it.

  At least they still served hot chocolate, Aaron thought, ordering three without asking either Petra or his father whether they wanted one. He’d worried that a part of Petra would always remain the little girl with skates around her neck, wondering why there was no place for her to use them, but as they sat down at the food court, she seemed oblivious.

  “I’m going to look at the stores,” she said.

  As she walked across a floor she’d once skated on, Aaron realized it was he who still wore the skates around his neck.

  “There used to be a skating rink here,” Aaron said to his father, because he couldn’t let go of the idea. Staring at his daughter’s hot chocolate cooling on the table, he told Karl that’s what Mom used to buy him, and he also told him about the pretty women who’d skated beneath the open patch of sky, one of whom eventually became his wife. It seemed, under the glare of shop lights, as incomprehensible to Aaron as it evidently was to his father, who didn’t appear to be listening. Where had his father been during those years, and why hadn’t he ever brought him here to teach him how to skate? And why was he telling him a story that he should already have known? This is where I met my wife. This is where I took your grandchild.

  “Petra is talking to a boy,” his father said.

  “What boy?”

  “Behind the pillar.”

  A peal of laughter echoed through the food court. Petra’s. The boy had made a joke. Aaron didn’t like him.

  She hadn’t brought any friends over since Aaron had moved into the apartment. Understandable, he supposed, but it had been a long time since she’d spoken about anything of consequence when it came to her private life.