The Dictator

by David Layton

  Aaron had fought him on it.

  “I’m Jewish,” he’d insisted.

  “Your mother isn’t Jewish.”

  “So?”

  “That means you aren’t Jewish either.”

  “Well, if I’m not Jewish, then what am I?”

  “You’re nothing.”

  His father had actually appeared proud, as if it were an achievement to make his son into nothing, but even now, with the Demerol still coursing through his veins, he felt the sting of it. To be nothing was to be anything. He supposed that was the point, though his father had never put it like that to him.

  Aaron watched the tall and important buildings speed past him, blending into one another, as if he, Aaron, had the power to unify their purpose. He’d been busy all his life inside such buildings, and he didn’t like the sensation of seeing things from the other side. He felt exposed as he got out of the cab and waited impatiently for the elevator to take him to his apartment. It was just past two. If he was lucky, Karl would be asleep.

  But Aaron wasn’t lucky. Opening the door, he found his father playing cards in the kitchen. With Petra.

  “That’s yours,” his daughter said, picking up a small pile of cards and placing them face down on his side of the table.

  Karl plucked a card from his hand and also placed it down. She did the same, and then he threw down another card, and they continued this way, back and forth in a competitive rhythm, until Petra shouted, “Schnapsen!” and brought her hand down over the pile, hesitating for just a second to give her grandfather a fighting chance.

  “Schnapsen!” answered Karl. “It’s yours.”

  His daughter claimed the pile. “It’s a game Grandpa taught me,” she said, without looking up.

  Aaron had been staring at them. The game was one he’d played with his father long ago. He couldn’t remember why they’d stopped.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “Sure, considering you locked Grandpa in the apartment.”

  “I didn’t lock him in,” Aaron said. It was a weak answer. He’d done just that. “What are you doing here? You should be at school.”

  “Grandpa phoned me.”

  “He did?” Aaron turned to Karl. “Did you phone her?”

  “I just said that he did,” Petra answered.

  “I didn’t know where you were,” Karl said.

  “You were asleep when I left.”

  “I heard the door close,” said Karl. “So I was awake.”

  “You were in your bedroom.”

  “That doesn’t mean I was sleeping.”

  “I had to open the door with my key,” Petra said. She stood up from her chair and pulled it out, proffering it like a piece of evidence to a jury. “What’s wrong with you? You can’t lock him inside. He’s not a dog.”

  Aaron wanted to lie down. He was just thinking about pulling the pillows out of the closet and resting on the couch, when the phone rang. It was Isobel.

  “Hi,” he said.

  His ex-wife ignored his greeting. “Where’s Petra?”

  “She’s here.”

  Aaron cupped the phone and whispered, “It’s your mother,” as he watched his daughter, his precious only child, mouth the words You’re fucked.

  “That’s odd, Aaron, because she’s supposed to be in school. I’ve been calling you, leaving messages.”

  “I was in the hospital,” he said, playing for sympathy.

  “The hospital? What for?”

  “I had a colonoscopy today. They thought there might be a problem, something serious.” Aaron offered a short pause in the hope it would elicit an expression of concern from her and the room. Then he said, “I have lactose intolerance.”

  “Is that some sort of joke?”

  “No.”

  “You can’t just pull our daughter out of school without telling me.”

  “I didn’t pull her out. She just came over.”

  “Promise it won’t happen again.”

  “I promise,” he answered.

  “How is Petra?” she asked, changing tone.

  “Fine,” he said, using one of their code words to indicate he wasn’t free to talk openly. Divorce doesn’t eliminate those little intimacies, thought Aaron. They continue to grow like fingernails on a dead body.

  “She’s dating someone.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m dating someone.”

  “That I didn’t know.”

  “I thought Petra might have told you.”

  “No.”

  “I suppose she wouldn’t. Anyway, I’m not sure how she’s taking it, but she does seem to spend a lot of her spare time with your father.”

  “Is Mom pissed?” Petra asked, after he got off the phone.

  “No.”

  “You were in the hospital because you have lactose intolerance?”

  “I didn’t know I had it. That’s why I went.”

  “I have a few friends who are lactose intolerant. They can’t eat ice cream, so they take a pill or something. That’s why you locked Grandpa inside the apartment? Because you can’t eat ice cream? That’s pathetic, Dad.”

  His father still held a fistful of playing cards in his hand and was waiting to resume the game.

  “Do you have trouble eating dairy products?” Aaron asked him.

  “Trouble?” his father answered.

  “It’s a problem Jews suffer from.”

  “They do? I used to make cheese. And milk cows. That’s why you went to the hospital? Because you get stomach aches from cheese?”

  Aaron detected contempt in his father’s voice, as if his son had let him down with such a banal weakness.

  “Yes, apparently. But they didn’t know what the problem was,” he reiterated.

  “You milked cows?” Petra asked her grandfather, who nodded. “Did you know that, Dad?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Maybe if you didn’t lock your father inside the apartment, you’d know a lot more.”

  “Petra, can I have a word with you?” Aaron made his way to the balcony. Petra reluctantly joined him. He slid the door closed behind them.

  “I want you to know how much I appreciate you taking care of Grandpa. He’s old and has a lot of problems. Maybe this is a bit too much for you.”

  “Of course it’s too much for me, Dad.”

  The honesty made Aaron laugh. “This is my fault. Grandpa’s not going to be staying here much longer, so you won’t have to go through this anymore.”

  “You mean so you won’t have to go through this anymore.”

  “I can’t take care of him, Petra.”

  “Sure. It’s easier that way,” she said. “Like getting a divorce.”

  “Getting a divorce isn’t easy, Petra.”

  She’d burst into tears the day they’d told her. Aaron had rehearsed the scenario, talked with other divorced parents, even a therapist, but inevitably, it seemed, he and his ex-wife had fallen into the same predictable pattern all parents do when their marriage comes to an end. They’d told Petra that it wasn’t her fault, that they would both continue to love her, that they would still be a family, just not one that lived under the same roof, which even then never made sense to him. With all the divorces that had preceded his own, Aaron was astonished there wasn’t a wider range of options for expressing himself. Instead, all those breakups had produced the opposite effect, blunting and dulling the language until it all sounded wearyingly familiar.

  “You’ll always be our daughter,” he’d said, taking her into his arms. He smelled the scent of childhood in her hair and wanted to find that special brush he’d used when she was a little girl, the one with the red rubber tips attached to the end of each bristle so that her scalp wouldn’t be scratched as he ran the brush down her hair.

  Since then, they’d hardly mentioned that day, or the divorce for that matter. Petra had stayed with her mother, and Aaron had moved into this apartment.

  “Do you want to talk about it
?”

  “What, you and Mom getting a divorce?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that why we’re out here on the balcony?”

  “I just wanted to talk.”

  “About what?”

  “About this.”

  “Okay. Why did you and Mom get a divorce? Did she catch you cheating with someone?”

  “No.”

  “Did you catch her cheating with someone?”

  “It wasn’t anything like that.”

  “Then, what was it?”

  “Sometimes things just end, Petra.”

  “That’s great, Dad. Thanks for sharing.”

  “We weren’t happy together.”

  “Why not?”

  “If people had the answer to that question, they’d be a lot happier than they are.”

  “Did Mom tell you she has a new boyfriend?”

  He sighed. “Just now, over the phone.”

  “I don’t like him.”

  “You’re not supposed to like him. I don’t like him.”

  “You haven’t met him.”

  “I don’t need to.”

  “He tries.”

  “Well, there’s that.”

  “Yes, there’s that,” she said accusatorially.

  One minute they were allies, the next enemies. It was hard to keep up, and Aaron suspected it might not be the divorce they needed to talk about but everything that had happened and might happen afterwards. Her mother had met someone else. He would meet someone else. And there were other concerns: his father. Karl’s insertion into the household had altered Petra’s family equation.

  “What are we doing for Thanksgiving?” Petra suddenly asked.

  “Thanksgiving? I haven’t thought about it.”

  “No surprise there. I’d like Grandma to come.”

  “I’m not sure she’ll want to be here.”

  “I also want Mom to be here.”

  “We don’t live together anymore, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  “She just wants to hang out with her new boyfriend. I want Mom and Grandma here for Thanksgiving. I want my family around me,” Petra said it as if family were a warm garment she could wrap around herself.

  It must be a phase, thought Aaron, a moment in the wake of a divorce when a child wants to reconstitute the fragments, but he found something manipulative and possibly bullying in her request. That, too, was probably normal. She wanted all the adults to assemble on her behalf. He and his ex were civil toward each other, but there was no point pushing things. And before Karl had shown up unexpectedly at his mother’s home, it had been years, actually decades, since they’d all broken bread together.

  “It’s not up to me,” he told Petra.

  Aaron retreated to the living room. He wasn’t a good father. According to his daughter, he wasn’t a good son either. For that reason, he sat on the couch, while his father and daughter resumed their card game. Petra threw out a card from her hand, then his father did the same, and the process repeated itself, back and forth, until Aaron closed his eyes and fell into a deep sleep.

  7

  IT WAS UNBEARABLY HOT AND THE SHIP stank of oil and paint, but the weather cooled as they made their way out to sea and became even cooler for the first two days of their journey southward. Then the heat returned and grew, staining the sky a mournful grey; it began to rain, forcing people inside. The sea roughened. Lying in their beds, the men in Karl’s cabin started to vomit.

  “What godforsaken place are they taking us to?”

  “It’s hot as hell.”

  “It is hell.”

  Karl rested on the upper bunk, rocked by waves and the shuddering propeller shaft. Nerves began to fray; even Mr. Weinberg, pale and exhausted through most of the voyage, looked defeated. It had been a long journey for all of them, and their capacity to imagine what awaited them was almost depleted by the time their boat glided into the tropical waters of Puerto Plata, its false, bright colours reminding him of the sickly vomit that had been spilled on the boat during the crossing. He couldn’t explain the heat, and he felt it needed explaining. Much more astonishing were the improbable notes of the German national anthem wafting across the water.

  To the strains of “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” the boat sailed past a square-walled fort that must have dated back to the Spaniards, with long abandoned sentry posts at each crumbled corner. A volcano-shaped mountain soared into clouds that had been created by its own height and dwarfed the town below, with its buildings of painted wood and tin-capped roofs. They weren’t in New York anymore; they certainly weren’t in Germany or Austria. He could see that plainly, but what he heard was all too familiar.

  “Why are they playing that hateful song?”

  It was Esther, wearing her best dress, stockings and black shoes, with a fashionable purse in hand, as if she were about to go shopping in Manhattan. She tentatively leaned over the wooden railing and looked down at the sea, as if it might be the source of her confusion and worry.

  As more refugees joined them on deck and the ship docked against a concrete pier, the source of the music came into view. A raised platform on shore held a full band dressed in white uniforms. In the broiling sun, they played the anthem over and over again, while Dominican flags fluttered above them.

  “I think they want to welcome us,” Felix said.

  “How is that possible?”

  As with the other men, Karl wore a jacket and hat, but nobody, not even Esther, came close to what Felix was wearing. He had on a cream-coloured panama suit, his shirt buttoned up to his neck, a fedora rakishly tilted on his head.

  To the continuing tune of “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” Karl followed Felix down the ship’s gangplank. Maybe they are welcoming us, thought Karl. Over there, they were Jews; perhaps in this new land, they were considered Germans and Austrians. Wasn’t that the point of getting away: to reclaim their birthright?

  If so, it didn’t make their first steps down the narrow gangplank any more steady. Dozens of men and women held onto the sides as if they might fall off.

  “You must be admiring my suit,” Felix said. “I bought it in Portugal off a man more desperate than myself. You’ll find a lot of men like that in Lisbon. You paid for a prostitute, I bought a suit.”

  After disembarking from the boat, they entered a customs shed sheathed in corrugated steel. The anthem was less pronounced inside the building, but still it played, as the customs officers inspected their papers, putting people on edge. The officials were brown-skinned but not as dark as some of the Portuguese he’d seen in Lisbon, and they seemed to respond to Felix’s theatrical style. A well-tailored officer inspected his papers through mirrored sunglasses at what appeared to be a respectful speed.

  Still, there were queues for all of them, and despite the heat and humidity, few of the men thought of taking off their hats or jackets until they were safely on the other side of the processing line and assembled at the main exit of the customs shed, their suitcases and steamer trunks collected beside them.

  They waited, for what no one knew exactly, but they were in someone else’s country, and no one wished to complain. They turned their suitcases into seats and lit cigarettes, until they were summoned outside the shed in front of the platform Karl and the others had seen from the ship. Mercifully, the band had stopped playing. The musicians sat there hugging their instruments, seemingly exhausted. Finally a man walked onto the platform and strode to its centre. He stared at them with the confidence of a high official. He was handsome, with dark hair slicked back and a pinstriped suit that looked as if it had never been worn before today. He opened his mouth and shouted in Spanish.

  “The General welcomes you to your new home. Here you will be in peace and quiet.”

  These translated words came from the left of the group, so everyone turned away from the man standing before them. Their translator wore khaki pants and a white short-sleeved shirt, and when he clapped, Karl saw how the sun had bleache
d the hair on his forearms a pale blond. The man continued to clap, until it became apparent that they were meant to join him. The man on the stage accepted the applause and attention with an embracing smile before continuing.

  “In Palestine there is bloodshed, but here you will not have any kind of that. From this moment forward you are not foreigners but Dominican! And we want the brains and skill of the Jewish people. I myself am one-eighth Jewish.” Hearing his translated words, the man on the platform repeatedly and boastfully pointed to himself.

  This didn’t sound right to Karl. Who at this time would want to claim Jewish blood? One-eighth Jewish meant seven-eighths not Jewish, an equation of survival. He looked around to see if this made any sense to the others, but after the translation they too seemed confused, if not suspicious. What was the man up to? There was polite clapping as he continued his speech, eventually becoming so animated that he failed to pause for the translation that, when finally offered, didn’t seem to justify the man’s excitement. His words were repetitive and general: you are welcome here; you will be given citizenship; we will build a future together. Bulbs flashed; photographs were taken. A man whom Karl took to be a reporter scribbled down the words of the official. Standing in the debilitating sun, Karl lost interest. He waited for the speech to end, which eventually it did, but everyone continued to stand there, including the man on the stage, who now seemed as exhausted as the band.

  Shuffling his feet and feeling ever thirstier, Karl fixed his eyes on an American limousine parked in the shade of a cluster of palm trees. Two men were busily cleaning the polished black metal while a third, in driver’s cap and uniform, idly smoked a cigarette until the back door opened, catching the limousine driver off guard. Quickly throwing his cigarette down, the driver held the door open for a man who, sartorially superb but comical in his dress uniform mugged with medals and ribbons and epaulettes and gold braid, strode toward the stage. It seemed Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo himself had come to meet his new European refugees.

  On cue, the band shot to attention and began to play, but it was a different anthem this time, the Dominican one, Karl assumed, one written for this man on stage, adding to his pomposity and stature. Even the flags cracked to attention. Then a row of pretty young women joined him on stage.