The Dictator

by David Layton

  “What am I doing here?” Karl asked. He wondered if there was a plan for the day, a course of action. Or were they supposed to just exist inside this apartment?

  “I guess what we’re doing is trying to figure out what we’re going to do.”

  “I want to go home,” said Karl.

  “You can’t live by yourself, Dad.”

  His son released a long intended-to-be-heard sigh while looking at the papers on the table. The signing pen was missing. Karl realized it was in his hand.

  “None of this is your concern,” he said, still staring out the window. He could have retired to his own room, but it wasn’t really his room, and he’d have felt even more trapped at the back of the apartment, behind another closed door. At least here he had a view.

  “You’re in my apartment. We’re living together. You’ve made it my concern.”

  Nothing, Karl came to understand, stood alone and was of itself: in order to look out the window and understand what you saw, you needed to know what you’d seen. It was all a shuttling from one to the other, a constant and continual stitching together.

  “I did not ask to come here. I do not want to be here.”

  “But you are here, whether you want to be here or not. We have to deal with the facts.”

  His son had taken him to a doctor, who’d administered a battery of tests—word and number games, mainly—that he’d been assured he could neither pass nor fail. Just concentrate on the computer screen in front of you, Mr. Kaufmann, and try to answer as many questions as you can. It was a lie, of course. It was all about passing or failing. And the fact that he was being tested meant he’d already failed.

  His son, who’d waited for him outside, had been brought in afterwards to discuss the diagnosis, though no one had asked Karl’s permission, and together Aaron and the doctor discussed the results, along with his recent history, focusing mainly on the visit he’d made to Claire’s. Karl clearly saw that it reflected poorly upon him and that it signalled a fault of a particular kind.

  “Does he have Alzheimer’s?” his son had asked the doctor.

  The doctor’s response was pleasingly less than precise. There was no clear-cut, easy answer as to what was happening to him, he said. Karl knew otherwise.

  It had been a stupid decision to return to his old house. Karl was like a domestic bird who, given its freedom, briefly flutters about the room before voluntarily returning to its cage. Why had he gone to Claire’s? They thought it was because he was losing his memory, and so what if he was? It saved him the energy of suppressing it. Like sex, it was one less urge, one diminishing itch the aged could properly dispose of. If either his son or the doctor had gone through even a tenth of what he’d gone through, they might understand how easy it was to occasionally misplace the memories of common life.

  As for misplacing things, his visit to Claire’s did not strike him as all that great a transgression. If anyone had reason to visit the doctor’s office, it was his son, and the diagnosis must surely be more serious than lactose intolerance.

  One suggestion from the doctor: Karl should do crossword puzzles to keep his mind active. But Karl had no talent for word games. It seemed to him a waste of time, like golf, where you wandered around chasing a ball. He simply didn’t see the point.

  The real purpose of the visit was for his son to take control over him. Make him seem senile, weak. It would be the excuse he’d need to have Karl legally removed from his home. But so long as Karl had his mind, no one could sign his rights away. For all his troubles, the power still resided with him, though it wasn’t clear for how long he’d be able to maintain his autonomy. When the doctor spoke about what was happening to him and what he could expect to have happen to him in the future, Karl saw that all was diminishment and foreclosure.

  “So you want me to trust you with power of attorney?” asked Karl.

  “You’re going to have to make a decision,” Aaron said. “We need to think about putting you in a facility that can take proper care of you.”

  “I don’t want to live in a ‘facility.’”

  “The place we went to looked decent, Dad. I know it’s not perfect, but what is?”

  “I can’t afford a place like that.”

  “You can if you sell your apartment. And I’ll be paying for some of it.”

  “You won’t be paying for any of it. I’m not going there.”

  After the doctor’s appointment, his son had taken him to a nursing home, the thought of which caused Karl to feel nauseated as he conjured up the linoleum hallways, the cubicles off the hallways, the eating area with the television mounted on the wall and flowers placed on the tables, their petals flicking the air with faded colour. Yes, they’d visited the place. And no, he wasn’t going to sell his apartment in order to pay $4,200 a month for the privilege of being locked inside, because that’s what was really happening in there, wasn’t it? It was just a prison you paid for.

  There was an entire wing in the nursing home for people who couldn’t remember themselves. Affixed to each door was a photograph of the occupants taken before they could have known what was in store for them, men and women caught in a smile, staring into the summer sun, a reminder as you passed their rooms that they had once been more than their sockless feet sticking out at the ends of their beds. Karl was horrified at the thought of a similar photo being placed on his door.

  “All you have to do is let me out,” he said, recalling the nurse who had taken them around. There was no jewellery or makeup to adorn her blowfish-round face that was vivid in its plainness.

  In frustration, Karl retired to his chair and, resolute in his decision to ignore the legal papers, cast his eyes on the sheets and a folded blanket on the couch. When Petra stayed the night with them, his son slept on the couch. Karl would wake up early in the morning and find Aaron asleep in the living room, his body pressed against the back of the couch like a suckling pig in need of warmth and nourishment.

  “Is Petra coming tonight?” Karl asked.

  “Yes. I was just about to fix her room up.”

  Karl rose to his feet again. “I’ll help,” he said, surprising himself because he believed Petra was old enough to clean up after herself. It didn’t do to treat children as children. They needed to grow up, and quickly. He had no patience for the romanticism of childhood, which had led to Americans, and most everyone else in the world, dressing like children, with sneakers and baggy pants and T-shirts with cartoon characters stencilled on the front. People dressed as if they were permanently readying themselves for bed and a bedtime story. There’d been a phase in his son’s life when he had wanted his father’s comfort, and Karl had sat with him on the bed and opened some books with pictures in them, but he’d always felt as if any excessive feeding of his son’s imagination might lead to a kind of obesity. His son needed to remain lean and know the truth, because one day he might have to run away from it quickly.

  Petra’s room was a little less bare than the others; she had a desk and chair for her computer. There was a printer and shelves half full of books, binders and pictures, but the room suffered, as they all did, from a sense of temporariness.

  Stripping off the old sheets, Aaron stood beside the bare mattress as if it were roped off and untouchable. Karl had never felt the desire to peer into his son’s room when it was empty, nor did he recall ever having the need to crack open the door and hear his son’s soft breathing when he slept.

  “She’s going to be all right,” said Karl.

  His son tucked in the corners of the fitted sheet and smoothed out the wrinkles with his hands.

  “She’s angry with me,” Aaron confessed.

  “And you’re angry with me,” Karl said.

  A patch of sun from the window caught his son’s forearm, lighting up his skin. Aaron looked at it as if he’d been shot.

  “I thought of you when I told Petra about the divorce. You just left us. One day you were there, and the next you weren’t. At least, that’s how I
remember it.”

  That’s how Karl remembered it too, but he didn’t say anything.

  “I thought it would be different with Petra. I promised myself it would be different.”

  “It is,” Karl said.

  “You’ve been telling her things, Dad. Things about your past that I don’t really know about.”

  Maybe that was the point about his son: from his own loins came an accusation, a pair of newborn eyes, ice-blue at first and unfocused but soon fixating on the man who’d made him, wanting answers, as if no lid could ever hide from his eyes Karl’s own accumulated foulness. Why did it need to be a son? A daughter might have been better, thought Karl.

  “I haven’t said anything to her,” he said.

  “That’s the way it’s always been, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s the way it always will be. But it’s like your cigars. I think you’re encouraging Petra. She’s confused about a lot of things, and I’m not in her Best Dad book right now. Do we understand each other?”

  Aaron began to stuff a duvet into its freshly laundered cover slip, eventually stuffing his own head inside in an attempt to reach the corners. He looked like a wounded animal burrowing for protection. Karl took the opportunity to return to the living room and leave his son be. The power of attorney documents sat on the coffee table, the cheerful rainbow tabs still reminding him of candy. Karl went into the kitchen, popped a sugar cube into his mouth and sucked on its soothing sweetness.

  9

  KARL WASN’T SUPPOSED TO OPEN THE WINDOW in his room, and he wasn’t allowed to step outside his son’s home without an escort, another one of the “conditions” of his stay, as if he’d been offered any choice. Despite this restriction, after the doctor’s visit he’d been given a cell phone with programmable numbers. All he had to do was push one of the buttons and it would immediately connect to either his son or granddaughter. Not that he had any intention of ever using the phone. They were treating him like a child. We are born helpless and we die helpless, thought Karl, and in between we torment those in the first and last categories.

  Karl sat in front of a television, which was on though he wasn’t watching it. He wore headphones not to enhance the sound but to muffle the world, which was the way he currently preferred it. The shows on TV just didn’t catch his attention anymore; they cast out their colourful lures, bobbled them in front of him, and he stared back like a weary fish hidden in the weeds. He was probably staring at his son now in just the same way.

  “Petra’s in her bedroom, so ask her if you need anything while I’m out,” Aaron said to him.

  “I’ll use my new phone to call her.”

  “There’s hot coffee in the pot.”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “And don’t even think of smoking your cigars in the apartment, Dad.”

  His son was going out to his think-tank—a place where fish like his son could swim. Aaron had taken him there once, and he’d been unimpressed with the drabness and earnest faces of Aaron’s fellow-fish. Bike lanes? Stricter traffic control? Cleaner environment? How paltry it all seemed against the tangled background of the Kaufmann men—great-grandfather, grandfather and Karl himself. As far as he was concerned, Aaron hadn’t moved on from when he’d been a little boy crying over that dead bird.

  “And don’t let Petra smoke,” Aaron added.

  Karl nodded. Another feeble concern. Not that there was much he could do to stop her, and besides, he was grateful not to be locked inside the apartment again.

  When his son finally left the apartment to enter that wider world, which Karl increasingly looked upon with the unease of a foreigner, he pulled off his headphones. He took pen and paper from the inside pocket of his jacket, smoothed out the folds and went over to the table, where he spent a few minutes drawing a map. Aaron might have taken away his apartment, his car and his keys, but Karl still had his wallet. Reaching into his other pocket, he pulled out cards with his name printed on them. There was his Visa card, his MasterCard and his debit card, which he lined up vertically beside his map, a cascade of reinforcing identity: K. Kaufmann. Three times confirmed. For extra measure, he took out the cash, a few crisp twenty-and fifty-dollar bills, and laid them out as well.

  This his son as yet could not take away, though he would try again to gain legal control over his assets.

  Meanwhile, Karl needed more money in his wallet and to know that, unlike his father, he could walk into the bank and stake his claim of independence and safety. The world was conspiring against him, converting rights into privileges. So, he would walk to the bank. In his mind’s eye, he practised the route—he walked down the carpeted hallway, pushed the elevator button, waited, then stepped inside, pushed another button, rode the elevator down to the lobby and then strolled across the red-tiled floor to the front exit. And from there?

  Slipping his cards back into his wallet, he once again put pen to paper, adding a path leading from the building to the sidewalk. Dragging the line downward for two blocks, he reached the main street and then turned left for three, possibly four blocks, until the main intersection. He knew there was a bank directly in front, but that wasn’t his. There was a second bank on the other side, but that wasn’t his either. He needed to keep going, keep going a bit farther past the lights, until he reached his bank. He’d driven past it a number of times while in the car with his son. It wasn’t his branch, the one he’d used over the years, but he recognized the logo of a lion’s paw perched in predatory ownership over the globe, as if it were carrion.

  The map would be useful, prevent his getting lost.

  Pleased by the bold straight lines of his composition, Karl plucked out a cigarillo he’d kept hidden in his eyeglasses case for just such an occasion, plus a book of matches he’d tucked under the sofa cushion. He lit the cigar, took a contented puff and swirled the captured smoke in his mouth just as his father had done, before leaning back and exhaling, the cigarillo clamped firmly between the fingers of his left hand.

  Karl was a natural lefty. He’d been disciplined as a child to use his right hand, and it wasn’t until many years later, in a sudden flash of insight, that he understood why—you wiped your ass with your left hand. Karl wondered if this was a natural phenomenon. Did all left hands instinctively reach for their bottoms, or was it learned, like driving on the left-hand side of the road, as the English did? His teachers believed it could be eliminated, that one could be trained to work from the right.

  Later, after the Anschluss, when things turned serious, Karl fell to wondering whether all Jews were naturally left-handed. Was that why they were so reviled by the brutal, cigar-holding hands of the Austrians who had decided to stamp out the unsanitary ass-wiping Jews once and for all?

  The peculiar direction of his thoughts was brought to a stop by his granddaughter.

  “Grandpa! You’re not supposed to smoke in the apartment.”

  He knew the young woman approaching him from the hallway wasn’t his sister; he also knew that Trude would have looked like this, a woman of vitality, if she’d lived a few more years. Karl’s sister had kept her hair in two long braids that reached below her shoulders; when she unfastened them to take a bath, her hair sprang and tumbled with the same cheerful abandon as this girl, who was, Karl comprehended, his granddaughter. It was a gift, this similarity, and a curse. She was here, and so he had, in some indirect way, fulfilled his promise and saved Trude. But it wasn’t magic, he told himself, just genetic predestination. He couldn’t escape what they were and what they would become.

  “Dad would be so pissed if he found out that I let you smoke in the apartment. You should have heard him this morning—‘Make sure he doesn’t light the stove. Don’t let him make any coffee; tell him there’s already a full pot. Don’t let him smoke in the apartment’—I guess he’s terrified you’re going to burn everything down.”

  “When is he coming back?”

  “This afternoon.”

  Karl scrutinized his watch. It was early; there
was plenty of time.

  “But you can’t smoke in here, Grandpa.”

  As if proving her point, she slid open the balcony door. Gusts of cold air swirled around, ruffling Karl’s map. He reached out his hand and pinned it to the table.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “What’s that?” Karl answered, pointing at the cigarette that had found its way between his granddaughter’s lips.

  “Don’t tell Dad.”

  “Doesn’t he know?”

  “He sort of knows, but he pretends not to know. It’s like that with him. Let’s move outside to the balcony, Grandpa. There’s a chair you can sit on.”

  Karl was surprised by how upset he was, watching her light the cigarette and inhale the poisonous mist of adulthood into her lungs. It reminded him of a fairy tale his mother had read to him from Der Verschwender, of evils spells cast and battled against.

  Taking his seat, they spent a few moments quietly indulging their respective desires. Petra leaned her head back when she exhaled, just as his father had done.

  “You are left-handed,” Karl remarked.

  “I guess so. Dad says I got it from him.”

  “Your grandfather was left-handed,” he said.

  “Is left-handed. You’re not dead yet.”

  It took a moment for Karl to understand. “I meant my father.”

  “My great-grandfather.”

  “Yes.”

  It was such a long line of history, thought Karl, almost incomprehensible. “I’m left-handed too. Or I was. It wasn’t considered acceptable, when I was your age.”

  Petra considered this for a moment and then took a puff of her cigarette, the smoke constricting her vocal cords. “Dad says you never talk about the past, because of what happened. He says there isn’t anyone left.”