The Dictator

by David Layton

One day while kissing her, Karl placed a hand directly over her breast. They were on one of those long stretches of beach, away from the prying eyes of the colonists. She let it remain there for a fraction of a moment before removing it. She held on to his hand to ensure that it would remain at a distance, but neither of them said a word about it.

  He asked her about school. Did she like going?

  It wasn’t the right question to ask on the beach. It changed things between them.

  “Dr. Bruck cut open a cane frog today and made us look inside. He said there isn’t really that much difference between us and a frog, at least on the inside. But if that’s true, then why is it right to cut up a frog and not a human being?”

  “I suppose because a frog doesn’t have a soul?” Karl hated the way his answer came out as a question, as if she were the teacher and he the clueless student.

  “But it must feel pain.”

  “Wasn’t it already dead?”

  This wasn’t what Karl wanted to talk about, not after just touching Ilsa’s breast. Why would she never kiss him when they were in town? Karl hadn’t given her a thought on the ship sailing here, but now he wanted nothing more than for her to be with him, and for others to recognize that fact. So what was this nonsense about frogs? Why not cut them up and eat them? he wanted to shout at her, but she’d think him stupid, uneducated.

  Karl hadn’t been to school since Vienna. Diepoldsau was not made for children, and Karl had not been forced to attend school in Sosua because of his in-between age and the fact he had no parents to concern themselves with him. Every morning when Karl was out digging ditches or mending fences, he’d watch the children brought into town on the donkey-drawn school bus. Ilsa usually walked to school or rode in on her family’s horse, but one day when he spotted her in the school bus with the other children, he took off his straw hat and waved after her. The children waved back at him and he felt, for the first time, terribly old.

  “Why does Dr. Bruck have the right to cut up an animal?”

  He knew about Dr. Bruck, a distinguished surgeon before the Nazis kicked him out of Germany. Now he taught the children of Sosua.

  “Because he is helping you learn,” said Karl.

  “So it is right to kill another living thing, if it serves a purpose?” Ilsa didn’t seem to think so, or at the very least didn’t believe the purpose was worth the life of one frog. “And who says what is important to learn and what is not?”

  Since Karl was no longer going to school, he felt he couldn’t measure what was right and what was wrong. He was at a distinct disadvantage and wished he’d never asked about her education, because it only seemed to highlight his lack of one. Had he been in school, he might have had the chance to sit beside Ilsa every day and think about those questions. What were all these words about, anyway? If Karl had learned one thing, it was that right and wrong didn’t seem to stop anybody doing anything to anyone.

  “Besides,” said Ilsa, “it was very hot in the classroom.”

  “It was hotter digging ditches today,” Karl said, a little more roughly than he intended.

  “Well, now you can cool off in the sea.” Ilsa, bored with the conversation, dropped his hand and rushed for the water.

  She’d hardly known how to swim when they first arrived in Sosua, and she still reverted to the occasional dog paddle, arms and legs kicking in a furious attempt to keep her head above water, but since then she’d learned the front crawl, and now he watched her cut through the water with hardly a splash. He thought back to his last, strangely peaceful summer at Kritzendorf on the Danube, his mother and father and sister enjoying their days, lazing on the river beach, fishing and swimming. It was the last time he’d swum with his family.

  “Are you coming?” Ilsa called out.

  Karl answered by diving into the water and swimming after her, pleased that he was wanted.

  KARL’S ARRIVAL IN Sosua coincided with a sexual awakening that sprouted with the same sort of lush and unmanageable ease as the tropical landscape.

  Ilsa, like other girls in Sosua close to his age, was already developing in an atmosphere of sun and safety that seemed to compensate for the broken bonds of family and home. Yet Karl didn’t know what to do. He’d been so intent on his awkward embarrassment that night in Lisbon that he felt even more naive than before he’d slept with a prostitute. Compared to what he’d experienced, he knew his time with Ilsa was farcically innocent. He wanted more but didn’t know how to go about finding it, and he wasn’t alone in his problem.

  There weren’t enough women in Sosua. For every three Jewish men, there was just one Jewish woman, very few of whom were single. Fifty-one Jews, including Karl, had disembarked from the boat from New York. Of those, thirteen were married couples, some with children, twenty were bachelors and only four were single women. They hadn’t brought enough of them in. That was how the men—the single men who, like Karl, lived in dormitories and quietly masturbated beneath sheets washed, pressed and folded by women—described the situation, as if women were one more item of which the colony was in short supply, along with fuel, rope, treated lumber, newspaper ink, various categories of machinery and machinery parts, copper wire, fencing and sulpha.

  Those other supplies could eventually, hopefully, be found, but the women hadn’t been planned for, and no more could be brought in. The colony had been cut off from Europe soon after Karl’s arrival. His boat had been one of the last to make it with Jews on board, and they were now a total of 650, some 450 of them men, building and shaping the new community of Sosua.

  “What’s the difference between being a virgin and living in Sosua? Nothing.” That was the sort of joke they made in the men’s barracks. From what Karl could gather, he was the youngest—though he couldn’t have been the only one who’d lied to get himself there. Most of the men appeared stronger and hairier.

  Even if he wasn’t technically the youngest, he was treated as the youngster in the group.

  “The poor kid must be going crazy,” they’d say.

  That’s what it was like when you were young. People spoke about you as if you weren’t there.

  “We’re all going crazy! At least he doesn’t even know what he’s missing.”

  “Hey, Karl, you know what you’re missing?”

  “Not if he lives in Sosua.”

  They laughed, and so did Karl, but he wasn’t sure if it was at his expense. That he wasn’t sure made him feel childish. No one mentioned Ilsa, which was a relief, because he didn’t want them to know how he felt about her. But they knew something, and knew why he didn’t want to hear it, and he never had the courage to say directly what was on his mind. That too made him feel young.

  “You’ll have to marry yourself, Karl.”

  “That’s what we all do every night.”

  So it went, Karl laughing but never trying to make jokes himself, because he worried they’d reveal something desperate about himself.

  The trick was to do what they’d been sent here to do. The idea was to create a community of Jewish farmers, and for that you needed men who could hack their way through the landscape, rip up the soil and withstand the heat, privations that came with constructing a sanctuary in the tropics. It was no place for women. But then, Europe was no place for Jews. Some of the women had made the crossing because they were married, others because they were daughters, or because their strength was in their will to survive. And others simply because, in the end, they were lucky.

  Karl dug trenches to siphon stagnant water, and unspooled wire fencing to pen in the rising number of farm animals acquired and born into the colony. It was hot, dirty work, but he preferred it to the earlier job he’d been given in the leather shop. That was where saddles and shoes were repaired, and it was hot and smelly. It reminded him too much of his father’s business, and he was glad to be assigned to outdoor work.

  No matter his job, Karl was paid, as was most everyone else in the community, a dollar a day with money supplied by American Jews.
It was a living wage, the bare minimum expected for Europeans, as they apparently self-classified themselves. It afforded Karl certain luxuries like fruit and candies, and sometimes even chocolate that he bought from the community-run colmado, which had expanded its goods to include everything from canned fish and meat, to rubber boots, rope, sugar, coffee and bananas.

  Their community was created on the former site of a banana plantation, so it seemed strange to Karl that he needed to buy this fruit at the shop. The dormitory where he slept, along with several other structures scattered across the cleared fields, had been built by United Fruit Company, a big American organization Karl had heard about after his arrival. They’d cleared and harvested the land and then, when it was no longer profitable, had abandoned it, leaving behind ragged banana stalks that grew too high. The drooping fruit was pecked by birds, infested by insects and devastated by a host of diseases before it could ever ripen.

  There’d been discussions about reviving the plantation, but along with coffee and sugar, there was an ample supply of bananas in the Dominican Republic, and the government hadn’t brought Jews all this distance to work on a plantation. From the day of his arrival, when Karl was taken along the road leading to Sosua, he’d seen the Dominicans—and many Haitians too—working in the fields, hundreds of them weeding the rows of sugar cane, while men with lighter skin sat on horseback, their horses’ tails flicking away flies and heat.

  As was pointed out to Karl from the moment of his arrival in Puerto Plata, he and the other colonists were Europeans, Germans most of them, and what they were meant to plant was the seed of European success. Karl learned that from the newspaper accounts of their arrival and the expectations of visiting officials, all of whom assumed the Jews were imbued with exceptional talent. That’s why they’d been refused travel permits to settle elsewhere in the country, especially its capital, Ciudad Trujillo. They would help the people of the Dominican Republic but not compete against them.

  None of them had any idea how to grow bananas or sugar or, farther up in the mountains where the air was cooler, coffee. They didn’t know how to grow any crop anywhere, let alone in the tropics. They tried tomatoes and sweet potatoes, but all that green growth was a trick of the eye, a false fruitfulness, and one of the outdoor jobs Karl had been given was weeding their failure back into the ground. As with the banana stalks, much of what they planted rotted before ripening. They grew enough for themselves, but it was not enough, nor of sufficient quality, to market.

  Everything looked so promising, as if you had only to drop a seed in the soil and pluck the fruit, but scarcity lurked behind seeming abundance. And this always brought the conversation back to women.

  Some of the men managed to slink off with Jewish women who were already married, because in that air of heat and liberation, the women could no longer be contained by the constraints of home and family, even as they were attempting to build just that in their new community. Or so it was said by men in Karl’s barracks. He heard eagerness in their voices but also betrayal.

  Enemies formed. In the dining hall, clusters of men sat at specific tables. A group of Belgians who had arrived together a year before Karl kept to themselves, and Karl found that his fellow Viennese looked down on their less-refined German compatriots from Stuttgart and Hamburg.

  Of course, it didn’t matter where the women came from or, more dangerously, if they were married. But none of this concerned Karl directly. His age and interest in Ilsa protected him, though, as with his job assignments, he didn’t like being overlooked or not being taken seriously.

  Still, because of the community’s concerns, a rabbi was brought in from New York. His first counsel was to build a synagogue, directing the excess passions afflicting the community toward its construction. Karl wanted to help, but other men who’d been in the colony longer and who were older got the work. An existing path was widened, some houses were built alongside it, and even before the pews arrived on a boat from America, the colonists, including Karl, had assembled beneath the synagogue’s wooden roof to discuss their problem.

  Hadn’t they come to build a new home for themselves? asked the rabbi. Their presence here was an act of defiance, proof that our people would carry on and prosper.

  But how could they do that, when there weren’t enough Jewish women? Men wanted families, companions, someone to share their burdens and their future. What were they supposed to do?

  The answer, said the rabbi, came from the very land that gave them sanctuary. They could marry Dominican women. Why shouldn’t they marry those who lived on the land that had given them this sanctuary? God would surely understand. There were difficult and exceptional moments in Jewish history, when one needed to break from tradition in order to uphold it. This was such a time. Life must go on.

  What if we have children? someone asked the rabbi.

  If boys should be born from these unions, then they will be circumcised, replied the rabbi, and they will come to this synagogue, and they will be Jews.

  KARL WAS WALKING down to the beach imagining the thriving colony he’d establish with Ilsa, when he practically tripped over Felix’s lounging body. His friend lay on the sand like a tree root. Felix didn’t even give Karl time to lay down his towel before voicing an opinion.

  “What a bunch of hypocrites. Most of them haven’t stepped foot in a synagogue in years, and here they are building one, so that they can have a rabbi tell them it’s okay to screw Dominicans. Suddenly they all need to become Jews.”

  Because Karl had been daydreaming about Ilsa, the outburst felt abrupt and personal. Karl needed to defend himself.

  “But they are Jews,” he said. He might not want to get married or have children right away, but unlike Felix, he’d gone to the synagogue with the rest of them looking for answers.

  “We used to be Germans, Austrians, Belgians. It was Hitler who made us Jews. Now we have a rabbi telling us how to be good Jews, as if we’re the ones who have done something wrong.”

  “I’m not sure they think they’ve done anything wrong.”

  “And there’s your problem,” said Felix.

  Felix hadn’t waited for permission to take up with Dominican women; he’d done so within weeks of his arrival. Karl didn’t think he treated them very well. “They’re illiterate,” Felix had said, as if that explained it. Karl could see for himself that some of the women Felix had taken up with were beautiful, and there were others that Karl, if he was interested, could have been with, but his heart only wanted Ilsa, not because she was Jewish but because she came from a world that he understood and that might, one day, understand him. He fantasized about it, about how well she would know him; with a glance, she could tell what he was thinking and react in just the right way. There were times when he felt this happening, but it was awkward too, like the way she had held his hand when he wanted to touch her breast. She must have understood him then. Back in Europe they’d lived hundreds of miles apart and in two different countries, but over here they came from the same place, and that made this new life more manageable.

  Felix didn’t care to be understood. He’d already found his way of managing. He spent most of his time on the beach, lounging beneath the shade of a sea grape tree. He was usually alone, though there were always other men like him strewn along the mile-long stretch of sand, collecting their daily dollar without working, or hardly working, because what was the Jewish agency in charge of them going to do? asked Felix. Let them starve?

  There might be houses to build, land to clear, drainage ditches to dig, crops and chickens to grow, fences to erect and mend, but for some the allure of the beach or bed was too much, and they shirked their duties whenever they could. It was as if the burst of energy they’d used to escape Europe had depleted them. The Dominican government should come down to this beach, thought Karl, if they ever feared Jews would desert the settlement and compete with the local population.

  “This isn’t home and I’m not even sure we’re guests of this place,”
said Felix, patting the sand beside him. “Sit down.”

  Karl dropped his towel but remained standing.

  “Sure, do what you wish. That’s my motto.”

  Staring at the horizon, Karl spied a funnel of smoke far off to sea, smearing the clear, blue sky, and he imagined Felix’s mouth as another sort of funnel, spewing dirt into the air. They were no longer behind the wire of Diepoldsau, no longer refugees. They were colonists relaxing on a sandy beach. For all of its problems, Sosua was a paradise compared to where they’d been. Why couldn’t Felix accept this place?

  There was someone in the water, much closer to shore. She was the reason he’d come down to the beach. Felix saw Ilsa too, standing on the small rocky reef, her knees cresting the water’s glassy surface.

  “I know it’s about women,” he said. “But you don’t need a purpose to sleep with them either.” And as Karl made his way to the water, Felix called out, “Just be careful of the sharks.”

  Offal from slaughtered farm animals was dumped over a cliff not far from the beach, an unexpected bounty for sharks. Danger lurked in all sorts of places, often unseen, but when Karl found his footing beside Ilsa on the reef, he looked down and spotted through the clear clean water not sharks but striped sergeant majors, which darted around his ankles. Large waves often broke on the reefs along the coastline making it impossible to stand in the water, but today all was calm.

  The vista from the reef was wide enough to put him and everyone else in their place. Rocky outcrops on either side of the beach reached out like embracing arms, sheltering them from the open ocean. The beaches were one of the reasons Sosua had been selected for settlement. Before the paved road from Puerto Plata was built, supplies had been brought safely to shore by boat; even now, when hard rains made the road impassable, the beaches offered a vital link with the outside world.

  Behind the beach was a strip of trees that provided shade, and beyond the shade rose hills that a little farther inland and beyond their range of sight flattened into farmable land slowly being claimed by the community.