The Dictator

by David Layton

  Karl stood with Ilsa under the sun, the ocean all around. Let others gather at the synagogue and worry about the future. Out here, he could see everything, including Ilsa’s hand dipped beneath the water’s surface, as if it were one more exotic and beautiful fish swimming toward him.

  11

  AARON NEEDED TO BUY THINGS FOR his father, and with Karl and Petra in tow, he joined families and bits of families—mothers, children, sisters, husbands, wives—diligently following the IKEA floor arrows past assembled dining rooms, bedrooms and kitchens promising the familial comfort he’d so recently rejected. Or had he been ejected?

  The divorce was mutual, in that he and Isobel had mutually decided they no longer liked each other, but it wasn’t clear who’d left whom. He was the one who’d left the house, but that wasn’t necessarily the same as leaving her. Was it? Either way, the result was catastrophic.

  Likely there were other shoppers at IKEA also contemplating domestic failure. Petra pointed out a middle-aged woman staring at a fake TV set as if she were watching a riveting show in the privacy of her well-furnished living room.

  “Look, Dad,” she said. “That’s what Mom is like every night.”

  Clearly Petra was not thrilled about the divorce. She blamed each of her parents equally but also exclusively, depending on whom she was staying with at the time.

  “Keep an eye out for anything you might want,” he said.

  In previous journeys down these trafficked lanes, he’d bought a bed for Petra, along with a side table, duvet and pillows, thinking it was best to populate her room with the necessities and let her work on the details herself. But the act of filling a household never seemed to end, and now, with the arrival of his father, it was expanding. Aaron’s neck was feeling substantially damaged from his nights on the couch, so he was searching for some proper pillows for himself, as well as such perennial basics like plates, forks, and specialty lightbulbs found only at IKEA.

  “I don’t think I’ll find it here.”

  “Find what here?” Aaron asked.

  “What I want.”

  Petra, like him, was keeping an eye on the odd community of families in search of better furniture.

  “Besides,” she said, “we need to make sure Granddad doesn’t wander off.”

  “I guess you have better things to do on the weekend,” said Aaron.

  “Not really,” she said. “Do you?”

  “Not really.”

  This was to be expected. He was a divorced man taking care of his daughter and father. But she was sixteen. Why didn’t she have anything better to do with her weekend?

  “What about that guy you met at the mall?”

  “What about him?” she asked.

  “Have you seen him?”

  “I see him every day at school.”

  “I mean outside of school,” Aaron said, aware of how adept his daughter was at evasion. He realized he sounded accusatory and decided to change tack.

  “Dad, do you want to take a rest for a moment?” he asked.

  Karl, out in front, didn’t answer, but Aaron would have sworn that instead he picked up the pace. He was a stubborn old bastard, Aaron thought. And not very likeable.

  The hot dogs were just on the other side of the checkout counters, and after paying for their purchases, Aaron, Petra and Karl joined the line of hungry shoppers. It had taken only a few trips to IKEA for Petra and him to develop a routine: they’d shop, and then she’d eat, ordering two hot dogs, a drink and a box of Danishes. Aaron ordered a tea. The food here was poisonous, he thought, but there were worse routines in the world.

  This time Petra surprised him. She wasn’t beside him; neither was his father. Instead the two had ventured over to the Swedish food section, where they were picking up crackers, cheese, smoked salmon and other items far healthier than the hot dogs his daughter usually ate.

  The surprises kept coming after they returned home, because Petra, who’d never shown any interest in the kitchen before her grandfather arrived, prepared some food for them all. It was as if she’d decided that as the sole female in the household, it was her role.

  Aaron watched her bring out a plate of cheese and crackers, along with the pepper grinder. Not a pepper shaker, mind you, but a grinder, because Karl insisted pepper needed to be fresh. Karl’s arthritis meant he found it difficult to twist the grinder, so it was Petra who hovered over the sliced cheddar cheese, waiting for her grandfather’s odd culinary command.

  It wasn’t forthcoming.

  “Grandpa?” She held up the grinder to show him.

  Karl sat in a heavy wingback armchair, one of the few pieces of furniture brought over from his apartment. Today’s excursion had induced a vacancy of expression on his face, a dreadful oblivion from which his granddaughter was trying to rescue him. His father had good days and bad—good moments and bad. Blank periods like this, when his father sat in his chair staring into space as if he’d abandoned himself, were frightening, and they reminded Aaron yet again that he needed to keep looking for a place that could look after him. His father couldn’t go home. And he couldn’t stay here.

  “Do you want some pepper?” Petra shook the grinder in front of Karl, as if it were a rattle.

  “No,” his father finally answered, without looking at her or the food.

  “Okay, but you always like it with pepper.”

  Not this time, apparently.

  Aaron watched from the couch with perhaps the same blank expression as his father. His newly purchased pillows were stacked on the other end, along with some sheets, and on the coffee table was an empty water glass, a pair of reading glasses and the book he was reading, The Organic Diet. Aaron didn’t like sleeping on the couch. It didn’t help matters that his father had fallen into the habit of getting up in the night, sitting in that armchair and staring at him while he slept. Aaron, sensing a presence, would open his eyes, and there would be his father, looking at him as if trying to figure out who he was. Aaron would declare himself—“Dad, it’s me”—but there were times when he was certain his father knew exactly who he was, and that that was the problem.

  The expression in Karl’s eyes was disquieting—it reminded Aaron of a pet fish he’d once bought for Petra. It quickly became her favourite, and she named it Goggles because of its comically outsized eyeballs, which swivelled upwards and conveyed a state of perpetual anxiety. Something deeply unsettling about his father’s expression reminded Aaron of Goggles’ eyes—that longing for freedom from the confining contours of its world and yet, at the same time, the need for someone to take care of its daily needs.

  “Go back to bed,” he’d tell his father, and then Aaron would read from his book, fall back to sleep and dream he was a piece of organic fruit: easily bruised and with a short shelf life.

  Unable to shake her grandfather out of his daze with the cheese, Petra tried another approach. “Tell me a story about Dad,” she said. “Something I don’t already know.”

  The question appeared to work. Karl stitched his eyebrows together, his forehead folding along the deeply incised vertical lines until the edges of each bushy strand made contact, a positive and negative charge ready to ignite thought. Aaron leaned forward. Aaron and his father didn’t talk in stories; there was never any banter or family mythmaking, no You’ll never believe what happened to me today! So whatever his father was about to say would likely be something he hadn’t heard before. Forgetting about his lactose intolerance, Aaron reached for the cheese plate and popped a few slices into his mouth.

  His father spoke. “He was a good boy.”

  It was the sort of vague, abstract and ultimately meaningless description he should have expected from a father who himself was vague, abstract and ultimately meaningless.

  Even Petra sounded disappointed. “In what way was he good?” she asked.

  But the tightness in Karl’s forehead had already eased, and the sparking contact between his eyebrows was severed, along with whatever memory he had been repl
aying in his mind.

  “Why don’t you let Grandpa rest?” Aaron said.

  Petra turned and looked at him as if this were the first time she’d noticed he was in the room; it was clear she wasn’t trying to get a rise out of just her grandfather.

  “How come we hardly visited Grandpa when I was growing up?”

  “We visited,” said Aaron, through a mouth full of cheese and crackers.

  “When?”

  “You want dates?”

  “I just don’t have a lot of memories of him when I was growing up.”

  “You’re still growing up,” Aaron reminded her.

  “I meant when I was a kid.”

  “You probably don’t remember the times we visited, because you were so young.”

  Petra looked rightly skeptical.

  Aaron recalled the time he’d brought over a framed photo of Petra as a baby, taken while she was in the bathtub. Instead of propping it up, Karl had laid it flat on the table, where it stayed for the entire visit, Petra’s glowing smile directed toward the ceiling.

  “Why don’t you ask Grandpa how many times he came to visit us? He’s right here.”

  Karl stirred in his chair. “I’d like a cigar now.”

  “You know you can’t smoke in the apartment, Dad. You’ll have to go out on the balcony.”

  “But it’s cold out.”

  “So wear a jacket.”

  “It’s not pleasant,” his father protested with unexpected delicacy.

  “Neither is cigar smoke in the apartment. And it’s not anything I want to expose Petra to.”

  “I don’t mind,” Petra said.

  “Well, I do.”

  Aaron knew his father hid a stash of cigars in his room but couldn’t bring himself to take them away, even after he’d returned last week to an apartment that reeked of smoke. Petra had been looking after her grandfather, but he hadn’t said anything to her, just tried to show with slumped shoulders that he was disappointed, though this parental attempt to induce guilt didn’t seem to have much effect on his daughter. He knew that she smoked cigarettes, another life-altering habit she’d formed after the divorce. Everything she did seemed designed to hurt him. The two of them probably smoked together, so he wasn’t surprised now when she offered to help.

  “I’ll take him to the park.”

  Petra fetched her grandfather’s coat, and when he rose, he allowed her to place it over his shoulders, the sort of simple act that had eluded Aaron all his life. Aaron suggested gloves and scarf but was ignored.

  After the front door closed behind them, he grabbed a pillow and tossed it behind his head, but he didn’t feel like napping. Within minutes he felt a gnawing pain in his gut, which he unsuccessfully attempted to ignore. He got up and took the cheese plate to the kitchen and turned on the dishwasher in the hope its hum would soothe him, but there was something off-key about it, a whisper of a sound that exaggerated the unsettling quietness.

  After the decision was made to leave his house, he had spent less than a day looking for a new place before settling on this apartment. When things fall apart, it’s best to fit yourself into a mould, thought Aaron, and these four square walls with stainless steel appliances would do for now. He just hadn’t planned on his father being there.

  During Aaron’s early years, there had been empty fields around his parents’ house, but developers soon filled in the spaces with tract housing, brown and squat, each with a newly planted tree out front, a futile replacement for the imposing maples they’d knocked down. Then they’d widened the nearby highway. At night, he would hear the dull roar of it, the distant waterfall of tar and rubber. There’d been a mad race to transform the land, to make it as unrecognizable as possible, everything changing, nobody knowing what was there before and nobody caring.

  Aaron spent a lot of his childhood watching television shows where aliens made frequent visits to earth, invading homes and bodies, often undetected. He’d find himself shouting at the television to relieve the unbearable tension caused by such a dark and dangerous secret. “He’s an alien!” he would warn the townspeople, but it never made a difference, and besides, there was, in their unmentionable secret, something about the aliens that reminded him of his father.

  Karl had once given Aaron an expensive leather-bound diary, the kind that looked like a published book but had endless blank pages to fill. “Your Story” was embossed in gold letters on the cover. Perhaps his father, unable to speak about his own past, hoped it might be different for his son. Aaron, intimidated by its title, had never written a word in it.

  With both of them gone for a smoke, Aaron took a shower. The bathroom had the high functionality of a hotel room, everything impersonal and in its place, so that even a tube of toothpaste and a couple of razors made the sink counter look chaotic.

  The room quickly fogged up with steam from the hot shower. Wiping the condensation from the bathroom mirror with the heel of his hand, Aaron stared at himself in the small circle of reflection. With dark hair that easily tangled and almond-shaped eyes, he’d never looked anything like his father, whose swept-back wavy blond hair, blue eyes and Aryan good looks had surely contributed to his survival. But what else had Karl done to survive? Aaron imagined that one had to do evil to survive evil, that it was the best and the finest who had perished. It could very well be that his father had been a shit all his life and for him to blame the Holocaust was false. But maybe that was just trying to make sense of what remained, at its core, inexplicable. Bad people lived; so did good people. There was no rhyme or reason to it.

  He opened the bathroom window and leaned out, baring himself to the biting wind of late afternoon and stared down at the sight of daughter and father huddled in the small parkette below, Petra’s blue puff jacket ballooned and partially unzipped, her body oblivious to the cold. He was horrified to see her smoking a cigarette. His fears were confirmed.

  His father was also smoking, and though Aaron couldn’t smell the pungent odour of his cigar, the smoke crept through the now open window of Aaron’s memories. Then as now, his father took contented puffs, tasting the smoke as one would a fine wine, then blowing it up toward the sky.

  Looking down at his father’s wisps of white hair combed back over a freckled scalp, he felt as if he were decomposing like the fall leaves scattered about his father’s feet. Aaron had never smoked and was careful where he placed his feet on the wet bathroom floor. He ate organic and was wary of potential danger, a gift from his father, whose absence in his life was contradicted by an almost obsessive concern for Aaron’s safety. “Be careful,” he’d say, when his young son stepped outside the house; sometimes he’d grab his coat and accompany him to a friend’s house or the corner store, the two of them keeping step along the sidewalk, saying little to each other, as if they were soldiers on patrol, alert to danger. “Keep an eye out” was another of his favoured warnings. But an eye out for what? Aaron already knew there were people who wished children harm and that he shouldn’t talk to strangers, but he never sensed that was what Karl was getting at; it was something far more menacing.

  Aaron had kept his eyes open as instructed until the day his father left the house and Aaron discovered that he’d been blind to the real threat: abandonment. His father had never returned to the house or to him, eventually becoming the very stranger he’d been warned about.

  Leaning out of the bathroom window, Aaron felt lonely and apart and wanted to call out, Hey, Dad, it’s me. Tell me what happened. Tell me the story. It was probably the only thing worth talking about, the only real thing that would explain what they were both doing here and why he should feel so furiously strained.

  Instead he hovered over them like the grey clouds above, damp and silent, until a sharp pain in the gut, a result of his carelessness, forced him to pull back into the room, doubled over in agony.

  12

  JACOB HAD INVITED HIM FOR DINNER, and Karl was happy to be walking on the road leading out of town, the sun already sinking
behind him. Now that the heat of the day had subsided, he spotted several cows in the emerald green fields, the air so still he thought he could hear the sea’s rhythmic attack and its retreat from the shoreline more than a mile away. No matter how big the Dominican Republic, with its ten-thousand-foot mountain and wide, rich valleys, Karl could never forget it was surrounded by sea in every direction.

  In Austria the sun could speedily dip behind a mountain, and during the winter months, it would sometimes hardly appear at all. In the tropics, though it darkened quickly, Karl always felt the sun, even when it was hidden behind thick clouds. At night, the brightness of the moon and the constant warmth of the air spoke of its presence.

  The road Karl walked along traversed the north coast of the country, beginning at the Haitian border, onward toward Puerto Plata, past the sugar cane fields he’d seen from the bus, and then for a few short miles, Sosua and the newly developed homesteads. Small tracks laid down by Dominican feet led off from the main road, and Karl would occasionally spot Dominicans walking to or from a home well hidden behind thick tropical greenery. Perhaps they felt safer that way. These people were friendly but often seemed baffled by Karl’s appearance, as if he were some fruit growing in the wrong season. These were not the Dominicans who had come to work for the colonists. These people lived too close to the soil to wander away from it. They were terribly poor, in rough clothes and bare feet, even worse off in some instances than the black Haitians who worked the sugar cane fields.

  Walking past the impressive homestead belonging to the Sichels with its large front porch and jalousie windows, he noted that the Jewish colonists thought otherwise. They weren’t afraid to be seen at the side of the road. The General had given them citizenship, and land too, which the Sichels were busily clearing for cows and crops. They were all favoured by the General.

  The road continued through ever more primitive and remote villages and towns until finally reaching the town of Samana, located on a peninsula similarly named that jutted out like a fat index finger into the Caribbean Sea.