The Dictator

by David Layton

  Less than a hundred years ago, a foundering ship full of American slaves who were being transported from one plantation to another had washed ashore, as if that index finger had beckoned them to safety. They’d found freedom in their new home of Samana, and it was said they still spoke an old-fashioned and courteous English from their time of American captivity. Karl wondered if it would be the same for the colonists, if in a hundred years his descendants would be cut off from the world, rumoured to have escaped a catastrophe and speaking an old-fashioned, antiquated German. The island was full of displaced people, thought Karl, and he was one of them. Like the American slaves, he had been shipwrecked and had come to this lost shore to find a home.

  Jewish colonists, families mainly, were moving out of town, building homes, digging wells, clearing and seeding land and raising cattle. Dairy farming had become popular among the colonists. Every day a van—one of only two owned by the community—picked up fresh milk from the homesteads and brought it to town, where it was pasteurized and shipped to Puerto Plata and farther inland to the second-largest city in the country, Santiago. A few women had banded together to create the Sosua Fibre and Crafts store, where they embroidered Tyrolean flowers on sisal fibre belts that were then exported to the United States, Cuba and even faraway Argentina.

  The recently incorporated Sosua Cheese Co-Operative was now producing various cheeses, ranging from Dutch to Danish but also lately adding a new mild-tasting, yellow-tinged cheese called “Sosuan.” Karl had been involved with its earliest production, helping to press the mass of salted curds with his fists, so that it occupied the mould evenly. The perfected cheese had been invented just after the United States entered the war, and it was Jacob, along with other dairy farmers, who’d uncovered the white linen cloth, tasted a few slices of their new cheese and proclaimed with religious solemnity that “This cheese is the very first product made in the Hebrew Colony of Sosua.”

  Meals in town were taken communally, but cheese wasn’t always on the menu, because what was made needed to be sold. It wasn’t particularly missed by the children, who had quickly adapted to the Dominican diet of rice, beans and plántanos, whereas many of the older refugees still ate and cooked foods from home—meat and potatoes and fat that coagulated on the plate. Mrs. Baum, one of the first settlers in Sosua, had even started making apple strudel to sell out of her home. Felix had tasted it and thought it was delicious, but he stubbornly refused to buy any more, saying he didn’t want to eat any food associated with the people who’d tried to kill him.

  Karl never felt the need to pick sides but, like Felix, tended to stay away from Mrs. Baum’s apple strudel, for a different reason: the taste transported him back to memories of his sister, who loved strudel, especially when the pastry was sprinkled with sugar. Trude loved anything sweet, which didn’t seem to stop her having the whitest teeth. Sugar was rationed before Karl had left her behind in Vienna, and he sometimes imagined bringing back with him a few stalks of the sugar cane that grew like wheat, vast fields of sweetness ready to be plucked and sprinkled over another batch of apple strudel.

  Not that he would be able to get back there any time soon. The British were in North Africa and still had a long way to go if they were to reach Berlin. The war news was typed up and posted to a mango tree in town, not far from the colmado, and over the course of time, the ink would bleed onto the bark, as if the great events beyond their shores were being washed away. He felt that way about his memories, as if they, like the news, had bled out but left a ghostly imprint. If the war ended in victory, would he simply reverse the journey? Would he take a boat, then a train back to Vienna and walk back to his apartment as if none of this had happened? He could not imagine it, and so he tried not to imagine anything at all to do with his family. He had a new one now, or something like it, anyway.

  The spirit of communal eating in some ways accorded with the presence of a kibbutznik who’d been brought in from faraway Palestine to teach the colonists how to grow food and sustain themselves as a group. Beyond the kibbutznik’s inexperience with tropical conditions—in Palestine he’d learned how to conserve water whereas in the Dominican the trick was finding methods to drain it away—his singular failure lay in his inability to marshal any true communal, socialist spirit among them. He didn’t last. Shortly after arriving, he packed his bags and made his way home via New York and Cairo to join the bigger fight.

  The truth was no one in Sosua wanted to share land; the communal barracks were only temporary arrangements, born of necessity rather than ideology. What people wanted, including Mr. Weinberg, were separate homes and plots of land they could claim as their own.

  “We need to stand on our own two feet,” Mr. Weinberg told Karl. “We Jews have always been dependent, looking for someone to solve our problems, to protect us, even to feed us. Now we will become farmers and feed ourselves.”

  But in Jacob Weinberg’s haste to be settled and get on with things, mistakes had been made. Though the house he built was raised off the ground to avoid dampness and insects, it was angled to the east, which allowed the wind to blow rain through the window slats. Sometimes, Ilsa told him, she would wake up during the night thinking her sheets were damp from sweat, before becoming conscious of the storm outside.

  “One learns from one’s mistakes,” said Jacob Weinberg.

  Things would get better. Improve. This was only one of the platitudes that sustained the Weinberg family and which Karl preferred over Felix’s dark and, he felt, increasingly stupid mutterings.

  As Karl approached the house, Ilsa, spotting him from a window, came out to join him on the road.

  “I didn’t see you on the beach this afternoon,” she said. “I was worried that you weren’t going to come tonight.”

  “Did you miss me?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Karl told her he had been working, but in truth he’d avoided her so that he could walk the road alone. Sometimes it was better to think about walking beside her than actually doing so. He could talk to her more freely when he was alone, and he could also ignore her when the need arose and concentrate on other things, or nothing at all. He liked to lose himself on the road, to forget who he was.

  The question was who he wanted to become. Ilsa seemed to be a part of his future self, but she didn’t let him advance toward it, keeping her distance. She let him kiss her and hold her hand in the water, but that was really all she allowed. Ilsa was young, but so was Karl. She seemed at times far more confident. Of course she missed him, she’d said, but in what way, and if so, why not let him get closer to her?

  Together they walked to the front door, where Mr. Weinberg put out his hand, and Karl felt the grip of a proud man.

  “It’s good to see you, Karl.”

  “I brought these from the colmado.” Karl handed over several lemons.

  “Good boy, you remembered. Come, let me show you something,” said Mr. Weinberg.

  Ilsa took the lemons inside, while he and Mr. Weinberg walked around the house, past the well he’d helped dig seven months ago, toward one of the two modest sheds. Inside was a wooden paddle similar to one the Sosua Cheese Co-Operative used to churn milk. Beside the wooden paddle stood a series of glass jars.

  “I’m skimming off the whey, pouring the cream into the jars and shaking it until I make butter.” Mr. Weinberg held out his hand as if to ward off an objection. “I know I don’t have any milk to spare, but why should the co-operative make all the cheese and butter? Maybe I can do something a little different.”

  “I’m sure you can,” said Karl.

  Mr. Weinberg stared at Karl, as if his words held deep significance. “Yes, why not! Here,” he said, pulling off a layer of cloth from a wedge of cheese and cutting a thin slice. “Taste.”

  Karl tried it. “It’s good.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “I think it needs a little more salt in the curd. And you need to paddle the milk more, let it thicken until your arms feel like they’
ll fall off.”

  Mr. Weinberg nodded. “When are you going to come and join us?” he asked. “We could do with your help, Karl.”

  Men like Karl, who were single and under twenty-one, were being encouraged by the town administration to move in with settled families and help out on the farms. He’d been asked on several occasions by Mr. Weinberg to live on his homestead, but so far Karl had refused the offer.

  When they returned to the house, Ilsa handed him a glass of cold water flavoured with the lemons he’d brought from town.

  “Soon we’ll have our own,” she said.

  Karl took a seat on the porch and stared in the direction of two small lemon trees planted close by the country road that had led him here. On the other side was a bush, its upper reaches flamed by the setting sun.

  “And oranges,” said her father.

  “And bananas,” added Mrs. Weinberg, joining them on the porch. “We should have some of those soon too.”

  She was a quiet woman; she had never said much, here or when they’d first met on the ship. Karl had alternately thought her shy or stern but came to realize she was neither. Rather, she was infused with a deep moral conviction that was in its own way stronger than her husband’s. She believed in this project, in this place, and in her Jewish family.

  “Like the avocados?” Ilsa’s words provoked weary laughter from her parents.

  “Next year in Jerusalem,” said Mr.Weinberg, his joke for failing crops and other natural setbacks.

  They all clinked their glasses and repeated in unison, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

  “You see that we need you,” Mr. Weinberg said to Karl. He turned to his family. “I asked him again to move in with us, but so far he says nothing.”

  “I’m thinking about it,” said Karl.

  “It’s good to think. But sometimes you need to act. And Ilsa would like the company.”

  Karl turned away, furious at himself for blushing. Ilsa was one of his strongest motives for moving to the homestead. But she went to school and Karl would be alone during the day. He feared the isolation of living away from town. But then, there would be evenings like this, when they’d be close.

  “Where would I sleep?” joked Karl. Their home was small, with only two bedrooms. “Perhaps at the Sichels’? They seem to have enough space.”

  Mr. Weinberg frowned at the mention of his neighbours’ house. Karl knew he disapproved of the way they hired Dominican labourers to help out on the farm. Local labourers had built the Sichel house, which was why it was bigger and sturdier than Jacob Weinberg’s, and why, too, it was properly situated to take full advantage of the breeze.

  “We can build an extra room ourselves. Or maybe your own cabin, for privacy. I can get some extra lumber if you move out here,” he said. “You don’t want to stay in town forever, do you?”

  “Maybe not forever,” Karl admitted.

  Mr. Weinberg was a socialist. He, along with the communists—Karl did not fully understand the difference between the two—worried that the Jewish refugees might one day lord it over the Dominicans, paying for labour they should do themselves. The Dominican Republic did not want Jewish merchants, and these sentiments seemed to be shared by Jacob Weinberg and others, who in some ways disapproved of the town they had helped to develop. Sosua encouraged activities and occupations that belonged to their past. He could tell there were those who suspected that their former problems might one day visit them here, that their only chance to change their future was to change themselves, to become something other than who they’d been.

  Did Karl want to change? Lurking behind Jacob Weinberg’s invitation was a question as much as an offer.

  “And we might even build your own outhouse,” said Jacob. “Think what privacy that will be after living in the men’s barracks.”

  The toilets were a favourite topic of complaint in the community. They were kept as clean as possible, but they were infested with spiders, all of them gigantic, some deadly. Karl didn’t know what the women’s toilets were like, but the men’s could be revolting on hot days after a recent rain, when the sun shone directly above the zinc roof.

  “So, your own room, a private outhouse with no spiders, and good, honest work. What more could a man ask for?”

  KARL MADE HIS decision three weeks later. With a towel slung over his shoulder, he was on his way to take a shower in preparation to attend a musical put on by the colonists, when he spotted several military vehicles driving down the town road and stopping outside the colmado. The soldiers remained inside the vehicles as if to allow the dust to settle, and all that could be heard was the low rumble of engines that had not been turned off.

  Karl and a few of the colonists made their way over to see what was happening. The military had never before stopped in their small colony. A few Dominican dignitaries had visited from time to time, but that had all been organized and announced long before they arrived, and the community had been given time to prepare a special meal, to lay out tablecloths and offer speeches of gratitude and friendship. These vehicles had arrived without announcement, or none that Karl had heard about.

  “What’s going on?” Karl asked those nearest him.

  “I have no idea.” The man who answered had arrived on the last boat to make it out of Europe. His name was Francis. He came from Belgium, was at least ten years older than Karl and, by and large, kept to himself.

  Karl had learned that upwards of a hundred thousand Jews had been offered sanctuary in the Dominican Republic, but after the outbreak of war, only 650 of them had made it over. They were it. As his mother might have said, they weren’t exactly das beste vom besten, the cream of the crop.

  It wasn’t a standoff, but with the colonists waiting and the engines rumbling, it felt like one. Eventually the doors opened and uniformed men jumped out on either side of their vehicles, then walked toward the colmado, assembling where the news of the war was posted.

  Karl had learned enough Spanish that he no longer needed Joseph Stern’s translation, after he showed up and began negotiating with the soldiers. The men in uniform were requisitioning two of Sosua’s valuable trucks, which they claimed were needed for the war effort. Stern was accompanied by a committee member belonging to DORSA, whose money supported the colony. Based in New York, DORSA had paid passage to Diepoldsau for Mr. Solomon Trone, who’d selected him and Felix for relocation. American money had paid for their passage across the Atlantic, had even paid for Karl to lose his virginity. And it had paid for the trucks. As proof, the man from the settlement agency presented a sheaf of papers that Karl was close enough to see had a series of stamps, swirling signatures and embossed emblems meant to impress anybody except the soldiers, who proffered their own documents.

  Four soldiers from the end of the military convoy were ordered to join the men up front, and all of them walked over to the two trucks to be confiscated. A few of the colonists helped take out milk canisters and other hardware from the back of the trucks, which the soldiers allowed before jumping into the vehicles and starting up the engines. Then they drove off, a reminder to Karl and all the Jews that they lived at the mercy and goodwill of a dictator.

  On his way to the musical shortly afterwards, Karl wondered if it wasn’t a better idea to hide, the way the impoverished Dominicans seemed to do, living off the main road and out of sight.

  The performance took place at the makeshift cinema, where a Russian trader living in Santiago delivered battered film canisters every two weeks and returned with cheese and anything else he could sell back in town. On stage, the men and women of Sosua wore homemade lederhosen and feathered hats. They sang Austrian folk songs while dancing around a white picket fence festooned with ivy and meant to remind the theatre-goers of the tamer greenery of home. Was that, too, a form of hiding? They wanted to look just like Austrians, even in this place. It made Karl think of his summer vacations in the mountains, when he and his family would dress up in traditional clothes, and the time, seemingly so long ago, whe
n a farmer had examined the palms of his hands and those of his sister as well. They’d been too soft for his liking, and there’d been something else that the farmer hadn’t liked about them either. Karl now knew what it was.

  After the musical ended, Felix found it comical to hitch up his pants and pirouette in the street. The confiscation of the trucks had made them all come a little unhinged.

  “Who’d imagine that we’d sing and dance to the music of our enemies?” said Felix. His mocking tone, as it so often did, felt like an attack on all of them, including Karl.

  “We have the right to miss our home. Or should they be able to take that away from us as well?” Karl was surprised by his anger. He wasn’t defending only himself but, he felt, the colonists too, including and especially Ilsa, who had stood up and clapped after the performance.

  “They’ve already taken it away. Look where we are.” Felix extended his arms up to the sky. They hadn’t walked very far but already they were enveloped in a starry darkness. “We’re Jews who grow bananas.”

  “We don’t grow bananas. And if you did any work around here, you’d know this. What do you suggest we do?”

  “We wait.” Felix shrugged. “Maybe after the war we go to America, maybe Canada. But we shouldn’t be here. Everyone wants to pretend this place is paradise.”

  “No one ever worked this hard in paradise,” said Karl, thinking of Jacob Weinberg, his neighbours and everyone else who was putting time and sweat into creating a precarious home for themselves. Like the trucks, it could all be taken away with a few pieces of paper and florid signatures.

  “There’s blood here,” said Felix.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know what I’m talking about. Everyone here does.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Remember that first day when we got off the boat? There was that official who told us he was part Jewish.”

  “Yes. I thought it was strange. He seemed proud of it.”