The Dictator

by David Layton

  “What do you mean by ‘seems to’?”

  “They both seem to have disappeared.”

  “Well, maybe they’ve just gone out for a walk. Have you phoned Petra?”

  “She’s not answering.”

  “That doesn’t sound like her.”

  Lately, he wasn’t sure anymore what his daughter sounded like.

  He phoned Petra one more time, screamed another message into her phone and then waited for a few minutes, not in expectation of Petra answering but because he was filled with fear and unsure what he had to do next.

  He phoned his ex-wife. “Petra wouldn’t be at your place by any chance?” he asked her.

  “No, why would she be?”

  “Well, Petra and my father are missing.”

  “As of when?”

  “They were gone before I woke up.”

  “When did you wake up?”

  “Around ten-ish.”

  There was a pause, and in his mind’s eye he saw her consult the Tag Heuer watch he’d bought her five years ago, a gift so successful it had outlasted him.

  “But it’s past twelve-thirty!”

  “I know. I thought she was sleeping.”

  “How could they just walk out together without you hearing them?”

  “I’ve been wondering the same thing myself,” he said. Then he recalled how Petra had pleaded with him to keep watching the television show with her. She’d wanted to tire him out.

  “Would you go up to her room and see if anything is missing?” he asked.

  “Missing? Like what? Our daughter?”

  As he told her about their daughter’s oddly immaculate room and his father’s missing suitcase, Aaron heard Isobel’s worried footsteps stop halfway up the stairs, as if she were going to say something to him, before resuming her march upward. Then the footsteps stopped, and there was silence as she entered Petra’s room. Aaron saw it with her, the white duvet cover with the vertical blue lines, the blinds dropped down and turned against the sunlight, because for some reason teenagers become vampires and fear the light, the white desk in the corner, the wide-planked hardwood floor, slightly scuffed and strewn with shoes, jeans, socks and shirts. But maybe that wasn’t what Isobel was seeing, because he hadn’t visited the room since leaving the house, and it might all have changed, the way Petra had changed. The blinds certainly wouldn’t be down. Isobel would have thrown as much light into the room as possible, in the hope of banishing whatever shadow was hiding Petra.

  “Do you notice anything different?” Aaron asked.

  “I don’t think so. I’ve looked, but I can’t really tell what’s missing, or if anything’s missing, because I’m not sure what she owns anymore. I used to always be in her room. I folded her clothes. I bought her clothes. But now I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I,” Aaron confessed. Had he ever known? “She wanted to spend time with her grandfather,” he added.

  “And you didn’t want to spend any time with them.”

  This was unfair but, as he’d just lost his daughter and father, perhaps well deserved. The angrier she became with him, the more violently Isobel rummaged through their daughter’s belongings. Drawers and closet doors were pulled open and slammed shut with ever greater grievance.

  “I think some of her summer clothes are missing. Is that possible? Wait,” said Isobel.

  Aaron waited. He heard another set of drawers opened, then closed, then opened again.

  “Aaron, I can’t find her passport.”

  “That’s impossible,” he said.

  But it wasn’t, and at that moment they both knew it.

  “She’s supposed to keep it in the same place at all times.”

  “Yes, that was the deal,” said Aaron, because he’d been around at that point to make it.

  Petra loved having a passport and from the earliest age had insisted that she be the one to present it to whatever authority requested it. They’d let her keep it in her room, provided it was always in the top drawer of her desk.

  “What about your father’s passport?”

  “I don’t know if he has one. I’ve never seen it.”

  “Well, let’s assume for now that he does.”

  “Okay,” Aaron said.

  “Where has he taken her?”

  “Look, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Maybe Petra isn’t even with my father.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe she went out, left him in the apartment.”

  “So you’re saying they’re both missing, but not together?”

  Put that way, Aaron had to admit that it didn’t sound likely.

  “Aaron, her passport is missing, and so is your father!” Her voice was rising.

  His father had always been missing, thought Aaron. The problem was that his daughter had chosen to disappear as well.

  “Where are they?” Isobel demanded.

  “Let me phone you right back,” said Aaron.

  Aaron had gone past cajoling or yelling at his daughter. Now the message he left her was just a plain statement of fact: “I don’t care what you’ve done or why. Just call me and your mother back. Let us know you’re okay.”

  The phone rang; it was his mother.

  “Have you found them?” she asked.

  “I think I know where they are.”

  “Are you going to get them?”

  Aaron paused and wondered how to proceed on a topic they’d assiduously avoided all their lives. She’d never come to terms with what had happened with his father. Neither had he.

  “Mom, I need to talk to you about a few things.”

  “What sort of things?”

  The things of the past, thought Aaron.

  An incoming call interrupted their conversation. “Stay on the line,” he said. “It’s probably Isobel.” He switched over.

  “I’m just talking to my mother,” said Aaron.

  “I’m in the Dominican Republic.”

  “Petra?”

  Aaron pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at the screen. There was his daughter’s name. And a photo of a young woman smiling back at him, taken on her fourteenth birthday, the year he and Isobel had separated.

  “Dad, can you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m in the Dominican Republic,” she said again.

  “Are you kidding? How did you get there?” Now it was Aaron’s turn to consult his watch. It seemed barely possible that she could already be so far away.

  “By plane,” she said. Even at this moment, she couldn’t refrain from being a smart-ass. “We left at six this morning.”

  “What are you doing there?”

  “You know what I’m doing here.”

  Aaron nodded, though there was no one to record his acknowledgement.

  “Did Grandpa do this? Was he the one who took you down?”

  “No, I did. I brought him down.”

  Aaron took a few considered breaths. “Well, now you both need to come back.”

  “We can’t.”

  “This is not up for discussion.”

  Petra fell silent, as if she agreed with him. Then he realized she was crying.

  “Grandpa has gone missing,” Petra said. “I can’t find him.”

  16

  “I’D SAY ‘WELCOME HOME,’ ONLY this isn’t home and you’re not altogether welcome,” Felix said when he first moved back to Sosua.

  Karl hadn’t been the only one to return. Within the year, close to sixty other settlers, having found life too hard, had broken their farming contracts and gone back to Sosua. As punishment, the DORSA officials in charge of them had offered inferior accommodation, and they were no longer separated by sex or even family. With the rumours of what was happening to the Jews in Europe came new pressures from New York that the colony needed to become self-sufficient, or at least not so great a drain on their resources. Money needed to be spent on Jews in far direr straits than them.

  The Berbaums, with their two c
hildren, lived in the same barracks as Karl. “What are we, outcasts?” Gina Berbaum loudly complained to Karl. It was also a complaint against him, because her lack of privacy was something she acutely felt in those close quarters. Her husband had drawn a makeshift curtain around their beds, but during hot nights they needed to expose themselves if they were to remain cool. One of the children developed the awful habit of picking her nose whenever Karl looked their way, which disturbed her mother far more than it did Karl. She’d slap the child’s hand away in fierce protest.

  Yes, that’s exactly what we are, thought Karl, outcasts, all of us, whether we worked the land or lived in town.

  Felix, despite a second convalescence up in the mountains, didn’t look well. He’d lost more weight, and the sun seemed to have lightened his hair without darkening his skin.

  “I have the clap,” said Felix, registering Karl’s concern. “It’s rampant here. Don’t worry, there’s no chance of you catching it.”

  Felix drew down the edges of his mouth to show, as a clown would, exaggerated sorrow for his friend. “You’re a young man and you should be doing what young men in this world like doing.”

  “And what is that? Getting venereal disease and killing people? Because that’s what young men are doing.”

  “Well, I don’t suggest you go off and kill anybody. But you could find yourself a woman.”

  “I had Ilsa,” Karl said. It sounded pathetic to his ears, and he was thankful for Felix’s temporary silence on the matter.

  He and Felix were standing in line outside the DORSA office, waiting for their pay. The settlement agency doled out the salaries once a week, along with special ration stubs for such items as cigarettes and soap. Lining up for their money, the colonists used the occasion to practise their English on the two Americans who wielded the authority to disperse it. Speaking of the weather while counting out the money tended to slow things down, but nobody complained, because it was accepted that English was important. Karl himself said only “Hello” and “Thank you” when he reached the front desk with its ledgers and stacks of money stored in a heavy metal safe that seemed to convey the solidity, weight and wealth of America. Felix was one of the few who took his money without uttering a word in English, German or Spanish.

  After stuffing the money into their pockets and exiting, he and Felix went to purchase supplies at the colmado, located less than a minute’s walk away, along a dirt road that continued to the beach. Constant use had substantially widened the path since the day, years ago, when Karl first walked down to the sea, and Ilsa took his hand beneath the water’s surface. He should have understood right then and there that her interest in him was transitory.

  Anyway, right now the beaches that mattered were far off in Normandy, their locations posted on a newsboard propped up on the colmado’s veranda. News of the world was typed on a sheet of paper tacked to a mango tree, but the occasional newspaper from the city made its way through, often a single copy, already well-thumbed and precious.

  The upper and lower folds of the front page, pinned to the board like an exotic insect specimen, showed several maps, one of Western Europe, another of the northwestern shoreline of France, and a closeup of the actual beaches invaded by the Allies—Juno, Sword, Omaha. All the maps had bold arrows of various thicknesses thrusting eastward. Berlin was clearly marked.

  During the past year, the sea off the Dominican coast had thickened with ships. Even the once empty skies were now filling up with flying metal and men. Karl had witnessed a fleet of heavy bombers pass over Puerto Plata on their way out to open ocean, the whitecaps seemingly whipped up by their thrumming engines.

  No one ever spoke of following those arrows back home. Rumours of forced marches, starvation and death camps had reached the colonists without any aid of newspaper or radio and were generally accepted as truth. After all, as a group, they had been first to believe in the impending disaster and committed to escaping it. Everyone understood, most especially the administration responsible for handing out the money every week, that there would be many more Jewish refugees, perhaps millions, looking, as they once had done, for a new home.

  Which made Felix and Karl and the other Jews milling about the colmado with their freshly dispensed money both an example and a burden. Passing over a few coins, Felix bought some Chiclets, for which he’d developed a mild obsession.

  One of the Americans who only moments before had been doling out the money now spoke about the urgent needs of Palestine Jews, as if the colonists’ good fortune were something to be embarrassed about.

  “They need tools, clothes, food and money to buy land, but our resources are limited.”

  Their pleas were well understood, but the colonists had enough problems of their own to solve.

  “We still haven’t replaced the two trucks that were taken,” one of them said.

  “Stolen!” shouted another, as Felix leaned against the colmado’s veranda railing. Vigorously chewing his gum, he attempted a pose of studied boredom.

  “We’re working on getting them back or at least obtaining some compensation,” said one of the Americans.

  “We need those trucks to deliver our meat and cheese and milk. Otherwise everything will spoil.”

  The success of the Jewish colony depended on those trucks, and yet they’d had no choice but to hand over the keys and watch the officials drive off in plumes of petrol smoke.

  “We understand, but remember that our brethren in Europe and Palestine and everywhere else in the world are suffering too.”

  Hal, the American, spoke with some exasperation, as if to spoiled children.

  “The Allies have landed on the beaches of Normandy,” he said. “The Russians are advancing. Europe is devastated, and support and finance will be needed for the millions of displaced Jews across the continent. This is not a welfare state.”

  They were all meant to make their own way eventually, to be profitable.

  Hal had arrived from New York only four months ago. Along with the other Americans, he lived in private barracks with proper beds and finer sheets, shipped down to them by way of freighters from Miami and New York. Hal used hair gel that couldn’t be found in the colmado, and his hair glistened with prosperity.

  Felix hated Hal. “Trujillo brought us here, not you,” he said.

  “You must learn how to stand on your own two feet,” said Hal.

  It was an oft-heard comment, but Felix held an almost perverse belief in the opposite proposition. “Let them pay, that’s my motto.” Discussions about how their financial independence could come about had been going on for years and were especially pronounced after payday.

  Felix pushed himself away from the railing and stood before the newspaper posted on the colmado’s veranda. He turned to Karl. “What will you do after the war?”

  Such clear and confident certainty that all those arrows would eventually crash into Berlin left Karl momentarily speechless and reminded him of when his father had taken him to a museum. They’d stood before African masks, crossed spears, and shields covered in animal hides. His father told him, “You see, the treating of animal skins is an ancient and noble profession,” but the physical facts presented to Karl had only deepened the mystery of what he was looking at. Who had owned these spears? What were the shields defending against? How did the shields and spears make it to Vienna? Had they been won in battle? Given as gifts? Were they stolen? He had so many questions, yet they’d already moved on. These primitive arts were meant to be looked at but not questioned too deeply.

  If the arrows on the map were now like the strange spears he’d witnessed as a child, they also pointed toward something unknowable and primitive. The small, tropical world of Sosua, with its wooden huts and threadbare shops, felt more secure to him, more ordered and civilized than anything he recalled from the place he’d left behind.

  “I haven’t thought about it.” Karl wasn’t even sure he was able to envision the day when there might be a choice to stay or leave.
The very idea felt threatening. Yet what he’d just said to Felix wasn’t true: he’d chosen not to think about it every day.

  “Have you noticed that everyone is learning English?” Felix asked. “The Americans will win the war and then everyone here will go to America.” Felix stared at Hal, as if he were the full representative of that country and found it wanting.

  “So why aren’t you learning it?” Karl asked.

  “I don’t plan to leave.”

  He said this with the same tone of confidence he’d used for predicting the war’s end. Karl was skeptical.

  “But you don’t like it here. At least, you always talk about how you don’t like it.”

  “I hate the reason for being here but not the place itself. Besides, where would I go?”

  “To America. You said so yourself. It’s the future.”

  “Your future perhaps, but not mine.” Felix pointed to the pinned newspaper with its striking arrows.

  For all the suggested movement the arrows implied, he and Felix were stationary. Their tiny world was a form of shelter. They’d been hidden away.

  “None of us is ever going back home, so I might as well stay here.”

  “Some of us might return,” said one of the Belgian Jews who was standing on the porch near to them.

  A new and hopeful expectation, especially among the Belgian Jews, who looked forward to early liberation, was taking hold of the colony. The war that pushed ever closer to Germany was also pushing toward them. They thought it possible that letters would soon make it out of liberated Europe, cross the ocean to reach them and that they, in turn, would write back to say they were alive and prospering.

  Many of the colonists had been writing to their families for years. Karl had watched them as they sat on their beds, knees up, pencil in hand, or at a table in the dining room, bending their backs over a piece of paper, writing to those they’d left behind. These letters were more like diaries; though some colonists still slipped the folded papers inside envelopes they’d purchased at the colmado, they would not reach war-torn Europe.

  At the same time, he and the other Jews created postage-stamp patches of cleared land that were never meant to be mailed or sent anywhere. Surrounded by mountains and forest and sea, they were cut off from the war and their past, which was the point of being here, the reason they were safe. Since returning to town, though, the outside world was moving inexorably toward him.