by David Layton
What struck Karl most about the house was the lack of window curtains. The place seemed bare without them. So about a week later, he arrived with curtains that had been used only briefly by a family in Sosua. They were white with red and blue stripes. One set was for the main room and the other for Maricel’s bedroom window.
He’d returned to visit twice more before he spotted the curtains up on the windows, and he felt oddly proud of how cozy the house now looked when compared to the neighbours’. And only then was he struck by the fact that he hadn’t as yet met Maricel’s mother. Where was she? And how had he not noticed her absence on the few occasions he’d been there? Perhaps it was because Karl had become so accustomed to his own state of motherlessness that he apparently no longer saw it as abnormal for others to find themselves in a similar position.
“Where is your mother?” he asked her gently.
“She is dead,” the father answered.
Karl felt his face flush in embarrassment. Should he have guessed this? Not asked at all?
“I am sorry.”
“So are we,” said Miguel.
A look of intense sadness crossed his face.
“My mother’s name is Variola,” said Maricel, and Karl was fairly certain she spoke in the present tense. The mention of her mother’s name induced a smile so bright and open that it was as if she were casting sunshine into his eyes.
Karl let himself go blind. His own mother’s name could not be spoken by him, in the present tense or otherwise. It had been years since he last saw her, and if the rumours coming out of Europe were true, he might never see her again. Dead. Muerta. He had this in common with Maricel.
She accompanied him on his walk back to Sosua that night. They strolled along the beach. It was dark, but they both knew their way along the worn path between the treeline and the sand. He took her hand, and she squeezed it.
“I thought you would never take it,” she said.
They stopped halfway along the beach and sat down on a patch of surprisingly cold sand. Karl kissed her and then, for the first time since arriving in Sosua, and with only the second woman in his life, he made love.
Or he’d made something. It had been quick, and then he said goodbye and went back to Sosua, because he couldn’t take her to the sleeping quarters he shared with the Berbaums and others. He imagined what Mrs. Berbaum, who yelled at him for bringing a smidgen of soil into the barracks, would say if she found a woman in his bed. She’d be hysterical.
Karl hadn’t told Maricel he’d had only one woman before her, and one he’d paid for, and he hadn’t enquired about her own sexual experiences, which he assumed by her actions to be more substantial than his own. As with so much else, though, he couldn’t be sure. Up until that night, he hadn’t even known her mother was dead.
AS THE VISITS continued, Maricel’s father seemed to accept him the way he did the chocolate Karl brought to their table, as something worth admitting into their household. Karl would even lie with her on her cot, the mosquitoes buzzing around the net he’d bought for her, and gaze at her breasts and ripe hips, noticing how her dark skin was almost purple against his own. After all the time he’d spent on the other side of Ilsa’s wall, wanting to touch her, there was now no barrier, nothing between him and Maricel.
Neither Maricel’s father nor Mrs. Berbaum—nor anyone else, for that matter— interfered or commented upon his coupling with Maricel, though there was hardly any more privacy here than at the barracks in Sosua.
They never walked into town together. Karl would wake up at dawn, alone in her cot—Maricel left early for her job in the kitchen—and on his way into town, he’d pass the women gossiping at the communal water pipe as they awaited their turn to fill metal buckets and walk back across the beach to Sosua. Maricel was already working in the kitchen when Karl got there for breakfast. Nothing much changed in their routine—sometimes, for instance, he would watch a movie in Sosua and arrive at her house after she was already asleep, slipping quietly into her cot. Sometimes he spent the night at the dormitory, but he found that he no longer liked sleeping alone.
“Where is your family?” she asked him one night when they were in bed together.
He never imagined she would ask him this question. “I don’t know,” he answered.
“Manman’m te Ayisyen,” she said.
This didn’t sound Spanish. Karl didn’t understand. Maricel repeated herself, and then, when Karl still looked confused, she said in French, “Elle était l’Haïtienne.”
My mother was Haitian.
As a child, he’d been given French lessons, but, like so much else in his life, that had come to an end under the Nazis.
“Manman’m te Ayisyen,” she said again, and this time Karl understood that she was speaking Creole, a language Haitian cane-cutters spoke when they didn’t want anyone else to understand them.
They were whispering, because they were in bed and it was late, but there was something other than the hurt of a lost mother that concerned him. There was something like fear in Maricel’s eyes. It was as if the language she spoke was illicit and dangerous.
“One day she didn’t come back,” Maricel said.
“Where did she go? Dónde fué?” he asked stupidly.
“It was the Night of Tears,” said Maricel. “I’m half Haitian. I am dark,” she said. “Oscura. You see my skin. I am darker than many Dominicans, and that darkness is a danger for me.”
My mother was Haitian. The explanation was inherent in those four simple words, but it took time for Karl to really hear what she had said, to piece the words together. She was not offering a clue for him to decipher but a bold clear fact. Maricel’s mother was dark-skinned. And Maricel’s skin, the darkness of it, marked her out. At night, when Karl reached out for her, he would notice how her skin lightened his own tanned body, but gradations of skin colour were not something Karl was attuned to. The Dominicans were all brown-skinned, some lighter, others darker, and while he noticed that the lighter the skin, the higher one’s rank in government and business, even Generalissimo Trujillo, like Maricel’s family—like many Dominicans—was mestizo, of mixed blood. Up until now, they had all been, to him, simply brown.
Karl had learned that Trujillo admired the colonists for their whiteness; it was one of the reasons they’d been brought to the country. But until now, he’d never properly considered the inverse: that Trujillo hated blackness, attributing many of the ills that plagued his own country to the dark blood flowing through Dominicans like an infestation.
“What happened to your mother?”
“I am taller than her now” was all Maricel had to say before she pressed her body into his and fell asleep.
It had never occurred to Karl that he too had grown taller over the past few years. He’d look down on his father, if he ever saw him again.
One day when Karl knew Miguel would not be home, he commandeered a vehicle and transported good chairs and a table to the family home. He didn’t want Miguel to feel obligated by the gift or to object. Let the chairs just be there when he arrived home. Later, seated around the table, Karl asked him some questions about what had happened and why.
Miguel was born in Santiago, the second-largest city in the Dominican Republic, known for its rich agricultural land. The main road to the capital, Santo Domingo, ran through the city, and there was some trading that went on between Sosua and Santiago, but as with so much of the country, Karl had never visited the place. Before Maricel was born, her mother had found a housekeeping job with one of the landowning families in Santiago. Miguel was already working for the family in the carpentry shop, helping to maintain the estate. They met and married, and shortly afterwards she gave birth to Maricel. Miguel found another job in the centre of the city, but Variola continued to work for the family, leaving every day before Miguel woke for breakfast and arriving home in time to prepare dinner for her family.
“One day she did not return,” Miguel told him.
In 1937, branches o
f the military and police were called out to terrorize and herd the Haitians back across the border. Soon ordinary citizens began picking up rifles, guns, machetes or even common kitchen knives and doing their job for them, slaughtering as many Haitians as they could. Some families did what they could to hide and protect those who were being hunted, while others killed household servants who’d worked for them for years and even friends who were Haitian.
“That’s what probably happened to my wife,” Miguel said sadly. “But we will never know.”
They never found her body. She just disappeared.
Generalissimo Trujillo wished to cleanse his country of Haitians who crossed into the Dominican Republic like a plague, unsettling the social order and worse, undermining its vigour with their negroid look—the same look Trujillo himself did his best to hide with whitening creams. His contempt metastasized into a nationwide slaughter.
After the fever of killing broke, Miguel was determined to leave the city that had killed his wife. For him it had been the Night of Tears, but the Dominicans, he said, had no name for what they’d done. Miguel never felt safe afterwards, not when his daughter was half Haitian.
“I heard a story about Jewish settlers who had come to my country in search of sanctuary, and I thought, ‘What kind of stupid, crazy people must they be?’ Then I read that they were white, from Europe, and I understood.”
Miguel had brought his dark-tainted offspring to Sosua in the hope that the Jews’ sanctuary might become his own. He did this at around the same time an American had come to Diepoldsau looking for young, strong Jews to farm a new land on the other side of the world.
“You are protected,” Miguel said to him. “They will not come for you.”
If Karl had learned one thing, it was that there was always someone coming for you. He felt safe here, but only up to a point. Who knew what the General might be thinking next year or the year after that, but compared to Maricel, he was safe, and so long as she was with him, she was too. Or so her father must have hoped.
The first time he’d spotted Maricel on the beach, Karl had thought she belonged to this place, when in truth, she was, like him, a foreigner. Her darkness was a sign of inferiority, a certifiable mark of an ancestry she couldn’t scrub clean.
Lying on the cot that night, Karl placed his forearm next to hers and then entwined his fingers with hers; it was as if his white skin had also faded out his Jewishness. Nobody could see what he was. Underneath the covers, Maricel rubbed her hip against his thigh. He reached for her breast with his other hand and felt her nipple grow hard. She had small, perfect black breasts. Everything he loved about her, Trujillo despised. If they had children, they would be whiter than her, and their children’s children might be whiter still. That was Trujillo’s point, to clean up his country and eventually make it look like the one from which Karl and Felix and the other colonists had barely managed to escape.
“HOW MANY DO you think died?” Karl put this question to Felix later, because Miguel had been unable to offer an answer. The death of his wife was enough; what more did he need to know about it other than that?
“Ten thousand. Others say more.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. C’mon, let’s get going.”
He and Felix, groceries in their arms, were on the road leading out of town, which bent its way around the beach. They heard the sound of the ocean beating against the sand. It would be dark in less than ten minutes. Behind them, to the east, lay Ilsa and the other homesteaders. In front of them was Cherimicos and Maricel.
“I know you tried to tell me about it.”
“Don’t beat yourself up. No one wants to talk about what happened.”
“But you do.”
“Yes, I do.”
“You knew right at the beginning.”
“At the very beginning, when we were on the bus to Sosua, and you saw those Haitians working the sugar cane fields.”
“I didn’t actually know they were Haitians.”
“But they were black.”
“That didn’t mean much to me.”
“Remember when we got off the boat? That speech about the white race, how we’d come to lighten the population? It didn’t take long to figure things out.”
“So why didn’t you speak to me directly about it?”
“I did, and that’s why you hit me, remember?”
“I hit you for other reasons.” There’d been the play, the white picket fence on stage, the Austrian songs, and Felix’s remorseless attack on all of it.
“Don’t be so sure,” said Felix.
They could have walked safely along the middle of the empty road, but it struck Karl that they kept to its edge out of respect for what it represented. This road linked them to the outside world. They had travelled on it to reach this place of relative safety, but the road also connected them to all the dangers from which they had escaped. One day when the war was over, Karl might take the road one last time and ship himself away to America or Canada, a place where a dictator did not rule.
“There’s a lot I haven’t understood,” said Karl.
“Like I said, don’t beat yourself up. There are a lot of people who do understand the truth but don’t have the strength to lift it above their heads. Everyone here is without family. Even those with families, including the Weinbergs, are cut off. The Weinbergs were never strong enough for you.”
It had never occurred to Karl to think of the Weinbergs as weak or in need of support, but looking back, he thought it possible that the loneliness he’d felt while living there might not have been his alone, that it was shared by all of them on that isolated pocket of land. What did Jacob Weinberg know of farming? The bemused smile he held for his cattle was perhaps nothing less than fear. And there’d been something desperate in the family trip to Ciudad Trujillo and in their eager welcome of the man who came to court Ilsa. The rituals of Passover had prevented Karl from seeing how fawning they all were to that German idiot, Walter. They needed something from him, Karl now understood. Their need showed weakness.
“I still don’t have the full story. What are we all doing here? Tell me what you know, and I promise not to punch you again.”
“I’m a weak man with malaria.”
“And the clap, don’t forget.”
“That too, though that’s been cleared up with penicillin. Me and the troops are fighting this dirty war together.” Felix let out a hollow laugh.
For a moment, he’d been good and kind and thoughtful. Clearly it had taken something out of him.
“So tell me,” said Karl.
“You have to go back to the old days in Diepoldsau. Remember how we worked those smooth Swiss roads? It didn’t seem right that you and I should have had a hand in such perfection. One day Mr. Solomon Trone comes to a refugee camp in Switzerland offering sanctuary to Jews in some tropical country no one has ever heard of? Don’t you think the whole of it was strange right from the beginning?”
Karl had thought it was strange, but so much had happened, most of it incomprehensible.
“Remember when the American mentioned a conference at Evian, France? It was about refugees, which meant it was about Jews. No one wanted them, least of all the Americans. And that’s where our General comes in. Trujillo surprised everyone by offering sanctuary for a hundred thousand Jewish refugees. His problem was that he’d massacred Haitians, another persecuted people no one wished to help. Because the Americans were allies of Haiti and because they weren’t exactly opening their arms to let in persecuted Jews, they were embarrassed on both counts, and so Trujillo saw his chance. Besides, he wanted white people to populate his country. Enter one Mr. Trone through the gates of Diepoldsau.”
Obviously those hundred thousand Jews had never made it over. There were just 650 of them, two of whom could now be found walking along a dark tropical road, each with a bag of groceries tucked under his arm.
“If you know all this, why do you want t
o stay here?”
“I told you. I don’t have a home anymore. And I like it here.”
“Even after what you know?” said Karl.
“You know it too. All of us do, including the Dominicans. But nobody wants to talk about it, and maybe that’s the way it should be. We just carry on, maybe with some food under our arm and a girl to visit. And what can we do? I know what the man did, but maybe you can find some good in all of it.”
“Who is this woman you are visiting?” Karl asked, changing the subject. He’d never met her and had never even asked after her until now, because he’d been so busy with his own problems and thoughts. It was also true that Felix was secretive and didn’t appreciate questions directed at himself.
“She is someone I am seeing.”
“Do you like her?”
“It’s not a question of like.”
Felix was too young to have lines on his face, but Karl could already see where they would appear. It was as if a thin sheet had been placed over him, hiding the wear and tear below.
“Then, what is it?”
“We might be travelling on the same road together, but our paths will lead us in different directions. Don’t ever follow me.”
Saying goodbye to the sweat-stained back of Felix as he marched farther down the road, Karl shifted the bags of groceries from one arm to the next, and in that moment, he noticed Felix do the same.
In some small way they were both helping other families. Maricel and her father had come to Sosua to make a new start and leave their past behind, just as Karl had done when he’d walked away from his own family. They were all in need of one another.
18
“SOSUA,” AARON SAID TO THE TAXI driver.
Nearby was an armed sentry at the gates to the airport, and beyond him the mountains, their mottled greenery the same colour as the soldier’s camouflage uniform. The soldier wore sunglasses with lenses so dark it looked as if he’d had his eyes plucked out.
The taxi turned left onto the main road and sped down a wide valley planted with sugar cane, their stalks brown and tattered on the upper reaches. After a few miles, Aaron noted how the sugar cane had been ripped out and replaced by a golf course that meandered with designed indolence toward the sea. People came here for vacations. In the distance were gigantic hotels and then more sugar cane fields. Ten minutes later, the landscape closed in on Aaron, as they left the wide valley behind and entered an area of green humped hills and scruffy villages. Smoke from burning leaves and rubbish rose into the afternoon sky like plumes of sewage.