Blood-Dark Track

by Joseph O'Neill

  Of course, displays of class are, to an important degree, self-fulfilling and artificial, but it seemed that the aspirant and romantic elements in Joseph’s brand of stylishness did not pass unnoticed. Into his thirties, he would be teased by girls chanting the rhyme

  O Dakak-e

  Tu nous fais tourner

  La tête.

  (Oh Dakak, you turn our heads.) The chant illustrated something else: contrary to the local custom of calling people by their first name (Monsieur Jean, Monsieur Theodore, etc.), for some reason Joseph’s peers generally referred to him by his surname, Dakak.

  But if Mersin was a one-horse town, and my grandfather owned that horse, it was to be noted that when Mersin was a one-fridge town, Joseph owned that fridge – a tall Frigidaire, expensive as a motorcar, bought in around 1950. He also owned the first car with automatic transmission in Mersin, a blue Pontiac bought in around 1956, and in the new hotel he installed Mersin’s first central heating system and first elevator. When Mersin was a one-pedigree-dog town, Joseph owned the dog: Tarzan, a Great Dane acquired in Lyon in 1947, whose gargantuan appearance would send the people of Mersin diving for cover. (In those days there was so little traffic that Tarzan was allowed out on solo tours. His master rarely took him out for walks.) Back in 1939, Joseph employed a European architect to build the town’s first decent cinema, the Günes Cinema, which was equipped with plush seats and loges. And, of course, Joseph at all times owned and ran the premier hotel in Mersin.

  It was clear that these material firsts – many of which, in a backwater like Mersin, could only be achieved with a great deal of effort and expense – were more than social affectations. My grandfather’s imagination was grabbed by technological progress. New things, modern things, brought into view cultural horizons which profoundly excited him. That said – and here was a rare trait in Mersin – he also was interested in ancient forms of civilization. He had an antiquary’s curiosity about relics and would ask local villagers whether they had come across any objects of interest. He wrote to Ankara to protest at the local habit of incorporating ancient blocks of limestone into the villagers’ houses. He was proud of his friendship with Professor John Garstang, the English archaeologist, and also made friends, in the ’forties, with another English archaeologist, Michael Gough, whose wife Mary subsequently wrote of ‘the good M. Dakad’. When the English travel-writer Freya Stark checked in at the Toros Hotel in April 1954, she wrote, ‘Such a kind welcome because all here are friends of John Garstang’s. They gave me one look and asked me what period I was studying – and are full of interest in Alexander the Great.’ In Alexander’s Path (1958), she described Joseph Dakad as ‘overflow[ing] with kindness and a passion for cleanliness unique in my experience of Turkish inns’.

  Joseph Dakad enjoyed reading history books and subscribed to the French journal Historia. He liked non-fiction. Novels did not interest him; neither, despite his interest in the Günes Cinema, did movies. Aided by his voracious newspaper reading habits, he was knowledgeable about a wide range of matters. When Julian Huxley came to the hotel, Joseph knew who he was. He took an interest in domestic and international affairs, which he viewed from a perspective that was ‘not left-wing, that’s for sure,’ according to Oncle Pierre. My father was surprised to learn that his father-in-law knew all about Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork who died on hunger strike in 1920, and Roger Casement, the Irish patriot hanged by the British in August 1916 for treasonably acting as Germany’s ‘willing agent’; Joseph even knew the name of the gun-filled trawler, the Aud, with which Casement’s U-boat had a rendezvous off the coast of Ireland.

  ‘Papa was a cultivated man,’ my mother said quietly. ‘There was no one like him in the whole of Mersin.’

  On the subject of cultivation, it was Joseph’s dream to own an orange garden. He bought books about the farming of citrus fruit and kept an eye open for land that might suit his purposes. He loved having oranges about the house, buying them in crates that he kept on top of a cupboard, out of the children’s reach. It would seem that his love affair with citrus fruit endured even after, on one view, it had played a decisive part in the most disastrous episode of his life.

  It is lunchtime, and hours of planning, shopping and cooking by my grandmother and her servants are about to pay off – or not. The lamb cutlets have been consumed approvingly, the correct acridity of the babaganoushe has been noted, the böreks have not been criticized. Now everything turns on the watermelon. That so much should hinge on this fruit is strange, since its quality will merely reflect on the choice made by the majordomo, Ahmet, at the market that morning; but that is the way it has always been: in the final analysis, the pastèque is the king of the table.

  A rich red tranche is forked up from the serving dish and placed on Oncle Pierre’s dessert plate. Pierre frowns, noting the consistency of the fruit’s redness. A hush descends at the table as he brushes the dark pips from the flesh and inserts a morsel into his mouth. All the while, my grandmother watches anxiously. Oncle Pierre chews, then swallows. ‘Pas mal,’ he concedes. ‘Sept sur dix.’

  Mamie Dakad is happy and relieved, and general conversation resumes.

  ‘Everything is marvellous, Georgette.’ The speaker, in French, is Madame Olga Catton, an old friend of the family. Olga has a strong, gravelly accent in every language she speaks, her r’s rolled with a regal finality; and indeed everything about her suggests a tsarina in exile. She takes out a cigarette and fixes it in her cigarette holder. My sister Ann, who knows the routine, offers a flame from a silver lighter. ‘Here you are, Auntie Olga,’ Ann says. ‘Thank you, darling,’ Olga says in English. Olga sucks on her cigarette holder, and her eyebrows – plucked into nothingness and replaced by a stroke of pencil – curve upwards appreciatively. ‘You’re so pretty, my dear, you really are.’ She turns to Mamie Dakad and says in Arabic, ‘She takes after her mother – the eyes, the hair, the chin.’

  Mamie Dakad says, slightly begrudgingly, ‘She has her mother’s colouring, perhaps. But the bone structure is the father’s.’

  Pastries – pains d’Espagne and sablés topped with icing sugar and home-made apricot jam – are brought out to accompany the fruit.

  Oncle Pierre stands up suddenly and authoritatively jangles a fistful of keys. ‘Right, I’m off.’ He looks at his watch. ‘How are you going to the beach?’

  ‘By bus,’ my mother replies.

  Pierre makes the click of the tongue that, in Turkey, means no. ‘The müdür will drive you, or give you his car,’ he decrees.

  The müdür is the manager of the hotel. Although a helpful man, he is a former colonel in the Turkish army and is not, by training or inclination, a chauffeur. ‘Pierre, there really is no need,’ my mother protests. ‘Besides, the children like going by bus.’

  This is not true. We much prefer travelling by car – preferably Pierre’s car, an air-conditioned, petrol-guzzling Chevrolet with an aquamarine front bench seat and a dark blue sunband at the top of the windscreen.

  ‘Never!’ my grandmother exclaims. ‘Take the müdür’s car!’

  Dursun, the cook, comes in with cups of Turkish coffee. (Her name means ‘Stop’, her parents having had their fill of children when she was born. Trained by my grandmother, she is a well-paid and highly sought-after freelancer.) Meanwhile, my mother and Amy help Fatma, the housemaid, to remove the dishes. In spite of years of mopping the eternal floors of the hotel by hand, Fatma is strong, wiry and flexible. She is probably in her fifties. Her eyebrows are thick and united, and her hair, beginning to grey, is always bunched out of sight inside a headscarf; my mother says that Fatma has never cut it and that it falls to her waist. Fatma’s recent promotion to the key position of housemaid has been a success, although my grandmother says that la Présente (as Fatma is called when she is within earshot) depresses her with relentless tales of woe. Fatma, who is a Kurdish Turk, comes from a village in the east and still suffers from homesickness. At the age of thirteen, she married a fellow t
wenty years older than her. He died before any children were born. Fatma remarried another old-timer, a man (as she never ceases to repeat) older than her own mother. They have had six children. One daughter committed suicide; one son is mentally disabled; another son, in his late teens, is a source of constant anxiety and trouble (gambling or drug troubles, Fatma reckons) which, it is hoped, military service will iron out. Fatma’s husband refuses to work. Thankfully, she has a son who works hard as a mechanic and who has bought her a washing machine, although Fatma worries that the one day the good son will snap and kill the bad son. Fatma worries a lot. She has never really got over the death of a little granddaughter who ran in front of a car.

  I don’t learn any of this until years later. All I know for now is that if Fatma wishes to make a phone call she asks me to dial the number since, like Dursun, she has never learned to recognize numerals or letters.

  Auntie Olga, meanwhile, has brought out a fan decorated with peacocks. Her makeup, which climaxes in a fiery streak of lipstick, is under threat from the high temperature. ‘What heat, what heat,’ she says. ‘Darling,’ she says to Ann, ‘pour me a glass of water.’

  Oncle Pierre, who has lit up a king-size American cigarette, frowns and looks at his watch again. ‘That’s it, I’m off. I’ll see you all this evening.’ He strides away rapidly, to the bank he is building.

  Moments later, footsteps from the hallway announce somebody’s arrival: it is the müdür, a sheen of sweat on his brow and a smile on his face, graciously insisting that we take his car.

  ‘That’s settled, then,’ Mamie Dakad says. While we get ready for the beach, she and Isabelle and Olga drink more Turkish coffee and respectively smoke Pall Mall, Kent and Dunhill imported cigarettes while Fatma polishes the cutlery and the plaques awarded by the municipality to Georgette Dakad for being the proprietor of the hotel in Mersin to pay the most corporation tax in a given fiscal year.

  I remembered these scenes on a morning in August 1995. I was alone in my late grandmother’s apartment on the top floor of the hotel, breakfasting on white cheese, olives, bread, and a glass of milkless Black Sea tea. My solitude was heightened by the shutting off of the top floor to paying guests. The decision was Mehmet Ali’s, who for two or three years had been running the hotel for his own profit. Oncle Pierre, who was spending most of his time in Paris, had lost interest in the business and, in a not entirely selfless move, he let the hotel to Mehmet Ali at a near-nominal rent. Mehmet Ali, it was felt, had earned his break: not only was he efficient, trustworthy and enthusiastic but, most importantly, he had looked after my elderly grandmother in her last years with unflagging kindness – running errands, ensuring she took her medicines, assisting her with her domestic arrangements.

  I got up from the breakfast table and went out to the balcony. The view of the sea was obstructed by the Panorama Apartments, eight storeys of luxury accommodation that rose from the middle of the hotel’s terrace. The White Sea (as Turks call the Mediterranean) used to run up to a strand at the base of the hotel, where banana trees grew, but in about 1960 a tract of a land was reclaimed from the sea by Dutch engineers and transformed into a park. A crab-infested ridge of rocks served as a shoreline, and, quite far out at sea, large breakwaters created a haven. Over to the left were the docks and piers. They were dominated by a huge grain elevator that, with its classical white columns and majestic proportions, had always struck me as beautiful as any building in the city.

  The Panorama Apartments stood on the site of the hotel’s old swimming pool. When Oncle Pierre built the pool – a deep, cobalt box with an adjacent kidney-shaped paddling pool – it was the first swimming pool in central Mersin, and for the few years of the pool’s existence, in the late ’sixties and early ’seventies, the modern Toros Hotel saw its heyday. But Oncle Pierre noticed that the businessmen who used the hotel rarely went for a dip and figured that there might be more profitable uses for the land taken up by the pool. And so there emerged the small skyscraper that changed the skyline of Mersin to such effect that postcards depicting it were run off by the city’s tourist board, and beneath the apartment block there materialized the first upmarket shopping mall in Mersin. The ancestral land was still being put to profitable use.

  I retreated from the balcony, which was suddenly too hot, into my grandmother’s apartment, which was suddenly too sultry. Over the years, everything had been tried to cool down that hellish space. Air-conditioning, electric fans, a dogsbody with a water-hose spraying the roof – nothing had worked. Nor was the stuffiness helped by the wintry fin de siècle furniture (specially made in Istanbul) that my grandparents had favoured since the ’fifties: heavy armchairs and sofas, and heavy wooden sideboards with a matching dining-table and chairs.

  ‘But isn’t it very hot?’ The waiter, Huseyin, arrived to collect the breakfast remains. I signalled my agreement with the pained wrinkling of the brow and the twisting of the hand that means, ‘How long must we put up with this torment?’

  Huseyin had been working at the hotel for over fifteen years and had escaped the round of redundancies introduced by Mehmet Ali when he took over the hotel. During Oncle Pierre and Mamie Dakad’s time in charge, firings were very rare and the bulk of the staff would stay on for decades. Few quit. Employment at the hotel, which was fully unionized, was well paid and well insured, and the pension arrangements were hard to beat. Now, however, the future of the hotel was very much in doubt. Business was nothing like it used to be. New, competitive air-conditioned hotels had sprung up around the city and the Toros Hotel, although clean and well-situated, had become old-fashioned and uncomfortable.

  I left my grandmother’s apartment and went down to the hotel saloon, on the first floor. The saloon had remained practically unchanged in the quarter century I’d known it. The bar still featured revolving stools bolted to the ground, a display of ageing bottles of liquor, an icebox packed with bottles of cherry juice, apricot juice, beer, and Pepsi. The massive gilt mirror hung, as ever, by the entrance; next to it was the flaking, gilt-framed eighteenth century painting of camels arriving at a waterfront; over there were the rugs scattered on the cool floor, and there the pile of antique cushions and armchairs. The ’sixties breakfast tables were present and correct, and the defunct fan hung from the ceiling of the television alcove, where lonely businessmen still killed off evenings in dense clouds of cigarette smoke.

  I had an appointment later that morning with a man called Salvator Avigdor, who had worked at the Toros Hotel during the Second World War, and with some time to spare before my meeting, I drank a small glass of tea and looked at my notes. I had, by this time, spoken to a number of Mersin old-timers who had known my grandfather, and gathered together photographs and a very few written documents I’d found in a large manila envelope in my grandmother’s sideboard. I had not yet dug out the manuscript that, years previously, Phaedon and I encountered in the depot. The keys to the depot were missing and my mother was looking for them.

  What I knew so far was that Joseph Dakak was born on Christmas day, 1899 – ‘In Capricorn,’ Amy said, ‘the business sign.’ His mother was Caro Raad. The Raads were an old family from the Syrian grande bourgeoisie, but the early death of Caro’s parents left her and her sisters désargentées, and consequently the Raad girls married men who were considerably older than them. Eugénie Raad married into the Kandelaft family, who belonged to the soyeux, silken, class of Lyon and lived in a huge medieval chateau. Caro made a humbler match with Basile Dakak. Basile worked as a transiteur des douanes – a customs agent of some kind – in Iskenderun, a port to the south-east of Mersin; but not much else was known about him or the Dakak family, who were Greek Catholics from Aleppo or, possibly, Damascus.

  Basile and Caro initially lived in Iskenderun, where three children were born: a daughter, Radié, who was five years older than Joseph, who himself was five years older than Georges. In about 1910, shortly after the family had moved to Mersin, Basile Dakak died from tetanus contracted by opening a rusty-
topped bottle of gazeuse; he was perhaps fifty years old. The family was plunged into a financial crisis. Radié was taken by her mother to Istanbul to seek a favour from a cousin who was one of the Sultan’s ministers; they stayed at the Pera Palace, the luxurious hotel built to accommodate European train travellers, and were grandly received. More mundanely, Caro rented out rooms to des gens biens. Her house, a handsome two-storey limestone building, was not in Mersin’s upscale Greek quarter but in the Maronite quarter, not far from the Catholic church. The rental income only went so far, and Caro sold her jewels in order to pay for Joseph’s fees at boarding school in Aleppo. Papa loved her specially as a consequence, my mother said.

  But the money from the sale of the jewels also ran out, and Joseph was forced to leave school at sixteen. It was the Great War, and my grandfather found work as a bookkeeper in Belemedik, a spot in the Taurus Mountains where Ottomans and Germans were building railroad tunnels. After Belemedik, where he picked up German, Joseph worked for a while as an interpreter for the Red Cross; it was unclear for how long and unclear, generally, what he’d done during perhaps the most mysterious time in Mersin’s history, the French occupation from late 1918 to January 1922, a time which I knew nothing about other than that it saw Radié and Georges’ departure from Mersin to France, and Caro’s death, in early 1921, of a brain haemorrhage suffered in a cinema. She was forty-two years old. By 1923, grandfather was left in Mersin without a family.

  Joseph’s sense of abandonment was perhaps reflected in a document, dated 23 March 1923, that I’d found in my grandmother’s apartment. It was a manuscript transcription by Joseph of a poem by a French poet – Jacques [illegible] – called Renoncement, in which the speaker bade an emotional, self-pitying farewell to his departing lover. The poem was of doubtful literary merit and was on the face of it unlikely to have been inspired by Georgette Nader, who was only fourteen in 1923 and who, in her unbudging devotion to Joseph, was the opposite of the poem’s inaccessible, fleeting love object. And yet the fact remained that my grandmother had preserved the poem; and it was in the ’twenties, when she was still a teenager, that she began to carry a torch for Joseph Dakak. She loved his style and his authority, and he was drawn to this attractive and spirited young woman (ten years his junior) who had excelled at school. ‘J’étais sérieuse, pas flirteuse,’ my grandmother had once told me. ‘Je n’étais pas tralala.’ Exactly how Joseph earned his living at this time was not certain – his children could only assume that he was engaged in commerce of some kind – but at any rate, he got by. He was a débrouillard, his niece Ginette had told me, a man who could make do and make things happen. A seemingly eternal romantic involvement began between Georgette and Joseph. It grew to be the talking point of Mersin, since Dakak refused to commit himself to marriage, even when he was well into his thirties and financially secure. He had two main sources of income. The property, which he rented) and initially called the Bellevue Hotel. The clientele consisted mainly of Turkish businessmen: in the two decades before the Second World War, the movement of foreigners into and around the Turkish Republic was strictly controlled. The second source of Joseph’s wealth was income derived from acting for a German company, or companies, building sewer systems in and around Mersin and other Turkish towns. It was this line of work, Oncle Pierre believed, that led Joseph Dakak to go on a business trip to Berlin in around 1934 – a trip about which the only thing known by the family was that it took place.