Blood-Dark Track

by Joseph O'Neill

  However, there was an obstacle. Travel through Syria (i.e., Greater Syria, a territory covering modern-day Syria and Lebanon) and Palestine was under British control, and in order to get to Jerusalem my grandfather required visas from the British Consulate in Mersin. It was far from sure that these would be granted. As recently as the autumn of 1941, Joseph Dakak, who had just opened an import–export office, had unsuccessfully applied to Desmond Doran, the British passport officer in Mersin, for transit visas for a business trip to Egypt. No reason was given for the refusal.

  Not long after this rebuff, Joseph Dakak found himself at the office of Hilmi Bey, the chief of the political section of the Mersin police, on a routine matter. On Hilmi’s desk was a photograph of Doran and a shooting licence; Dakak joked that Doran shouldn’t get the shooting licence until he granted Dakak the visas to Palestine. Hilmi Bey smiled and said nothing.

  A little while later, Dakak bumped into Olga Catton at the Toros Hotel restaurant; she was dining with a friend, Togo Makzoumé. Seeing my grandfather, she snatched her British passport from her bag and taunted him with it: ‘You can’t get a visa, but I can – and a diplomatic one, at that.’

  The next time Dakak visited Hilmi Bey – on another routine matter – the police chief asked why it was that Madame Olga had been able to obtain a visa for Egypt while Dakak had not. Dakak replied that he’d heard that she was off to Egypt on an important mission; and because Olga herself had freely gossiped about her activities, Dakak felt able to ask Hilmi whether it was true that her mission was on behalf of British intelligence. Hilmi Bey simply smiled. Dakak asked a second question: was Togo Makzoumé, who’d lately been Olga’s constant companion at the Toros Hotel, also working for the British? Again, Hilmi Bey gave a knowing smile and said nothing.

  After the war, my grandfather learned that Olga Catton’s job in Egypt was running a women’s internment camp, a post she owed to her lover – the British passport officer, Desmond Doran.

  In any event, in February 1942, my grandfather applied to the British Consulate for visas for Palestine. One morning in early March, he ran into Arthur Maltass, a consular officer, in the market. ‘Mr Doran has gone to Beirut,’ Maltass said. ‘He has asked me to tell you that he’s doing his best to procure your visas.’ A few days later Doran returned from Beirut with visas for Joseph Dakak.

  On the afternoon the visas came through, Joseph Dakak was again approached in the market – this time by a Turk, Osman Emre Bey. ‘So,’ Osman Emre Bey said, ‘you’ve got what you wanted, you’re off to Palestine to make a fortune.’ Dakak made a non-committal gesture. Osman squeezed his arm. ‘It’s thanks to the good word I put in for you with Doran that he was persuaded to grant your visas.’ Osman continued to press against Dakak. ‘As you know,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a lawsuit coming up from trial, and I need to pay the lawyers. Give me money, Dakak. If you don’t, my sister will lose her orchards. You owe it to me.’ Dakak frowned and moved away. ‘I’ll think about it,’ he said. In fact he was reflecting that, far from being indebted to Osman, he was in credit to the tune of one hundred liras: Osman had yet to repay a loan fully documented by a receipt kept in Dakak’s office. But Osman wasn’t going to be fobbed off. The next day, and the day after that, he came to the hotel and repeated his demands for money. Finally, to be shot of the man, Dakak said, ‘Look, I don’t have the money at the moment. I’ll think about it when I get back from Palestine.’ Agitated, Osman said, ‘But that’s no good to me, my trial won’t wait, I need the money now.’ ‘I told you, I don’t have it,’ Dakak said brusquely. At that, Osman Emre Bey turned around and left in a fury.

  On 24 March 1942, Joseph Dakak departed for Palestine. To cover his expenses he carried £150 obtained from the Ministry of Finance. He travelled, first class, on the Taurus Express.

  A couple of things need to be made clear. First: the incidents described above come straight out of Part I of Joseph Dakak’s written account of his arrest and imprisonment, which he entitled The Departure. Second: although I’d rediscovered and photocopied the entire testimony in the summer of 1995, it was not until January 1996 that I began to have access to its contents, and then only in instalments. From time to time I received in the post a chunk of text translated from Turkish into French by my aunt Amy – who, like her brother and sister, had never read the papers before. ‘It’s going slowly,’ Tante Amy said when she called me from her home in Geneva. ‘It isn’t easy work, you know.’ She made a throaty noise, and I realized that she was struggling with tears. ‘Anyway, you’ve got everything I’ve done so far. I’ll send the rest to you as soon as I can.’

  A photograph stapled to a train pass dated 7 March 1941 (issued in the name of Joseph Dakak, and not his new name, Dakad) helped me to guess at the image my grandfather projected as he took his seat on the Taurus Express. The photograph showed a man wearing a double-breasted, chalk-striped grey suit, a white handkerchief in his breast pocket, a white shirt with a buttoned-down collar, and a tie with diagonal stripes. His hair, still not grey, was brushed immaculately back and his moustache was trim. His fellow passengers would have received the impression of a gentleman travelling on business had it not, perhaps, been for this feature: dark circular sunglasses that covered his eyes and gave him a cool, somewhat sinister look; to those of a dramatic cast of mind, the look of a spy.

  This was not as fanciful as one might think. In 1942, mystique and the promise of adventure were attached to train journeys. Illicit romantic encounters, skulduggery in the dining-car, identical suitcases exchanged on steaming platforms, cat-and-mouse in the corridors of trembling wagons: how many old movies and books contained such tropes? In 1949, for example, a British soldier called Richard Pearse published an idiosyncratic memoir of his wartime experiences entitled Three Years in the Levant, and it was clear that he, at least, saw spies everywhere. A member of the Field Security Service of the Intelligence Corps, he served for a time as a security controller on board the Taurus Express. It was a crucial railway connection. Excluding the Far East, there were four frontiers between Allied-held territory and neutral states: the border in Ireland; the Russian–Turkish frontier; the Iraqi–Turkish frontier; and, last and most important by far, the Syrian–Turkish frontier. Twice a week, this line was crossed by a train from Istanbul to Baghdad via Aleppo, where another train could be caught to Tripoli, Beirut and Jerusalem. In the absence of shipping traffic, the railway served as the funnel for travel from the Far East to the West and from the Northern Mediterranean to the Gulf. As a consequence, the luxury end of the train was occupied, Pearse reported, by ‘Prime Ministers, diplomats, engineers, Arab princes, Turkish princesses, Egyptian professors, mystery men and beautiful blondes (some of the spy fiction type)’. Eastbound travellers came from Germany, Sweden, France and Holland with the latest news from Europe; westbound travellers came from China, Afghanistan, India and Iran. During its transit through northern Syria, the train was sealed and an armed British sentry stood at every door. ‘It was well known,’ Pearse explained, ‘that the Taurus Express had already carried in its luxury sleeping- and restaurant-cars more international agents and spies than any other train in the world.’

  As the train slowly made its way south-east, my grandfather no doubt thought about Georgette, who was eight months pregnant, and the very real chance that he would come home to a second child; about the arrangements made for the care of the hotel and the racehorse in his absence; about the windfall that, all being well, he stood to make from the lemon deal, a capitalistic enrichment of a kind that running a hotel could never produce; and, of course, about the state of the war. My grandfather would have been aware that, in the words of the British Consul in Mersin, Norman Mayers (writing home on 29 March 1942), ‘The rumours are going around of a possible invasion by the Germans of Turkey, or Syria, or what not’. He would have known that the German invasion in the Soviet Union had been checked by the Red Army’s counter-offensives but that there remained a very real risk of a German advance to the oil-ric
h Caucasus and, from there, to Turkey and the Middle East. He would have known that Rommel had taken Benghazi in January 1942 and that a German drive across North Africa, to the Suez Canal and the Holy Land, was apparently imminent.

  Nevertheless, my grandfather went ahead with his venture. When he married, Georgette had made him promise to give up taking business risks – Georgette, the gambler par excellence! – but what possible downside was there to this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? (Joseph had not, incidentally, kept his promise to his wife: unbeknownst to her, he’d dabbled in the tin market and furtively stored away a substantial quantity of the metal.) Moreover, it was exciting to travel to Jerusalem, a city he’d never visited, on the Taurus Express, a train that offered the vivid contrast of wild and beautiful country on the outside and, indoors, polished wood, crisp white sheets, good food and (in these interesting times) stimulating and exotic company. For Joseph Dakak, a man not fully tested by Mersin’s provincial demands, such a trip, in such a milieu, was more than a commercial outing: it represented a fulfilment of his cultural potential. Was he not, after all, a man of the world?

  Joseph Dakak arrived in Beirut at 5 p.m. on 26 March 1942. He deposited his luggage at a hotel and paid a visit to a cousin, Alida Hannah. Alida immediately insisted that Joseph check out of his hotel and stay the night with her and her son, Rico.

  There then occurred the first of a series of encounters between Joseph Dakak and oddly animated, oddly politicized strangers. After dinner, Alida’s neighbour, a Dr Saliba, dropped by for the evening. Dr Saliba, who worked at the American University of Beirut, made it clear in conversation that he was anti-English and pro-German. My grandfather wrote: ‘Since I didn’t care for this subject, I didn’t give Saliba’s utterances much thought; but on reflection, his insistence on manifesting his Germanophilia did seem a little strange.’

  Early the next morning, Dakak travelled in a horse-drawn carriage to the train station. Rico Hannah helped him with his luggage. He advised my grandfather that the place to stay in Jerusalem was the Modern Hotel.

  On train between Haifa and Jerusalem, a stranger engaged Dakak in conversation. Soon Dakak found himself being interrogated in detail about the political situation in Turkey – in such detail, in fact, that he finally promised the stranger that as soon as he returned to Turkey he would be sure to make special inquiries at the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It dawned on the stranger that Dakak was being sarcastic, and he fell silent.

  On 27 March 1942, Dakak arrived in Jerusalem. Perhaps drawn by its name, he went directly to the place recommended to him by Rico – the Modern Hotel. It was there, in the lobby, when he was checking in, that a voice loudly proclaimed, ‘Why, if it isn’t Joseph Dakak! How are you, my dear?’

  Dakak turned to see a woman approaching him. ‘You don’t recognize me?’ she cried. ‘It’s me, Olga, the sister of Nicole Panayoti of Antakya!’

  Dakak knew a Panayoti who ran the Tripoli branch of Catoni, the old Iskenderun shipping agency; but this woman? Then it came back to him: he had met her once in Mersin, a long time ago. She was Olga Husseini, ‘a notorious adventuress’ active in the Arab nationalist movement. Her husband, Mustapha Husseini, was a nephew of Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem. Dakak had heard somewhere that Olga had accompanied her husband to Iraq and even India to whip up support for the Palestinian cause.

  Olga continued to behave like a long-lost friend. She organized a session of concain in Dakak’s honour (‘Maybe,’ my grandfather speculated, ‘she knew that I often played this card-game in Mersin’). The game was spoiled, my grandfather recorded, by Olga and Mustapha’s incessant talk of politics – tirades against the English, advocacy of the Arab movement, praise of the Germans. Turkey, they pronounced, had done well not to declare war on Germany and not to allow itself to become the pawn of the English. It would be better still, they said, if the Turks opened the way for the Germans to come down through Turkey and Syria to the aid of the Palestinians.

  Every time Joseph Dakak tried to change the subject, Olga and her husband returned to it. This state of affairs continued for the remainder of Dakak’s stay at the Modern Hotel. For twenty days, Arab nationalists – all friends of Olga, all pro-German – gathered in the evening and spoke against the English and in favour of the Mufti, who at that time was in Germany.

  In his account, my grandfather did not spell out but certainly knew the essential facts of the Mufti’s situation. Amin el-Husseini received the life appointment of Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921 from Ronald Storrs, the Governor of Jerusalem. If Storrs believed that the responsibilities of office would moderate el-Husseini’s political stance, he was wrong. The Mufti became the leading figure in the Palestinian anti-Zionist movement and was instrumental in the Arab rebellion of 1936. In 1937, facing arrest and imprisonment, he escaped to Beirut, where he continued his political activities. In 1939, he relocated to Iraq and set up a shadow Palestinian government in Baghdad. Then, in May 1941, after participating in the failed uprising against the British in Iraq, the Mufti was forced to go on the run to Teheran. In September 1941, after British and Soviet troops entered Iran and installed Mohammed Reza as Shah, the Mufti disappeared yet again, by now with a bounty of £25,000 on his head. Refused entry into Turkey, he somehow resurfaced in Italy in October 1941. The following month he was in Berlin, where he quickly assumed responsibility for notoriously virulent propaganda broadcasts to the Middle East.

  At a certain point in his testimony, my grandfather suddenly veered to the subject of oranges: it was his habit, he said, always to keep a bowl of these by his bedside at the Modern Hotel. One night, he discarded an orange that had a strange and unpleasant taste. He tried a second orange but it, too, was inedible. Three more oranges were sampled and they all had the same foul taste. That night, Dakak fell violently ill. Suffering from severe stomach pain, diarrhoea and wind, his heart kicking in his chest, he vomited all night. By morning he was exhausted, and he spent the whole day in bed. The following day his stomach ache persisted and he asked Mustapha Husseini to take him to a doctor. Husseini took him to a Dr Dajani, whose surgery was only a hundred metres away. ‘Dr Dajani speaks German very well,’ Husseini said as he escorted my grandfather to the doctor. ‘He studied in Germany.’ It was Dr Dajani’s opinion that Dakak had caught a cold and he prescribed pills for stomach ache. ‘Unfortunately,’ my grandfather wrote, ‘not yet understanding the cause of my problems, I didn’t mention the oranges to the doctor. And yet it certainly was my first poisoning.’

  My grandfather explained this dramatic statement by relating the following incident. One evening, Olga was playing cards with some Greek soldiers who had checked into the Modern Hotel. She called Dakak over to her table. ‘Have you heard the latest?’ she said. ‘Turkey has entered the war.’ ‘I hope that isn’t true,’ a Greek colonel said anxiously. ‘It’ll mean an end to the food parcels I send from Istanbul to my parents in Greece. They’ll starve to death.’ Dakak didn’t get excited. ‘Let’s wait for the official news tomorrow,’ he said; and sure enough, the next day saw no report of any Turkish declaration of war. The whole episode, my grandfather asserted, had been Olga’s attempt to trick him into revealing (by his reaction to the bogus news) whether Turkey would enter the war – and, if so, on whose side.

  It was here that my aunt Amy’s first chunk of translation came to an end, and here, too, that I realized that I was lost – lost in the intricate, cryptic place into which the testimony had dropped me, a zone in which Arab conspirators, Greek soldiers, Turkish secret policemen, Levantine businessmen, British consular officials and German sympathizers loomed and drifted. What was the connection between the events in Mersin (dealings with the British consulate; conversations with the chief of the secret police; an attempted extortion) and Jerusalem (poisonous oranges; Palestinian intrigues)? What linked Olga Catton at the Toros Hotel to Olga Husseini at the Modern Hotel? And what was the significance of the peripheral figures – pro-German Dr Saliba, the inquisitive stranger o
n the Jerusalem train, German-speaking Dr Dajani, cousin Alida? Were we to understand that Alida’s son Rico – who had, after all, advised my grandfather to stay at the Modern Hotel – was somehow in collusion with Olga Husseini’s crowd? And with whom was that crowd in cahoots? I assumed that, as I continued to read the testimony, express answers to these questions would be forthcoming. But they weren’t. It was as if my grandfather never succeeded in gaining a clear perspective on the blurred circumstances leading up to his imprisonment, and that, like a moth that has flown into treacle, he remained forever stuck in the opaque, viscous events he described. Certainly, he never satisfactorily answered the unspoken, anguished questions his story raised: What was behind my downfall? What did I do to deserve this?

  It was my mother who brought up the name Wright. Mr Wright, she said, had been the British consul in Mersin during the war, and occasionally Mamie Dakad had fondly mentioned that this monsieur had assisted her in the matter of her interned husband. ‘Mr Wright was a young man at the time,’ my mother said. ‘You never know, he might still be alive.’

  So in February 1996 – only a few days, incidentally, after a massive explosion in the London Docklands had brought the seventeen-month-old IRA ceasefire to an abrupt and fatal end – I consulted the Diplomatic and Consular Year Book of 1943. I saw that D.A.H. Wright, Vice-Consul in Trebizond, assumed duty as Vice-Consul at Mersin on 5 May 1943, in succession to Norman Mayers.