Blood-Dark Track

by Joseph O'Neill

  Jerusalem was more beautiful than I had ever imagined: a place of elevations and drops and, at its centre, where the walled Old City rose out of the green, bucolic depths of sheep-strewn valleys, extraordinary juxtapositions of pastoral and urban scenes. There was something else that I hadn’t anticipated. Because of planning regulations introduced by the British and evidently still in force seventy-five years later, buildings in the central districts of the city were constructed, or at least clad, in limestone, and as a consequence Jerusalem still presented to the world the pale stone exterior that used until a few decades ago to be so typical of the cities of the Levant. Ambling in tranquil, sunlit nineteenth-century districts in the New and Old Cities, I was overcome by visual and atmospheric echoes of old Mersin. It felt faintly absurd to apprehend the city in such humble terms, but as I walked amongst the dramatic throngs in the Old City – outlandishly outfitted monks and clerics, minuscule and bonneted old Greek women dressed entirely in black, East African pilgrims in long robes and turbans – and noted with amazement that the Arab, Christian, Jewish and Armenian quarters actually contained ancient populations of Arabs, Christians, Jews and Armenians (each attired in distinctive robes and hats and shawls), it occurred to me that this was precisely the vivid commingling of races and nationalities and religions and languages that had so powerfully struck travellers to nineteenth-century Mersin. The link between this city and the little Turkish port of my childhood became clear: they were both profoundly Ottoman places. The gulf between modern, uniform Turkey and the culturally variegated Levant in which my grandfather grew up revealed itself. To trace his fate, I was beginning to realize, I needed to look deeper into that Ottoman world – in which, after all, Joseph Dakak had passed the first third of his life.

  I stayed in the New Imperial Hotel, an attractive edifice in the Parisian style situated just by Jaffa Gate, in the Christian quarter of the Old City. Built in 1889 for Greek Orthodox pilgrims, the hotel was still the base for flocks of Greek women arriving for the Greek Orthodox Easter, who every morning and evening cawed and rustled in the hotel’s cavernous salon. There were remnants of the ‘Deli’ that used to operate here, and a sign persisted in proclaiming the availability of non-existent BEVERAGES! and SHAKES and DELI-SANDWICHES. On the balcony, lantern spheres advertised the croissants, brioches, cakes and ice-creams of yesteryear. The hotel motto – in English, like the other old signs – was painted on the wall of the ground floor entranceway: Yesterday is already a dream and tomorrow is only a vision, but today well lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope.

  My main objective in coming to Israel was to track down, first, the Modern Hotel in Jerusalem, and second, the monastery at ‘Emuas’ where my grandfather had been locked up for the best part of three years. With respect to the former, I held out little hope: investigations I’d made from England had made it pretty clear that the Modern Hotel was no longer in business and had, as far as one could tell, entirely disappeared. The owner of the New Imperial Hotel, a courteous man in his fifties named Mr Dajani, had no knowledge of the Modern Hotel, and neither had the people I spoke to at the Ron Hotel or the Golden Jerusalem Hotel or the Kaplan Hotel or the American Colony Hotel or the King David Hotel.

  Meanwhile, I ran into an unexpected difficulty regarding the monastery: there was no sign, on the detailed maps I consulted, of a village called Emuas or Emwas on the road between Jerusalem and Ramle, and all that the young Jewish woman I spoke to at the Tourist Information Office could suggest was that I go to Damascus Gate. ‘Ask the Arabs there,’ she said; ‘they may be able to help you.’ Although puzzled about why she would think that random Arabs might know more than a tourist information expert, I went to Damascus Gate, a crowded, rowdy place where minibuses to Ramallah and other Palestinian destinations gathered. Fairly soon, a scrum of experts had gathered around my road map; but none could point to the place called Emuas. ‘Go here,’ one man said; ‘go there,’ another said, indicating different points in the map. Confused, I thanked my would-be helpers and returned to my car to mull over the conflicting advice I’d received. Just as I was opening the door of the car, a man who had not previously spoken urgently approached me and said with conviction, ‘Go to Latrun; Emuas [he pronounced it Amwas] is there’; and having no better lead, I followed his advice.

  It was a faultless, warm day. The drive to Latrun was on the Tel Aviv highway, a poppy-lined road that ran through a series of gulches and ravines, their sun-bleached rockfaces decked out with cypress groves, clusters of pines, and acacia bushes with flowers the colour of New York taxis. Eventually this rocky landscape suddenly gave way to a vast plain of chequered farmland. LATRUN, a signboard announced. I swung off the highway. Before me, on a raised plateau, stood an unpleasant block-like building with two watchtowers and fortified perimeters. I decided to drive over.

  I stopped in the car-park of the military base. There were many Jewish families around, unpacking picnics and trooping through an entrance in the fifteen-foot-high stone wall that surrounded the base; above the wall, a row of tanks loomed and flags of Israel hung from thirty flagpoles. ‘Is there a place here called Emuas?’ I asked an official-looking middle-aged woman standing at the entrance with a walkie-talkie. The woman shook her head. ‘There is somewhere called Emmaus, I think, over there, maybe’ – she pointed back across the highway – ‘but not Emuas. Emuas I don’t know about. This place, Latrun,’ she said, ‘was the fort and detention centre of the British in the Mandate days. Prisoners of war – Germans, Italians – and Zionist guerillas were held captive here during the Second World War. Nowadays, it is a tank museum and memorial to the valour of the Armoured Corps Division of the Israeli Defence Forces. Desperate and repeated efforts were made to capture Latrun from the Arabs in 1948,’ my guide said, ‘but these failed, and many men lost their lives. Over there’ (the woman gave an indication with her head) ‘is a wall where you will see the names of those who died. In the museum is a computer where family and friends have typed in their memories of the dead soldiers. Not all of the dead have been remembered,’ the woman said, adjusting her glasses. ‘Many of the forces that attacked Latrun were fresh from Europe and had not even been officially registered anywhere before they came here and were killed.’ The woman’s speech was blunt and grooved, and she had plainly made this talk before. ‘It was not until the Six Day War in 1967,’ she said, ‘that Latrun, and the Latrun corridor to Jerusalem, fell to Jewish troops. Latrun was a strategically crucial spot, since it controlled the main supply route into West Jerusalem.’ She pointed back at the highway I had driven down, where the road entered a narrow pass between two wooded hills. Then I noticed on the southern hill, gleaming amongst trees, a spectacular brick building with over forty west-facing windows, a red roof, and a towering chapel: a monastery, surely.

  I thanked the woman for her help and went quickly back to my car. In a state of some excitement, I drove into the monastery’s grounds and went slowly uphill through beautifully tended gardens dense with trees and vivid flowers. Then shadowy cloisters and huge columns appeared; this was a grand, almost palatial place. In the reception area, I found a young man, a French speaker, selling wine and honey produced by the Trappist monks who, he told me, had inhabited the monastery since its foundation in the 1890s. He flatly denied that the place had been a British camp during the war. ‘Never. Impossible.’ I was baffled. So where was the village of Emuas, then? ‘On the other side of the highway,’ he said, confirming what the woman at Fort Latrun had said. He gave me a careful look. ‘To be accurate, it’s not a village any more. It is a park. I think that the Israelis destroyed the village in 1967.’ ‘Is there nothing left, nothing at all?’ ‘There’s an ancient basilica there,’ the young man told me, ‘and, I think, a house.’

  I got back into the car and, a couple of minutes later, crossed the highway. After coming to the park mentioned by the receptionist at Latrun Monastery – Canada Park, built and planted thanks to the donations o
f Canadian Jews – I doubled back on myself. Not far from the highway, I noticed for the first time a gateway to a property. There was a sign – La Communité des Béatétudes, Emmaus Nicopolis – and, beyond an open gate, an ancient ruin of some sort, in which a priest and a group of tourists bowed their heads in prayer. That ruin was, presumably, the basilica that the man at the Trappist monastery had mentioned. Then, as I got out of the car, I caught a glimpse of something further up on the hill: an elegant building of white stone, surrounded by cypress trees. I walked past the tourists up the steep and curved gravel path that led to the yard at the front of the building, a two-storey block flanked by two protruding towers. On the ground floor were eight arched and barred windows and a huge front door. On the first floor, a handsome terrace, fronted by a series of columns and arches, was recessed into the building; circular, porthole-like windows gave on to the terrace from the central block. Crenellations ran along the top of the frontage, giving the house – which was in immaculate condition – an austere, embattled look that spoke of Crusades and infidels. I noticed that the stones surrounding the well in the front yard were arranged into the shape of a cross.

  I climbed the steps to the front door, a grand affair with enormous silver hinges. I rang the bell hanging by the door. A man in his forties – he introduced himself as Yves-Marie Villedieu – appeared, and I briefly explained the purpose of my visit. Monsieur Villedieu said that the building might indeed have been used by the British during the war but that he himself knew little of its history. In that regard, I ought to speak to Monsieur Florent Arnaud, he said, scribbling a Jerusalem address on a piece of paper. Nowadays, he explained, the building housed a religious community consisting of two French families (whose children attended the French school in Jerusalem), some monks and some nuns. ‘Here, let me show you,’ he said, and he led me to a modern chapel that was incorporated into the west wing of the house, a simple, elegant space with new stained-glass windows. Then I followed Monsieur Villedieu out of the chapel and into the cool of the house’s spacious entrance hall. Monsieur Villedieu said that I could not see the private areas of the building but was welcome to go up to the terrace. We went up the stone staircase to the first floor. Overhead, light flooded through the high porthole windows; underfoot, black and white tiles gleamed. I could have been in a clinic. I came to the terrace, maybe eighty feet lengthways and ten feet deep, and rested my hands against the thick ledge. Below was the gravel yard where I had stood minutes before, and, in the distance, clearly visible between the tops of palm trees, cypresses and fruit trees that grew about the house, Fort Latrun, its shrunken tanks squatting like cockroaches. The Fort was just like its counterpart at the Curragh: the same strategic location and coldly functional set-up, the same phantasmal presence of the British and their internment camps.

  The grounds beyond the immediate vicinity of the house consisted of a few acres of thickly overgrown meadowland that ran downhill to a boundary of stone walls. If there had been a prison here during the war, all of this vegetation would have been cut down, which meant that the Latrun detention camps, with their floodlights, barbed wire and trudging columns of prisoners, would have been a constant and oppressive spectacle. I tried to blot out the birdsong, the smell of wildflowers, the all-enfolding serenity. I tried to imagine another scene: the bewildered figure of my grandfather, unaccustomed to manual labour, toiling away on the hillside in the heat, in the rain. I tried to imagine him, with his troublesome heart, struggling up and down the stairs I had just climbed. It was not easy. The flowering greenery, the odours and sounds of nature, the cool, all had a tranquillizing effect; and, of course, I wasn’t even sure that my grandfather had been here at all.

  I left the house and drove around Canada Park, looking for a sign of vanished Emuas. Following a trail inside the park, I travelled through an almost dreamlike setting of limestone escarpments, cultivated terraced hillsides, copses, and wild meadows where storks paused in the grass and cows and sheep grazed. During twenty minutes of driving through a landscape apparently untouched since biblical times, no human being appeared other than soldiers of the Israeli army packed into a patrol jeep.

  Back in the clamour of Jerusalem the following day, I paid a visit to Haidar Husseini, who, I’d been told, was a member of the famous family of the old Mufti, Haj Amin el-Husseini. I found Mr Husseini in his office at the Lawrence Travel Agency, which was situated on the ground floor of the Lawrence Hotel, on Salah-a-Din Street in East Jerusalem. A distinguished-looking man in his sixties wearing a blazer, a grey-checked cardigan and a purple tie, he was not familiar with the names of Mustapha and Olga Husseini. However, when I mentioned that Mustapha and Olga liked to meet with Arab nationalists at the Modern Hotel, he interrupted me and said, ‘The Modern Hotel? I remember it well. It was on Mamilla Street, and if I remember rightly it was the property of the Islamic waqf; the lease was in the name of Hassan Ahweida. Mamilla in those days was the centre of Arab Jerusalem, a very busy place,’ Mr Husseini said. ‘Near the hotel there used to be a patisserie and a coffee house, and every day there was a card-game next door, at the house of Zeronian, whose children, Jerry and Diana, I knew well. They fled after the occupation in 1948. We all left the area at that time, of course. I was young, fourteen or fifteen years old; my father had been a judge in the High Court of Justice under the British Mandate.’ Haidar Husseini picked up a pen and paper. Prominently displayed behind his chair, I noticed, was a photograph of the travel agent shaking hands with Yasser Arafat. ‘The Modern Hotel would have ceased to operate in 1948, I believe,’ Mr Husseini continued. ‘It was a three-star hotel, in today’s terms. You’ll see it if you go to Mamilla street; it is still standing, but it is old and empty. I think the Israelis intend to knock it down.’ Mr Husseini drew me a map. ‘This is Mamilla, here,’ he said, sketching. ‘And here’ – he made an X – ‘is the building you are looking for.’

  I walked back to the New Imperial Hotel and, sitting in its gloomy, chair-infested old saloon, I reread my grandfather’s testimony for any mention of Mamilla Street. There was no such reference, but something else did catch my attention. When my grandfather had been ‘poisoned’ by the oranges he’d eaten, he was taken to see a Dr Dajani, whose surgery was about 100 metres from the Modern Hotel. Dajani: wasn’t that the name of the proprietor of the very hotel I was sitting in? It was a long shot, but I went to see him in his office and asked him if, by chance, he could throw light on the matter. He said unhesitatingly, ‘that doctor would be my uncle, Dr Mahmoud Dajani.’ ‘Did he speak German, or did he study in Germany?’ I asked, remembering my grandfather’s assertions to this effect. ‘He spoke a little German, perhaps,’ Mr Dajani said doubtfully, ‘but he was not educated in Germany. But I am sure my uncle would be your doctor,’ Mr Dajani said conclusively. ‘There would be no other Dr Dajani. He had a large house, now knocked down. He ran a clinic from there. It was down below, on Mamilla Street.’

  Mamilla Street was a five-minute walk west and downhill from the New Imperial. It ran east from the junction of King David and Agron streets to Jaffa Road. Completely blocked off from pedestrians and road traffic by metal barricades, Mamilla was a street of ruins. Its western side had been completely razed, leaving nothing but mounds of weedy earth, and only a handful of buildings on its eastern side were standing: crumbling arcades, commercial premises and houses that dated back, I guessed, to the last decades of the Ottoman empire. The Modern Hotel was an elegant stone wreck. Shuttered-up old shops took up the ground floor, and the hotel, running to a width of seven shops, occupied the two storeys above. Immediately behind it was a wasteland, and next door was a fine, square, gutted house – the Zeronian place that Mr Husseini had mentioned? – with tired red tiles still adhering to its rooftop. All that remained of the Modern Hotel’s roof was a disintegrating lattice of timber beams. The arching windows of the hotel were tall and windowless and dark, and empty doorways opened onto the vestiges of balconies. The occupants of the west-facing rooms had no doubt sat o
n those balconies looking down on the crowded road and pavements below, a spectacle of urban vitality that, peering on tiptoes over the barricade from the street below fifty years after the event, was hard to envisage. My difficulty was more than topographical. Mamilla Street not only fizzled out into a cul-de-sac of barriers and earthworks but also, it seemed, into a historical deadend. For nearly fifty years, the ghostly thoroughfare had borne witness to the territorial and moral convulsions of 1948, when Mamilla, the venue of anti-Jewish riots, became a dangerous no-man’s-land occupied by squatters and overshadowed by Jordanian guns; and 1967, when Jerusalem was ‘reunified’ by Israeli forces and the Mamilla squatters were controversially and forcibly removed to high-rise buildings on the edge of the city. But now a decisive rescripting seemed afoot. I could see that a road-building operation was underway at the bottom of Mamilla Street, and the long, spindly arm of a red crane hovered in the sky, a wire line dropping from its tip like a line of ink from a nib in flow. The line reached down into a body of pale concrete rising just below Mamilla Street, where signs in Hebrew and English announced the construction of a new, truly modern hotel. The plan, I discovered from the Jerusalem Post, was that within two years the Mamilla neighbourhood – a century ago ‘the beating social and commercial heart of Jerusalem’ where ‘Jews and Arabs once cohabited as merchants, shopkeepers and customers’ – would ‘once again brim with stores, hotels, entertainments and sidewalk cafés’. Supermarkets, a park, hotels, underground car-parks and luxury apartments with German kitchens would be built on the sites of old Israeli and Jordanian sniper outposts. It remained to be seen, the Post reported, to what extent the development would, as was hoped, form a bridge between the Arab and Jewish communities. There was no mention of the fate of the building of the Modern Hotel.