Blood-Dark Track: A Family History

‘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 twenty 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 first was the hotel, which he founded in 1933 (in the old Nader 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.

Meanwhile, the ’thirties passed and Joseph still clung to his bachelordom. He played the field, rode his horse, and enjoyed his freedom – none of which prevented him from exercising dominion over Georgette. He made her quit her job helping out in a shop, and when she played cards he would appear at the door and simply say (in Arabic), ‘I have come.’ Unless she was losing heavily and needed to play on, she would gather up her chips and leave. Then, in 1939, when he was thirty-nine and she thirty, they married. ‘Enfin! Enfin! Enfin!’ my grandmother’s friend Lolo Naccache exclaimed when she me told the story. ‘Seventeen years he kept her waiting – seventeen years!’

Soon after the marriage came the Second World War; and in 1942, Joseph’s mysterious incarceration.

In 1945, he returned to Mersin from Palestine by train. My mother, five years old, accompanied her mother to the railway station to meet her father. He alighted from the train and walked along the platform towards them weeping.

Afterwards, Joseph could not do very much. He opened an import – export office, but the enterprise failed. He was distressed and gloomy. For a year or so he compulsively stalked backwards and forwards for a distance of around twelve feet, staring at the ground as he strode and swivelled, his hands behind his back, his face bunched into that dark, forbidding expression. He began to receive treatment for heart problems.

The one document surviving from this time was his recipe for marmalade to be made from six bitter oranges (turunç), three sweet oranges, and one lemon.

In 1947, Joseph accompanied Lina to Lyon, where she was due to start at a new school. They rowed out to the ship in a lighter loaded with trunks and cases filled with food for the French relations, who were subject to rationing. It was a therapeutic voyage for my grandfather. He went to Paris, and he visited his brother and sister in Lyon, from where he wrote a letter home in October. The first part of the letter was a rushed, somewhat curt response to three letters he had received from Georgette – ‘I did not write a long letter from Paris as I had hoped, so don’t expect one.’ He explained that his return would be delayed by a week due to a cholera outbreak in Alexandria, and confirmed that he would still be arriving in Mersin via Beirut. He assured his wife that Lina was very happy and that she needn’t worry about the little girl. Then the letter changed tack and concerned itself with a problem at the hotel that the Vali, Tewfik Sirri Gür, had brought to Joseph’s attention, namely that complaints had been received about hotel guests going to the hotel’s communal toilet wearing their pyjamas.

Returning to Mersin with Tarzan the Great Dane, Joseph concentrated on the business of the hotel. Life, as they say, returned to normal. Joseph opened a patisserie at the hotel, complete with a Greek chef, but it didn’t work out. ‘He was ahead of his time,’ my mother said. Mersin changed only very slowly, and in letters written at the Toros Hotel in 1954, Freya Stark described the town as ‘just two streets, one tidy and one dingy, and merchants’ houses in gardens beyond.… It must be like the age-old life of little ports here … [I]n another year or so the big roads will be made and even more changes. I am only just in time.’

The final document I had found in my grandmother’s apartment was dated 1 November 1959 and written in French. It was from a Walther Ülrich in Weissenfels (a mining town near Leipzig, in East Germany), with whom Joseph had not been in touch for ‘at least ten years’. Neither I nor anyone else had heard of Walther Ülrich, and all I could deduce from the letter was that he’d visited Mersin in the past and that Joseph had in turn visited Herr Ülrich at his home in Saxony – presumably in 1934, the year of my grandfather’s trip to Germany. Walther Ülrich informed Joseph that he and his wife had become old (seventy-five and sixty-five respectively) but were still healthy. ‘You know that I lost my boys and all my fortune in this terrible war,’ he wrote. ‘I am thus forced to work right to the end, and count myself lucky to still have my position at the office.… And you, my friend, how are you and your family? How is business and who is still alive of those good people whom we count as our mutual friends, the Brazzafolis, Gioskun, etc. etc.? Much has changed in the world since we had the pleasure of your visit.…’

Indeed, by 1960, Mersin had finally started to change, and at the forefront of the developments was the new hotel, which was being built with a low-interest government loan procured thanks to the intervention of my grandfather’s good friend, Mr Okyayüz, the Vali. That year also saw the dramatic death of Tarzan. The dog was dying of cancer and it was decided to put him down in the mountains near Gözne, where he had been happiest. Joseph, distraught and tearful, did not have the heart to shoot the animal himself and instructed two locals to perform the task. They took Tarzan to a neighbouring valley and shot him there. Unfortunately, they botched the job. Tarzan survived and, bleeding from the gunshot wound, somehow managed to walk the three kilometres back to his master’s summer house, where he lay on the steps and died.

My grandfather never spoke about the war. Once, when a friend broached the subject, it brought tears to his eyes. ‘Leave this old story alone,’ he said. ‘Laisse tranquille cette vieille histoire.’

I closed my notebook and got to my feet. It was nearly midday. The time had come to see Salvator Avigdor. I walked down past the reception and headed out into the heat.

A visitor to Monsieur Salvator, who lives with his wife in an apartment not a pistachio shell’s throw from the Greek Orthodox Church, will quickly learn that he is a survivor of a multiple bypass operation (four veins removed from his leg and transplanted into his heart) and brain surgery (a tumour ‘the size of an orange’ excised). Monsieur Salvator, pale and contented and bald as a melon, will tell you that his family comes from Adrianople (Edirne), in European Turkey; that his uncle was a tailor to Sultan Abdul Hamid II and was awarded a gold medal (which Monsieur Salvator can show you if you so wish) for services rendered; that his father was a watchmaker with a sideline in revolvers; that his son went to Harvard and now runs a huge garment business in the United States; that another uncle worked the boat from Marseille to the United States and spoke twenty-four languages. Sipping a limonata and mopping his brow – a surgical scar runs across his cranium like a bicycle track – Monsieur Salvator will tell you these things and indeed many other things that may come to his mind: his loquaciousness, he explained to me, was a side-effect of the heart surgery.

Monsieur Salvator said that he and his wife were the last two Jews left in Mersin. The synagogue had disappeared, as had the seventy Jewish families who lived in the town when Salvator joined the Toros Hotel as an eighteen-year-old on 9 September 1935 – a time when Mersin was a marvel, Monsieur Salvator said, a cosmopolis where you’d hear three words of French, four words of Turkish and three words of Arabic, and when Joseph Dakak, a punctilious but fair boss, caroused until three or four in the morning and didn’t emerge from his rooms in the hotel loft until noon. There was a staff of five: a Christian, a Muslim woman, a Kurd, and two Jews. Monsieur Salvator, the bookkeeper, found the ethnically diverse atmosphere uncongenial.

In 1940, Monsieur Salvator recalled with a sigh, the Toros Hotel was the place to be. It had twenty rooms and a first-class restaurant with a chef who had cooked for Mustafa Kemal. On Sunday nights there was dancing to tunes played by musicians from Stamboul on the terrace overlooking the sea. The hotel buzzed with Mersin society, travellers and foreign so-called businessmen. Leaning forward with not a little excitement in his voice, Monsieur Salvator revealed that the Turkish authorities forced Monsieur Dakak to engage a man – Moharem, he was called – who was an agent of the Turkish secret police and whose job it was to spy on the goings-on at the hotel; that an Austrian resident of Mersin called Gioskun Parker, mentioned in Herr Ülrich’s letter as a friend of Joseph, was an agent of the Germans and quite possibly a double agent of the Turks; that in 1940, Monsieur Salvator quit his job because the secret police wanted him to intercept letters and inform on the guests staying at the hotel. The most eminent of these guests was the German ambassador, Franz von Papen. He, Salvator Avigdor, a Jew, had personally accompanied His Excellency and Frau von Papen on a motoring trip down the coast in the direction of Silifke, stopping at the spectacular caverns known as Heaven and Hell.

I asked Salvator whether my grandfather ever expressed opinions about the war.

‘Never. It was out of the question. At the hotel, there would be a German here, an Englishman there, and an Italian in between. You couldn’t open your mouth. You never knew who was working for who.’

I said, ‘What about my grandfather? Do you think he worked for anyone?’

Monsieur Salvator said, ‘Well, he was Germanophile, that’s for sure. His German was fluent, and he’d speak to the German visitors at the hotel.’ He continued pleasantly, ‘I personally think that he probably did work for the Germans. You see, once you’ve given a little information, that’s it, you’ve crossed the line.’

Monsieur Salvator didn’t elaborate on his speculation. Instead he stood up and made an aerobatic motion with his hand. ‘Every day an Italian plane flew over the port, counting the ships. You must understand, Mersin was an important place. It was full of intrigue, like Lisbon. Mersin,’ Mr Salvator said, pointing upwards, ‘was like Casablanca.’

Walking back to the hotel from Monsieur Salvator’s, I reflected that pretty much everything I had heard about Joseph suggested that he saw himself as a man apart, and indeed that seeing himself must have been an essential procedure of his psyche. It wasn’t that, Narcissus-like, he fell in love with his own reflection; it was rather that, in order to generate and project an image for which there was no local model, he would have needed to dream up an imagined version of himself by which he might gauge his style and conduct. To judge from his reputation as a self-cultivator, this relationship with his imaginary double must have been a powerful one; perhaps as powerful and enduring as any he knew. The question was: what was the character of this modular other? Who was he?

The notion of my grandfather as a fantasist made me think of certain other fantasists I encounter in my working life – the kind who wind up on the wrong end of allegations of fraud. What often marks the downfall of these men – almost invariably they are men – is not a cold ambition to enrich themselves at the expense of others but a fatal susceptibility to their own deceptions: a crazy, romantic belief that their get-rich-quick schemes, however flawed and tricky, will result in champagne for all. Could the same thing have happened to Joseph? Could some dreamlander’s misapprehension have led him astray – into espionage and subsequent imprisonment? I thought about what Monsieur Salvator had said about Casablanca. I was, of course, thinking about the movie, about a well-dressed man in a white tuxedo who tries to steer a neutral and profitable course through a sea of vultures, gamblers, desperadoes, lovers, black marketeers, drinkers, secret agents, beauties, idealists, rumour-mongers. Humphrey Bogart, as Rick, the owner of Rick’s Café Américain, had been almost exactly my grandfather’s age; and Casablanca was set in December 1941, precisely when my grandfather was running the Toros Hotel and, unless I was mistaken, only months before he was arrested.

I ran into my mother at the Toros Hotel reception. ‘Did you find the key to the depot?’ I asked. My mother reached into her hip pocket. ‘I have it here,’ she said.

With the key in my hand I ran up the hotel’s handsome granite stairs just as, twenty-one years before, I ran up the stairs clutching a telegram from Ireland that a waiter had handed me. I was in tears as I sprinted up to my grandmother’s apartment that day, because the telegram from my uncle said, ‘DAD DIED YESTERDAY STOP FUNERAL ON SATURDAY STOP BRENDAN’.

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Now never marry a soldier,

a sailor or a marine,

But keep your eye on the Sinn Féin boy