Blood-Dark Track (32 page)

On the morning of 12 April 1996, I met Florent Arnaud, whom Yves-Marie Villedieu had advised me to speak to about the home at Emmaus. Monsieur Arnaud worked at the offices of the Pilgrims’ Commission in a building across the road from the New Gate, next to the church of Notre Dame de France. He was a man in his fifties, and in his
fonctionnaire
’s blazer and tie and goldrimmed glasses he
displayed a Gallic neatness that set him apart from the sartorial jamboree taking place in the street outside. For eighteen years, he explained, he had been the secretary of the commission that had established relations between Israel and the Vatican. ‘Dakak,’ he said, as he began to flick through the pages of the testimony, ‘is a commonplace name –
un nom banal
. There are plenty of Dakaks in Bethlehem, Muslims, I believe, who mainly work in tourism and often marry foreigners; and are there not Christian Dakaks in Aleppo?’ He read on for a little while, sometimes skipping pages and at other times lingering on paragraphs with eyebrows at a critical arch. I suddenly felt embarrassed for my exposed grandfather. ‘There are certain things about this document that immediately strike me as bizarre,’ Monsieur Arnaud said decisively. ‘Opening an import–export office in late 1941? Applying for a visa to go to Egypt? You’ll excuse me, but that seems to me a little.…’ He pointed a whirling index finger at his temple. Then Arnaud retrieved some typed notes of his own from his desk and, consulting these, began to speak in the manner of somebody giving a lecture. ‘The story of the property of Emmaus-Latrun really begins in the nineteenth century,’ Monsieur Arnaud said. ‘The Crimean War (1856) and the construction of the Suez Canal (1860) led to a great influx of westerners to this area. Among these was the Princesse La Tour d’Auvergne, who lies buried in the Mount of Olives. She summoned a French architect, Bernard Guillemot, from France. It
was Guillemot who, in 1885, carried out the dig which resulted in the discovery of the ruins of the Old Church which you now see at the entrance to the property. At that time, the land, owned by the Carmelites of Bethlehem, was marshy and, aside from a small building occupied by a hermit, deserted.’ Monsieur Arnaud cleared his throat. ‘The Pères de Betharran –’ Monsieur Arnaud said, ‘Betharran being near Lourdes – established themselves in Bethlehem as a consequence of the separation of church and state in France. In 1932 or 1933, they built the house at Emmaus as a holiday retreat. Perhaps it is not quite accurate, therefore, to speak of it as a monastery. At the back of the mind of those building the house was the thought that a carmel might also be built in the grounds; but nothing came of that, apart from a door and archway which you will find in the perimeter walls. I have done a little research of my own,’ Monsieur Arnaud said, ‘into the somewhat neglected architects of the church buildings in the Holy Land. The house at Emmaus was designed by a very fine architect, Favier, whose other buildings include the French consulate in Jerusalem and the carmel of Haifa. The house at Emmaus has several notable features – including, as you will have seen, the magnificent silverwork on the door, made possible by a gift from the Belgian court. Unfortunately, the building is poorly constructed. The land there is at a sharp incline and the earth is unstable and slippery. As a consequence, the house is a
danseuse
. The cellars are now dangerous and have had to be closed, and all of the dividing walls are cracked or broken. Indeed, it is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that the building is in danger of falling down. In 1940,’ Arnaud said, ‘the Pères de Betharran were deported to France or to Italy and the English requisitioned the building. They used it not as a prison camp but, to be exact, as a concentration camp; and it must have been the place where your grandfather was held. After the war ended,’ Monsieur Arnaud said, ‘the Pères did not return. So you see, the drama of the house at Emmaus is perhaps this: that it has never fulfilled its vocation.’

The next day, I drove out to Latrun for a second time. It was another warm and sunny day and the traffic flowed quickly. There was no indication anywhere that, three days before, on 10 April,
Israel had suddenly launched Operation Grapes of Wrath, a ferocious aerial and artillery attack directed at Hezbollah guerrillas in south Lebanon which, by 15 April, would result in the deaths of at least twenty-two people and the displacement of around 400,000. I had personally felt a gust of the political violence stirring in the air. The previous day, 12 April, which was the day after my meeting with Haider Husseini, a bomb exploded directly above the Lawrence Travel Agency in room 27 of the Lawrence Hotel. The explosion shattered every window on the second floor of the hotel, spewing glass on to Salah-a-Din Street, and the doors of all ten rooms on the second floor were ripped from their hinges and scattered. It was first thought that the occupant of room 27, who crawled out of the room covered in blood, was a British citizen called Newman; but investigations would subsequently reveal that the man – who lost his legs, an arm, and the use of his eyes – was a Lebanese Shiite called Hussein Mohammed Hussein Mikdad, and a Hezbollah operative.

I arrived at the junction of Latrun and turned off in the direction of the Trappist monastery. Following a suggestion made by Monsieur Arnaud, I asked the receptionist at the monastery if I might see Brother Guy. ‘The old monk is a simpleton,’ Arnaud had said, ‘but he’s lived in Latrun all his life and might be able to tell you something of interest.’

I had always associated Trappist monks with silence, but Brother Guy – a small, cheerful, bald, physically robust man wearing brown sandals, a stone-coloured ankle-length habit, a black scapula with a hood, and wide brown cincture that tied at the hip – was loquacious and excitable. ‘I saw it all!’ he would exclaim from time to time. ‘
J’ai tout vu!
I’m seventy-one, I’ve been here since I was ten, I tell you I saw it all with my own eyes!’

Brother Guy walked me up towards the top of the hill on which the Trappist monastery was built. He was born in Tripoli, in Lebanon, he told me, and had been brought by his cousin to the monastery as a
juvéniste
. He had only twice left the monastery: to study in Jerusalem, in 1942, and to have a brain operation in France. When a huge bandy-legged lizard scuttled across our path,
Brother Guy noticed my interest and asked in astonishment, ‘You don’t have lizards in London?’

After a few minutes Brother Guy stopped and pointed back to the plain of Ayalon, where Fort Latrun had come into view. ‘I saw them locked up there,’ he exclaimed, waving his arms in excitement. ‘Four thousand Italians, one hundred Germans, one hundred Pétainistes – I saw them for myself. There were executions – an Englishman was executed, a German, an Arab, a Druse, and one other. There was barbed wire everywhere, and Poles guarded the prisoners. There were seven thousand Poles here!’

Presently, the remains of a castle appeared on the other side of a chasm formed by old Ottoman barracks. ‘This is a Crusader castle,’ the monk said. ‘Richard Coeur de Lion played checkers with Saladin right here. The castle was built by Flemish knights in the twelfth century, to guard the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem. That’s where the name
Latrun
comes from, from the name of the castle,
La Tour des Chevaliers
.’

We walked on and reached the very top of the hill. ‘The moment the British left in 1947,’ Brother Guy said, ‘the Arabs built fortifications around this castle. From here the Jordanian artillery, under the command of a German officer, bombarded the Jewish convoys to Jerusalem. The Jews counter-attacked, but it was a disaster. Six hundred Jewish soldiers died on this hill in three hours, as you can see from this commemorative monument.’ Brother Guy gestured at a menhir-like boulder held aloft by two metal prongs.

‘What about the house over there?’ I asked, pointing to the hill of Emmaus. ‘Do you remember anything about that place during the war?’ ‘Well,’ Brother Guy answered, ‘there used to be barbed wire around that house, too. I’m not really sure who was imprisoned in there – top officers, was the rumour. It was a mysterious place. I never went there. It was at Emmaus,’ the monk said, ‘that Jesus manifested Himself to the two disciples and took supper with them. There used to be an Arab village there,’ he added. ‘They were good people, the people of Amwas. Some of them worked at the monastery. In three days, using nine bulldozers, the village was wiped off the face of the earth. The gardens, the olive trees, the
apricot trees, all were churned up and destroyed. The chickens and vegetable plots were buried in rubble. I saw it happen,’ the monk said. ‘I saw it all.’

Brother Guy agreed to accompany me to the house at Emmaus. He turned out to be a knowledgeable guide. As we stood by the ruined basilica just inside the gate of the house, he explained that this was a Byzantine construction from the fifth century, which had been covered seven hundred years later by a Crusader church. ‘Emmaus,’ Guy said, ‘first came to historical prominence in around 165 BC, when Judas Machabeus defeated the Syrians in the famous victory that gave rise to the Jewish feast of Hanukkah. The city was destroyed by Varus, in AD 4, but rose again. The Roman Fifth Legion camped here for two years before attacking Jerusalem in AD 70, and by 223 the Romans had renamed the place Nicopolis. Arab armies established a large military base here in the seventh century, then shortly afterwards a plague broke out and the city emptied. Then it was repopulated and it regained its importance. It was the last station of the Crusaders on their way to Jerusalem in June 1099,’ Brother Guy said.

Standing in the basilica, I looked up the hill of Emmaus and saw once more the mock-battlements of the house appearing just above the tops of thick green trees. Leaving Brother Guy down at the basilica, I set off on foot up one of the pair of driveways that approached the house in two separate curves, like pincers.

I walked up the hill reflecting that I was the first in my family to have parted the thick folds of familial pain that had covered this place; and when I thought about the tears that would come to Mamie Dakad’s eyes at the mere mention of my grandfather’s time here, I became light-headed with sadness. I arrived once more at the house. I thought about ringing the bell and having another look around. There seemed little point. I had been inside once already and, if Florent Arnaud was correct, the cellars in which my grandfather had spent the last months of his internment were now hazardous and out of bounds. The house did not look as though it was in danger of falling down. It exuded solidity and beauty and militaristic Christianity, and there was no sign of its past as
(Arnaud’s term) a concentration camp. But it was certainly here that my grandfather had lived for nearly three years. He had slept and woken in this building, walked these grounds, and surveyed the valley below and the encampments at Latrun, and hated it here. The competition to tell the story of this patch of the planet was intense: the Jews, the Arabs, the British, the Christian churches, the Romans, the French – all had laid narrative claim to Emmaus or Amwas or Nicopolis, and alongside their insistent sagas my grandfather’s small story seemed as miserable and effaceable as graffiti. But I was glad to have made the journey. I felt I was claiming my grandfather and his pain from this beautiful doomed house, and by my presence scrawling on its pristine stone,
Joseph Dakak was here
.

M
y last appointment in Israel was at Shamelech Boulevard, Tel Aviv, where the office of Yitzhak Shamir was situated. Shamir had agreed to see me after I had written to him briefly explaining my inquiries into my grandfathers and asking whether he knew anything about Desmond Doran, the British agent killed by the ultra right-wing guerrilla organization of which he had been a member, Lehi (also known as the Stern Gang). He faxed me back, granting my request for an interview. He added:

A man by the name of Doran was killed in Tel Aviv during 1946–47, when a British intelligence building was blown up in Tel Aviv, as part of the actions against British offices. He worked in this building.

I was already a little surprised at Shamir’s readiness to meet me – ‘he treats his past like a state secret,’ an Israeli historian had cautioned me – and when I reached his office, on the tenth floor of a modern office block, it struck me how low-key, and apparently lax, was the security for a man who presumably knew something about assassination and blowing up buildings. I was shown directly to his room, which was sparsely decorated with a bust of John F. Kennedy, a large flag of Israel that drooped from a pole, and a
shofar in a case. Bright sunlight filtered through the lowered blinds. Shamir, dressed in a grey suit, blue shirt and dark tie, stood up from his chair with a shy hospitable smile, and I immediately saw that this tiny eighty-one-year-old man was in terrific shape – trim, energetic, mobile and, judging by his handshake, strong.

Shamir didn’t have much to say about Doran. ‘Doran personally didn’t interest us,’ he said. ‘The operation was directed against the British intelligence office. It was nothing personal.’ He raised his hands slightly. ‘I wasn’t involved in the operation,’ he said. ‘At that time I was already out of the country, in East Africa.’ In the summer of 1946, Shamir explained, he was deported to Eritrea. He had already, in 1943, escaped from an internment in Palestine, and in Africa, the British felt, the arch-terrorist would be out of harm’s way once and for all. But they were wrong, because Shamir escaped again. Stowed in a compartment in the container of an oil truck, he travelled over a thousand miles across British-controlled Ethiopia to Addis Ababa; and then he traversed another thousand miles to one of the hottest places in the world, the French Overseas Territory of Djibouti. Granted political asylum, he lingered in Djibouti until the French authorities approved his papers and transported him to Toulouse. From Toulouse he went to Paris, and from Paris, via Czechoslovakia, he returned to Palestine.