Blood-Dark Track (6 page)

The significance of this comment would only later become evident to me. My immediate attention was fixed on the next sentence: ‘A great future evidently lies in store for the port of Mersina,’ wrote Lortet, ‘once [blank] is no longer an obstacle to the creation of lines of communication to the surrounding valleys.’

The blank was arresting. Three or four words had been removed from the text – scraped away so as to leave a vacancy. A few pages later, there was a second such intervention. The port of Alexandretta, Lortet wrote, was a dreadful settlement lost in swampland and half-invaded by green, pestilential pools. The majority of its houses were huts swarming with pale, emaciated wretches, the children particularly afflicted by typhoid fever and dysentery. ‘And yet all it would take is a few channels and a few swings of a pick to make all of these stagnant waters run to the sea and save these pour souls condemned to an early death. But this work will never be done [blank].’ Here, three whole lines were scraped away. What instrument the censor had used for this purpose, I couldn’t be sure; perhaps a knife, or a specialized print-scraping instrument from a censor’s tool-kit of effacers. I couldn’t say who the censor was, when he did his work, or what (presumably anti-Turkish) sentiments he obliterated. Nor, for that matter, did I know how this book had come to be in the possession of Joseph Dakad’s brother, Georges, from whom my grandmother had received it as a gift. I meant to ask Mamie Dakad about this, as I meant to ask her many other questions; but, a reluctant interrogator, preoccupied by swimming and eating, I never did. In January 1995, while I was in India on my honeymoon, my grandmother died and was buried next to her husband.

The funeral procession of Joseph Dakad is recorded in a photograph. My grandfather’s coffin is being shouldered by six men of
differing heights, a variation that is causing them a little discomfort. Employees from the hotel lead the way, holding small bunches of flowers. My grandmother, wearing dark glasses and a black headscarf, is escorted by Pierre. Amy is also there, at her mother’s shoulder; behind them, an assortment of family friends. The cortège is on Atatürk Çaddesi. It has come from the deceased’s house and is heading for the Toros Hotel, still a few hundred metres away. Afterwards, at the Catholic Church,
le père
François will say prayers for my grandfather’s departed soul. It is a cold day, and the mourners are warmly clothed. As is often the case in Turkey when a private affair is being played out in the street, members of the public are making their presence felt, some simply looking on, others respectfully issuing instructions and hand-signals to the coffin-bearers. The sorrowful, dramatic tableau might be a scene from a film I watched from the rear window of the priest’s house.

The cemetery in which Joseph is buried lies between the northern edge of the city and the foothills of the mountains. The burial ground is bordered by enormous cypress trees, and inside, more evergreens throw cooling shadows, bestowing on the graveyard the tranquillity and amenity of woodland. Nearest the entrance are the Christian dead. They lie in the oldest and best plots with their un-Turkish names: Mavromati, Levante, Butros, Nader, Naccache, Chalfoun, Rickards, Saad, Del Conte. Among these mausoleums is a raised box-like structure of grey-white marble, about three feet high, ten feet wide and twelve feet long. It is enclosed by a specially planted thicket of twelve pine trees that shed needles on the surface of the tomb; young boys unobtrusively present in the cemetery hose these away in the hope of a tip. A pale marble cross rises from the tomb, and beneath the cross appears the Turkish phrase
Dakad Ailesi
: the Dakad Family.

The names of the individual dead are not inscribed on the tomb, but I am told that my grandmother lies there with two of her sisters, Isabelle and Alexandra; two brothers, Anton and Joseph; and, probably (no one is quite sure), her mother, Nezha Nader (
née
Dibo), commonly known as Teta (Arabic for grandma) and posthumously nicknamed Madame Promenade on account of her
fondness for taking strolls. Amidst this crowd of Nader dead lies only one born Dakad: Joseph.

Actually, that is not strictly accurate. My grandfather was born Joseph
Dakak
(itself a transformation of a gargle of Arabic,
da’a
, which means ‘smith’). He changed his name in around 1939, the year he married. He wanted to bear the same name as his younger brother, Georges, who’d emigrated to France and amended Dakak to the more French-sounding
Dacade
. Despite his name-change, Joseph would still refer to himself and be known as Dakak.

For the record, Joseph was first buried in an old Nader plot which dated back to 1892; then, when the preparation of the new plot – which he had acquired himself – was completed, he was reburied. It is doubtful that many more of his descendants will join him in the family tomb. Pierre is in Paris, Amy in Geneva, my mother in The Hague; and only two of these three’s eleven children are still in Mersin. The city’s other Christian families have splintered in the same way to the United States of America, Canada, Malaysia and (in the case of the Chaldaeans, who emigrate in great numbers) Germany. On top of these dispersions, religious and cultural migrations: the remaining young, my own generation, are now married to and loved by Muslims, and if they speak French, it is as a frail, diminished third language, after Turkish and English. Arabic, the oldest tongue of all, is vestigial, restricted to the foodstuffs that continue to appear at dinner tables:
muhshi, fassoulia, kibbe, tabbouleh, siyadiyeh
. Thus the distinctively Christian community is disappearing, disappearing together with the place that it built and found marvellous, the Ottoman port with its dolphins, its gambling, its Club, its contagions.

All of this matters because the life of my Turkish grandfather is mixed inextricably with the life of that evanescent city.

O
ne night around the Christmas of 1960, my father, a responsible and dutiful twenty-one-year-old employee of Chicago Bridge & Iron Co., an American corporation devoted to the profitable worldwide erection of tanks, pipelines, towers and other petrochemical constructions, trashed his room at the Toros Hotel
with the petulance and panache of a rock star. He was the worse for a considerable quantity of cheap whiskey when a friend from work, an American called Bill Purdey, called by his room to get him to come out. My father, lying on his bed, sullenly declined the invitation, and Purdey, sensing the need for decisive action, said, ‘Come on, let’s get going,’ and abruptly slammed shut a window – and cracked the pane. My father perked up. ‘That’s typical of you, Purdey. You just can’t do anything right.’ He got out of bed, picked up the portable electric fire and threw it through the cracked pane of glass. ‘You see? That’s how you do it.’ He paused to contemplate his deed; then he smashed each of the remaining windows of the room.

The next morning, my father went down to the
bureau
of Joseph Dakad to make amends. He felt like a boy going to see the principal. Monsieur Dakad, not a barrel of laughs at the best of times, used the grave and headmasterly English of Alec Guinness in
Lawrence of Arabia
. He sat behind a large desk equipped with inkwells, blotters and fountain pens. On the wall behind him hung a photograph of a grim-faced Atatürk.

He listened to my father’s apology in unimpressed silence. Joseph Dakad was not a whiskey man himself, nor even a raki man. The only alcohol he touched was the very occasional beer. He had got drunk once in his life, as a youth, and had never allowed himself to forget the indelicate consequences. Joseph Dakad was a water man; indeed, he was something of a water connoisseur. ‘This water is poor,’ he would declare, pushing aside the tumbler filled with the offending liquid; or, sipping appreciatively, ‘Now,
this
is water.’ Soda – as carbonated mineral water is called in Turkey – was a particular favourite, since it went easy on his troublesome stomach. He also liked
ayran
– strained yoghurt, water and salt – which he enjoyed making and foisting on his family. ‘Drink,’ he would command his children. When my grandmother was unable to nurse my infant mother and the wet-nurse tested positive for tuberculosis, Joseph bought a cow to ensure a supply of fresh and hygienic milk for his daughter. He was discriminating and imperious about all food. He would stick a long knife vertically into a watermelon and
listen for the long tearing sound –
craaatch –
that signalled a good fruit; if the melon was pale or watery or otherwise substandard, he would discard it, sometimes getting through ten before he was satisfied. He was a vigorous and fussy shopper at the market and bought meat from a personal
kebabçi
whose every motion of the cleaver he would supervise and direct. Joseph also enjoyed receiving imported goods – tinned ham and the like – that my father was able to procure at the American air base near Adana. On one occasion, my father offered him sardines. Monsieur Dakad reflected for a moment or two, weighing words. His use of English was very skilful, and he searched his mind until he found the expression that exactly reflected his sentiments. ‘Fuck sardines,’ he said.

Joseph’s approach to food was one manifestation of a general authoritarianism. His children all described him as
très autoritaire
, and his niece, Ginette, affectionately recalled that her uncle was ‘very commanding, like a Turk’. My grandmother (whom Joseph sometimes called
yamara
, Arabic for ‘my wife’), about as forceful a woman as you could wish for, deferred to him in almost all things. Why? Perhaps (as her elderly friends suggested to me) it was out of love; or perhaps because she guessed that a sense of his supremacy lay at the centre of her husband’s self-estimation, and indeed of her estimation of him. Either way, my grandfather didn’t impose himself by shouting or physical violence. Only once did he spank my mother, after she and Amy had naughtily rearranged the furniture; and when it came to giving tiny Amy her
pan pan
, he let her off. Ten years later, when Amy plucked up the courage to ask for permission to ride with her friends on a
mobilette
, he said, ‘How dare you even
think
of asking for my permission for such a thing?’ Usually, in such a situation, Joseph would simply frown and darken his eyes, making a forbidding face: a face that said
Non
. And no meant no. ‘Of course,’ my mother told me lightly, ‘we were all afraid of him.’

My mother, who all my life barely breathed a word about her father, at first only spoke about him if prompted, and then apparently spoke unemotionally, as if the subject were a distant country of moderate interest she had once visited. But then came a thaw, and a runnel of information began to flow my way. This may have
been due to a sense that if her father’s life was to be reduced to ink and paper, it was as well she had her say; but I think her openness really stemmed from an impulse to commemorate her recently deceased mother, with whom she had enjoyed very happy relations and whose finished life was inextricable from that of her husband and
grand amour
.

My mother disclosed small, pleasant things. For example: that Joseph would proudly instruct her – his eleven-year-old daughter finally returned from four years’ schooling in France – ‘
Récite!
’ and she would speak verses by Alphonse Daudet to gathered adults; that in the evenings he would take his daughters out on a rowboat in the sea (a boatman, and not Joseph himself, would man the oars); that he would take my mother for a spin in the car through the citrus groves or to the patisserie in Tarsus to buy baklava; that he bathed three times a day; that he read newspapers fanatically (often, wearing crisp pyjamas, in his bed: for an enterprising man, he was curiously idle), consuming six a day, morning and evening editions; and that Papa, whose suits were beautifully cut, always wore a clean white handkerchief in his breast pocket.

Amy also remembered little moments. When she was fifteen years old, her father saw her wearing a touch of mascara. He explained to her: ‘Let me tell you something. Girls who wear makeup do so because they need to. You have big brown eyes, so you have no need to wear make-up.’ Amy was very interested in my investigations into her father’s life, and she sent me documents and photos and suggested lines of inquiry. It seemed that for her, too, Joseph – who died, after all, when she was only twenty-one, and whom for years she’d only seen during school holidays – was obscured in a dimness out of which she wished to haul him. There was, naturally enough, an iconolatrous element to this desire, but there was also plain curiosity. My mother became curious, too – she was only twenty-three when Joseph died and, like her sister, had been away from home for much of her life’s short overlap with her father’s – and after a time her long reticence about her father largely disappeared. That reticence, my siblings and I had always vaguely sensed, had been expressive of a some kind of injury. The only
paternal tort we could think of – apart from the unknown matter of our grandfather’s wartime activities – was Joseph’s refusal to permit my mother to pursue a university career. Equipped with a French baccalaureate, she desperately wanted to study medicine or law at a French university, but her father would not contemplate the expense: a young woman had no real business acquiring professional qualifications of that kind. Crushingly, the matter was not even debated. Although no Mersin women attended university at that time, it was probably not until my mother had graduated
doctorandus
in French from Leiden University in her thirties that she began to forgive her father his act of chauvinism.

In the event, Joseph did authorize Lina (Caroline) to go to London and take a bilingual secretarial course at a college in Dunraven Street, in Mayfair. My mother lived in The Boltons, a splendid address in South Kensington, in a hostel overshadowed by the mansion of Douglas Fairbanks Junior. In the mornings she would walk across Hyde Park to her college. She found London, with its stupendous fogs and polite, pin-striped pedestrians, strange and wonderful. She made friends, among them the about-to-be-famous model Jean Shrimpton, ate lunch at Selfridges, improved her English. She was not homesick. To keep in touch with home, she corresponded with her mother. ‘Did your father write to you?’ I asked her. ‘No,’ she said, ‘just my mother. Maman cared for the children – visited us at school, looked after our day-to-day needs. We were part of her domestic domain. My father’s domain was outside the house, at work, at the hotel. I had a very quiet childhood,’ my mother said. ‘I never recall my parents raising their voices at each other.’