Blood-Dark Track: A Family History. Joseph O’Neill
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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