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