Prologue

      For me it began in far-off Mesopotamia now called Iraq, that land of Biblical names and history, of vast deserts and date groves, scorching suns and hot winds, the land of Babylon, Baghdad and the Garden of Eden, where the rushing Euphrates and the mighty Tigris converge and flow down into the Persian Gulf.

      It was there in that land of the Arabs, then a battle-ground for the contending Imperialistic armies of Britain and Turkey, that I awoke to the echoes of guns being fired in the capital of my own country, Ireland.

      – Tom Barry, Guerrilla Days in Ireland

      At some point in my childhood, perhaps when I was aged ten, or eleven, I became aware that during the Second World War my Turkish grandfather – my mother’s father, Joseph Dakad – had been imprisoned by the British in Palestine, a place exotically absent from any atlas. A shiver of an explanation accompanied this information: the detention had something to do with spying for the Germans. At around the same age, I also learned that my Irish grandfather, James O’Neill, had been jailed by the authorities in Ireland in the course of the same war. Nobody explained precisely why, or where, or for how long, and I attributed his incarceration to the circumstances of a bygone Ireland and a bygone IRA. These matters went largely unmentioned, and certainly undiscussed, by my parents in the two decades that followed. Indeed, the subject of my late grandfathers was barely raised at all and, save for a wedding-day picture of Joseph and his wife, Georgette, there were no photographs of them displayed in our home. Dwelling in the jurisdiction of parental silence, my grandfathers remained mute and out of mind.

      Partially as a consequence of this, it was not until I was thirty that the curious parallelism in my grandfathers’ lives struck me with any force and that I was driven to explore it, to fiddle at doors that had remained unopened, perhaps even locked, for so many years; and not until then that I began to make out what connected these two men, who never met, and these two captivities – one in the Levant heat, the other in the rainy, sporadically incandescent plains of central Ireland.

      As will soon become apparent, I wasn’t bringing a reflective political mind to bear on my grandfathers’ lives, or any expertise as a historian, or even any abnormal inclination to wonder about what might lie behind a closed door. In general, I’m as content as the next man to proceed on the footing that any information of importance – anything that has a bearing on my essential interests – will be brought to my attention by those entrusted with such things: families, schools, news agencies, subversives. This is so even though the information I have on most historical and political subjects could be written out on a luggage tag; is almost certainly wrong; and, at bottom, probably functions as a political soporific – which perhaps explains why the insights I gained into my grandfathers’ lives often took the form of a slow, idiotic awakening. It took anomalous forces – a writer’s professional curiosity turned into something like an obsession – to push me, reluctant and red-eyed and stumbling, into the past and, it turned out, its dream-bright horrors.

      Two inklings set me on my way, one for each grandfather.

      My Turkish grandmother, Mamie Dakad – mamie being French for granny – had an extreme attachment to a set of keys. She clung to them from morning till night and then, secreting them under her pillow, from night till morning. When she mislaid them, all hell broke loose, in multiple languages. She would shriek first at herself in Arabic (‘Yiii!’), next at her family, in French (‘Où sont mes clefs?’), and finally – with terrifying loudness and venom – at the nearest servant, in Turkish: ‘ANAHTARLAR NERDE?’ The loss of keys was not the only thing that would set her off. My grandmother yelled frequently and for a whole variety of reasons at the waiters, maids, managers, cleaners and cooks whom she employed to staff her hotel and to attend to her personal needs and the needs of her family. All day they scurried in and out of her apartment in a sweat, delivering panniers of toast, bars of goat’s cheese, lamb cutlets, fish, aubergines, meat pancakes, melons, watermelons, water, glasses of lemonade, bottles of Efes beer, sodas, Coca-Colas, Turkish coffees, Turkish teas. You could never have enough to drink. Mersin, the port in south-east Turkey where my grandmother lived, is as humid a spot as you’ll find in the Mediterranean, and in August, when my parents and their four children arrived for their annual holiday, my grandmother’s breezeless apartment on the top floor of the hotel was as hot as a hammam. Fans vainly circulated warm air, and the trickle of coolness produced by the grinding air-conditioning machine escaped ineffectually through the windows towards the harbour, where Turkish warships sat on the still water like cakes on a salver. When we were not immobilized on the divans, pooped out, stunned, minimizing our movements, we were opening one of the refrigerators – the doors, tall as ourselves, swung out with a gasping, rubbery suck – and taking long, burning slugs of the freezing water that filled the Johnnie Walker and Glenfiddich bottles jammed in the rack. My grandmother’s outbursts were all the more terrible for their suddenness and unfairness, the minor domestic booboos, if any, from which they sprang (a fork misplaced in a drawer filled with Christofle silver, a floor-mopping delinquency) shockingly disproportionate to the condemnation that followed. I have never really understood why she was prone to these authoritarian rages. She was loving and unstinting with her friends and family and, it so happens, a loyal employer. Perhaps the heat played a part, and racial and class contempt. Either way, Mehmet Ali, Mehmet, Huseyin, Fatma and the rest of them got it in the neck.

      As I said, Mamie Dakad carried a bunch of keys about her person at all times. She never jingled them or fixed them to a pretty ring. She strung them around a bare loop of metal and gripped them – even in her old age, when arthritis had curled her fists into strengthless talons.

      One morning, in a summer of the late ’eighties, when I was in my mid-twenties, there occurred an episode which