Blood-Dark Track: A Family History. Joseph O’Neill
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ports of these regions, Greeks and Christians of Syria are the principal inhabitants – the Greeks being energetic, enterprising, and many of them rich. The purely European residents are very few in number; an unhealthy climate and the lax commercial morality of the place, render it almost impossible for a European to thrive, or even live there.’ He noted that nearly all the Syrians spoke French – ‘it is remarkable how great an influence France has had upon the Roman Catholic population of Syria’ – and was impressed by the Greek hospital and church and, especially, the Greek school (which, forty years later, my grandmother would attend), where masters fluent in French taught ancient and modern Greek, sacred history, French, geography, arithmetic. Then, in July, when he returned to Mersin to catch a steamer home, Davis saw a dark side of the town that almost cost him his life. Descending from cool mountains, he was horrified by an intensely humid and enervating heat and the spectacle of sick people lying on mattresses at the door of their houses. To make things worse, cholera had appeared in Syria, and the service of the Russian steamers had been suspended due to a ten-day quarantine imposed by the Ottoman government on all arrivals from Syria. Davis was forced to sweat it out in Mersin. He almost didn’t make it. With the whole town in the grip of fever, and funerals passing regularly under his windows, and sleep impossible during nights he compared to a ‘damp, yet hot, oven,’ Davis fled for the relative relief of Boluklu, a village in the foothills about an hour’s ride away, where the air was marginally better. He stayed in the Mavromati house – the house, that is, of my uncle Fonda’s great-grandfather. Eventually, after eight feverish days during which he lay tormented by horrid dreams and visions, he booked a passage on a French mail steamer to Marseille and escaped Mersin’s ‘entrancing beauty and deadly air and heat’.
There was one book, however, that I came across not in London libraries but in Mersin, at my grandmother’s apartment in the Toros Hotel. A first edition with crumbling leather covers, La Syrie D’Aujourd’hui, by Dr Lortet of the Faculty of Medicine of Lyon University, was an account of the author’s travels in the Near East in 1875, the year that saw the visit of the Reverend Davis and the acquisition of Mersin property by the Nader brothers. Dr Lortet observed that there wasn’t much more to this port than thirty or so houses, and there was not even a proper harbour, vessels having to anchor in the roadstead some distance out at sea. His description was illustrated by an etching of Mersin and its ‘miserable buildings’: a strand, jetties, some beached rowing-boats, a huddle of two-storey buildings. Dr Lortet did say that the town had the most picturesque population you could wish to see, a commingling of Turks, Arabs, Syrians, negroes, Ansarians and others, all dressed in brilliant, variegated clothing. Behind the houses, orchards surrounded by verdant hedges grew vigorously; the pear and apricot trees were particularly fine, producing fruit much sought after in Beirut and Rhodes. Dr Lortet took a horseback trip to Tarsus. The countryside he passed through seems to have been paradisal. Ploughs drawn by buffaloes and camels and oxen churned up dark, fertile earth, clouds of aquatic birds rose from waters full of turtles, and storks pecked in the wake of the ploughs. The plain of Mersina, noted Dr Lortet, saw an abundance of boars, francolin, yellow-necked vultures, gazelles and a tigerishly striped deer. Beavers, black otters, jackals and hyenas were still in evidence, and the hunter in the pine forests might encounter the leopard. In the dark forests of the Cilician mountains were also bears, badgers, black squirrels and, at the highest summits, gigantically horned goats. ‘The English,’ Dr Lortet commented, ‘have been inspired in their recent annexation of Cyprus. From that island, they are the absolute masters of the beautiful gulf of Alexandretta, which delivers to them, through Mersina, eastern Asia Minor, and, through Alexandretta, Aleppo and the upper valley of the Euphrates; thus they hold the key to the Mesopotamian railway line which is soon to be the great route between the Far East and Europe.’
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 head-scarf, 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