Blood-Dark Track (45 page)

A justification of this kind entailed rationalizing the assassination as a form of
notice
. The purpose of such violence was not to bring about direct or immediate change or to make a measurable military gain but, rather, to alert the world to the existence of a wrongful political injury – in this case, the continuing trespass of the English in the north of Ireland – with a view to preserving, and enabling the eventual enforcement of, the rights of the injured party. Just as, in an ordinary case of trespass, signs of continuing ownership were required to defeat the claim of a long-term trespasser, so the title of the Irish nation in the land occupied by the English, if it was not to fall by the wayside, had to be asserted. More basically, after years of republican inactivity, a national revival of the IRA and its cause was required in 1936. Simply warning Admiral Somerville to stop helping would-be recruits to the Royal Navy would not have accomplished this; shooting him undoubtedly did. The fact that the Admiral had not been warned, and therefore might be said not to have ‘deserved’ his fate, was in this context (rather than in the context of a just war) an ethical irrelevance. It was not necessary to identify a ‘deserving’ target of violence, because in many ways the less deserving and more shocking the target, the greater the notice that would be taken of the existence and seriousness of the injury complained of and, as a consequence, the less gratuitous – and the more effective and morally coherent – would be the act of violence. Violence of this kind also gave rise to this assessment of the killers: that, in their readiness to assume the guilt and risks that came with
the killing, they were to be applauded for assuming a moral burden on behalf of society; for, as the Good Friday Agreement illustrated, it was a well-recognized phenomenon that the apparently pacific majority in Ireland furtively but gratefully adopted the outcomes produced by the violent actions of republicans.

Having constructed this cold-hearted polemic, I recoiled from it. Although its final proposition rang true, taken as a whole it was clearly specious, not least because it appeared to sanction, say, the massacre of a classroom of schoolchildren as a mechanism of political complaint; and every moral intuition I possessed told me that was surely wrong. In any event, the polemic was a red herring: for Admiral Somerville was almost certainly killed by people who thought he deserved to die. What I still didn’t fully understand was
why
they thought this – or why they thought that killing
him
would be politically productive.

However, to return to Mrs Salter-Townshend’s point, did any of this matter any more? A palpable change in the political culture in Ireland suggested that it did not. Irish nationalism had entered a phase in which even the republican wing of the movement increasingly recognized the distinction between improving the lot of northern nationalists and unifying the island. It was more noticeable than ever that, with the progress of the peace process – i.e., the 1994 and 1997 ceasefires, the IRA’s agreement to the ‘Mitchell principles’ of non-violence, the all-party talks, and finally the Good Friday agreement – people in the Republic felt increasingly able to take an interest in the bloodshed of Irish history as a kind of entertainment, and anguished and bitter scrutiny of this or that unpleasant incident suddenly seemed misplaced and old hat. As old tensions disappeared, I wondered if it wasn’t a hard reality of certain kinds of political change that, after a point, certain victims and injustices were best forgotten about; and if, perhaps, the healthiest thing might not simply be to let Admiral Somerville rest.

8

The storm-blown, starving travellers landed, their mouths watering at the sight of all this wealth of food, but directly they seized a bread-fruit from the nearest tree, it passed from their hands into a shadow, and everything they met with had the same evanescent quality.… At length they met with some of the inhabitants. Like everything else in this strange country, though they appeared to be solid, they, too, were shades, and the living men passed through their forms as if there was nothing there. The shades spoke, however, and told them that this was Bulotu, the Place of Departed Souls, and they were the Tangaloa of old time, and the Souls of Eiki, their departed Chiefs. They said that no solid food, such as they needed, could be got here, for all that grew was shadow-food, the Food of the Gods, for their shadowy sustenance.…

But Bulotu is a bourne from which no traveller may ever return for long. It is the Land of the Dead, and its air, however deliciously scented, is the air of Death, not fitted for mortal lungs. In the course of a few days after reaching Tonga, all these travellers died, and being Chiefs, went permanently to Bulotu; not as a punishment for their temerity, but as the natural consequence of once breathing that fatal atmosphere.

– Admiral Boyle Townshend Somerville,
Will Mariner

A
dana, the fourth biggest city in Turkey, sits on the inland rim of a sweltering delta largely given over to the cultivation of cotton. In 1942, the counter-espionage agent Sir Patrick Coghill found Adana ‘a deadly, absolutely one-horse town for all of its 80,000 inhabitants’, and forty years afterwards, with its population approaching one million, Adana was still looked on – at least, from the maritime, relatively cosmopolitan vantage-point of Mersin – as tedious, insular, and provincial; which was perhaps why my own interaction with the place was limited to flying into and out of its small, stifling airport. In recent times, these adverse perceptions have been challenged. Although to drive into the city is still to penetrate a spattering of industrial buildings and dreary, dimly-lit blocks of housing, with its theatre and its resident orchestra and its archaeological and ethnographical museums and its university hospital and its increasingly cherished antiquity – Hittites, Persians, Greeks and Romans were settled here, the last-mentioned building a twenty-one-arch bridge that still carries traffic across the river Seyhan – Adana is developing another image. We are now invited to see a vigorous and self-confident city that, although devout as ever – a new mosque has the tallest minaret in Turkey and a capacity close to 30,000 – is not afraid to look the west in the eye or, even, to glance at the face of its pre-Kemalist past. One aspect of this modified vision, I discovered one night in late August 1998 was the restoration of Adana’s rather magnificent three-storey station-house to its original glory. Its stones and brick had been cleaned and its red roof tiles renewed, and in the tree-lined plaza at the front of the station a shiny, vividly painted steam engine was marooned on a length of track. The installation functioned as spectacle and technological homage – who does not admire steam engines? – but, like any relic, it also gave off a spray of history which for most people no doubt fell as fine, inconsequential vapour.

A railroad first arrived in Adana back in 1886, on the completion of the short but valuable Mersin–Adana line, which, like most of the few disjointed railways then in existence in Turkey, was wholly owned by British capitalists. In 1908, the Mersin–Adana line officially became a branch line of the Deutsche Bank-financed
Baghdad Railway, which was seen by Germany’s rival powers, themselves engaged since the Crimean War in the exploitation and manipulation of the disintegrating, systemically out-dated and finally debt-crippled Ottoman Empire, as one of the most sinister features of German expansionism: for the BBB (Berlin–Byzantium– Baghdad) promised German-controlled railways from the Baltic to the Persian Gulf and German growth in Mesopotamia, Syria and Arabia. For the German public, the appeal of the
drang nach Osten
was entrancing. German traders ranging from travelling salesmen to infrastructural contractors followed the banking syndicates into the Ottoman Empire, and by 1898, when the Kaiser visited Istanbul, the finance and trade of the Empire, which previously had been practically exclusive to France and Great Britain, was predominantly in German hands. In order to fund the Railway – regarded by Sultan Abdul Hamid II as a crucial military transport link between the great cities of Istanbul, Izmir, Aleppo, Damascus, Beirut, Mosul and Baghdad – the Ottoman government issued guarantees which committed it to paying investors huge sums; the result was German control over the Ottoman treasury and powerful political influence over the Sultan and, after his removal from power in 1908, the Young Turk government.

Although British influence in the Near East went back a long way – in
Macbeth
, Act I Scene iii, there is a reference to a sailor who’s ‘to Aleppo gone’ – it was France, as the dominant regional power, that had the most to lose from the growth of German influence. In imitation of the French imperial method, German missions and schools sprang up in the Near East to promote knowledge and appreciation of
das Deutschum
– the values and character of German civilization, German history and, most importantly, the German language. In the words of one Dr Rohrbach, an influential commentator of the time,

No lasting and secure cultural influences are possible without the connecting link of language. The intelligent and progressive young men of Turkey should have an abundant opportunity to learn German.… We can give the Turks an impression of our civilisation and a desire to become familiar with it only when we teach them our language and thus open the door for them to all of our cultural possessions.

The epitome of the intelligent and progressive young man of Turkey was, of course, the linguistically gifted sixteen-year-old who, in September 1916, presented himself to his German superiors for work in the construction of the Berlin–Baghdad Railway, Joseph Dakak.

The station-house at Adana gave way to two relatively humble platforms. In the rafters of the platform roofs, hundreds of swallows had established a colony. The birds fidgeted and cleaned their feathers and looked out of nest-holes and darted around in the warm air, while below them sprawling families played out scenes of good-tempered restlessness. The women, every one wearing a headscarf, kept an eye on the children, often grabbing them and giving them ferocious and unselfconscious kisses. The men, cigarettes constantly ablaze, sat with their legs daintily crossed, the toe of the dangling foot pointed towards the ground so as not impolitely to expose the sole of the shoe. They wore pyjama-like trousers, knitted hats, cloth caps, baggy short-sleeved shirts (the buttons undone to reveal a white vest and an undergrowth of chest hair), faded blue or grey or brown suits. I was the only westernized traveller, Turkish or foreign, to be seen.

At four in the morning, a blinding, otherworldly light, accompanied by a terrible blast of a horn, advanced out of the western darkness. The Taurus Express had arrived. There was a brief crush as passengers with cases and packages descended from the carriages. Then I boarded the train. It was packed with overnight travellers struggling for sleep, and the odour of feet was distinctive. There was no restaurant car, and First Class consisted of claustrophobic six-seat compartments that appeared marginally less comfortable than the open seating in the Second Class carriages.

Inexplicably delayed, the train remained immobile for an hour. Then, at daybreak, we finally dawdled out of the station, the diesel engine roaring like a bus. We crossed the river Seyhan and
sluggishly traversed the northern part of city, where nomads had made camp in a wasteland of cement structures ruined by an earthquake a couple of months before. The train continued to emit monstrous hoots, scattering wild dogs roaming around the track and awakening people in the ramshackle sleeping platforms built on the houses’ flat rooftops. A flock of storks hovered on air currents high in the pale sky. Ahead, the railway line made a frail curve towards the east.

When I first conceived of this outing, my thought was simply to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps on the Taurus Express. But the Taurus Express was no longer an international spy-train. It was merely bound for Gaziantep, a couple of hundred kilometres to the east, and not, as in the old days, across the frontier to Aleppo and beyond. The luxurious wagon-lits had been replaced by tired carriages, and the cosmopolitan gentlemen and shady diplomats and pulp-fiction blondes of the war years had disappeared. Nowadays the train only carried families who could not afford to travel by bus and who in the old days would have sat crushed into hard-seated, sweaty third-class coaches armed with bags of dates, grapes, white cheese and salted nuts. This was not Joseph Dakak’s scene at all. He would never had travelled, for example, in the company of the group of men seated next to me. Dressed in old-fashioned rustic attire, they spoke in an extremely expressive and intent manner, their serious looks and emphatic gestures and low, urgent tones suggesting important and telling confabulations; but I had no idea what any of them was saying, and even if my Turkish had allowed me to eavesdrop I would have been little the wiser, because I had no real idea who these people were or what kind of existence they led. Although, in westernized Mersin, the public lives and values of Christians and Muslims had merged to such an extent as to be superficially indistinguishable, my fellow travellers came from a world I knew little about – and actually feared. They belonged to the Anatolian hinterland into which the train was headed, a region that, on the dozen or so nights I’d crossed it by bus from Istanbul or Izmir to Mersin, had always filled me with a dread of my impending annihilation. I knew it as a black, unfathomable zone of
flickering petrol stations, senseless land formations and barely lit villages, a place in which humanity, almost entirely rubbed out by the vast dark erasers of the plains and mountains and sky, was exposed at its most nugatory. What I was really feeling, during these journeys, was the solipsistic anxiety that can result from being plunged among people with whom I stood in a relation of near-total mutual ignorance. To be among such strangers was a form of eradication; for which of them could bear witness to who I was? And the converse was also true: unable meaningfully to incorporate these Anatolians into my construction of the world, I lacked the ability to do them justice. They were literally insignificant.