Blood-Dark Track (47 page)

I simply could not imagine Joseph Dakak taking part in such capers. Given what I now knew of his circumstances and
background, I doubted that the thought of acting as a partisan would have even entered his mind.

When, in 1922, Joseph Dakak entrusted his fortunes to the nascent Turkish nation-state, he also assumed the responsibility, as a member of a minority with a history of disloyalty, of winning the trust of his new country. He was, in effect, committing himself to the politics of good citizenship – of ingratiation and submission and compliance. Such an outlook involved complete withdrawal from the risks of the political fray and a profound aversion to trouble, and it seemed to me that neither money nor an infatuation with Franz von Papen or German culture would have been likely to disturb this stance. Besides, Joseph’s ‘Germanophilia’, such as it was, ante-dated the rise of National Socialism by fifteen years and, in the absence of any evidence that he was pro-Hitler, could not fairly be equated with support for Germany in its war aims. As Denis Wright observed, ‘Allegations that many of these people were pro-Axis in the early days of the war should not be taken too seriously’. Nor was there evidence to substantiate Salvator Avigdor’s suspicion that Joseph Dakak had been pressured into anything.

I’d also concluded that my grandfather at all times
believed
that he was acting correctly. This didn’t get him off the hook, because the state of a man’s conscience might be little more than an index of his capacity for self-reproach; but it was something. It seemed to me that the very flagrancy of Joseph’s dealings with Papen, Hilmi and the Husseinis could only betoken an artless conviction on his part that he had nothing to hide. A spy, unless he was playing a crazily risky hand of double-bluff – not at all Joseph’s style at the card-table – would certainly have acted more discreetly than Joseph and, almost by definition, would not have been so brazen. Nor, it seemed to me, would Joseph have been bold enough to bring his thorny case to the attention of the Turkish authorities – who, in his paranoia, loomed all-powerful and all-seeing – if he had not truly believed that there was no real basis for his guilt; and his testimony would certainly not have culminated, as had finally become clear to me, in an elaborately indirect, but very real, accusation against the Turkish Republic of a breach of the trust he’d reposed in it.

I found a seat in a café looking across the boulevard to the park, ordered baklava, and took pleasure, as I always do, in the solicitous yet democratic atmosphere of Turkish restaurants. The baklava, my grandfather’s favourite sweet, arrived. It was strangely moving to think that he loved these flavours of millefeuille pastry and sugar and pistachios and had precisely known the delight I took in these mouthfuls.

By 1939, Joseph Dakak must have thought that his decision to stay in Turkey had worked out nicely. Atatürk’s famously radical reforms – the declaration of a secular republic oblivious to all religious and ethnic affiliations; the introduction of a Gregorian calendar and 24-hour day; the emancipation of women; the introduction of the Latin alphabet; the purification of Turkish language from all foreign (especially Arabic and Persian) words; the centralized overhaul of the economy; the scrapping of the oriental fez and turban – largely corresponded to Joseph’s own notion of progress, and he must have felt that, as a literate, modern, westernized, economically productive man, he embodied key virtues demanded of the new Turk. In other respects, admittedly, his citizenship was less certain. A true Turk was someone who ‘habitually speaks Turkish and has assimilated Turkish culture,’ this being a prerequisite for membership of the Republican People’s Party (essential for any position of public importance) and my grandfather continued to speak French and Arabic with his friends and family and to embrace European cultural preferences. In 1939, he even changed his name from Dakak to Dakad to make it sound more French. The attitude that ethnic and religious minorities were not proper Turks – evident from Atatürk’s outburst in March 1923, when, annoyed by the number of large properties owned by Syrians and Greeks, he urged the ‘people of Mersin’ to take possession of their town – was still widespread. But Joseph felt that he had handled these difficulties well. Unlike many Syrians, he didn’t hold himself completely aloof from the Turks or voice complaints about his lot as a Christian. He was on good terms with the well-connected Muslim figures of Mersin, with whom he played cards at the Club and did business. The Günes Cinema, for example, was launched in
partnership with a war hero in Atatürk’s army and with a prominent Muslim landowner. Yet even his association with these figures did not prevent criticism of the cinema’s lighting scheme: the red, white and blue bulbs, somebody complained to the Ankara authorities, signalled the French tricolour. The cinema owners naturally protested the absurdity of the allegations but, anxious not to cause offence, removed the blue bulbs and left only the red and white, the colours of Turkey.

This semi-comic episode no doubt reminded Joseph, in case he’d forgotten, of the fragile and antagonistic sensitivities of the State. But he no doubt felt that he’d acted, as always, as an impeccably loyal citizen of Turkey. This sense of himself lay beneath the heated assertion with which he ended the testimony: ‘
What most enraged me were the insinuations directed at making me believe that my own government had delivered me to the English
.’ Although ostensibly rejecting these insinuations, my grandfather was in fact bitterly adopting them: Nazim Gandour’s allegation that Desmond Doran had Turkish policemen in his pocket, and Captain Sylvester’s sly advice that Dakak look to his own government for compensation.

This was cloudy, roundabout stuff – a way of pointing a finger while keeping his hands in his pockets – but my grandfather’s conviction of Turkish involvement in his arrest was almost certainly well-founded. The Turkish security services co-operated closely with their British counterparts and, as Denis Wright had said and Norman Mayers had hinted, were quite capable of acting against people they didn’t like; and they didn’t like rich ‘Syrians’. Joseph felt, though, that he had done nothing to deserve such treatment. He was a solid Turkish citizen and a neutral. Was he not entitled, like Bogart’s avowedly non-partisan Rick in
Casablanca
, to declare ‘I’m just an innkeeper’? Why shouldn’t he entertain Franz von Papen and treat him with the courtesy to be extended to all guests? And why shouldn’t he take advantage of the fluctuations in the lemon market? Unlike his own government, which was selling highly profitable quantities of chrome and magnesium to both the Axis and the Allies, it wasn’t as though he was dealing in goods of
military value. Why not, in short, carry on with business as usual? Why not apply for visas to travel to Egypt in the autumn of 1941, when the Mediterranean islands and waters were the scenes of carnage, and ferocious battles were being fought in Libya, and a German advance on the Suez Canal was on the cards? Why not travel to and from Allied-occupied territories of critical military importance – Syria and Palestine – and combine the trip with a fortnight of close contacts with Arab nationalist extremists with plenty of intelligence to communicate to their Axis allies in Turkey? Why not quiz the chief of Mersin’s political police about Olga Catton and Togo Makzoumé’s links with British intelligence?

Put in this way, my grandfather’s position was inescapably, absurdly, vulnerable. And yet it seemed that he could not see, even in retrospect, that he may have left the British and their Turkish collaborators with little choice other than to arrest him. It was, of course, possible that had the intelligence services been more competent and less prejudiced towards Levantines and Christians, Joseph would have been released after interrogation. But of course they were prejudiced, because racial and religious stereotypes are never more reductive than in times of war. My grandfather, a well-informed, watchful man who prided himself on his knowledge of the ways of the world, must have appreciated this; and yet he was blind to the appearance of his actions and the impressions they would make in the minds of unsympathetic authorities and the opportunity they presented to certain people – people like Osman Emre Bey – to denounce him. How could this have happened?

I could only think that a clue lay in the humble, agreeable scenes that surrounded me. Although an ancient port and perhaps busier than at any time in its history, Iskenderun remained an unimportant place for anyone other than the small class of people who lived or made money here; but even a local might sometimes feel marooned in such a place. My grandfather was, it seemed to me, in this kind of situation. Although happily rooted in Mersin, he was enthralled by the spectacle of the wider world, which he monitored by reading four newspapers a day and with which he stayed in touch through his work and languages. The documents that he’d chosen to
preserve in his safe told a story of sorts. The letter of claim to the British embassy (in English) that was never mailed, the letter of appointment from Lenz & Co. (in German), the letter of commendation from the Baghdad Railway Company (in French) – these papers had no lasting function, yet Joseph Dakak kept them as he might keep land deeds or contracts or promissory notes: as the most valuable documents he possessed. The mystique of foreigners must have been particularly great during the isolated and introspective years Turkey went through from 1923 to 1940, when severe travel restrictions meant that visitors to the country were rare and Mersin was more cut off than ever. Then the war changed everything. There was an influx of European newcomers – diplomats, construction workers, sailors, business people – and it seemed to Joseph that the exciting streams of history on which they arrived were safely navigable by a man like himself. His craft, for this purpose, was neutrality; and his object was to succeed as never before in his central ambition: to be a
gentleman of importance
. Important meant rich, of course, hence the tin and lemon ventures, but it also meant being connected and knowledgeable – about world affairs, languages, one’s horse, legal matters, archaeology, Turkish politics, important personalities; and, perhaps just as importantly, it meant being
seen to be in the know
. In wartime, there were hazards attached to such a profile, particularly if (as Oncle Pierre had once remarked to me) the guiding political precept for Mersin Christians was that
il ne faillait pas se mouiller
: it wouldn’t do to get wet. My grandfather, intoxicated by the success of the hotel and restaurant and the new opportunities, lost sight of this precept, or of its meaning. The fortnight with the Husseini crowd at the Modern Hotel, when he simply could not drag himself away from the action, was a case in point. In his mind, playing cards with the Arabs and listening to their fervent chatter no more rendered him, a Turkish neutral, a political protagonist than a ringside seat turned a spectator into a boxer. He was mesmerized by the idea of himself as a man at the centre of things, a man of accomplishments, a
chevalier
; and it was this that led to his incarceration in the house at Emmaus-Latrun,
la tour des chevaliers
: the tower of the cavaliers.

The egotism at the root of my grandfather’s undoing was not purely spontaneous. Its manifestation, in his cultivated persona of polyglot, gallant, man-about-town, equestrian, revealed the deep impression made by his youthful exposure to the glamorous types from France and England and Germany; but more fundamentally, his self-centredness was in many ways the outcome of the compact he’d made with the Turkish Republic in the early ’twenties. Perhaps because all his life he’d been the object of self-seeking imperialist attention (by 1922, the young Syrian had been educated by the French and employed by the Germans and ruled by the Ottomans, the British, the French and the Turks), Joseph had little sense of the State as an instrument of personal autonomy. If he had cherished the possibility of full-blown freedom, or believed in it, he could have emigrated to France with his brother and sister and reinvented himself. Instead, he settled for modest liberties: a liberty to prosper economically, a liberty to develop his personal qualities, a liberty to mind his own business. It didn’t trouble him that as a Christian Turk he would be excluded from jobs in public service because these exclusions complemented the detachment he felt from nationalistic Turkey and, in a way, exempted him from anything more than a formal engagement in the country’s affairs. By a tacit agreement, his role was limited to acquiescing in the new order and keeping quiet; in particular, colluding in the national silence about the discrepancy between the Kemalist doctrine of equal citizenship of all Turks and the actual treatment of minority groups – notably the Armenians. It was a sad fact that Joseph and the rest of the Syrian community could be counted on in this regard. The social and religious and racial divisions that had immemorially separated the Syrians and the Armenians were so deep, it seemed, that the groups barely existed for each other. This was evinced, in Joseph’s case, by his total failure to perpetuate the fact of their obliteration, which he’d seen with his own eyes, and also by the express words of his testimony. In order to establish his credentials as a staunch Turkish citizen, Joseph portrayed all Armenians mentioned in the testimony in an unflattering, threatening light: Hachadourian was a British spy who spouted
anti-Turkish rubbish; the hotelier Ayvazian was a pro-German troublemaker; the Armenian who formerly occupied the condemned men’s cell in the Prison des Sables was a multiple murderer; and, in a conflation of every Turkish fear imaginable, the Armenian prison sergeant in Beirut was an ominous figure who intimated that he’d worked, during the French occupation, as a butcher in Adana.

I knew that my grandfather wrote his testimony at a desperate time, that he had good reason to distance himself from Armenians, and even that he may well have encountered a succession of unpleasant Armenian nationals; but I couldn’t help feeling that these portraits reflected an incapacity to attach significance to the vivid ordeals of his fellow Cilicians or, indeed, to the political passions that lay behind their disastrous fate. True, this incapacity was perhaps necessitated by the demands of survival in Turkey. But my grandfather chose to stay in Turkey and in a sense, therefore, chose to incapacitate himself. He paid a very high price for his choice. When the Second World War came to Mersin, he was unable to appreciate quite how much the issues at stake mattered to its participants, who were being killed in their millions, and what this might mean to their perception of him and his formally neutral actions.