by Moris Farhi
Thus privacy eluded us until the obligatory siesta. Because of my father’s privileged status, I had managed to secure, as my retreat, the big room in the attic, which served as a dump for the villa’s oddments. That’s where we secreted ourselves, much to the displeasure of the Gorgon, who could not keep an eye on us in there.
Bilâl brought out the letter his mother had received from the family lawyer and translated it. His Greek was perfect. Since Ester claimed to have taught the language to Bilâl’s father, Pepo, in the early years of their marriage (not true, actually; Pepo had known Greek before he met Ester, had even acted as an interpreter during the War of Independence) we used to tease Bilâl that he had learned it by listening to his parents’ pre- and post-coital cooing. (A crass banter that we instantly abandoned after Bilâl confided in us that all was not well between his mum and dad.)
Much of the letter was devoted to an incident that had taken place on 11 July. On that day, a Sabbath, the Wehrmacht commander of northern Greece had decreed that all male Jewish citizens of Salonica between the ages of eighteen and forty-five must gather at 8 AM in Plateia Eleftherias, ‘Freedom Square’, to register for civilian labour. Some 10,000 men, Ester’s elderly father Salvador among them, had duly reported in the hope of securing work cards. The Germans had chosen to humiliate the assemblage by keeping them standing in the blistering heat, without hats, until late afternoon. Those who had collapsed from sunstroke had been hosed down with cold water and beaten up; others, ordered to perform arduous exercises until they, too, had passed out, had received similar treatment. These horrific and arbitrary abuses, the lawyer admitted with mortification, had been witnessed, mostly with indifference, sometimes with glee, by a large number of the city’s inhabitants – people who, no doubt, considered themselves good Christians. Worse still, the following day, the newspapers, brandishing photographs supplied by the German army, had praised this attitude. Perhaps even more invidious was the fact that not a single professional organization, nor any members of one, had spoken up on behalf of a Jewish colleague or in protest against the Jews’ maltreatment. But what was even worse was that in Salonica – and nowhere else in the country – there had been many denunciations of Jewish neighbours by the citizens. These denunciations had much to do with Greek nationalism, which still resented the fact that throughout the centuries when Salonica had been an Ottoman city, Jews and Turks had had very harmonious relations. But it must be remembered, the lawyer bitterly lamented, that every institution in Salonica, not to say every citizen, had also worked and maintained close ties with Jews for generations. How could that tradition be forgotten? After all, history had produced only one constant in the Balkans: the Jew’s word as his bond.
To date, the Germans had dispatched most of the men who had assembled on that Saturday to build roads and airfields. What the future held for other Jews, the lawyer dared not imagine. Reports from eastern Thrace and Macedonia augured the worst. The Germans had delegated the administration of these territories to their ally, the Bulgarians; but since the latter kept prevaricating on the matter of surrendering their own Jews, the Germans had decided to deal with the Jews of Thrace and Macedonia themselves. Lately there had been rumours that these unfortunates would be deported en masse to Occupied Poland. All of this made the lawyer look back regretfully to the time when the Italians had been the occupying power. The Italians had been humane, often in defiance of Mussolini’s edicts. Throughout their occupation, they had persistently warned the Jews of the Nazis’ racist policies and urged them to leave the country; on many occasions they had even granted Italian passports to those who heeded their advice. Ester might remember one Moiz Hananel, a distant cousin from Rhodes: he was now safe in Chile. But, alas, Ester’s father, Salvador, disinclined to liquidate his considerable investments, had procrastinated. Now, the Italians had gone and Salvador’s wealth had evaporated.
There the lawyer’s letter ended.
Then Bilâl brought out another letter, the latest from Ester’s sister, Fortuna. It was written in French, the lingua franca of the educated Sephardim, and he read it out loud. As might be expected of my Scottish lineage – the antithesis of the insular, monolingual English – I was quite cosmopolitan and spoke several languages fluently.
Fortuna’s letter was like that of a dying person, without a trace of the billowing fury with which she normally faced adversity. Her husband, Zaharya, one of those impressed for road construction, had suffered a heart attack and died. Viktorya and Süzan, her daughters, aged eight and ten, had become the family’s breadwinners. Every morning before dawn, they would leave home – which, these days, was a corner in a disused warehouse – and climb to the lower slopes of Mount Hortiatis where they would collect wild flowers. They would then run back, at breakneck speed, to reach the city by noon and sell the flowers, often in competition with equally destitute Gypsy children, to German officers relaxing at the waterfront tavernas.
Every morning, as they left, Fortuna felt sure she would never see her daughters again. Her son, David – who, like Bilâl, was nearly thirteen – fared worse. His daily task was to scour the city for scraps of food. In doing so, he had to avoid the German patrols for whom the humiliation of rabbis, women and the elderly, the beating of children and the random shooting of ‘die-hard communists’ – a euphemism for semitic-looking people – had become favourite pastimes.
Salvador, a man who, in his time, had never backed down from a fight, was now a ghost. Since the expropriation of his villa by the Wehrmacht, a few days after 11 July, he had ensconced himself in a shack, near the Eptapyrgio fortress, that terrible prison on the crest of the old upper city. Vowing that he would never again be maltreated and calling for his wife, mercifully dead for many years, to come and take him away, he had not left the shack since. Viktorya and Süzan took him food, but how long could they go on doing that?
All of this had persuaded Fortuna that she would have to learn the ways of this new world, become cunning and predatory and, abandoning all notions of decency, survive any way she could. She was still young and attractive. Greek men, everybody knew, had a fondness for Jewish flesh. The Germans, too, it was said, had a secret passion for it.
Bilâl’s relatives had to be saved. They were, to all intents and purposes, our kindred too. Bilâl, who had met them when he and his parents had visited Salonica in the summer of 1939, just before the war, had praised them to us so highly that we had adopted them unreservedly as family. Viktorya and Süzan, adorable little girls threatened by every peril under the sun, were the little sisters we all wished we had. (Naim’s older sister Gül had died two years earlier.) David was our age and, on the evidence of photographs, looked like Bilâl’s twin; therefore he was our twin. In Fortuna’s case, the prevailing moral view that prostitution was a fate worse than death plunged us into gruesome fantasies. Thus, though we secretly felt aroused by the thought of a woman who gave herself to any man, we could not let her face perdition in a thousand and one horrific ways. We had our reservations about Salvador – he had been a veritable tyrant all his life – but we decided that abandoning him would be heinous.
Given our eventual course of action, it might be assumed that we deliberated on the matter for days. We didn’t. Our decision was instant and unanimous. Such considerations as to how we would solve any problems that arose could be dealt with, we decided, in due course. We were young; and according to Plato, who had captured our imagination in those days, we were wiser than our elders. We could make the world a better place. Eradicate wars. Establish universal justice and human rights. Stop the sacrifice of millions at the altar of monomaniacs.
Bilâl presented an ‘if only’ scenario that had become his mother’s lament. If only we could procure five Turkish passports and deliver them to Fortuna ...
He had investigated the possibilities.
As anybody who went around Istanbul with eyes and ears open knew, the black-market trade in passports was a thriving business. Those of neutral countries, like Swe
den and Switzerland, or from regions outside the theatres of war, like Latin America, were worth a fortune. There were some exceptions: Turkey was neutral, yet because it was feared that Germany, seeking to destroy Soviet oilfields and refineries east of the Black Sea, would invade the country, Turkish passports were not much in demand. Basically, the market value of a passport was governed by the vagaries of war. On occasion, even passports from war-battered countries could prove a gold-mine – British passports, for instance, though they had the same modest status as Turkish ones, would fetch a fortune from Jewish refugees seeking to settle in Palestine.
In the main, Bilâl instructed us, the black market in passports was dominated by the Levantines, that tiny minority of Europeans who, enamoured of the Orient, had settled in the Ottoman empire and intermarried with its many peoples. Immensely proud of their mixed ethnicity, the Levantines had evolved, in eastern Mediterranean eyes, into ‘lovable rogues’. In the new Turkey, they had perfected the highly specialized métier of iş bitirici, ‘job-accomplisher’. It was said that once they accepted a commission, only death would prevent them from completing it to the client’s satisfaction.
Here, Bilâl declared, luck favoured us. Naim had a perfect entrée into this community. His classmate, Tomaso (Turkish name, Turgut), was the son of ‘Neptune’, owner of the famous restaurant in the Golden Horn, which served the best fish in the world. Neptune was a scion of the Adriatiko, an elite strain of Levantines who were the descendants of Venetian sailors taken prisoner in the sea battles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then used as galley-slaves in Ottoman men-of-war and, eventually, set free and allowed to settle in the empire. Neptune had a horde of ‘cousins’ who, in pursuit of their smuggling activities, covered Turkey’s four seas with a fleet of trawlers; not surprisingly, they had ended up dominating the fishing trade – which explained the excellence of his restaurant.
So, if we could get hold of five British passports, Bilâl concluded, we could approach the Adriatiko and arrange a barter for Turkish ones. The latter, he reminded us, were worth about the same but had the advantage of being bona fide for the German occupation forces because Turkey was not only a neighbouring country but also neutral. They offered the only chance of escape for Ester’s family.
And this is where I came in. I was a member of the British diplomatic community. Perfectly placed to lay my hands on new passports. Fate had brought me to Istanbul for that very purpose.
We wove an ingenious plan.
During the rest of the holidays I would be especially friendly with the Johnsons, particularly Mr Johnson, who was His Majesty’s Consul. And I would find out, by asking the sort of casual questions that might occur to any curious youngster, how the consulate issued passports and where it stored them. Then, on my father’s next trip to Istanbul, I would visit him at the consulate on some pretext and, while everybody went on with their work, slip into whichever storeroom contained the passports and pinch the five we needed. If the passports were kept under lock and key, the boys would provide me with a passe-partout. Obtaining such an item from a locksmith would be easy; having worked the markets with their fathers, they knew countless tradesmen.
Once we had the passports, Naim would prevail on Tomaso to introduce us to the Adriatiko for the exchange with Turkish ones.
The next phase, slipping into Greece, should be equally simple, we convinced ourselves. We could engineer a good excuse to leave town for a few days. Our district boy scout troop had a progressive programme of fitness and culture that included excursions to famous archaeological sites. Since our parents approved of these activities – to date we had explored several digs in Anatolia – we would ‘invent’ such a jaunt to, say, the Royal Hittite Archives in Boğazköy.
For entering Greece, we had two options. We could either waft into eastern Thrace by crossing the Meriç river, which ran along the Turkish-Greek frontier, or sail directly, in a hired boat, to a deserted cove.
We discounted the first as dangerous. To do that we would have to evade two armies, the German and the Bulgarian occupation forces. Moreover, despite Germany’s assurances that it would not invade Turkey, the Turkish government, remembering that similar pledges had been given to the Soviets, remained alert. Consequently, the border was assiduously patrolled by a third military outfit, the Turkish army.
Naim felt sure that his friend Tomaso could be as helpful on this matter as with the passports by enabling us to hire a boat from one of his father’s ‘cousins’ for the short hop over to Greece.
The journey to Salonica – by bus, we surmised – would be uneventful thanks to Bilâl’s impeccable Greek. Once there, we would intercept Viktorya and Süzan as they went to sell flowers and would be taken to the rest of the family.
We would have a fair amount of money; we all had some savings. Moreover, because of the war, the exchange rate between the Greek drachma and the Turkish lira greatly favoured the latter. However, to be on the safe side, the best-off among us – me – would sell his bicycle and tell his parents that it had been stolen.
The journey back, we believed, would be just as easy. We would sneak back into our boat at night and reach Turkey before dawn.
Bilâl’s relatives, now equipped with Turkish passports, would execute the formalities for exit visas and travel to Istanbul either by rail – directly or via Sofia – or by steamer, if services were still operational.
The first phase went perfectly smoothly.
It took me only a few days to become Mr Johnson’s favourite youngster. I did so, rather cunningly, by undertaking to give daily maths lessons to his oldest son, Ernest – not the brightest of boys – who had to retake an exam in September. The fact that snooty Dorothy, after an initial bout of cold-shouldering, began to take an interest in me and contrived invitations to some of their family outings also helped. So did my mother’s condition: reduced, in the space of a year, from a jolly, athletic woman to a listless, tumbledown person by the death of her younger brother in action with the Royal Navy, she had ceased engaging with the world. The Johnsons, dear people, were determined to compensate for her neglect of me by lavishing treats on me.
One such treat was a standing invitation to the consulate which, Mr Johnson must have assumed, would impress me with His Majesty’s Government’s delicate work and thus further justify my pride in being British. Indeed, I found the activities there – comprising, in the main, preparatory work for my father’s committee – fascinating. And I discovered, to my surprise, that the passport office was seldom manned; it had never occurred to us that, in the midst of war, there would not be many travellers. As for the passports, they were stacked in neat piles, together with the consulate’s stationery, in a large metal locker behind the front desk. The locker had a key, but it was always left hanging from the handle for the benefit of those who needed stationery.
I decided to take my chance straightaway and arranged another visit to the consulate, this time with Ernest and Dorothy, after having taken them to the cinema. At a convenient moment, pretending to go to the lavatory, I slipped away, stole into the passport office, filched the five passports and stuffed them in my satchel. I had brought my satchel to borrow books from the consulate library and, as might be expected of a bookworm, had made a habit of taking it with me everywhere, even to the toilet. To make sure that the numbers would not be consecutive, I picked each passport from a different pile. That was an inspired move, worthy of a seasoned agent. I am proud of it even today.
Naim, too, had an easy time.
His friend Tomaso, envious of the adventure we had planned, went to work diligently. Arranging an exchange of passports, he told us, should be child’s play. But when it came to getting in and out of Greece, he dissuaded us from approaching the old-timers. Since Germany’s invasion of the Balkans, these veterans had abandoned their legendary braggadocio. They had even stopped smuggling. These swastika-Huns, they told everybody, were not like the Germans who had fought in the Great War; they were rabid dogs, just
like their Führer.
However, the new generation, the delikanlι – those with ‘crazy blood’, to use that graphic Turkish expression – were itching to prove their mettle; they were particularly keen to match wits with the ‘master race’. And none more so than Marko, Tomaso’s mother’s kid brother, not yet twenty-five, but already extolled as a Sinbad.
The exchange of passports did turn out to be child’s play. Tomaso, pretending that he had undertaken a job – his first – for a Greek friend, sought advice from his father on how to arrange the exchange. Neptune, proud of the boy’s initiative, supervised the transaction himself. In the true tradition of the fixer, he asked no questions. But he made sure to turn a profit of seventy-five liras.
Tomaso then introduced us to Marko.
Even today, Marko is imprinted on my mind as the manliest man I’ve ever met: a blend of film star, athlete and Olympian god with the thick, perfectly groomed regulation moustache of a Casanova; serene as if he had perfected the art of being a loner, yet a man always living at the peak of his spirits. We fell under his spell immediately. Even Naim, who at first perceived him as puzzlingly ingenuous, ended up mesmerized by his irrepressible confidence. But then, Marko had every reason to be confident. Since embarking on his career, he had undertaken all sorts of perilous assignments and had accomplished every one with panache, an unprecedented achievement in a very precarious profession. Moreover, he had so souped up his boat, the Yasemin, that he could outrun any patrol craft in the Aegean.