Blood-Dark Track

by Joseph O'Neill

  But old Mersin – the Mersin to which my grandfather’s body returned, a town of verandas, gardens and large stone houses – has largely disappeared. One by one, the villas have been sold, knocked down and replaced by tower blocks. The last surviving villa of the Naders, my grandmother’s family, is in Camlibel. The fate of this elegant building, which until only a few years ago was occupied by my mother’s cousin Yuki Nader and his Alexandrian wife, Paula, is not atypical. Surrounded on all sides by tower blocks whose occupants bombard it with junk, it is boarded up and empty – awaiting the bulldozer or, I’ve heard it rumoured, conversion to a bank – its avocado trees, shutters, gates, even its footpath stones, ripped out by persons unknown. Nobody seems to notice or, more precisely, attach significance to this spectacle.

  My grandfather’s childhood home

  A few other places survive. An ancient Nader property is now a primary school, and in the old Maronite quarter, the house where Joseph Dakad grew up is in use as a police station.

  For what it is worth, I like the new city and am excited by it. I know what fantasy and work and guts underpin its progress, I know that with its parks, shops and up-to-date facilities it is a pleasant, utilitarian and altogether desirable place to live – a model Turkish city, in many ways. But because of its modern, commercial character, Mersin has no place in western European narratives. British guide books, for example, are unanimously dismissive: ‘Can serve as an emergency stop on your way through,’ is the assessment of one book, ‘none too attractive’ and ‘almost without interest’ of others. One guide book asserts that the city was ‘little more than a squalid fishing hamlet’ at the beginning of the twentieth century, while another declares that the place did not even exist until fifty years ago.

  Although Mersiners would probably find hurtful and wrong the notion that their city is nothing more than an ugly point of onward transit, it is likely that they would agree, without anxiety, with the suggestion that it has no past to speak of. Very few families have been rooted in the town for more than a generation or two, and most have histories connected to distant Anatolian villages or Kurdish mountainsides. No collective stock of stories or postcards of the old Mersin circulates, and no real interest exists in the handful of crumbling stone buildings that appear here and there, without explanation, between the apartment blocks. What matters overwhelmingly is the here and now, and so Mersin is unmythologized and ghostless, and contentedly so. Of course, it is not exempt from the generic Kemalist myth and, like every other urban settlement in the Turkish Republic, it is haunted by Atatürk, whose image, in a variety of get-ups, attitudes, silhouettes and situations, continues to adorn schools, shops, offices, homes, buses, stamps, bank notes and public spaces. (How many millions of times is a Turk fated to behold that wise, subtly pained visage?) If the past has any meaning, it is as a realm of Kemalist socio-economic progress: the only printed history of Mersin that exists, an illustrated book produced by a local lawyer, concentrates on municipal achievements like the reclamation of seaside land, the construction of the modern port, the creation of the waterfront park.

  Atatürk famously visited the city in 1923. He stayed in an imposing mansion of white stone and red rooftiles that, with its ballroom, its huge mountain-facing balcony and its lush garden, was Mersin’s best shot at a palazzo. In recent years the house has been meticulously restored. Decades of grime have been scraped from its walls, shutters have been replaced and metalwork renewed. It has been named Atatürk’s House, and for a small fee visitors may stroll about its rooms to admire the enormous proportions of the building and the painted ceilings and the period furniture, and to try to envisage the great leader breakfasting here or consulting with his adjutants there or, as happened on 17 March 1923, stepping out on to the wrought-iron balcony at the front of the house and shouting at the crowd gathered below – for reasons it took me a long time to fathom – ‘People of Mersin, take possession of your town!’

  A tiny and dwindling number of Mersiners will never really think of the big house as Atatürk House. For them, it will always be the Tahintzi house, the house where my uncle Fonda and his forebears lived. Fonda himself says that the house used to be known as the Christmann house, after Xenophon Christmann. The Christmann family arrived in the Levant as part of the entourage of the German Prince Athon, who was summoned to Greece in the 1830s by prospectors for a Greek royal family. Xenophon Christmann wound up as the German consul in Mersin, married Fonda’s great-aunt, and spent a chunk of his fortune on building the most magnificent building in the town. Years later, when Atatürk requisitioned the residence and the Tahintzi family standoffishly withdrew into a wing of the house, the Gazi (warrior of Islam) took offence and demanded, ‘Where is the lady of the house?’

  My grandmother had a tale of this kind – a colourful jelly of small facts in which the family origins are suspended and conserved. She said that her patrilinear ancestors, the Naders, came to Turkey from Lebanon. The arrivals were two brothers from Tripoli – les grandpères, she called them both, although only one, Dimitri, was her grandfather – who were in the business of shipping timber cut from the fir and juniper forests of the Taurus Mountains to the Suez Canal. The buyers of the timber offered to pay with gold or, if the brothers preferred, shares in the Suez Canal Company. The Nader brothers chose gold, and with it they bought land in the burgeoning port of Mersin. They planted orchards and, in 1875, built two large stone houses for themselves on Mersin’s main drag. The houses formed a single immense building two stories high and a block wide, with the ground floor given over to commercial units; sixty or so years later, these premises were transformed by my grandfather into the Toros Hotel.

  Such fragments of lore aside, the Christian community is fully implicated in Mersin’s general lack of retrospection. I never grew up with a clear sense of what these strange French-speaking Turks were doing in Mersin, or who they – we – really were. I knew that some families had connections with Lebanon, but I had little idea of what that meant. We were in Mersin now, and there was very little else to say.

  In order to gain a picture of historic Mersin, I had to leave the city – leave Turkey, in fact – and track down the writings of travellers kept in European libraries. I read that in 1818, when Captain Beaufort went there, Mersin consisted of nothing more than a few wretched huts raised on piles. Some years later, a long-term English resident of Tarsus called William Burckhardt Barker noticed that on the slightest appearance of bad weather, Arab lombards from Syria would take shelter at a spot known as Zephyrium, or Mursina, where the roadstead was excellent. Mursina was a name derived from the Greek for myrtle, because immense bushes of that plant were practically the only thing to characterize the site. In 1838, there were only a few magazines and huts there, and bales of cotton were left out in the rain until French vessels arrived to ship them to Marseille. Barker saw an opportunity. He built large warehouses capable of holding the cargoes of fifteen vessels at one time, and soon these were filled with the produce of the hinterland for export: cotton, wool, wheat, barley, wax, sesame-seed, linseed, madder-roots, Persian yellow-berries, hides. Imports – sugar, coffee, indigo, cochineal, soap, Persian tobacco – also brought traffic to the area, and before long others had built magazines and settled there.

  However, a Frenchman who visited Mersin in 1853, Victor Langlois, saw only a damned, marsh-covered, fever-devastated land with a population that decreased every year; the air was lethal, the water insalubrious, the fruit harmful. (He was not exaggerating: in the Adana plain, entire colonies of Circassian refugees, escaping from Russian anti-Muslim oppression, would be rubbed out by malarial fever.) By April 1875, things had noticeably improved. The Reverend E.J. Davis, arrived from Egypt, gained the impression of a bustling scala whose success he attributed to the active demand for cereals consequent upon the Crimean War. Mersina, as the port was known to westerners, struck the Reverend as a ‘flourishing little place; its bazaars, thronged by the various races who have settled here, present a scen
e of great animation; some of its streets are paved with square blocks of limestone; and there are many really good stone houses’. Officials apart, the Reverend observed, very few Turks lived in Mersin: ‘As usual in 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 headscarf, 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: J
oseph.

  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 only two of these three’s eleven children are still in Mersin. The city’s other Christian families have splintered in the same way to the United States of America, Canada, Malaysia and (in the case of the Chaldaeans, who emigrate in great numbers) Germany. On top of these dispersions, religious and cultural migrations: the remaining young, my own generation, are now married to and loved by Muslims, and if they speak French, it is as a frail, diminished third language, after Turkish and English. Arabic, the oldest tongue of all, is vestigial, restricted to the foodstuffs that continue to appear at dinner tables: muhshi, fassoulia, kibbe, tabbouleh, siyadiyeh. Thus the distinctively Christian community is disappearing, disappearing together with the place that it built and found marvellous, the Ottoman port with its dolphins, its gambling, its Club, its contagions.

  All of this matters because the life of my Turkish grandfather is mixed inextricably with the life of that evanescent city.

  One night around the Christmas of 1960, my father, a responsible and dutiful twenty-one-year-old employee of Chicago Bridge & Iron Co., an American corporation devoted to the profitable worldwide erection of tanks, pipelines, towers and other petrochemical constructions, trashed his room at the Toros Hotel with the petulance and panache of a rock star. He was the worse for a considerable quantity of cheap whiskey when a friend from work, an American called Bill Purdey, called by his room to get him to come out. My father, lying on his bed, sullenly declined the invitation, and Purdey, sensing the need for decisive action, said, ‘Come on, let’s get going,’ and abruptly slammed shut a window – and cracked the pane. My father perked up. ‘That’s typical of you, Purdey. You just can’t do anything right.’ He got out of bed, picked up the portable electric fire and threw it through the cracked pane of glass. ‘You see? That’s how you do it.’ He paused to contemplate his deed; then he smashed each of the remaining windows of the room.