The next morning, my father went down to the bureau of Joseph Dakad to make amends. He felt like a boy going to see the principal. Monsieur Dakad, not a barrel of laughs at the best of times, used the grave and headmasterly English of Alec Guinness in Lawrence of Arabia. He sat behind a large desk equipped with inkwells, blotters and fountain pens. On the wall behind him hung a photograph of a grim-faced Atatürk.
He listened to my father’s apology in unimpressed silence. Joseph Dakad was not a whiskey man himself, nor even a raki man. The only alcohol he touched was the very occasional beer. He had got drunk once in his life, as a youth, and had never allowed himself to forget the indelicate consequences. Joseph Dakad was a water man; indeed, he was something of a water connoisseur. ‘This water is poor,’ he would declare, pushing aside the tumbler filled with the offending liquid; or, sipping appreciatively, ‘Now, this is water.’ Soda – as carbonated mineral water is called in Turkey – was a particular favourite, since it went easy on his troublesome stomach. He also liked ayran – strained yoghurt, water and salt – which he enjoyed making and foisting on his family. ‘Drink,’ he would command his children. When my grandmother was unable to nurse my infant mother and the wet-nurse tested positive for tuberculosis, Joseph bought a cow to ensure a supply of fresh and hygienic milk for his daughter. He was discriminating and imperious about all food. He would stick a long knife vertically into a watermelon and listen for the long tearing sound – craaatch – that signalled a good fruit; if the melon was pale or watery or otherwise substandard, he would discard it, sometimes getting through ten before he was satisfied. He was a vigorous and fussy shopper at the market and bought meat from a personal kebabçi whose every motion of the cleaver he would supervise and direct. Joseph also enjoyed receiving imported goods – tinned ham and the like – that my father was able to procure at the American air base near Adana. On one occasion, my father offered him sardines. Monsieur Dakad reflected for a moment or two, weighing words. His use of English was very skilful, and he searched his mind until he found the expression that exactly reflected his sentiments. ‘Fuck sardines,’ he said.
Joseph’s approach to food was one manifestation of a general authoritarianism. His children all described him as très autoritaire, and his niece, Ginette, affectionately recalled that her uncle was ‘very commanding, like a Turk’. My grandmother (whom Joseph sometimes called yamara, Arabic for ‘my wife’), about as forceful a woman as you could wish for, deferred to him in almost all things. Why? Perhaps (as her elderly friends suggested to me) it was out of love; or perhaps because she guessed that a sense of his supremacy lay at the centre of her husband’s self-estimation, and indeed of her estimation of him. Either way, my grandfather didn’t impose himself by shouting or physical violence. Only once did he spank my mother, after she and Amy had naughtily rearranged the furniture; and when it came to giving tiny Amy her pan pan, he let her off. Ten years later, when Amy plucked up the courage to ask for permission to ride with her friends on a mobilette, he said, ‘How dare you even think of asking for my permission for such a thing?’ Usually, in such a situation, Joseph would simply frown and darken his eyes, making a forbidding face: a face that said Non. And no meant no. ‘Of course,’ my mother told me lightly, ‘we were all afraid of him.’
My mother, who all my life barely breathed a word about her father, at first only spoke about him if prompted, and then apparently spoke unemotionally, as if the subject were a distant country of moderate interest she had once visited. But then came a thaw, and a runnel of information began to flow my way. This may have been due to a sense that if her father’s life was to be reduced to ink and paper, it was as well she had her say; but I think her openness really stemmed from an impulse to commemorate her recently deceased mother, with whom she had enjoyed very happy relations and whose finished life was inextricable from that of her husband and grand amour.
My mother disclosed small, pleasant things. For example: that Joseph would proudly instruct her – his eleven-year-old daughter finally returned from four years’ schooling in France – ‘Récite!’ and she would speak verses by Alphonse Daudet to gathered adults; that in the evenings he would take his daughters out on a rowboat in the sea (a boatman, and not Joseph himself, would man the oars); that he would take my mother for a spin in the car through the citrus groves or to the patisserie in Tarsus to buy baklava; that he bathed three times a day; that he read newspapers fanatically (often, wearing crisp pyjamas, in his bed: for an enterprising man, he was curiously idle), consuming six a day, morning and evening editions; and that Papa, whose suits were beautifully cut, always wore a clean white handkerchief in his breast pocket.
Amy also remembered little moments. When she was fifteen years old, her father saw her wearing a touch of mascara. He explained to her: ‘Let me tell you something. Girls who wear makeup do so because they need to. You have big brown eyes, so you have no need to wear make-up.’ Amy was very interested in my investigations into her father’s life, and she sent me documents and photos and suggested lines of inquiry. It seemed that for her, too, Joseph – who died, after all, when she was only twenty-one, and whom for years she’d only seen during school holidays – was obscured in a dimness out of which she wished to haul him. There was, naturally enough, an iconolatrous element to this desire, but there was also plain curiosity. My mother became curious, too – she was only twenty-three when Joseph died and, like her sister, had been away from home for much of her life’s short overlap with her father’s – and after a time her long reticence about her father largely disappeared. That reticence, my siblings and I had always vaguely sensed, had been expressive of a some kind of injury. The only paternal tort we could think of – apart from the unknown matter of our grandfather’s wartime activities – was Joseph’s refusal to permit my mother to pursue a university career. Equipped with a French baccalaureate, she desperately wanted to study medicine or law at a French university, but her father would not contemplate the expense: a young woman had no real business acquiring professional qualifications of that kind. Crushingly, the matter was not even debated. Although no Mersin women attended university at that time, it was probably not until my mother had graduated doctorandus in French from Leiden University in her thirties that she began to forgive her father his act of chauvinism.
In the event, Joseph did authorize Lina (Caroline) to go to London and take a bilingual secretarial course at a college in Dunraven Street, in Mayfair. My mother lived in The Boltons, a splendid address in South Kensington, in a hostel overshadowed by the mansion of Douglas Fairbanks Junior. In the mornings she would walk across Hyde Park to her college. She found London, with its stupendous fogs and polite, pin-striped pedestrians, strange and wonderful. She made friends, among them the about-to-be-famous model Jean Shrimpton, ate lunch at Selfridges, improved her English. She was not homesick. To keep in touch with home, she corresponded with her mother. ‘Did your father write to you?’ I asked her. ‘No,’ she said, ‘just my mother. Maman cared for the children – visited us at school, looked after our day-to-day needs. We were part of her domestic domain. My father’s domain was outside the house, at work, at the hotel. I had a very quiet childhood,’ my mother said. ‘I never recall my parents raising their voices at each other.’
My mother’s spell in England – which also included some months spent teaching conversational French at Tolmer’s, an obscure boarding school for girls near St Albans – was the finishing touch on an international upbringing. She attended Turkish primary school, and then, aged seven, went to boarding school in Lyon, where she did not see her parents for the best part of four years. For her secondary education, Lina was transferred to the Ecole Franciscaine in Aleppo, a convent school for girls. Schooling in Aleppo or Beirut was customary for the well-to-do Christian girls of Mersin. Its objective was to produce nice, comme il faut young women who would return home to excite the attentions of the resident young men – the Alberts and the Andrés and the Michels and the Henris – and fa
ll sufficiently in love as to get married. They would speak French (with a distinctive Levantine accent) as their first language and Turkish (also with a distinctive Levantine accent) as their second. Their speech in both tongues would be unidiomatic and relatively unsupple, limitations reinforced by the spectrum of activities awaiting them: cooking expertly; supporting their husbands’ business exploits; bearing and raising children; throwing and going to tea parties and cocktail parties; putting up with the heat in the summer and the boredom in the winter; periodically voyaging to Europe and, once there, shopping – for shoes in Italy, silk scarves in France, chocolates in Switzerland, raincoats in England. My mother was not enthusiastic, when the time came, about leaving London.
However, when she returned in 1960, Mersin, its population grown to sixty-something thousand, was livening up. A new port had been built and all kinds of projects were in progress at the new industrial complex, Ata. It was at Ata that my mother found work as a secretary with the American construction company, Foster Wheeler. She made a good living and, most importantly, she met her husband.
The improbability of my parents’ union is of the kind usually associated with being whacked by a rock fallen from outer space. Even leaving geography out of it, Cork boys would appear to have little in common with Mersin girls; and Kevin O’Neill – monolingual, freckled from head to toe, teeth ravaged by blows received from hurling sticks and the negligent interventions of Cork dentists – was, on the surface, pure Cork. He had been sent to Turkey to lay the ground for a project which Chicago Bridge had undertaken, the building of a small oil refinery for Mobil Oil. It was a big job for a young man, particularly one whose only experience abroad was a short time spent in Germany. But my father was energetic and undaunted, and, sustained by the O’Neill trait of easiness and unfathomable confidence, he took to the task and to the town. For the first few months, he stayed at the best hotel in Mersin, the Toros, whose top floor was still under construction and whose owner, Monsieur Dakad, would pass days judicially supervising the works in a chair across the road, his casque coloniale firmly placed on his head. When the time came to adjudicate in the matter of the windows my father had smashed, Monsieur Dakad, although displeased, did not overreact. He heard out my father and then calmly, without reprimand, leaned across his desk and handed over an estimate for the repairs. He never spoke of the incident again – not even a year or so later, when my father again requested a private interview, this time to ask for permission to marry his eldest daughter, Lina.
Over the years there has been a seepage of stories about my parents’ courting days. My father would borrow a car and pick up my mother from her home in Camlibel. Oncle Pierre, still a teenager, would come along to chaperone his older sister. As soon as the car had turned around the corner, Pierre would jump out of the car and my parents would be free to drive where they pleased – along the coast, or up to the blissfully cool yayla (mountain retreat) of Gözne. Overlooked by a ruined castle and laced with streams, Gözne was a gorge dotted with rickety wooden houses that were barely visible in the thick greenery of oak, hawthorn, honeysuckle, myrtle, arbutus, jujube and Judas trees. Other times, Kevin would take Lina for a walk to the beach or along Atatürk Çaddesi, where the pavement was shaded by awnings of vine leaves and bougainvillaea. They were in love. In November 1961, they got engaged.
Joseph Dakad was unhappy about the match. He did not like the idea of his daughter marrying a foreigner and going away overseas. ‘She has only just returned from England,’ he complained to my father. ‘And besides, how do you propose to support her?’ ‘The same way that you’ve done,’ my father said. ‘By working.’ Joseph Dakad was not satisfied. He knew for a fact that his daughter had good values; but how could he be sure this Irishman shared them? What sort of family was he from? ‘I must have a reference,’ he said finally. He wrote to my father’s parish priest in Cork and obtained ground. In February 1962, my parents were married at the Catholic Church in Mersin, after a slight scare: the bride, detained at the coiffeur by a bad hairstyle that required refixing, was one hour late for the wedding. My mother was led up the aisle by her father. She, of course, wore white; he wore an expression of happiness and – it was chilly inside the church – a smart overcoat.
Actually, Joseph’s characteristic nattiness was one of the few things I had always known about him – that, and the fact that he spoke seven languages (five – French, Arabic, Turkish, English and German – very well, and two – Italian and Spanish – well enough); in the Levant, linguistic expertise has always been highly esteemed. When I asked people about him, they mentioned his dapperness straight away, by way of a headline, as though it led right down to the bottom of things. He was very chic in an understated, entirely appropriate way; sometimes he wore pure silk shirts made especially for him in Istanbul. Another headline was that he was not a serious card player. He played for small amounts – a petit jeu. Just about anywhere else this would be a non-story, but in old Mersin so much turned on cards and the fortunes that were won and lost at the tables of the Merchants’ Club. By contrast, Georgette – here, deference would enter the reporter’s voice – played a grand jeu. Stud poker and concain (a kind of gin rummy) were the preferred games, and play went on in the Club until the early hours. The stakes were high. Someone told me that a night of gambling once cost my grandmother an apartment.
There was a final thing I knew about Joseph. He was, in my grandmother’s phrase, a coureur. To be exact, she exclaimed: ‘Was he interested in women? Et comment! C’était un grand coureur!’ This pronouncement came a couple of years before her death, as she sat in her favourite armchair. Her voice had contained a clear note of amusement or pride and this, together with the use of coureur, threw me slightly. Literally, the word means ‘runner’, and its innocent athletic connotation planted the notion in my head that my grandfather’s interest in women was a harmless pastime, somehow morally akin to pounding the track. The other expression I’d heard used about him, ladies man, also rang innocently in my ears, conjuring up an old-fashioned gallantry consistent with something Tante Amy later told me: ‘Papa was very knowledgeable about law and property and was of great assistance to widows who required his help. Every night there would be a lady in his office, seeking his advice about some matter or other.’ He enjoyed dropping in on women friends for tea, taking them for strolls and presenting them with gifts. He would promenade with Giselle Chalfoun’s mother and aunt, mischievously suggesting to each that her cooking was better than the other’s. He gave large gold rings to René Messageot’s sister and wife, and doted on René’s mother; when Madame Messageot died, Joseph was inconsolable. He was very good friends with his friend Riri Levante’s wife, the attractive and socially powerful Rosie, and very often visited them with my grandmother. All this suggested that perhaps he was not a man’s man, that he found an unusual measure of social gratification in female company. Then I discovered that coureur was short for coureur de jupons, skirt-chaser, and when further inquiries revealed that Joseph was sometimes nicknamed Rasputin, my impression of him as an attentive gallant came under strain. My sister Elizabeth repeated a story which Mamie Dakad, again in a curiously triumphant tone, once told her: before the war, Joseph had a Muslim mistress staying at the hotel whom he was anxious to be shot of, so he asked Georgette to move into the hotel for a few days to make the woman’s position impossible. ‘ “Never!” I told him. “You got yourself into this position, now get yourself out of it!” ’ ‘He loved me,’ my grandmother once said, ‘but he paid attention to other women.’
As often happens with the heartbreakers of yesteryear, my grandfather’s dreamboat charms are not revealed by the photographs of him, which show a bespectacled fellow with smallish eyes and a dark concentration of hair beneath the nose. However, his famous spruceness does come through, not least in a picture that turned up in early 1995 in my grandmother’s papers. The photo was copied and sent to various family members, almost as if it were an official portrait. Its seductive, ico
nic value was obvious. Joseph, thirty-something, sat atop a horse. (The animal’s name was Tayara, Arabic for flier. It lived in a makeshift stable in the hotel, where a full-time groom fed it and polished it up every day like a shoe. Occasionally, Tayara ran unsuccessfully at the Adana hippodrome.) He sported a smart wide-brimmed hat and round glasses, a sleeveless sweater, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up into neat scrolls above the elbows, breeches, and superb riding boots. He carried a whip and he wore white gloves. It was hard for me, a non-equestrian, to say whether a certain horsemanship was captured by the photograph, but to my inexpert eyes he looked the part. The horse was prancing, and its heraldic posture lent the rider – straight-backed, impassive, assured – a chivalric air. Le chevalier Dakad: this was what the ensemble was calculated to impress upon the world.
What particularly interested me about this image was that Joseph lived in a dusty Turkish port populated by the families of shipping agents, cotton traders, commercial landlords, shopkeepers, stallholders, tradesmen, importers, exporters. These people were not cavaliers, and to the best of my knowledge there hadn’t been a local class of chevaliers to which Joseph might have belonged since Crusader times.
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