Blood-Dark Track

by Joseph O'Neill

  Meanwhile, the ’thirties passed and Joseph still clung to his bachelordom. He played the field, rode his horse, and enjoyed his freedom – none of which prevented him from exercising dominion over Georgette. He made her quit her job helping out in a shop, and when she played cards he would appear at the door and simply say (in Arabic), ‘I have come.’ Unless she was losing heavily and needed to play on, she would gather up her chips and leave. Then, in 1939, when he was thirty-nine and she thirty, they married. ‘Enfin! Enfin! Enfin!’ my grandmother’s friend Lolo Naccache exclaimed when she me told the story. ‘Seventeen years he kept her waiting – seventeen years!’

  My grandmother in her twenties

  Soon after the marriage came the Second World War; and in 1942, Joseph’s mysterious incarceration.

  In 1945, he returned to Mersin from Palestine by train. My mother, five years old, accompanied her mother to the railway station to meet her father. He alighted from the train and walked along the platform towards them weeping.

  Afterwards, Joseph could not do very much. He opened an import–export office, but the enterprise failed. He was distressed and gloomy. For a year or so he compulsively stalked backwards and forwards for a distance of around twelve feet, staring at the ground as he strode and swivelled, his hands behind his back, his face bunched into that dark, forbidding expression. He began to receive treatment for heart problems.

  The one document surviving from this time was his recipe for marmalade to be made from six bitter oranges (turunç), three sweet oranges, and one lemon.

  In 1947, Joseph accompanied Lina to Lyon, where she was due to start at a new school. They rowed out to the ship in a lighter loaded with trunks and cases filled with food for the French relations, who were subject to rationing. It was a therapeutic voyage for my grandfather. He went to Paris, and he visited his brother and sister in Lyon, from where he wrote a letter home in October. The first part of the letter was a rushed, somewhat curt response to three letters he had received from Georgette – ‘I did not write a long letter from Paris as I had hoped, so don’t expect one.’ He explained that his return would be delayed by a week due to a cholera outbreak in Alexandria, and confirmed that he would still be arriving in Mersin via Beirut. He assured his wife that Lina was very happy and that she needn’t worry about the little girl. Then the letter changed tack and concerned itself with a problem at the hotel that the Vali, Tewfik Sirri Gür, had brought to Joseph’s attention, namely that complaints had been received about hotel guests going to the hotel’s communal toilet wearing their pyjamas.

  The old Toros Hotel, circa 1950

  Returning to Mersin with Tarzan the Great Dane, Joseph concentrated on the business of the hotel. Life, as they say, returned to normal. Joseph opened a patisserie at the hotel, complete with a Greek chef, but it didn’t work out. ‘He was ahead of his time,’ my mother said. Mersin changed only very slowly, and in letters written at the Toros Hotel in 1954, Freya Stark described the town as ‘just two streets, one tidy and one dingy, and merchants’ houses in gardens beyond.… It must be like the age-old life of little ports here … [I]n another year or so the big roads will be made and even more changes. I am only just in time.’

  The final document I had found in my grandmother’s apartment was dated 1 November 1959 and written in French. It was from a Walther Ülrich in Weissenfels (a mining town near Leipzig, in East Germany), with whom Joseph had not been in touch for ‘at least ten years’. Neither I nor anyone else had heard of Walther Ülrich, and all I could deduce from the letter was that he’d visited Mersin in the past and that Joseph had in turn visited Herr Ülrich at his home in Saxony – presumably in 1934, the year of my grandfather’s trip to Germany. Walther Ülrich informed Joseph that he and his wife had become old (seventy-five and sixty-five respectively) but were still healthy. ‘You know that I lost my boys and all my fortune in this terrible war,’ he wrote. ‘I am thus forced to work right to the end, and count myself lucky to still have my position at the office.… And you, my friend, how are you and your family? How is business and who is still alive of those good people whom we count as our mutual friends, the Brazzafolis, Gioskun, etc. etc.? Much has changed in the world since we had the pleasure of your visit.…’

  Indeed, by 1960, Mersin had finally started to change, and at the forefront of the developments was the new hotel, which was being built with a low-interest government loan procured thanks to the intervention of my grandfather’s good friend, Mr Okyayüz, the Vali. That year also saw the dramatic death of Tarzan. The dog was dying of cancer and it was decided to put him down in the mountains near Gözne, where he had been happiest. Joseph, distraught and tearful, did not have the heart to shoot the animal himself and instructed two locals to perform the task. They took Tarzan to a neighbouring valley and shot him there. Unfortunately, they botched the job. Tarzan survived and, bleeding from the gunshot wound, somehow managed to walk the three kilometres back to his master’s summer house, where he lay on the steps and died.

  My grandfather never spoke about the war. Once, when a friend broached the subject, it brought tears to his eyes. ‘Leave this old story alone,’ he said. ‘Laisse tranquille cette vieille histoire.’

  I closed my notebook and got to my feet. It was nearly midday. The time had come to see Salvator Avigdor. I walked down past the reception and headed out into the heat.

  A visitor to Monsieur Salvator, who lives with his wife in an apartment not a pistachio shell’s throw from the Greek Orthodox Church, will quickly learn that he is a survivor of a multiple bypass operation (four veins removed from his leg and transplanted into his heart) and brain surgery (a tumour ‘the size of an orange’ excised). Monsieur Salvator, pale and contented and bald as a melon, will tell you that his family comes from Adrianople (Edirne), in European Turkey; that his uncle was a tailor to Sultan Abdul Hamid II and was awarded a gold medal (which Monsieur Salvator can show you if you so wish) for services rendered; that his father was a watchmaker with a sideline in revolvers; that his son went to Harvard and now runs a huge garment business in the United States; that another uncle worked the boat from Marseille to the United States and spoke twenty-four languages. Sipping a limonata and mopping his brow – a surgical scar runs across his cranium like a bicycle track – Monsieur Salvator will tell you these things and indeed many other things that may come to his mind: his loquaciousness, he explained to me, was a side-effect of the heart surgery.

  Monsieur Salvator said that he and his wife were the last two Jews left in Mersin. The synagogue had disappeared, as had the seventy Jewish families who lived in the town when Salvator joined the Toros Hotel as an eighteen-year-old on 9 September 1935 – a time when Mersin was a marvel, Monsieur Salvator said, a cosmopolis where you’d hear three words of French, four words of Turkish and three words of Arabic, and when Joseph Dakak, a punctilious but fair boss, caroused until three or four in the morning and didn’t emerge from his rooms in the hotel loft until noon. There was a staff of five: a Christian, a Muslim woman, a Kurd, and two Jews. Monsieur Salvator, the bookkeeper, found the ethnically diverse atmosphere uncongenial.

  In 1940, Monsieur Salvator recalled with a sigh, the Toros Hotel was the place to be. It had twenty rooms and a first-class restaurant with a chef who had cooked for Mustafa Kemal. On Sunday nights there was dancing to tunes played by musicians from Stamboul on the terrace overlooking the sea. The hotel buzzed with Mersin society, travellers and foreign so-called businessmen. Leaning forward with not a little excitement in his voice, Monsieur Salvator revealed that the Turkish authorities forced Monsieur Dakak to engage a man – Moharem, he was called – who was an agent of the Turkish secret police and whose job it was to spy on the goings-on at the hotel; that an Austrian resident of Mersin called Gioskun Parker, mentioned in Herr Ülrich’s letter as a friend of Joseph, was an agent of the Germans and quite possibly a double agent of the Turks; that in 1940, Monsieur Salvator quit his job because the secret police wanted him to intercept letters and infor
m on the guests staying at the hotel. The most eminent of these guests was the German ambassador, Franz von Papen. He, Salvator Avigdor, a Jew, had personally accompanied His Excellency and Frau von Papen on a motoring trip down the coast in the direction of Silifke, stopping at the spectacular caverns known as Heaven and Hell.

  I asked Salvator whether my grandfather ever expressed opinions about the war.

  ‘Never. It was out of the question. At the hotel, there would be a German here, an Englishman there, and an Italian in between. You couldn’t open your mouth. You never knew who was working for who.’

  I said, ‘What about my grandfather? Do you think he worked for anyone?’

  Monsieur Salvator said, ‘Well, he was Germanophile, that’s for sure. His German was fluent, and he’d speak to the German visitors at the hotel.’ He continued pleasantly, ‘I personally think that he probably did work for the Germans. You see, once you’ve given a little information, that’s it, you’ve crossed the line.’

  Monsieur Salvator didn’t elaborate on his speculation. Instead he stood up and made an aerobatic motion with his hand. ‘Every day an Italian plane flew over the port, counting the ships. You must understand, Mersin was an important place. It was full of intrigue, like Lisbon. Mersin,’ Mr Salvator said, pointing upwards, ‘was like Casablanca.’

  Walking back to the hotel from Monsieur Salvator’s, I reflected that pretty much everything I had heard about Joseph suggested that he saw himself as a man apart, and indeed that seeing himself must have been an essential procedure of his psyche. It wasn’t that, Narcissus-like, he fell in love with his own reflection; it was rather that, in order to generate and project an image for which there was no local model, he would have needed to dream up an imagined version of himself by which he might gauge his style and conduct. To judge from his reputation as a self-cultivator, this relationship with his imaginary double must have been a powerful one; perhaps as powerful and enduring as any he knew. The question was: what was the character of this modular other? Who was he?

  The notion of my grandfather as a fantasist made me think of certain other fantasists I encounter in my working life – the kind who wind up on the wrong end of allegations of fraud. What often marks the downfall of these men – almost invariably they are men – is not a cold ambition to enrich themselves at the expense of others but a fatal susceptibility to their own deceptions: a crazy, romantic belief that their get-rich-quick schemes, however flawed and tricky, will result in champagne for all. Could the same thing have happened to Joseph? Could some dreamlander’s misapprehension have led him astray – into espionage and subsequent imprisonment? I thought about what Monsieur Salvator had said about Casablanca. I was, of course, thinking about the movie, about a well-dressed man in a white tuxedo who tries to steer a neutral and profitable course through a sea of vultures, gamblers, desperadoes, lovers, black marketeers, drinkers, secret agents, beauties, idealists, rumour-mongers. Humphrey Bogart, as Rick, the owner of Rick’s Café Américain, had been almost exactly my grandfather’s age; and Casablanca was set in December 1941, precisely when my grandfather was running the Toros Hotel and, unless I was mistaken, only months before he was arrested.

  I ran into my mother at the Toros Hotel reception. ‘Did you find the key to the depot?’ I asked. My mother reached into her hip pocket. ‘I have it here,’ she said.

  With the key in my hand I ran up the hotel’s handsome granite stairs just as, twenty-one years before, I ran up the stairs clutching a telegram from Ireland that a waiter had handed me. I was in tears as I sprinted up to my grandmother’s apartment that day, because the telegram from my uncle said, ‘DAD DIED YESTERDAY STOP FUNERAL ON SATURDAY STOP BRENDAN’.

  2

  Now never marry a soldier,

  a sailor or a marine,

  But keep your eye on the Sinn Féin boy

  with his yellow, white and green.

  – Anonymous, ‘Salonika’

  In summer, around Inishannon, the Bandon could be a jungle river. Rank, swollen trees – beech, oak, willow, ash, sycamore, horse chestnut, various evergreens – gather heavily over the banks, the trunks enveloped by vines and dangling plants, the forked branches supporting huge thunderheads of foliage. Everything is overgrown: river boulders and sandbars sprout bushes and weeds, the water surface is clogged with pale yellow blooms, and elongated strands of green vegetation run underwater. Further west and upriver, the Bandon slips along through meadows and copses and is only patchily visible from the main road. At Bandon, the old British garrison town of which it used to be said that even its pigs were Protestant, the river passes under Bandon Bridge. It is still remembered that in 1641 English troops tied 88 Irishmen of the town back to back and threw them off the bridge into the water, where all were drowned. Upstream beyond Bandon town, the river meanders by such townlands as Coolfadda, Shinagh and Laragh on its northerly bank and Castlebernard and Killountain on its southerly. It is briefly reunited with the highway, at Baxter’s Bridge, before twisting off again on a path of its own. The road, meanwhile, has started to resemble the secretive river it shadows – narrow, sinuous, and hemmed in by thickets and dense, overarching trees that barely admit daylight. Black-feathered birds drift like ashes out of the way of cars. The surrounding hills are obscured and the highway is reduced to a succession of blind turns. It’s enough to lead you, kept in this leafy dark, to imagine a conspiracy to conceal the world through which you travel – West Cork.

  Finally, a valley opens up ahead. A ruined mill appears on the right. You are coming to the village of Enniskean. If you take a left, towards the gentle uplands there, and follow certain hedged-in lanes, you will arrive upon the townland of Ardkitt, where my grandfather Jim O’Neill was born and the O’Neill farm, now occupied by my second cousin Pat O’Neill, may still be found. If you drive straight on, through Enniskean and the even smaller village of Ballineen, you will come to places where my grandfather, long after he had left the country to live in Cork city, returned on nights when neither the moon nor the floods were up, to steal salmon on the Bandon river.

  Jim usually took with him a son or two; often, too, his regular poaching sidekick, Dan Cashman, whose ready compliance with my grandfather’s commands outweighed the fact that he could neither swim, nor drive, nor see beyond the palm of his hand. The fishing party pulled up in the twilight at Manch, where the Bandon twists close to the road and where the fishing rights and riparian lands were the property of the Conners of Manch House. (Manch was also where Tom Barry’s Flying Column, having marched in rain through Shanacashel, Coolnagow and Balteenbrack, crossed the river after the Kilmichael ambush.) Arrival at dusk, when a car with no lights shining would not attract attention, was vital; the car’s electrics were doctored so that the brake lights could be turned on and off by a special switch under the dashboard.

  My grandfather, Dan Cashman and my uncle Brendan quickly jumped out. They took two nets – darkened with a product actually called Nigger-Brown Dye – from the boot and skipped over the stile. They passed through the hedge and crossed the single track of the Cork, Bandon & South Coast Railway. There was the water, only a few dozen paces away through furze and long grass. Meanwhile another uncle of mine, Jim Junior, drove on and parked the car in a spot he hoped was both innocuous and discreet. Only fourteen, he would wait there anxiously until the others returned later that night.

  Night fell. Nevertheless, it was possible to see clearly, since a night sky is navy, never black, and eyes grow quickly accustomed to the dark. Rain fell intermittently, which was good. The last thing the poachers wanted was the moon hanging there like a button on a blazer and lighting up the river.

  My grandfather pegged one end of a net into the ground. Then he took the net’s weighted line and threw it over the water on to the opposite bank, which was thirty or so feet away; he did the same with the jackline of the other (unpegged) net. He and Brendan forded the river by stepping on a gravel isle and wading knee-deep across the remaining stretch. Once they’d
crossed, Brendan unspooled and worked the first net so that it stretched across the water like a submerged tennis net. (The net could drop ten to eleven feet underwater in meshes of seven and a quarter inches.) Meanwhile my grandfather picked up the second, unpegged, net and signalled to Dan Cashman to do the same on his side of the water. Then Dan Cashman and my grandfather dragged that net through the water towards the tennis net.