I had always doubted that many Irish people subscribed to this kind of analysis with any vehemence or, if they did, gave it much contemporary significance. Most of us felt that the injustice and oppression suffered by our ancestors had been adequately ventilated over the past century and that our duties to them were sufficiently performed by the moderate forms of remembrance that were now in place: classroom history lessons, the occasional film or book, and ceremonies like the Great Famine Event in 1997. We were ready for fresh stories about ourselves, and this had apparently been confirmed by the famous referendums of 22 May 1998. But on 15 August 1998, which was only a week before I boarded the Taurus Express at Adana, a huge bomb exploded in the centre of Omagh, a market town in Co. Tyrone, killing 29 civilians. The massacre – the worst in the last 30 years of violence – was said to be the work of the Real IRA, a group associated by the press with Bernadette Sands, the sister of the hunger striker Bobby Sands. Bernadette Sands had come to my notice a few months before Omagh, when I’d heard her bitterly pronouncing on the failure of the Good Friday Agreement to make definite provision for a united Ireland. What had interested me wasn’t the fact of her opposition to the peace process – inevitably, some republicans would be incapable of compromise – but the grounds she relied on: that the Agreement rendered vain the sacrifices and exertions of bygone republicans – republicans like her dead brother and, of course, Jim O’Neill. Was it for a devolved assembly, she rhetorically asked, that so many volunteers died and sacrificed years of freedom? For Sands, it seemed, the resolution of present-day political grievances turned, on some fundamental level, on the discharge of assumed obligations to the wronged dead, whose shadowy needs were to be added to those of the living and unborn.
At what point were we released from participation in the injustices of the past? The Armenian nation still craved our attention and made demands on our pity and outrage, and as I sat on the Taurus Express, I felt under a blurry duty to fight off my tiredness, to remember those who passed through this unremarkable landscape eighty years before. But I fell asleep.
When I awoke, we were moving along the edge of a cool valley in a corridor of pine trees. Clusters of poplars signalled the course of a small river, and, in the hills, villages thick with fruit trees appeared among the pine woods. Every five minutes, it seemed, we stopped at a tiny, beautiful old station.
We climbed higher and the train began pleasantly to pass in and out of tunnels. We had reached the Amanus Mountains, which were the scene in the Great War of frantic efforts by the Baghdad Railway Company to complete the construction of the railway. Nevertheless, the Armenians working here were rounded up and marched off in June 1916 and replaced by 1,600 British and Indian prisoners of war. Just over a month later, Joseph Dakak started work at the construction camp at Belemedik, where the Taurus tunnels, the longest on the Baghdad railway, were being built. There, the Armenian workforce was still in place: the military imperative of completing the work and the lack of readily available skilled replacements had contrived to exempt them from deportation. The luck of these railway workers and their families held out for the rest of the war. They formed one of the very few cadres of Armenians to escape deportation.
After a lengthy stop in a hill-station, the train descended from the Amanus into typical Anatolian territory: flat farmland and marshy scrubland stretching out for miles up to a blur of distant hills. The train continued to crab towards Gaziantep, which lay directly to the east, along a maddeningly indirect loop of track. I fell asleep again and awoke again. Still the same scenes: cottonfields, cornfields and inconsequential stony fields. When I next opened my eyes, the train, escorted by a cloud of butterflies, was thundering by groves of pistachio trees. We entered the sprawling, dusty industrial city of Gaziantep, the source of so many summer visitors to Mersin’s coastline.
I didn’t linger. I went straight from the train station to the otogar and caught a mini-bus back towards the coast, to Iskenderun. My thoughts went back to a character in my grandfather’s testimony, Aram Hachadourian, the Armenian native of Gaziantep who’d lived in Iskenderun until he was forced out in 1939, when France conceded Hatay – that fertile strip of East Mediterranean shoreline to which Syria still laid claim – to Turkey.
It was mid-afternoon when I arrived in Hatay. The mini-bus stopped at Dörtyol, which used to be a mainly Armenian village, and then continued south. On the left, the Amanus loomed as vaporous and cloud-smudged as the Wicklow Mountains viewed from the Curragh. Passing through lemon and orange groves that overwhelmed me with memories – or fantasies – of a time when Mersin was ringed by just such gardens, we reached the coast at the small port of Payas. During the 1909 massacres, 272 Armenian deaths were reported in Payas, Dörtyol and other villages around Iskenderun.
After going through a heavily industrialized area of factories and container yards, we came to Iskenderun, picturesquely wedged between steaming, spectacularly proximate wooded mountains, and a Mediterranean Sea that seemed greyer and choppier than the one that lapped against the shore at Mersin. I checked into the Hitit Hotel, a half-gutted ’seventies construction that either had never been completed or was already ruined. The balcony of my room overlooked the sea and the post office, a grand limestone building built by the French. I took a shower and then strolled out into the humid early evening. I wasn’t sure what to expect. This was my first visit to my grandfather’s birthplace.
The waterfront was a less polished, more intimate version of the one at Mersin. There was a boulevard, palm trees, sparse traffic, and a congenial little park where, after dinner and dark, children would play on swings and seesaws until late in the warm night. A couple of horse-drawn carriages made their way decoratively up and down the boulevard, where a very few degenerating examples remained of the row of Ottoman villas that had, during the Second World War, housed the residence of the Turkish general commanding the region, and the Italian and German and British and United States consulates. Behind the waterfront was a neighbourhood of narrow streets and small, rickety houses. It was wonderfully quiet, and the odour of jasmine and the echoing calls of turtle doves stirred in me a sharp, bittersweet ache. My nostalgia intensified when I was surprised by the chatter of Arabic drifting from the small gardens; how comforting was the sound of a language I first heard spoken by elderly ladies who loved me! It was in this quarter, just behind the waterfront, that I came across the Greek consulate, housed in an old building that retained a crumbling, slightly ludicrous grandeur. Next door to it, in the only carefully restored Ottoman structure I’d seen, was the British consulate: it had returned to its 1909 location, the offices of Catoni, maritime agents and agent of Lloyd’s underwriters. I sensed, as I wandered back to the waterfront to the sound of Arabic mingled with Turkish and the smell of horse-dung, that something was left of the Ottoman Syrian town in which Joseph Dakak had passed his first ten years. There still stood in Iskenderun a Catholic church, two Orthodox churches and even an Armenian church. It was also easy to imagine, as the Amanus Mountains darkened in the east and I rejoined the locals in strolling along the boulevard, the intrigue and espionage that had taken place in this small, intense port during the last war. C.T.C. Taylor, the British SIME agent, wrote that German intelligence had approached a certain Y, a prominent resident of Hatay, to use his position to obtain intelligence about Allied troop movements in Syria and Palestine, but Y notified the British of the approach and offered his services as a double agent. On one occasion, Taylor met Y at Antakya under the surveillance of intensely suspicious Turkish plainclothes detectives; another time, they met at the open air restaurant of Joseph Ayvazian, the Axis informer, where Taylor dropped a parcel in the darkness for collection by Y. Taylor’s greatest coup was bribing the cleaner at the Italian consulate to place the contents of the consul’s – the Marquis di San Felice’s – waste-paper baskets into bags and pass them on to the British.
I simply could not imagine Joseph Dakak taking part in such capers. Given what I now knew of his cir
cumstances 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 ti
me 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.
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