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Blood-Dark Track: A Family History
Joseph O’Neill
A fascinating family memoir from Joseph O'Neill, author of the Man Booker Prize longlisted and Richard & Judy pick, ‘Netherland’.Joseph O'Neill's grandfathers – one Irish, one Turkish – were both imprisoned during the Second World War. The Irish grandfather, a handsome rogue from a family of small farmers, was an active member of the IRA and was interned with hundreds of his comrades. O'Neill's other grandfather, a hotelier from a tiny and threatened Turkish Christian minority, was imprisoned by the British in Palestine, on suspicion of being a spy.At the age of thirty, Joseph O'Neill set out to uncover his grandfather's stories, what emerges is a narrative of two families and two charismatic but flawed men – it is a story of murder, espionage, paranoia and fear, of memories of violence and of fierce commitments to political causes.
JOSEPH O’NEILL
Blood-Dark Track
A Family History
Copyright (#ulink_5f9e7ae5-41a8-5552-8bb8-a7a259227111)
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
This Harper Press edition published 2009
First published in Great Britain by Granta Books in 2000
Copyright © Joseph O’Neill 2000
Joseph O’Neill asserts the moral right to be identified
as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007309252
Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2017 ISBN: 9780007380770
Version: 2017-01-19
Praise (#ulink_a3f21287-0dbe-5952-9c19-8ef7bad19f7e)
From the reviews of Blood-Dark Track:
‘This is a beautifully written and complicated book, in which difficult perceptions are expressed with forensic honesty’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Joseph O’Neill is a corporate lawyer, a novelist … a philosopher. The story he tells here yields much evidence of the quickness of mind, analytical skill, contemplative ability and sheer endurance that these three roles demand … He also writes beautifully … But the book’s greatest triumph is in the delicate, sympathetic peeling back of layer after layer of two families before and after they overlap’
Financial Times
‘Blood-Dark Track is a superbly composed double-narrative … an extraordinary piece of detective work, removing the veil of silence that had been drawn across a history of the two branches of his family, and of the turbulent and often violent times in which O’Neill and Dakad lived’
Esquire
‘A gripping detective story, a thoughtful enquiry into nationalism, and a moving evocation of world war at the edges of its European theatre’
The Economist
‘An extraordinary book. The progress of [O’Neill’s] investigations are imbued with all the darkening excitement of a novel by le Carré or Greene’
TLS
‘His thoroughness and energy are phenomenal’
LRB
‘He uncovers fascinating parallels between the two men, illuminating the ways in which individual lives mesh with history’
Sunday Times
‘Joseph O’Neill writes beautifully. The fascination of this book lies in watching him come to terms with the violence in his family’s past’
Daily Mail
‘A most intriguing beast, this … An unusual and fascinating book’
Evening Herald
‘In its very unease, it is a remarkable work’
Irish Times
‘Blood-Dark Track moves adroitly between Ireland and the Middle East, and interlaces O’Neill’s own quest to discover what his grandfathers were up to with fascinating and unfamiliar insights into the history of their times … the result is riveting’
Sunday Express
‘An exploration into his secretive family history … makes compulsive reading’
Tatler
‘A book of remarkable virtuosity and illumination … This wonderful account is a joy to read, not least for the chance it gives us to understand ourselves’
The Herald
‘Blood-Dark Track is full of good things’
Independent
‘Unusual, expressive and absorbing. It is a rare triumph’
Irish Independent
Dedication (#ulink_c419b5de-0904-5b31-9e23-cb455c40444e)
To the memory of Joseph Dakad (1899–1964) and James O’Neill (1909–1973); to my sons; and to Sally.
Epigraph (#ulink_ece486b6-4a2f-506c-8300-4bc1557bc9a6)
Some day we shall get up before the dawn
And find our ancient hounds before the door,
And wide awake know that the hunt is on;
Stumbling upon the blood-dark track once more,
That stumbling to the kill beside the shore
– W. B. Yeats, ‘Hound Voice’
Contents
Cover (#uf89ede9c-9a0f-50cf-ae9d-c4343ad746da)
Title Page (#u674e8a1d-3299-593f-ab8e-42f77f17b3ac)
Copyright (#u2318b1de-0407-507a-8200-6a663735099b)
Praise (#ud4213409-4cc3-5063-804e-06ed1a7d4ceb)
Dedication (#u13f032fb-35b4-52dc-8ec0-deac648bec2e)
Epigraph (#uc14e1f5e-a3c4-5717-bd33-c84b82cc2f95)
Maps (#u87066db6-d551-5b07-b444-04b80f54447d)
Prologue (#u810ea885-9c38-5435-9c41-04dcf362c2db)
1 (#u7c06f6f6-21b5-560b-8721-f61a00d94fa5)
2 (#u70328fd1-276f-5914-8860-8aa15a742d9c)
3 (#u5fefb97e-e16d-5d02-976d-cecefc80af9f)
4 (#uc11ec406-f169-5b2f-9392-0cf03e6ac181)
5 (#u90362d34-d405-5d4d-aa85-72303c920c3c)
6 (#ud5206f1e-b11e-5720-960d-aee88d23fe98)
7 (#ua91af46f-65a6-5239-8298-e7e88bb14a1a)
8 (#u27732f11-be25-54a5-9949-27ba8b9b8aad)
Epilogue (#u1abba511-1d07-5777-bf5d-5b1f2f3e7c33)
Keep Reading (#ue99d11d2-38a5-5ad8-a60a-1a5e319d2a49)
Acknowledgements (#u89805d58-38b0-5681-b7cc-ca6ddc73589c)
About the Author (#u35fb1c25-1d2b-5c72-a16b-babc7db0761f)
Also by the Author (#u5f40828a-1dfd-52b7-9486-1724d71af79e)
About the Publisher (#u64f15bf2-9b1a-58ba-ac84-44e556e2637a)
Maps (#ulink_29644c7a-33e6-5f8b-b75e-4ab4860b3a33)
West Cork
Turkey/Syrian border, Spring 1942
Prologue (#ulink_93251466-3645-5908-adff-a0dfafb94c14)
For me it began in far-off Mesopotamia now called Iraq, that land of Biblical names and history, of vast deserts and date groves, scorching suns and hot winds, the land of Babylon, Baghdad and the Garden of Eden, where the rushing Euphrates and the mighty Tigris converge and flow down into the Persian Gulf.
It was there in that land of the Arabs, then a battle-ground for the contending Imperialistic armies of Britain and Turkey, that I awoke to the echoes of guns being fired in the capital of my own country, Ireland.
– Tom Barry, Guerrilla Days in Ireland
At some point in my childhood, perhaps when I was aged ten, or eleven, I became aware that during the Second World War my Turkish grandfather – my mother’s father, Joseph Dakad – had been imprisoned by the British in Palestine, a place exotically absent from any atlas. A shiver of an explanation accompanied this information: the detention had something to do with spying for the Germans. At around the same age, I also learned that my Irish grandfather, James O’Neill, had been jailed by the authorities in Ireland in the course of the same war. Nobody explained precisely why, or where, or for how long, and I attributed his incarceration to the circumstances of a bygone Ireland and a bygone IRA. These matters went largely unmentioned, and certainly undiscussed, by my parents in the two decades that followed. Indeed, the subject of my late grandfathers was barely raised at all and, save for a wedding-day picture of Joseph and his wife, Georgette, there were no photographs of them displayed in our home. Dwelling in the jurisdiction of parental silence, my grandfathers remained mute and out of mind.
Partially as a consequence of this, it was not until I was thirty that the curious parallelism in my grandfathers’ lives struck me with any force and that I was driven to explore it, to fiddle at doors that had remained unopened, perhaps even locked, for so many years; and not until then that I began to make out what connected these two men, who never met, and these two captivities – one in the Levant heat, the other in the rainy, sporadically incandescent plains of central Ireland.
As will soon become apparent, I wasn’t bringing a reflective political mind to bear on my grandfathers’ lives, or any expertise as a historian, or even any abnormal inclination to wonder about what might lie behind a closed door. In general, I’m as content as the next man to proceed on the footing that any information of importance – anything that has a bearing on my essential interests – will be brought to my attention by those entrusted with such things: families, schools, news agencies, subversives. This is so even though the information I have on most historical and political subjects could be written out on a luggage tag; is almost certainly wrong; and, at bottom, probably functions as a political soporific – which perhaps explains why the insights I gained into my grandfathers’ lives often took the form of a slow, idiotic awakening. It took anomalous forces – a writer’s professional curiosity turned into something like an obsession – to push me, reluctant and red-eyed and stumbling, into the past and, it turned out, its dream-bright horrors.
Two inklings set me on my way, one for each grandfather.
My Turkish grandmother, Mamie Dakad – mamie being French for granny – had an extreme attachment to a set of keys. She clung to them from morning till night and then, secreting them under her pillow, from night till morning. When she mislaid them, all hell broke loose, in multiple languages. She would shriek first at herself in Arabic (‘Yiii!’), next at her family, in French (‘Où sont mes clefs?’), and finally – with terrifying loudness and venom – at the nearest servant, in Turkish: ‘ANAHTARLAR NERDE?’ The loss of keys was not the only thing that would set her off. My grandmother yelled frequently and for a whole variety of reasons at the waiters, maids, managers, cleaners and cooks whom she employed to staff her hotel and to attend to her personal needs and the needs of her family. All day they scurried in and out of her apartment in a sweat, delivering panniers of toast, bars of goat’s cheese, lamb cutlets, fish, aubergines, meat pancakes, melons, watermelons, water, glasses of lemonade, bottles of Efes beer, sodas, Coca-Colas, Turkish coffees, Turkish teas. You could never have enough to drink. Mersin, the port in south-east Turkey where my grandmother lived, is as humid a spot as you’ll find in the Mediterranean, and in August, when my parents and their four children arrived for their annual holiday, my grandmother’s breezeless apartment on the top floor of the hotel was as hot as a hammam. Fans vainly circulated warm air, and the trickle of coolness produced by the grinding air-conditioning machine escaped ineffectually through the windows towards the harbour, where Turkish warships sat on the still water like cakes on a salver. When we were not immobilized on the divans, pooped out, stunned, minimizing our movements, we were opening one of the refrigerators – the doors, tall as ourselves, swung out with a gasping, rubbery suck – and taking long, burning slugs of the freezing water that filled the Johnnie Walker and Glenfiddich bottles jammed in the rack. My grandmother’s outbursts were all the more terrible for their suddenness and unfairness, the minor domestic booboos, if any, from which they sprang (a fork misplaced in a drawer filled with Christofle silver, a floor-mopping delinquency) shockingly disproportionate to the condemnation that followed. I have never really understood why she was prone to these authoritarian rages. She was loving and unstinting with her friends and family and, it so happens, a loyal employer. Perhaps the heat played a part, and racial and class contempt. Either way, Mehmet Ali, Mehmet, Huseyin, Fatma and the rest of them got it in the neck.
As I said, Mamie Dakad carried a bunch of keys about her person at all times. She never jingled them or fixed them to a pretty ring. She strung them around a bare loop of metal and gripped them – even in her old age, when arthritis had curled her fists into strengthless talons.
One morning, in a summer of the late ’eighties, when I was in my mid-twenties, there occurred an episode which might have belonged to a kids’ mystery story. My cousin Phaedon (the son of my mother’s sister, Amy) and I decided to take a look around a storage room in the hotel known as the depot. We knew that family stuff was kept there and we were curious. So we asked our grandmother for the key to the depot.
‘Why?’ she asked. She was getting her hair cut as she sat in the hot dining room, a white towel over her shoulders, a spectacular length of ash hanging crookedly from a butt in her mouth. Even though she was nearing the end of her career as a smoker (forty years of seeing off at least forty, preferably extra-strong Pall Mall, non-filters a day), she was still able to suck back an entire cigarette without touching it with her fingers.
I explained why. Mamie Dakad looked at me sceptically, then wordlessly pointed at her keys, which lay on a nearby table. I brought them to her. She plucked out a skeleton key. ‘Bring it back,’ she said.
