‘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.
We walked down the long corridor outside Mamie Dakad’s apartment. Ashtrays filled with sand were fixed to the walls, and dead, half-buried cigarettes protruded from the sand. The depot was half way down the corridor, next to the staircase that led to the roof of the hotel. From that scorching roof you saw, heaped on the northern horizon, the cool Taurus Mountains, whose name, spelled in phonetic Turkish, my grandfather Joseph gave to the hotel: the Toros Otel.
The depot was a stale, hot space overlooking the hotel’s oven-like internal yard. We found neat piles of sea-stained old paperbacks from the ’seventies; snorkels; junior-sized flippers; my mother’s schoolbooks and school reports. Then I noticed, on top of a trunk, some papers held together by a large, rusting safety-pin – sixty or so pages extracted from a ledger book, with columns for debits and credits and totting up. But if this was an accounting, it wasn’t of the financial kind. In place of figures, lines of elegant manuscript Turkish filled the pages.
Phaedon took a look while I peered over his shoulder. After a minute or so, he said that the writing had to be our grandfather’s. It was an account, Phaedon said slowly, of his arrest, in 1942, and his subsequent imprisonment. We looked at each other. We knew we were entering, maybe trespassing on, a dark corner of the family history. Then we read on. Flicking quickly through the pages, Phaedon reported the main features of the story as best as he could; he had difficulty in understanding the old-fashioned, Arabic-influenced Turkish.
What Phaedon said was this: in March 1942, my grandfather went to Palestine on a business trip. He spent some time in Jerusalem, where he associated with Palestinian Arabs and a female acquaintance. On his way home, he was arrested at the Turkish – Syrian border by the British. He was taken to Haifa and then to the British headquarters in Jerusalem, and then detained elsewhere for the rest of the war. Phaedon couldn’t figure out what the exact nature of the document was. ‘It seems to be addressed to the Turkish authorities,’ he said with a shrug.
By the time we returned to Mamie Dakad’s apartment, the hairdresser was clearing up and my mother was laying the table for lunch for twelve: chicken, stuffed peppers, tabbouleh, cucumber and watercress salad with a lemon dressing, beans, lentils with rice, yoghurt, bread. A rubble of watermelons, grapes and peaches was piled up in the kitchen. For my grandmother and the community she belonged to, nothing, not even cards, was of greater social importance than food.
When I broke the news of our scoop to my mother, she reacted in a curious way; that is, apart from a raising of her eyebrows, she did not react. Almost as if she hadn’t heard me, she continued to set out the forks and knives. Unabashed and excited, I turned to my grandmother and asked about the document. ‘Don’t speak about it,’ my mother said sharply to me in English, which was not one of Mamie Dakad’s languages, ‘it’ll upset her.’ It was too late. My grandmother was already in tears. ‘Le pauvre,’ she said, her face wrinkling and her hand raised in a distressed gesture of explanation, ‘le pauvre, il a beaucoup souffert.’
‘You see?’ my mother said. ‘You see what you’ve done?’
I returned the key to Mamie Dakad. Joseph Dakad’s papers were locked away once more, not to be seen again until years later.
My first moment of access to the life of my Irish grandfather, Jim O’Neill – and my first clue as to what may have formed his life’s hard, insubstantial heart – was also fortuitous. It took place in The Hague, the city where, in 1970, after series of migrations that had bounced us like a skipping roulette ball through South Africa, Mozambique, Syria, Turkey and Iran, my family came to a permanent halt. In the top shelf of the bookcase in the dining room was a hardback entitled Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Although as a teenager I’d read most of my parents’ books, I’d never been enthused by this one. It had an uncompromising black cover and an unappetising introduction by one Avrahm Yarmalinsky, and Dostoevsky himself, the balding, anxious man in the jacket photograph, whose writing I had not read, did not look like a lot of fun. The Hague, however, is an uneventful place, and eventually I found myself idly leafing through the Letters; and I encountered, trapped in the book’s thick pages, two newspaper clips.
The first read as follows:
O’NEILL (Cork and Ardkitt, Enniskean) – On September 6, 1973, at the South Infirmary, James, beloved husband of Eileen (née Lynch), Dún Ard, Southlodge, Browningstown Park (1st. Batt., First Cork Brigade, I.R.A.). Deeply regretted by his loving wife and family. Funeral on today (Saturday) after 2.30 o’clock Mass at our Lady of Lourdes Church, Ballinlough, to St Michael’s Cemetery, Blackrock.
The second cutting was an article headed Around the G.A.A. Clubs.
St Vincents. It was with the deepest regret that we learned of the passing away of our esteemed member, Mr. Jim O’Neill, during the past week. Beannacht De ar a anam.
For many years Jim had been a staunch worker in our club. He held many positions over the years, but for him no job was too big or menial where St. Vincents was concerned. He was behind much of our early plan making, nevertheless when those plans dictated the arduous work it took to fulfil them, Jim was oft times only too willing to undertake that work. Over a period of 22 years in which I knew him, he proved to be a true Gael. Ever mindful of our beautiful Gaelic culture, he had a life-time dedication to the cause of one united Ireland. In character he was straight and true. I remember 12 years ago being in employment with Jim. I happened one day to remark to him the briskness and dedication he put to his work. He replied that he was morally bound to give a just return for his pay. This was the honesty and directness I learned to expect always from him. Four of his sons, Brendan, Padraig, Kevin and Terry, have been stalwart members of our club down through the years. On behalf of St. Vincents I tender to his wife and family our sincere deepest sympathy.
The sudden palpability of my grandfather, of whom I knew and remembered next to nothing, caused in me a lurch of proud affiliation. First Battalion, First Cork Brigade, IRA. There was something appealing about this simple and assured assertion of his soldiership, and there was poetic force in the phrase a true Gael. To me these were glamorous texts, calls from a gritty world of hurling and revolution that was thrillingly distant from the bourgeois, entirely agreeable environment of The Hague. My vague imagining of my grandfather’s rebel world was in terms of the jacket illustration for Guerrilla Days in Ireland by Tom Barry, a tatty paperback memoir that had always occupied an incongruous niche between my mother’s multilingual dictionaries and volumes of French literature. The illustration is of an IRA ambush at dusk on a deserted country road in West Cork, the sky burgundy, the sunken day a low-lying mass of yellow. A convoy of trucks is turning into view, and waiting to jump them are a smart officer in a blue jacket and a tie, who is holding a pistol, and two sturdy, rifle-toting fellows in rough shirts. It is a colourful, quasi-fictional scene in the style of a boys’ comic, and speaks of cold, adventurous nights and clean-cut valour.
Hurling, on the other hand, I knew something about. Hurling was the fastest field sport in the world and required great skill and guts from its players. It was a wild, precise game in which the ball was kicked and fisted and swiped with flattened hockey sticks, the object being to score in goals that combined rugby uprights and soccer nets. It was gorgeous mayhem. My father, Kevin O’Neill, had played top-class hurling for his club, St Vincents, and county, Cork, losing half a mouthful of teeth and gaining a network of forehead scars in the process. I had played the game myself in the field behind my grandmother’s house,