Blood-Dark Track Read online

  Acclaim for Joseph O’Neill’s

  Blood-Dark Track

  “An extraordinary book.… As thrilling as a murder trial.… The progress of [O’Neill’s] investigations are imbued with all the darkening excitement of a novel by le Carré or Greene.”

  —The Times Literary Supplement (London)

  “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

  “Joseph O’Neill’s voice in this book is often intimate and engaging, like someone whispering fascinating secrets, but it is also at times a public voice, deeply involved with the silences and lies which have surrounded the past and distorted the present in both Turkey and Ireland. O’Neill is a born storyteller with a sharp eye, a great style, and a good wit. His sense of modern Ireland, with all its ghosts and contradictions, is superb.”

  —Colm Tóibín

  “A stealthy, evidential enterprise, it stalks its material, considers, reassesses and chews over the theories. It is a big cat of a book. It creeps up on you, then pounces. And once it has you in its grip, it doesn’t let go in a hurry.”

  —Evening Standard (London)

  “Every word in this riveting book is carefully freighted. Unlike many books which claim to trace a ‘journey,’ Blood-Dark Track achieves its ambition, leaving teller and listener at the end with a haunting sense of having arrived somewhere new.”

  —The Times (London)

  “Painfully honest and lucid.… 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 (London)

  “The book has certainly worked hard to earn the reconciliation it finally imagines. It is too honest to get what it hopes for; too uncertain to know for sure what it is that has to be reconciled or forgiven. In its very unease, it is a remarkable book.”

  —The Irish Times

  “The story [O’Neill] tells here yields much evidence of [his] quickness of mind, analytical skill, contemplative ability and sheer endurance. But the book’s greatest triumph is the delicate, sympathetic peeling back of layer after layer of two families before and after they overlap.”

  —The Observer (London)

  “This is a beautifully written and complicated book, in which difficult perceptions are expressed with forensic honesty. Its author finds that he cannot quite define his elusive grandfathers, and their moralities; but he has certainly come closer to defining himself, and his.”

  —The Sunday Telegraph (London)

  “The premise for this book is a simple and utterly compelling one; a commonality that brings two heterogenous places and cultures and lives together. The fruit of those parallel journeys is a remarkable book, almost novelistic in form and in style. [O’Neill] is a born writer … with a gorgeous sense of history and emotion and timbre.”

  —Sunday Tribune (Ireland)

  “[O’Neill’s] thoroughness and energy are phenomenal.”

  —London Review of Books

  “[O’Neill] uncovers fascinating parallels between the two men, illuminating the ways in which individual lives mesh with history.”

  —The Sunday Times (London)

  “A moving account, judiciously mixing familial feelings with historical research to powerful effect.”

  —New Statesman

  Joseph O’Neill

  Blood-Dark Track

  Joseph O’Neill was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1964 and grew up in Mozambique, South Africa, Iran, Turkey, and Holland. His works include the novels Netherland, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award, This Is the Life, and The Breezes. He writes regularly for The Atlantic Monthly. He lives with his family in New York City.

  ALSO BY JOSEPH O’NEILL

  Netherland

  This Is the Life

  The Breezes

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 2010

  Copyright © 2001 by Joseph O’Neill

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Great Britain by Granta Books, London, in 2001.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and The Wylie Agency LLC: Excerpt from “Cities & Memory” from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, translated by by William Weaver, copyright © 1972 by Giulio Einaudi Editore s.p.a., English translation copyright © 1974 by Harcourt, Inc. Originally Le citta invisibili by Italo Calvino, copyright © 1972 by Italo Calvino. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and electronically and in print outside the US by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC. Alfred A. Knopf: Excerpt from THE REBEL by Albert Camus, translated by Anthony Bower, translation copyright © 1956 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.; excerpt from LETTERS OF THOMAS MANN, 1889–1955, by Thomas Mann, translated by Richard & Clara Winston, copyright © 1970 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Reprinted courtesy of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Penguin Classics: Excerpt from THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, translated with an introduction by David McDuff (Penguin Classics, 1985), copyright © 1985 by David McDuff. Excerpt from ESSAYS AND APHORISMS by Arthur Schopenhauer, selected and translated with an introduction by R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Classics, 1970), translation and introduction copyright © 1970 by R. J. Hollingdale. Reprinted courtesy of Penguin Group UK, London, on behalf of Penguin Classics. Roberts Rinehart Publishers and Mercier Press: Excerpt from GUERILLA DAYS IN IRELAND by Tom Barry (1949). Reprinted courtesy of Roberts Rinehart Publishers, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group and Mercier Press, County Cork, Ireland. Scribner: Five lines from “Hound Voice” by W. B. Yeats from THE COLLECTED WORKS OF W. B. YEATS, VOLUME I: THE POEMS, REVISED, edited by Richard J. Finneran, copyright © 1940 by Georgie Yeats, copyright renewed 1968 by Bertha Georgie Yeats, Michael Butler Yeats and Anne Yeats. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Syracuse University Press: Excerpt from AN ONLY CHILD by Frank O’Connor (Syracuse University Press, 1997). Reprinted courtesy of Syracuse University Press. Verso: Excerpt from MINIMA MORALIA: REFLECTIONS ON A DAMAGED LIFE by Theodor Adorno, translated by E. F. N. Jephcott (Verso, London, 2005). Reprinted courtesy of Verso.

  The Cataloging-in-Publication data is available on file at the Library of Congress.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-74265-0

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  To the memory of Joseph Dakad (1899–1964) and

  James O’Neill (1909–1973); to my sons; and to Sally.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by this Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Preface to the Vintage Edition

  Map

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  This book is largely the product of help I have received from my family, Turkish and Irish. As regards the latter, I am grateful, first and foremost, to my grandmother, Eileen O’Neill, who freely lent herself to a project that,
by its nature, was troubling to her. I owe a similar debt of gratitude to Jim O’Neill, Terry O’Neill, Ann Pollock-O’Neill and Marian O’Sullivan-O’Neill, who shared thoughtful and sensitive insights into the character and life of my Irish grandfather, Jim O’Neill. My greatest debt, here, is to Brendan O’Neill. His generosity of spirit and willingness to reflect openly on sensitive historical issues made a huge contribution to this book. I also wish to thank, in relation to the Irish story, Acushla Bastible, Pat Buckley, Con and Oriana Conner, Dan Daly, Antony Farrell, Mick Fitzgibbon, Derry and Phyllis Kelleher, Paddy Lynch, Peig Lynch, Frank and Mary Morris, Barney McFadden, Angela McEvoy-O’Neill, Shammy O’Connell, Pat O’Neill, Seán O’Neill, Mary O’Sullivan, Billy Pollock, Mrs Salter-Townshend, Brendan Sealy, Christopher Somerville. John Bowyer Bell was an essential source of information about the shooting of Admiral Somerville and pre-Emergency republicanism generally. My heavy reliance on the work of Peter Hart and Uinseann MacEoin will be evident to readers.

  Amy Dakad’s translation of Joseph Dakad’s testimony is the foundation of my inquiry into my Turkish grandfather’s life, and I am enormously appreciative of her work. I am deeply grateful for the scholarship and friendly help of Sir Denis Wright, whose influence on this book has been vital. I also wish to thank, in relation to the Turkish story, Florent Arnaud, Sara Bershtel, Ginette Estève, Patrick Grigsby, the late Professor O.R. Gurney, Brother Guy of Latrun, the late Bill Henderson, Haidar Husseini, the Kurdish Human Rights Project, Tim Ottey, Denis Ryan, Tom Segev, Astrid Seime, Yitzhak Shamir, Yves-Marie Villedieu, the late Lolo Zahlout. I wish to acknowledge the contribution of my late great-aunts, Alexandra and Isabelle Nader, and grandmother, Georgette Dakad.

  A variety of institutions enabled my research, in particular the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College, Oxford; the New York Public Library; the British Library. While I wrote the book, my unlucrative presence was tolerated by the staff and proprietors of La Bergamote (thank you, Romain Lamaze); the Malibu Diner; and the Riss Restaurant. Bob and Nan Stewart were wonderfully hospitable to me in Ontario, Canada.

  The following helped me in various ways: Shari Anlauf, Tom Astor, Pete Ayrton, Matthew Batstone, David Bieda, Daniel Bobker, Susie Boyt, Philippe Carré, Monique El-Faizy, Jean Fermin, Vanessa Friedman, Michael Gorchov, Adam Green, Philip Horne, Philip Hughes, Nico Israel, Damian Lanigan, Darian Leader, Simon Page, Oliver Phillips, Michael Rips, Colin Robinson, Leon Klugman and the Singer family, Grub Smith, David Stewart, Philip Warnett, Arnold Weinstein, Jos Williams. Ann, David and Elizabeth O’Neill have been a great help to me, and I am deeply indebted to the chambers of Mark Strachan Q.C. for its good-humoured assent to my lengthy sabbaticals. I wish to thank Neil Belton for his important editorial contribution, Rea Hederman for publishing this book in the United States, and Gill Coleridge for her steadfast encouragement and guidance over many years. My parents, Kevin O’Neill and Caroline O’Neill-Dakad, have, more than ever, been a vital source of encouragement, inspiration and advice; and so, too, my wife, Sally Singer. This book was her idea.

  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’

  Preface to the Vintage Edition

  Blood-Dark Track, published in 2001, describes the inquiry I undertook into the history of my family, Irish and Turkish, from 1995 to 2000. The inquiry was propelled by my curiosity about the unexplained incarcerations of both my grandfathers during the Second World War, a private oddity that, looked into, gave entry to obscure, sometimes frightful parishes of Irish and Middle Eastern history. These places had an essentially, or especially, imaginary quality to a visitor from my situation, which is to say, a Westerner at the twentieth century’s end whose freedom from geopolitical upheaval and its connected dangers and responsibilities seemed as complete as possible. We know what happened next.

  As its text makes clear, Blood-Dark Track was written by a practicing lawyer. My work as a London barrister came to an indefinite end by 2001, by which time I had lived in the United States for about three years. I was in New York City on September 11th, 2001. That day and its consequences made up an ingredient of the book I wrote after Blood-Dark Track, a work of fiction titled Netherland and identified by some as a ‘9/11 novel.’ I have no quarrel with this tag, even assuming that I have a quarreler’s standing, which is doubtful. But I will allow myself to state that, if I have written a ‘9/11’ book, that book would, in my mind, be Blood-Dark Track.

  This edition is dedicated to the memory of my beloved grandmother, Eileen O’Neill.

  West Cork

  Turkey/Syrian border, Spring 1942

  Prologue

  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.