Blood-Dark Track Read Online Free PDF Page A

decisive of the hard-boiled question, twists the case and gives it a new meaning. This is, in a sense, what transpired after I began to look into the unknown lives of Joseph and Jim, following the narrow beam of their coincidental imprisonment. It led to times and places in which politics might have dramatic and personal consequences; in which people might be impelled to act or acquiesce in the face of evil and embark on journeys of the body and spirit that to many of us, living in the democratic west at the beginning of the new century, may seem fantastical; and in which people might through political action or inaction discover boundaries in themselves – good and bad – that we, casting our vote twice a decade, or losing our temper at thedinner table, or shunning the wines and cheeses of France, maybe cannot hope to know. Maybe. It may be, in fact, that our lives are thrown into greater ethical relief than we suspect. We may be judged strenuously by our descendants, who will perceive distinct rights and wrongs, shadows and crests, that we failed to notice. In part, my grandfathers’ predicaments stemmed from what they saw or did not see around them. To this extent, they stand as paradigms of political and moral visions of different sorts, the blind eye and the dazzled eye, each with its own compensations and each with its own price.

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 … the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.
– Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
    I was born on 23 February 1964 in the Bon Secours Hospital, Cork. The following day my father flew into Cork and went directly from the airport to the nursery ward, where to everybody’s amazement he unhesitatingly picked me out from the sixteen newborn babies lying anonymously in their cots. Then he walked quickly to the maternity ward to see my mother. She was in bed, and my father sat down on the rim of the bed. He took her hand. He had been abroad working, and it was their first meeting for over a week. ‘Your father has died,’ he said. My mother began to weep, and so did my father.
    Born the day after his death, I was given my grandfather’s name – Joseph.
    He died on a rain-blurred day in Istanbul. At some point in the afternoon, Pierre, my mother’s brother, sat grieving alone in an Istanbul café. A concerned stranger approached the tearful young man and gently asked him what his trouble was. ‘My father hasdied,’ Oncle Pierre said. The stranger took hold of Pierre by the shoulders and looked him in the eyes. ‘See to your mother,’ he said.
    Joseph had for years been troubled by a heart problem that necessitated trips to Istanbul for treatment; and in 1961, he suffered a heart attack that brought Oncle Pierre, who was in Lyon studying law and economics, back to Mersin to help his father with the completion of the new Toros Hotel building. Joseph’s condition worsened. In January 1964, when Fonda Tahintzi went to ask for the hand of my aunt Amy, he found Joseph in bed, dressed in his bathrobe and too weak to rise. In February, X-rays of my grandfather’s heart were taken; these were, according to the Mersin doctors, inconclusive. Joseph appealed for help to Muzaffer Ersoy, his former personal physician, in whom he had great faith. Dr Ersoy, who had moved his practice to Istanbul and was on his way to substantial professional fame, requested that the X-rays be sent to him. Once he’d seen them, he responded immediately. The Mersin doctors had misread the X-rays: far from being inconclusive, they showed that the patient’s heart had suddenly enlarged; it was vital that he go to Istanbul immediately for further treatment and tests. Joseph’s worst fears were confirmed: for days, now, he had been vomiting in the mornings, grimly muttering, ‘ J’aime pas ça .’ So, wearing a hat placed on his head by Amy, Joseph caught a flight at Adana. It was his first experience of aviation, the death of a