The Tribe Extract

The city was festooned in honour of the Sultan. Every window frame and doorway was wreathed in flowers; every balcony was draped in a blood-red Ottoman flag. Twenty-six ceremonial arches had been erected along the processional route, one of them the gift of the Carrache family. A military band played martial airs in the recently renamed Liberty Square. The fountain in the centre flowed with cherry juice, much to the delight of Jacob’s youngest children, Ruben and Bella, and the dismay of their mother, who had issued grave warnings of dysentery and cholera.

            The Sultan had entered the harbour the previous day but remained on board his flagship, Hayrettin Barbaros, where he received the Governor and provincial representatives, before resting after the two-day voyage from Constantinople, which had been the longest of his life. His loyal subjects had had little chance to rest, as carpenters hammered and sawed through the night, fixing uneven stands and rickety railings; sweeps spread sand to smooth the imperial carriage’s path over cobbled streets; and officials bawled commands at underlings during last-minute inspections. Any lull was broken by the snap and sputter of firecrackers, further alarming the jittery gendarmes, although the most incendiary rabble-rousers, the four leaders of the Socialist Federation, had been imprisoned or exiled prior to the visit.

            At last, the steamer carrying the Sultan and his entourage pulled away from the flagship and made for the shore. With a raucous whistle, it chugged through the sloops and skiffs that clustered round it like beggars soliciting alms. It was barely fifty years since the first steamship arrived in Salonica. Jacob had been a babe in arms and his father later told him of the panic on the quayside, with frantic calls for fishing boats to sail to the rescue of the seemingly stricken vessel. It was a sign of the city’s transformation that the plumes of vapour were now a familiar sight. The crowds on the waterfront were marking the Sultan’s arrival not with shrieks of terror but whoops of welcome, although he was too far away to hear. 

            Jacob gazed at the ship and pictured the scene through the Sultan’s eyes. The city was smaller than Constantinople but more cosmopolitan, poised midway between East and West, its skyline adorned with minarets and bell towers. Although the synagogues were less conspicuous, the Jewish influence was no less pronounced. Salonica might belong to the Turks and be claimed by the Greeks and Bulgarians, but Jews made up the majority of its population. And it was Jacob and his coreligionists who had reshaped it in the past thirty years from a sleepy backwater to an economic hub, building the hotels and department stores that bordered the square, building the warehouses that fronted the quay, building pipelines and plants that brought water and electricity into private homes. But even more than electricity, they had brought enlightenment.

            The steamer docked to thunderous applause. After a lengthy delay, the Sultan stepped ashore and ascended a specially erected podium. He stood ramrod straight and saluted as the band struck up the updated imperial anthem. Short and stout, with pursy cheeks, a walrus moustache and a medal-encrusted tunic, he exuded a faintly disgruntled air, either at finding himself in this unknown and, to him, remote outpost of his empire or, simply, at having been plucked from opulent obscurity two years earlier and thrust on the throne after the bloodless coup that deposed his brother. A very different monarch from the despotic Abdul Hamid, he had immediately ratified the new constitution, guaranteeing parliamentary rule and the rights of all his subjects. 

            While wary of the firebrands from the Committee of Union and Progress who had orchestrated the coup (and, indeed, of firebrands in general), Jacob had broadly supported their aims and applauded their spokesman, Enver Bey, who’d stood in this very square and declared that no longer were there Bulgarians, Greeks, Serbs, Romanians, Jews or Muslims: from now on, all were Ottomans, equal under the same blue sky. Setting caste aside, Jacob had linked arms with Ishak, an elderly waiter at the Club des Intimes, and hummed a few bars of the Marseillaise.

            He emerged from his reverie as the final jaunty chords of the anthem faded and the Mufti approached the podium to perform the sacrifice. Tall and turbaned, sporting a full beard and an emerald kaftan, he looked so much more regal than the Sultan that Jacob could imagine Ruben, a youthful devotee of The Arabian Nights, confusing them. Four acolytes followed, dragging two rams, their horns painted green and fleeces dyed red, orange and purple, some of which stained the men’s white jubbahs, as if the prescient beasts had sought to escape their fate. The Mufti slit the first throat with admirable adroitness, while an acolyte held up a bowl to collect the blood. The second ram, its last steps on earth as tottery as its first, lurched backwards, its desperate bleats accentuating Jacob’s horror of a practice long since expunged from his own rites. The Mufti, glaring at the beast as if its recalcitrance were an insult to the hundreds of soldiers lining the square, each of whom had pledged to lay down his life for the Sultan, grabbed one of its horns and hacked at its throat. Making supplication to Allah, he sprinkled the blood on the ground.

            The Sultan, accompanied by the Grand Vizier, inspected the rows of assembled dignitaries. Jacob, attending as president of both the Jewish Community Council and the Salonica Chamber of Commerce, felt a twinge of adolescent bashfulness as the Sultan walked past, no trace of curiosity in his hooded gaze. He watched as the Sultan stepped into his carriage to drive to the Konak, where he would reside during the visit. The processional route was flanked by children from the city’s various schools – Jewish, Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian – with only the Turkish pupils granted the honour of parading in front of the Sultan at the Konak. The original plan for a broad-based parade had been abandoned, ostensibly to avoid congestion on the narrow streets of the Muslim quarter. Yet Jacob had it on good authority that the true concern was inflaming tensions over the order of precedence among the other ethnic groups.

            Ruben and Bella were both taking part in the reception: his son grumbling about his cape, the laurel sprig he was required to wave, and the long wait in the clammy heat; his daughter enraptured by the prospect of throwing a rose at the Sultan’s carriage (‘Madame Dupont told us to aim at the wheels, or else it will look like a funeral’). They and their classmates from the lycée occupied a prime spot on the quay. Despite his support for universal education, Jacob had dismissed any suggestion of sending his own children either to an Alliance school or the Talmud Torah, where they would receive an unduly vocational or religious training and acquire undesirable habits from their peers, many of whom would in due course work for him.

            Muffling the nagging voice accusing him of double standards (which sounded uncomfortably like that of his eldest daughter, Esther), he scanned the quay, in anticipation of Bella’s inevitable ‘Papa, did you see me?’ But at this distance, picking out one white-clad child from the crowd was as hopeless as picking out a pet goose from a gaggle. He prepared himself for the equally inevitable prevarication.

            His fellow dignitaries began to disperse: some heading up Sabri Pasha Street to greet the Sultan a second time at the Konak; others, duty done, to join family and friends. Jacob’s family was scattered across the city. His wife Mathilde was watching the ceremony alongside both of their mothers and their middle daughter, Irène, from a balcony at the Hotel d’Angleterre. Although the Governor, fearing for the Sultan’s safety, had decreed that all balconies remain sealed for the duration of the visit, the edict had been widely ignored. Jacob smiled at the notion of anyone mistaking the eminently respectable Carrache women for insurrectionists.

            Irène had protested at being stuck with her mother and grandmothers while her brothers and sisters were out with their friends, prompting Mathilde to remark, with uncharacteristic asperity, that she was free to stay at home. ‘It’s not fair,’ Irène had replied, as she did to countless perceived injustices every day. Despite Jacob’s sympathy for his all-too-easily overlooked middle child, he could do little to help. At fifteen, she was too old to throw flowers with Bella, and too young to dispense with adult tutelage. He wished that he might say the same of seventeen-year-old Esther. His parents would never have permitted either of his sisters to go out alone before they were married. But the city’s landscape wasn’t all that had changed in the past thirty years.

            Esther had bought tickets for herself and her friend Leah Sagues to view the proceedings from the vantage point of the Club Nouveau. On the face of it, she couldn’t have chosen a more suitable chaperone. Leah was a dedicated, impassioned and highly intelligent teacher at the Alliance girls’ school. They’d met when Esther accompanied Mathilde to distribute clothing to the poorer pupils and had since become inseparable. Mathilde had invited Leah to dine and, on learning that she had no family in the city, renewed the invitation at least once a week. Leah made no secret of her radical sentiments, with which he feared she was infecting Esther. She even challenged him at his own table, and Esther, who would never have been so presumptuous herself, egged her on. Although Leah showed him every sign of respect, above and beyond what was due to a major benefactor of the school, he could never shake the suspicion that she was silently laughing at him.

            While four of his children were accounted for, he was ignorant of the whereabouts of his elder son. If anyone should have been celebrating the Sultan’s visit, it was Leon. Three years earlier, in defiance of his father’s express command, the then seventeen-year-old had been among a group of Jewish youths who, with their Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian comrades, marched beside rebels from Abdul Hamid’s army to the military headquarters at Monastir and exhorted the soldiers to mutiny. When he returned, flushed with the flame of revolution, Jacob had been so overwhelmed with relief that he neglected to punish him, an act of clemency he had come to regret. For all his qualities – honour, loyalty and compassion chief among them – Leon lacked application. Neither a year at the Sorbonne nor placements at both the tobacco factory and the bank had held his interest. He spent his days hunting and sailing, playing billiards and backgammon. Having declared the visit of the Sultan, for whose accession he had risked his life, to be nothing but ‘bread and circuses’, he was no doubt drowning his disappointment in a taverna.

            The last in the cavalcade of carriages rolled along the quay, its occupants, two elderly beys, chattering animatedly, as if to counter the crowd’s indifference. Tired and thirsty, Jacob crossed the square to the Club des Intimes. He handed his fez to the doorman, who informed him that his father and brother were upstairs.