The Sandcastle Girls

by Chris Bohjalian

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Chris Bohjalian

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Jacket design by John Fontana

  Jacket illustration © Debra Lill

  Jacket landscape photographs

  © vyskoczilova/bigstock.com

  and © pingrin 57/bigstock.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bohjalian, Chris, 1960–

  The sandcastle girls / Chris Bohjalian. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: “Parallel stories of a woman who falls in love with an Armenian soldier during the Armenian Genocide and a modern-day New Yorker prompted to rediscover her Armenian past”—

  Provided by publisher.

  1. Armenians—Fiction. 2. Armenian Americans—Fiction. 3. Armenian massacres, 1915–1923—Fiction. 4. New York (N.Y.)—History—21st century—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.O495S26 2012

  813′.54—dc23 2011050285

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53480-2

  v3.1

  In memory of

  my mother-in-law,

  Sondra Blewer, 1931–2011,

  and my father,

  Aram Bohjalian, 1928–2011.

  Sondra urged me to write this novel,

  and my father helped to inspire it.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Two Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Three Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  “we shot our heretical need

  to see the horror of the past

  through a wide-angled lens”

  “You asked: If there is no one to listen to the story, what’s left?

  The blown-out ceiling with its tinge of Duccio-color?”

  PETER BALAKIAN,

  “Sarajevo,” from his collection Ziggurat

  WHEN MY TWIN BROTHER AND I WERE SMALL CHILDREN, WE would take turns sitting on our grandfather’s lap. There he would grab the rope-like rolls of baby fat that would pool at our waists and bounce us on his knees, cooing, “Big belly, big belly, big belly.” This was meant as an affectionate, grandfatherly gesture, not his subtle way of suggesting that if we didn’t lose weight, we would wind up as Jenny Craig testimonials. Just for the record, there is also a chance that when my brother was being bounced on Grandpa’s lap, he was wearing a white turtleneck shirt and red velvet knickers. This is the outfit my mother often had him wear when we visited our grandparents, because this was the getup that in her opinion made him look most British—and he had to look British, since she was going to make him sing the 1965 Herman’s Hermits pop hit “I’m Henry the VIII, I Am.” The song had been popular four years earlier when she’d given birth to us, and in some disturbingly Oedipal fashion she had come to view it as their song.

  Yup, a fat kid in red velvet knickers singing Herman’s Hermits with a bad British accent. How is it that no one beat him up?

  I, in turn, would be expected to sing “Both Sides Now,” which was marginally more timely—the song had been popular only a year earlier, in 1968—though not really any more appropriate. I was four years old and had no opinions at all on love’s illusions. But I did, despite the great dollops of Armenian DNA inside me, have waves of blond spit curls, and so my mother fixated on the lyric “bows and flows of angel hair.” I wore a blue miniskirt and white patent leather go-go boots. No one was going to beat me up, but it is a wonder that a social welfare agency never suggested to my mother that she was dressing her daughter like a four-year-old hooker.

  My grandfather—both of my grandparents, for different reasons—was absolutely oblivious to rock and roll, and I have no idea what he made of his grandchildren decked out for American Bandstand. Moreover, if 1969 were to have a sound track, invariably it would have depended upon Woodstock, not Herman’s Hermits or Judy Collins. Nevertheless, the only music I recall at my grandparents’ house that year—other than my brother’s traumatizing refrain, “Everyone was a En-er-e (En-er-e!)”—was the sound of the oud when my grandfather would play Armenian folk songs or strum it like a madman while my aunt belly danced for all of us. And why my aunt was belly dancing remains a mystery to me. The only time Armenian girls belly danced was when they were commandeered into a sheik’s harem, and it was a choice of dying in the desert or accepting the tattoos and learning to shimmy. Trust me, you will never see an Armenian girl belly dancing on So You Think You Can Dance.

  Regardless, the belly dancing—as well as my grandfather’s affection for his chubby grandchildren—does suggest that their house existed beneath a canopy of playfulness and good cheer. Sometimes it did. But equally often there was an aura of sadness, secrets, and wistfulness. Even as a child I detected the subterranean currents of loss when I would visit.

  That belly dancing may also give you the impression that my childhood was rather exotic. It wasn’t. Most of my childhood was unexceptionably suburban, either in a tony commuter enclave outside of Manhattan or in Miami, Florida. But my grandparents’ house was different. My aunt really did belly dance until she was forty, and there really were hookah pipes (no longer used, as far as I know), plush Oriental carpets, and thick leather books filled with an alphabet I could not begin to decipher. There was always the enveloping aroma of cooked lamb and mint, because my grandfather insisted on lamb chops even for breakfast: lamb chops and a massive cereal bowl filled with Frosted Flakes and Cocoa Puffs, eaten with yogurt instead of milk. My grandfather loved American cereal, a culinary quirk that my grandmother embraced because it made her life easier. After sautéing the morning chop, my grandmother would refer to my grandfather’s breakfast as a “king meal.” My sense early on was that anything with lamb was a “king meal.”

  And yet despite their beginning the day with a big bowl of Cocoa Puffs, there was also a relentless formality to the house. My grandfather was an immigrant who, like many immigrants from the early part of the twentieth century, never quite mastered the art of Wasp casual cool. He was the polar opposite of his Presbyterian in-laws from Boston (and the genetic wellspring of my blond hair). Until he was a dying, bedridden old man and his wardrobe had shrunk to pajamas and a Scotch plaid bathrobe, I never saw him wearing anything but a shirt and a vest and a tie. He might strip off his jacket when he would play his beloved oud or trim the hedges or clean the oil burner in the basement, but he was still very likely to be wearing a white dress shirt. This is a guy who never owned a V-neck tennis sweater. When I study the pictures of him in old family photo alb
ums, my memories are corroborated; in almost every snapshot, he is wearing a suit. There is even a series of him on vacation at a bungalow by a lake in upstate New York, sitting with his legs extended into the tall grass before him, his back against a picnic table, wearing a gray pinstripe business suit. In one of the images, he is at that picnic table with other Armenian men in black and gray suits, and there is a cluster of closed violin and oud cases on the wooden tabletop. The men look like Prohibition era mobsters on the lam.

  And it is interesting that even in 1928, when he was building the elegant brick house in a New York City suburb that may have been my favorite of all the houses anyone in my extended family ever lived in when I was growing up, he looked almost as bald as the very old man I knew in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I presumed until he died in 1976 and my father corrected me at his father’s funeral that the man I called Grandpa had been born a senior citizen.

  “No, Laura,” my father said, “he wasn’t born old.”

  That evening, when we returned home to Bronxville after the reception that followed the interment, my father for the first time told me small bits and pieces of my grandparents’ youth. Soon my grandmother would tell me more. And so while I have begun this story with a moment from 1969, the reality is that I could have begun in 1976. Or, like all Armenian stories, I could have begun it more than half a century earlier. I could have begun it in 1915.

  Nineteen-fifteen is the year of the Slaughter You Know Next to Nothing About. The anniversary of its commencement—its centennial—is nearing. If you are not Armenian, you probably know little about the deportations and the massacres: the death of a million and a half civilians. Meds Yeghern. The Great Catastrophe. It’s not taught much in school, and it’s not the sort of thing most of us read before going to bed. And yet to understand my grandparents, some basics would help. (Imagine an oversized paperback book with a black-and-yellow cover, The Armenian Genocide for Dummies. Or, perhaps, an afterschool special.) Years ago, I tried to write about it, never even mentioning my grandparents, and that manuscript exists only in the archives of my alma mater—where my papers are stored. I was never happy with that book and never even shared it with my editor. Only my husband read it, and he came to precisely the same conclusion that I did: The book was a train wreck. Didn’t work in the slightest. It was too cold, too distant. Instead, he said, I should have shamelessly commandeered my grandparents’ history. After all, they had been there.

  He didn’t know the details of their story then; neither did I. Once we knew the truth, years later, he would change his mind about whether I had the moral authority to exploit their particular horror. By then, however, I was obsessed and unstoppable.

  And so now I am indeed telling their stories, once more focusing on a corner of the world most of us couldn’t find on a map and a moment in history that—though once known—is largely forgotten. I begin by imagining the mountains of eastern Turkey, and a village not far from a picturesque city and a magnificent lake called Van. I see a beach in the Dardanelles. A town house in Boston’s Back Bay. And, most often, I see Aleppo and the absolutely unforgiving Syrian desert that surrounds it.

  I am making my family’s history sound downright epic, aren’t I? I probably shouldn’t. My sense is that if you look at anyone’s family in 1915—an era we see through a haze of black-and-white photographs or scratched and grainy silent film footage, the movements of everyone oddly jerky—it will feel rather epic. And I honestly don’t view my family’s saga as epic. If I were forced to categorize it, I would probably choose romance. Or, when I look at the photos of me in my miniskirt or my brother in his red velvet knickers in a living room that looks like the Ottoman annex at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I might even suggest comedy.

  But for my grandparents in 1915 and 1916? Their sagas looked very different. When they met, my grandmother was, quite literally, on a mission. She was an essentially directionless young woman from what had to have been one of Boston’s most priggish families, suddenly witness to relentless slaughter, starvation, and disease. She had a spanking new sheepskin from Mount Holyoke and a crash course in rudimentary nursing when she accompanied her father into the inferno. She could speak, thanks to Boston do-gooders in the Friends of Armenia, a bit of Turkish and a smattering of Armenian.

  Meanwhile, my grandfather, after enduring all of that slaughter, starvation, and disease—after losing almost all of his family—would finally fight back. He would enlist in an army, joining men who knew little of Armenia and cared mostly about defeating a dying empire for reasons that had nothing to do with a blood feud. And neither of my grandparents would have seen anything romantic or comic at all in the world that summer of 1915. If they had been forced to categorize their stories at the time, I am quite certain they both would have chosen tragedy.

  THE YOUNG WOMAN, TWENTY-ONE, WALKS GINGERLY DOWN THE dusty street between her father and the American consul here in Aleppo, an energetic fellow almost her father’s age named Ryan Donald Martin, and draws the scarf over her hair and her cheeks. The men are detouring around the square near the base of the citadel because they don’t yet want her to see the deportees who arrived here last night—there will be time for that soon enough—but she fears she is going to be sick anyway. The smell of rotting flesh, excrement, and the July heat are conspiring to churn her stomach far worse than even the trip across the Atlantic had weeks earlier. She feels clammy and weak-kneed and reaches out for her father’s elbow to steady herself. Her father, in turn, gently taps her fingers with his hand, his vague and abstracted attempt at a comforting gesture.

  “Miss Endicott, do you need to rest? You look a little peaked,” the consul says, and she glances at him. His brown eyes are wide and a little crazed, and already there are thin rivulets of sweat running down both sides of his face. He is wearing a beige linen jacket, which she imagines to be infinitely more comfortable than her father’s gray woolen suit. She brings her free hand to her own face and feels the moisture there. She nods in response to his question; she does need to sit, though it embarrasses her to admit this. Still, it may be a nonissue. She can’t see where she might on this squalid street. But Ryan quickly takes her arm and guides her from her father, leading her to a stoop on the shady side of the thin road. He wipes off the squat step with his bare hand. There is a ramshackle wooden door behind the stoop, shut tight against the midmorning heat, but she presumes that whoever lives there won’t mind if she sits. And so there she rests and breathes in deeply and slowly through her mouth, watching the women in their headscarves and long, loose robes—some hide all but their eyes behind burqas—and the men in their ornate blazers, their voluminous, shapeless trousers, and their flowerpot-like fez hats. Some of the men glance at her sympathetically as they pass, others with a brazen want in their eyes. She has been warned.

  “There’s a nice breeze today,” Ryan says cheerfully, and while she appreciates the slightly cooler air, wafting along with it is the stench from the square. “Before you arrived, the heat was just unbearable.”

  She can’t imagine it being hotter. At the moment, she can’t imagine anywhere being hotter. And yet she found their apartment last night unexpectedly comfortable after the endless weeks aboard a ship, then a horse-drawn carriage, and finally two train cars that boasted only wooden seats. It was warm, but she had stood at her window for nearly half an hour in the middle of the night, gazing out at the row of statuesque cypress on the hill beyond the American compound and the bower of trees just inside the walls. She saw more stars than she ever saw in Boston, and the half moon seemed to dangle eerily, beautifully close to the earth.

  Her father is surveying the rows of sand-colored two-story buildings that curl toward an alley, his arms folded across his chest, his face stern, and then she notes him arch his back suddenly and stand up a little straighter. Ryan sees what he sees and murmurs just loud enough for her to hear, “Oh, Jesus, no. Not more.” Both Ryan and her father glance down at her, but they realize there is absolutely
nothing they can do; there is not a way in the world to shield her from what is coming. Besides, this is why she is here, isn’t it? Didn’t she volunteer to be a part of this aid mission? To chronicle what she sees for their organization, the Friends of Armenia, and to volunteer at the hospital—to do, in essence, whatever she could to help? Still, discomfort leaches from both men like perspiration, and she finds it interesting that they are as embarrassed as they are disgusted. If they had been here alone—if she had remained back at the American compound—her father and the American consul now would be experiencing only rage. And so she presses the palm of her hand against the wall of the house, the stone unexpectedly cool, and rises.

  Approaching from down the street is a staggering column of old women, and she is surprised to observe they are African. She stares, transfixed. She thinks of the paintings and drawings she has seen of American slave markets in the South from the 1840s and 1850s, though weren’t those women and men always clothed—if only in rags? These women are completely naked, bare from their feet to the long drapes of matted black hair. And it is the hair, long and straight though filthy and impossibly tangled, that causes her to understand that these women are white—at least they were once—and they are, in fact, not old at all. Many might be her age or even a little younger. All are beyond modesty, beyond caring. Their skin has been seared black by the sun or stained by the soil in which they have slept or, in some cases, by great yawning scabs and wounds that are open and festering and, even at this distance, malodorous. The women look like dying wild animals as they lurch forward, some holding on to the walls of the stone houses to remain erect. She has never in her life seen people so thin and wonders how in the name of God their bony legs can support them. Their breasts are lost to their ribs. The bones of their hips protrude like baskets.

  “Elizabeth, you don’t need to watch,” her father is saying, but she does. She does.