The Sandcastle Girls

by Chris Bohjalian

  Herding the women forward through the town are half a dozen young men, two on horseback who look nearly as weak as the women, and four walking beside the group. All of them have rifles slung over their shoulders. They, too, don’t look any older than Elizabeth, and it crosses her mind that the pair nearest her can’t be more than fifteen or sixteen; their moustaches are wisps, a boy’s attempt to look like a man.

  Just before the group reaches them, the gendarmes guide the women down the narrow street that will lead eventually to the square beneath the citadel, where they will be deposited with the deportees who arrived here yesterday. The men are short-tempered and tired. They strike the women when they move slowly or clumsily. They yank them back to their feet by their hair when they collapse. Elizabeth tries to count the women as they turn to the right and disappear into the alley, but reflexively she looks away whenever one of the skeletons meets her eye. Still, she guesses there are at least 125 of them. She verbalizes the number aloud without thinking.

  “I assure you, Miss Endicott,” says Ryan, “when that group left Zeitun or Adana or wherever, there were at least a thousand of them.”

  “Why did the Turks take their clothes?” she asks him.

  He shakes his head. “They don’t usually—unless they’re planning to kill them. Sometimes they take the men’s clothes immediately before executing them; they worry the clothes of the dead are defiled. But I have no idea why they did in this case. Degrade the survivors, maybe. Perhaps increase the chances they’ll die on their own in the sun. But don’t look for reason in any of this.”

  “And where are the men?”

  He dabs at his forehead with a handkerchief. “It’s safe to assume they’re dead. Either they were—” He doesn’t finish because her father glares at the consul to be silent. To be still. Her father is hoping to introduce her to this world gradually. In increments. They discussed it little on either the ship or the train. Generalities of Ottoman history only.

  Later this month, the two doctors in their party will arrive and they will start work. They—along with a returning missionary named Alicia Wells—telegrammed that their ship was going to be delayed leaving Boston, and might then take a more roundabout course to avoid U-boats. But whether the physicians are delayed two weeks or three might make all the difference in the world for some of the survivors who are brought here. These women, she presumes, will be long gone by then, marched back into the desert to one of the resettlement camps to the southeast. So will the group that is already in the square, the women and children who staggered in from the desert yesterday.

  In the meantime, Elizabeth can’t imagine what in the name of God she—what anyone—can do for them. Still, after catching her breath, she and her father and the American consul decide that instead of spending lunch discussing the conditions in Aleppo and planning for the arrival of the rest of their group, they will follow these woeful deportees down the alley and into the square, and there see what they can do to help.

  RYAN MARTIN LEAVES to find rags for the women to wear, but by the time he returns with a wagon of tattered dresses and blouses—remnants from the dead who have passed through Aleppo that summer—the newly arrived deportees already have been clothed by the other refugees. In the meantime, Elizabeth and a nurse from the hospital pick at the vermin on the women and clean the gaping wounds on their legs and ankles and feet. They ration the little calamine lotion and olive oil they have for those women whose sunburns have not seared deep into their flesh, and gently wash the wounds of those whose skin—especially on their shoulders and backs—has peeled off like a snake’s. Within minutes they finish off the one large bottle of iodine the nurse has brought. Elizabeth gives the deportees water and bowls of thin bulgur soup to eat, because it is all they can scare up at the moment. There may be bread tomorrow. She feels helpless. When she was given her nursing training back in Boston, no one prepared her for dysentery. For gangrene. For feet with bones splintered from weeks of walking barefoot, the toes and heels swollen and mangled and deformed.

  Most of the women are clustered underneath makeshift tents—canvas pulled tight on tottering wooden poles—but there are more women than there is room, so they spread out beyond the tent when the sun is no longer overhead and there are long stripes of comforting black shade. The children—among whom the only males in this new group can be found—remind her of dead sea horses she once saw on the beach at Cape Cod: The children, like the sea horses, are curled up on their sides and their bones seem as brittle and sharp as the shells of the dried pipefish. Perhaps a quarter mile away is a hospital, primitive by Boston standards, but a hospital nonetheless. It infuriates Elizabeth that there is, apparently, no room for these women there, and so far not a single doctor has emerged from the building and offered to help. Ryan has tried to mollify her by telling her that the vast majority of the beds there are filled with Armenian women and children, but this reality, too, has left her seething inside.

  The number of deportees who speak either English or French surprises Elizabeth, though most are too tired right now to talk. Nevertheless, there is a woman who looks to be in her fifties but Elizabeth suspects is actually half that age, who murmurs “thank you” in English as she takes the bowl of soup and brings it to her lips.

  “You’re welcome,” Elizabeth says. “I wish it were a more substantial meal.”

  The woman shrugs. “You’re American,” she observes, a statement. She is wearing a man’s shirt and a skirt that balloons around her like a sack.

  “Yes. My name is Elizabeth.”

  “I’m Nevart,” the Armenian offers, and Elizabeth carefully rolls the name around in her mind. A small girl sleeps beside the woman, the child’s collarbone rising and falling ever so slightly with each breath. Elizabeth guesses that she is seven or eight. “Where in America?” Nevart asks.

  “Boston,” Elizabeth answers. “It’s in the state of Massachusetts.” The woman’s nails are as brown as her skin. “Sip that soup slowly,” she adds.

  Nevart nods and places the bowl in her lap. “I know where Boston is,” she says. “I heard you speaking Armenian a minute ago. How much do you know?”

  “A little. Very little, actually. I know mostly vocabulary. I know words, not grammar.” Then Elizabeth asks the woman, “How did you learn English?”

  “My husband went to college in London. He was a doctor.”

  Elizabeth thinks about this, imagining this wraith of a woman living in England. As if Nevart can read her mind, the deportee continues, “I wasn’t with him most of the time. I have been to London, but only for a visit.” She sighs and looks into Elizabeth’s eyes. “I’m not going to die,” she murmurs, and she almost sounds disappointed.

  “No, of course, you won’t. I know that.” Elizabeth hopes she sounds reassuring. She honestly isn’t sure whether this woman will live.

  “You’re just saying that. But I know it because I was a doctor’s wife. I have survived dysentery. Starvation. Dehydration. They … never mind what they did to me. I am still alive.”

  “Is that your little girl?” Elizabeth asks.

  The woman shakes her head. “No,” she answers, gently massaging the child’s neck. “This is Hatoun. Like me, she is unkillable.”

  Elizabeth wants to ask about the woman’s husband, but she doesn’t dare. The man is almost certainly dead. Likewise, she wonders if Nevart has lost her children as well, but again she knows no good can come from this inquiry. Wouldn’t the Armenian have said something about her own children if they were with her now—if they were alive?

  Over the woman’s shoulder Elizabeth spies her father in the distance. He is ladling out the soup from a black cauldron and handing it to the women strong enough to stand and bring it to those who are collapsed under the tent. His sideburns and his beard, so much thicker and grayer than the thin whorls of cinnamon atop his scalp, look almost white in this light. They are expecting flour and sugar and tea in the next day or so—the first of two shipments they have arrange
d this month—though Ryan has warned her father and her that it is likely only a small fraction of what they have acquired will actually arrive in Aleppo.

  “Where do we go next?” Nevart asks her. “They brought us here, but they won’t let us stay.”

  “I’ve only been here a day myself, so I don’t know very much. I’m sorry.”

  “The people of Aleppo, they don’t want us in their square. Would you want us in yours?”

  “I do know there’s an orphanage in the city for the children,” Elizabeth answers, trying to be reassuring. “I haven’t seen it yet.”

  Nevart offers a hint of a dark smile. “I am sure there is,” she says. She balances her bowl on her knee with one hand, and strokes Hatoun’s hair with the other. “Soon there will be nothing but orphans.” She gazes down at the girl and then, carefully, takes another sip of her soup.

  RYAN MARTIN HAS warned Elizabeth that in the desert there are thousands and thousands more. Sometimes the gendarmes bring the deportees here to Aleppo, but other times they will march them east another week, following the Euphrates River until they get to the camps—though the word camps, he stresses, is a misnomer. “I am told that slaughterhouse is more apt,” he says.

  Now he is sitting on a pillow on the floor of a restaurant, across from her father and her, as a plump boy with a lazy left eye brings them tall glasses of watery yogurt and mint. Away from the emaciated women and children in the square, Elizabeth feels relief and guilt simultaneously. She accompanied her father to this corner of the Ottoman Empire because she felt this would be a meaningful culmination of her studies at Mount Holyoke, especially given her school’s existing outreach in eastern Turkey. Prior to the war, Mount Holyoke had had both a school and a seminary in the Armenian quarter in Bitlis. If Europe had not been a battlefield, she might simply have followed the path of her older male cousins and taken a grand tour of London, Paris, Rome, and Berlin. That had been possible just a few years ago. No longer.

  “Will we go there, too?” she asks, hoping the tremor she is feeling inside her has not crept into her voice.

  “To the camps in the desert? Yes, if they’ll let us,” Ryan says. “But that’s no sure thing. I am in discussions with the governor-general here—the vali—as well as with some of his underlings. If I do garner the necessary permissions, it will be no small accomplishment, I assure you. The Turks don’t want any foreign aid brought to the Armenians—nor do they want us to witness what they’re doing. They haven’t even allowed the Red Cross to visit.”

  There is a commotion at the door, and she turns to see two young German soldiers, their uniforms immaculate despite the stultifying heat outside, and a third man, a Turk, in wool trousers and a white linen shirt. The soldiers remove their caps and hold them deferentially before their hearts, and the heavyset woman who owns the restaurant emerges from the kitchen behind the drapes and seats them at a low table beside the American diplomat and the Endicotts. The soldiers are blond, but the Turk has a thick mane the color of creosote and eyes that are just as dark. They are, like all soldiers in her opinion, brash and happy and a bit like well-meaning big dogs that get their muddy paws on the couch. She knows intellectually that they kill people; it is what they have been trained to do. One even has a long, thin scar running along his cheek from his ear to his nose—a longitude line on a globe. But she will never witness the sort of violence that leaves a man dead in a trench or his face forever disfigured. Instead she sees soldiers only in moments like these, when with good-natured bonhomie they descend like tourists for their coffee or beer or—here—the aniseed-flavored arak.

  “I can tell that you people are Americans,” says the soldier whose face has not yet been marked by battle, his accent heavy, but he has pronounced each word with care. She has met other Germans since crossing into the Ottoman Empire earlier this week. He is a lieutenant. Then he extends his hand to her father, who takes it uncomfortably. “My name is Eric,” he says. “This is Helmut and this is Armen.”

  They nod as her father and Ryan introduce themselves. The diplomat evidences marginally more enthusiasm than her father, but both are barely more than cordial. “This is my daughter, Elizabeth,” her father adds simply.

  “I have a sister named Elli,” says the lieutenant, apparently oblivious to the chill in her father’s voice. “That’s like Elizabeth, isn’t it? Are you ever an Elli?” He raises an eyebrow mischievously as he inquires. “Like you, she is very pretty.”

  “I could be an Elli,” she answers, aware that her father might try to quash the flirtation, but still desirous of taking the risk. “So far, however, I’ve always been Elizabeth.”

  “Or Miss Endicott,” her father says flatly, and he seems about to say something to the soldiers that will signal that their brief exchange is finished—perhaps then turn his back to them, even if it means moving awkwardly on the thick pillow on the floor—but then the Turk with the eyes darker than night speaks up.

  “You’re here for the Armenians, aren’t you,” he says, his accent different from the others’.

  “Yes, we are,” her father answers. “We are part of a small philanthropic expedition.”

  “Thank you,” he says, the corners of his mouth curling up ever so slightly. “We can always use … philanthropy.” And that’s when it dawns on her. He’s not Turkish; he’s Armenian. Ryan has gleaned this as well, swiveling so quickly that he almost upends his yogurt with his knee. And before she can reply to the fellow’s remark, the American consul jumps in.

  “You’re Armenian! I suspected it, but I didn’t want to be presumptuous. I thought, perhaps, I had heard your name incorrectly when you were introduced. But it was Armen, wasn’t it?” he says, speaking with that same frenzied, unguarded tone he uses whenever he is excited. She wonders whether her father, with his reserve and meticulous cadences, will ever warm up to Ryan Martin. She doubts it. “Where are you from?” the consul asks Armen.

  “Van.”

  “Van, really? How in the world did you get out?”

  Armen seems to think about this—about how much information he wants to share. Finally he shrugs, his face growing a little taut. “My brothers and I fought,” he says evenly. “And then, when it was time, we left. There were three of us.”

  “And your brothers—”

  “One is fighting somewhere with the Russians—at least that was his plan—and one is dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ryan says.

  “I am, too,” he agrees, and then adds, “Thank you.”

  “And yet you’re friends with these—” The diplomat stops himself midsentence, aware that he is on the verge of saying something profoundly impolitic. But the German with the scar on his cheek—Helmut—rescues Ryan from embarrassment.

  “Germany and Turkey are allies. Armen is a Turkish citizen,” he says.

  “Although I am an infidel. At least technically,” Armen adds. “That does mean a second-class status in Turkey in this life and—so I am told—a pretty nasty experience in the next one.”

  “Regardless, he has never fought against the German Army,” Helmut continues. “Besides, we’re infidels, too.”

  “How did the three of you meet?” Ryan asks.

  The lieutenant slaps Armen hard on the back: “He is an engineer, like us. Maps for the railroad and lays track—at least he used to. Helmut and I have been working on the railroad spur from here to Nusaybin. We met at the telegraph station around the corner last week.”

  Elizabeth eyes the Germans carefully. “So you don’t approve of what your ally is doing to the Armenians?”

  “Heavens, no!” the lieutenant tells her.

  Helmut folds his arms before his chest, and Elizabeth realizes for the first time how very broad his shoulders are. “It’s barbaric,” he adds. As he speaks, his scar stretches ever so slightly. “Ask Armen here what he’s seen.”

  “Yes, tell us!” Ryan says, his voice so urgent that if a person didn’t understand his motives, he would presume the man was merely
a ghoulish voyeur.

  Armen glances at Elizabeth and their eyes meet for a brief second before he gazes back down at the low table. His skin is the color of coffee with cream, at once inviting and exotic in her mind. His lips are thin beneath a raven moustache, and his chin, though masked by a ripple of dark stubble, has the trace of a dimple. His forehead reminds her of her father’s—a little high—but it is his moist, burdened eyes that keep drawing her in. His eyelashes are long and unexpectedly girlish.

  “There is too much to tell. I wouldn’t know where to begin,” he says finally, speaking to the group as a whole. Then he turns his attention on her. “I would rather hear more about why you’ve come to Aleppo—or your world, Elli.”

  “Elizabeth,” she says, aware of her father’s scrutiny.

  “Elizabeth,” says Armen apologetically.

  “Please, I understand you have been through a great deal,” the American consul insists, his voice animated and impassioned, his fingers on both hands splayed as if clutching a large stone. “But people need to know what the Turks are doing! The Turks have—” He stops abruptly, remembering where he is, and grows silent. And so one of the Germans jumps in.

  “To our brave ally! To Talat Pasha and the Committee of Union and Progress!” Eric says—his voice, like Ryan’s, also far too loud for the small room—and he raises his glass in a mock toast. “Hear, hear!” And once more Elizabeth finds herself imagining these soldiers as overly enthusiastic, absolutely unaware big dogs. Or, worse, as boys.

  But then, perhaps, they are one and the same.

  “IF YOUR MOTHER were with us,” Silas Endicott says to his daughter, unsure precisely how to convey what he wants because it involves his daughter and men, and there is absolutely no subject in the world that makes him more uncomfortable, “I am sure she would offer good counsel.” He had always presumed that he understood Elizabeth, but then last year she had surprised everyone by rejecting Jonathan Peckham, a perfectly reasonable suitor from a very good family. Silas would have welcomed the fellow quite happily into the bank. And, after that, he had heard something unpleasant about how Elizabeth had kept inappropriate company with one of her professors in South Hadley. A widower who, apparently, had a history of taking a fancy to one of his students each year.