The Sandcastle Girls

by Chris Bohjalian

  “And Karine,” says Elizabeth. “You had her in Harput.”

  They are standing before a vat with a few small blocks of white cheese in cloudy water.

  “I did,” he agrees, and much to his dismay she unhooks her slender arm. It feels to him like an incalculable loss. But Elizabeth merely wants to buy all the cheese that remains and so she needs her purse—and it takes her two hands to unclasp the buckle at the top.

  • • •

  AT NIGHT ARMEN sleeps on a coarse blanket he has draped across straw, and inhales the smell of the camels and the sheep that, thank God, have finally stopped bleating. His eyes have adjusted to the dark, and he stares at the ceiling beams of his dank alcove in a dingy rooming house adjacent to a barn. The only furniture is a three-drawer dresser, but were it not for the Germans, he would have had nothing at all to put in it. They gave him extra clothes. A comb. A little money—though not enough that he was able to help Elizabeth buy the cheese that together they brought to the square. It was, in the end, a homeopathic offering only: the cheese was a barely detectable drop in an ocean of want.

  Now, sleep just out of reach, he recalls the way Elizabeth waited for the vendor to wrap the cheese in paper, her lips parted ever so slightly. He recalls bowls of figs and tries to remember the blue-black silkiness of his wife’s hair, and then the scent of his infant daughter’s breath when she would sleep on his shoulder. His younger brother, Garo, told him to think of these things and use the memories to fuel his desire for vengeance. His older brother, Hratch, recommended just the opposite: excise those recollections as if they were a gangrenous limb; they would only cause him more pain.

  Neither advice really matters, because he hasn’t a choice. He is never going to forgive and he is never going to forget, even after returning briefly to Harput last month. That’s why he is here in Aleppo, rather than in the Caucasus Mountains, perhaps fighting side by side with his younger brother. Instead, Armen went from Van to Harput to Aleppo. What he chooses to do with those memories from now on, however, is another matter. Garo, if he is still alive, is with the Russians and Hratch is dead.

  Now, in Aleppo, he just waits for the convoys of women, always hoping to find a group from Harput in which there might be someone who can tell him something more about the day his wife and his daughter were herded into a convoy. He knows they are dead. He learned that when he returned to Harput. But still he finds himself hoping to find people who can share with him moments of their last weeks or their last days. He wants to meet someone—anyone—who knew his wife and witnessed her smile before the world completely came apart.

  He hears a dog barking outside and is reminded of the deportees near the citadel under their makeshift canvas roofs. They are there in some cases because there is simply no more room in the hospital, and in others because they are lost causes: they are going to die anyway and there is no point in trying to find room indoors. Since they arrived, he and Elizabeth have spent hours each day with them, even though there is really very little either can do. There is very little anyone can do.

  Many of the women presume he is a coward or a collaborator. How else could he, a man in his late twenties, still be alive? He knows they imagine him bribing his way across the desert. Or betraying other Armenians in a show of traitorous camaraderie with the Turks. It was so much more complicated than that. Yes, he had trusted a Turk—a person who had once been his friend. Months later, he had killed that friend with the fellow’s own ceremonial scimitar. He had almost told a woman from Zeitun precisely that the day before yesterday, because a person from Zeitun would understand. He had almost told Elizabeth the story earlier this evening, because she was an American and would have found the Turk’s betrayal the stuff of dark fairy tales—something from that German named Grimm. But in the end what would she have thought of his cold-bloodedness? Of the Turk’s? Until this spring he had never imagined he was capable of such violence; he had never supposed he’d ever kill anyone. And yet was the murder really cold-blooded? In hindsight, he would never know for sure what his intentions had been when he had gone to Nezimi’s office.

  Once he and Nezimi had been friends. There they are again—he and Nezimi and Karine—in one of the cafés at the edge of the college. Nezimi, already the brash young official, is regaling them with his visions of a modern Turkey and how in their lifetime Constantinople will rival Paris. This is what the Young Turks will do. He smiles at Karine and tells her how her children will be the envy of Europeans, how they will have everything—even, thanks to her beauty, good looks. Then he teases Armen: “Her beauty trumps your ugliness,” he says, smiling and raising his glass. Then they had toasted, Armen recalls, though to what he can no longer remember. But Nezimi and Karine had each presented an origin behind the tradition of clinking goblets together. Nezimi had insisted it was so that whatever the sultans and kings were drinking would slosh into each other’s cups, preventing one party from trying to poison the other. Karine had suggested the practice had a far less Machiavellian foundation. A glass of wine already appealed to four senses: taste, sight, touch, and smell. The tinkling of the glasses appealed to the fifth—and final—sense: sound.

  Now Armen’s mind, as it has every night since meeting Elizabeth, circles back to the American. The woman is paler than Karine, and her hair is reminiscent of terra-cotta, but she has precisely the same pronounced cheekbones and irresistibly silken skin along the nape of her neck. Karine’s pupils were gray and Elizabeth’s are the color of cornflowers, but both women’s eyes are as perfectly shaped as an almond. An Armenian with red hair, he thinks when he imagines Elizabeth, and he smiles ever so slightly. Like an albino tiger: rare but not impossible. She is not Armenian, of course. And maybe that’s why he contemplated telling her what happened in Harput for even a moment. As they had stood side by side in the ruined palace’s tower or when she had hooked her arm through his on their way to the bazaar, they were so close that he had been able to inhale the rose-scented powder she had sprinkled on her skin beneath her clothes. Once, when she smiled, words had failed him completely.

  She was still so naïve—she had seen so little—that his story could not possibly have made sense to her. Besides, where would he begin? No, not where. He knows where. The issue is how. That is the dam that keeps the tale bottled up. And so he shared nothing with Elizabeth, just as he had shared nothing with the woman from Zeitun.

  He recalls how the Armenian refugees were especially mystified by him when he would wander among them with water or soup and he had the two German soldiers beside him. That is complicated, too. The women allowed their pictures to be taken when the gendarmes could not see them. They allowed the corpses of their dead children to be photographed, too.

  Now Armen says a small prayer that the hunger and pain of the women and children in the square will not keep them from sleeping tonight, and that the doctors these Americans from Boston are waiting for—and their supposedly bountiful crates of food and medicine—will arrive soon.

  NEVART IS AWAKENED by the squeaking wheels of a donkey cart. She opens her eyes and feels for Hatoun beside her. Though Nevart is not a mother, she understands on some level that she has just had a mother’s first instinct, and the irony is not lost on her. The child is still sleeping deeply, her breathing silent and slow, the metronomical rise of her bony shoulder the only sign that she is not already among the dead.

  Nevart guesses by the pale strip of light in the east that it may be as late as five or five-thirty in the morning. Her back is sore from sleeping wrapped in a thin blanket on stone, but she knows it will hurt more to move than to simply remain curled in her current position. As she is closing her eyes, vaguely aware that the donkey cart is nearing, she feels a hand on her arm and turns toward the woman beside her, a deportee roughly her own age named Ani.

  “Quick,” Ani whispers, “lie on top of the child.”

  “What?”

  And rather than waste a second answering or explaining, Ani crawls over Nevart and spreads her
self atop Hatoun, using her own blanket like a cape. She murmurs into the child’s ear, “It’s nothing, don’t move. Don’t make a sound.”

  Still, Nevart sits up, alert, despite the ripples of pain that moving sends down the right side of her neck and her back. Just then the donkey cart comes to a stop at the edge of the square beside them. There are two gendarmes and a Turkish soldier in a filthy uniform walking beside it, their eyes scanning the women before them. Inside the cart are five children, two shivering and alert, the others catatonic skeletons in rags. The soldier raises his right arm and she sees he is holding an electric torch. He switches it on and illuminates the Armenians around Nevart, spying a child, a boy, who has also been awakened by either the sound of the cart or the torch beam. The Turk points at the child and one of the gendarmes steps past Nevart and Ani, his shoes stepping on the blanket that shields Hatoun, and he lifts the boy off the ground by his chest. Then, unceremoniously, he drops him into the cart, as if he is a sack of flour, not bothering to move the half-dead children who are already there.

  A moment later, the gendarme takes a second child, another boy, and then a third, this one a girl. Only the girl makes a small, meek cry of protest, but it is brief and seems to awaken no one: no mother or grandmother or aunt. No older sibling. Briefly Nevart finds herself in the beam of the torch and squints. She tries to stare back at the soldier, wanting to ask him precisely what this is all about. But then he motions at the other gendarme, and the fellow swats at the donkey’s rump with a crop, and the cart begins its slow roll away from the square and down an alley, its wheels once again whining along the cobblestones.

  When the cart is gone, Ani sits up, and she and Nevart both gaze at Hatoun. The child has opened her eyes, her face wary. “Shhhhhh,” Nevart murmurs. “They’ve left.” The girl seems to think about this and burrows deeper against Nevart, closing her eyes. Nevart hopes she will fall back to sleep.

  “Where do they take them?” Nevart whispers to Ani. “Do you know?”

  “A cave outside the city. They herd them into it and then build a big bonfire at the entrance. The children choke to death inside.”

  “But … why?”

  “There’s so little room at the orphanage. And the Turks might insist it be closed anyway.”

  “The orphanage.”

  “Yes. After all, why bother to kill the adults if you’re going to allow the next generation to live? It makes no sense.”

  Hatoun brushes an insect off her arm and jerks her head as if she is dreaming. But even though her eyes are still closed, she could not possibly have fallen asleep so quickly. Nevart leans over her and kisses her softly on her forehead, her desiccated lips barely touching the little girl’s skin.

  IN SOME WAYS, IT IS RIDICULOUS OF ME TO DIFFERENTIATE MY ancestry into the Bostonians and the Armenians. There are at least seven thousand Armenians in Watertown, Massachusetts, who would have every right to roll their eyes at my Westchester, Bryn Mawr, and Miami provincialism. They view themselves as Bostonians, too. That seven thousand is not hyperbole, by the way. Watertown, barely six miles northwest of Boston, is a city of thirty-four thousand people—roughly a fifth of whom are Armenian. The town houses the Armenian Library and Museum of America (180 rugs!), the Armenian Cultural and Educational Center (with its Cafe Anoush, where they serve kheyma, known also as Armenian steak tartare or the cannibal sandwich), and St. Stephen’s Armenian Elementary School. There are Armenian bakeries with Armenian desserts that are worth every single calorie. (And at midlife I am extremely discriminating when it comes to dessert. Trust me, the desserts at the Watertown bakeries at the eastern edge of Coolidge Square alone are worth a visit.)

  And yet when I was growing up, I was oblivious to the idea that within ten or fifteen minutes of where the spectacularly waspy Endicott family once had resided was this enclave of Armenian traditions and history. My father—the son of witnesses to the nightmares of 1915—never discussed it.

  Moreover, there were already Armenians in Watertown—plenty of Armenians—when my grandmother and great-grandfather were planning their trip to Aleppo in 1915. They had begun arriving in the 1880s and 1890s, immigrating to the United States either because of the same economic opportunities that drew the Irish, the Swedish, and the Germans, or because they were escaping the massacres of 1895–1896—the precursor to the much greater slaughter that would follow a generation later. Certainly the number of Armenians would grow in the diaspora that followed the First World War, but I am confident that Silas Endicott and his daughter, Elizabeth, were friendly with a great many Armenians. I know for a fact from my research that perhaps as many as a quarter of the do-gooders in the Friends of Armenia were Armenian Americans.

  And yet it was not until I was in my first year of college in western Massachusetts that I discovered in Watertown the photographs that would lead to this story.

  I was writing for the school newspaper, one of half a dozen freshmen who were occasionally assigned an article—usually about a change in the vegetarian meal plan or other similarly important, campus-quaking event. That spring the U.S. House of Representatives voted to declare the 1915 slaughter a genocide. (The full Congress would fail to approve the resolution, and so Armenian Americans are still waiting for that semantic confirmation from the United States government—though, if they are wise, they are not holding their breath.) The editor of the school newspaper was from Watertown, and she deduced that because my last named ended in “ian,” I was likely to be of Armenian descent. She thus thought it might be interesting if I nosed around the town where she had grown up and visited the museum there—to see what people on the street were saying about the resolution. In hindsight, I think she also sent me in part as a public service: she was a little shocked that I had never before been to Watertown or visited the museum.

  And so I borrowed my dorm advisor’s 1979 Ford Maverick and drove ninety minutes east to Watertown. I ate a pastry filled with apricot jam and a square of paklava that rivaled my grandmother’s. I rounded up the obligatory quotes from senior citizens, only one of whom as a child had grown up in the final days of the Ottoman Empire (and I didn’t press him for details, since I had already used up a lot of time at that wonderful bakery). All of the Armenians were predictably pleased that the House had passed the resolution and disappointed that the bill was in all likelihood going to die in the Senate. All of the non-Armenians agreed that the events had occurred so long ago it didn’t matter, and why risk alienating Turkey, a democracy and an ally in an otherwise absolutely chaotic corner of the world?

  Then, before leaving, I went to the museum, and it was there, no more than ten minutes from the moment after I had passed through the entrance, that I saw for the first time the photograph that, years later, would haunt me. It was part of a traveling exhibition called “German Images from the Genocide.” (That was indeed the display’s inadvertently confusing title. Was I the only visitor to the museum that month who presumed these would be photographs from the Holocaust? I doubt it.) I was too young or too self-absorbed at the time to understand the image’s full significance. I was too focused on being a freshman in college and loving my life at nineteen. Besides, my Armenian grandfather and his Boston-born wife had already passed away. But on some level I think I knew even then that eventually that photograph was going to be a game-changer.

  ONCE MORE, ELIZABETH takes Armen’s arm as they walk between the post office and the bazaar. “How did Helmut get that scar?” she asks. “Did he ever tell you?”

  “You’re imagining a bayonet charge or an artillery shell, aren’t you?” he says.

  “It wasn’t in battle?”

  “No.” He recalls the fragments from the Turkish mortar that riddled his brother Hratch’s body like the arrows that quilled Saint Sebastian. Hratch had taken half an hour to die, not losing consciousness until the moment he expired. It had been horrific to witness. “Helmut and Eric have been fortunate. They’re too valuable to lose in battle. The Turks need to expand their rail l
ines, and they depend on engineers such as those two.”

  “And you,” she says.

  “Well, they did. Briefly. Obviously no more.”

  “So, his scar isn’t a war wound.”

  “Nor a duel.”

  She laughs and leans into him. “Do Germans still duel?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Then how?”

  “Ice-skating.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “He was skating with his sister when they were teenagers, and somehow they both fell and the blade on one of her skates nearly took out his eye. Instead it merely gave him that scar.”

  “It’s frightful,” she murmurs, but then she stares up at the sun and her tone changes. “I rather love to skate. Do you?”

  “I never have, so I don’t know.”

  “Does Lake Van not freeze?”

  “Oh, it does. I just never happened to skate.”

  “In that case, I will have to teach you.”

  “Somehow I don’t see Aleppo ever growing cold enough for there to be ice.”

  “Then you’ll have to come to Boston.”

  He turns to her reflexively, unsure what to make of this American forwardness.

  “Or, after the war, you could take me to Van,” she continues. “But, trust me, there are plenty of Armenians in Boston.”

  An unexpected tremor of happiness ripples along his spine. As if she can sense it, she takes two fingers on her free hand and runs them over his cheek. “Promise me,” she says, “if you ever get a scar here, it will only be from an ice skate.”

  • • •

  CONSUL MARTIN GAZES at the flame from the oil lamp through the cognac in his goblet. Meanwhile, Silas Endicott paces back and forth before the window to the compound courtyard, deeply vexed. Tonight he is troubled by his daughter.