The Sandcastle Girls

by Chris Bohjalian

  “She is growing too familiar with the Armenian,” he tells Ryan, his tone exasperated.

  “Armen Petrosian.”

  “Yes. The engineer.”

  “Are you sure you won’t join me in a cognac?”

  Silas pauses before the window. With his back to Ryan he says—not answering the diplomat’s question—“I have seen this tendency before in Elizabeth. Her mother and I both have.”

  “And that tendency is?”

  “To forget herself. To lose her bearings with men. She has a history of … of this sort of thing.”

  “I rather like Armen,” Ryan tells him, savoring the way the alcohol warms the back of his throat and his chest. “He does not strike me as the type to take unfair advantage.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “No?”

  The American banker sighs loudly and shakes his head. Finally he turns from the window and faces Ryan. “We came here to save these exotics,” he says, enunciating each syllable slowly and with great care, “not romance them.”

  NEVART PAYS ATTENTION to the immaculately dressed Turkish officer who has appeared out of nowhere and towers over the women and children in the square from atop a massive white stallion. There are gold braiding and tassels along his uniform shoulders. He has an adjutant on a smaller chestnut-colored horse just behind him. And beside the adjutant stands a Catholic nun who, Nevart estimates, is in her mid- to late fifties. She is either German or Swiss, and she has her hands clasped behind her. Her face is lost in part to the shadow cast by the horse to her right. Nevertheless, Nevart can see that her expression is stern but not unkind. And looking up at the two soldiers on horseback as if they are gods is a trio of scruffy gendarmes with rifles. The three of them seem uncharacteristically attentive—as if they aspire to be soldiers instead of mere thugs.

  “Tomorrow the women will be brought to the resettlement camp to await the end of the war,” the officer is saying, his voice robust and strong, carrying across the cobblestones as if he were using a megaphone. “The older children may accompany their mothers, and the younger ones will be taken to the orphanage. Sister Irmingard tells me that some beds have opened up. I assure you, the children will be well cared for there.”

  She supposes she knows what it means that beds have opened up. Those children were not reconciled with their parents, nor were they found new homes. Almost certainly they died. Is it possible they were so sickly that they, too, were put onto that nightmarish bier that rolled along the edge of the square the other night?

  She tells herself that isn’t likely. This nun wouldn’t allow it. The beds are now free because the children died or have been sent to the hospital. But they were not carried away, still half-alive, on that cart.

  She feels Hatoun leaning into her and knows in her heart that as terrifying and draconian as the orphanage might be, Hatoun will have a better chance of surviving there than at a resettlement camp. Nevart has heard all about the resettlement camps. Everyone has. You die there. They are desert wastelands without food or shelter or, sometimes, even water. All of these women in the square would be better off if the Turks just brought in machine guns, mounted them on tripods, and ended it all right here and now.

  She worries that it will devastate Hatoun to be separated from her. It will break her own heart, too. But Nevart doesn’t believe she has a choice. She resolves that moment that when it’s time, she will send Hatoun away with the nun.

  • • •

  THE DOCTOR IS a short, squat Turkish fellow with black wire spectacles that curl around his ears in great swooping Cs. He is bald but for his white moustache and the gray stubble that wraps around the sides and the back of his head like a cowl. He has far more impressive locks emanating from inside his ears and his nostrils than anywhere else on his head. Elizabeth guesses he must be sixty. His name is Sayied Akcam, and the more time that Elizabeth spends with him in the hospital, the more she has come to appreciate him. She has been volunteering here a few hours in the morning and a few hours in the afternoon, visiting with the women in the square in between. Akcam has always been at the hospital when she has, sliding with equal ease among those who will live and those who will die. He is a Muslim, but almost everyone he is treating is a Christian, because almost everyone here is an Armenian woman or child who collapsed upon arrival in Aleppo.

  She does exactly what he orders: she empties bedpans and cleans wounds and spoons soup into the mouths of whoever is incapable of sitting up and holding both a bowl and a utensil. Her training in Boston, brief and rushed as it was, has proven more helpful here than in the square: She is able to change dressings. She is able to sterilize sutures and ligatures. She bottles water, boiling it and filtering it three times.

  Akcam speaks about as much English as she speaks Turkish, and so on occasion they resort to asking the German nurse who speaks both languages to serve as an interpreter. But the doctor is improving her Turkish and her Armenian enormously, and often in ways that surprise her. The first sentence he has taught her perfectly in Turkish is from the Qur’an: “Allah has full knowledge and is well acquainted with all things.” He is convinced that a righteous God is going to make the Turks pay for what they are doing. “Allah dwells in all men, even the infidel,” he says. “The soldiers and gendarmes know not whom they are killing out here in the desert. There will be consequences.”

  Elizabeth is less sure. In the meantime she does all that she can to assist him.

  THE AMERICAN COMPOUND seems empty when Armen arrives, its pulse uncharacteristically slow. Yet the massive gate is open, so, a little perplexed, in he strolls. He stands listening for a moment before the main house’s front door—ajar and, in his mind, beckoning. But he hears nothing except the birds in the trees over his shoulder. And so he uses a single finger to push the door all the way open, and then he waits motionless in the entry foyer. He feels his heart beating a little faster and has to remind himself that there is no reason to be wary. Why would the Turks have murdered the American consul or his assistant or his guests from Massachusetts? Still he worries that something has happened because anxiety is now as much a part of his muscle memory as climbing stairs or using a knife and a fork. And so he walks silently into the kitchen, where he sees that the cook has cleaned up after breakfast but has not yet begun to prepare lunch. She is, he reassures himself, at the market acquiring provisions. Then he peers down the long corridor where Ryan Martin and his secretary have their offices and, again, sees not a trace of either.

  It is then that he hears the footsteps above him. He freezes, one hand on the dark wood paneling, his fingers near the heavy drapes, which have been drawn to keep in the marginally cooler air from the night. In a moment there is the brief, almost rhythmic drumming of someone rapidly descending the stairs, oblivious and unalarmed.

  And then he sees her, and seconds pass before he speaks because he doesn’t want to frighten her, and because the sun through the open doorway catches the red in her hair and the pale beauty of the skin on her cheek and he is simply unable to open his mouth. When she turns to the coat rack in the corner and stands on her toes to reach for a straw hat, he says her name and she falls against the wall with a start.

  “You scared me,” she says, her face a little flushed. She is holding the hat before her with both hands, as if it were a bouquet of flowers.

  “I scared myself,” he tells her, and he tries to smile. “I thought something might have happened to you. To all of you.”

  “I’d forgotten a hat,” she explains. “I was at the gate and I realized I’d forgotten a hat. Also … a handkerchief.” Her words catch in her throat. “My father and Mr. Martin are investigating when the first train cars will arrive with the aid. I said I would meet them later at the hospital.”

  “You shouldn’t be walking around Aleppo alone.”

  She smiles. “You sound like my father.”

  “People …”

  “Yes?”

  “People disappear here,” he says, a
nd finally he allows himself to move. He crosses what feels like an ocean of longing between them.

  “I won’t,” she tells him.

  He takes the hat from her hands, still feeling a little unmoored, and starts to place it gently on her head. But she is shivering ever so slightly, which surprises him because he couldn’t imagine that this lioness from America ever trembled. And so he takes a step back, and she surprises him once again by shaking her head no. No. And then she is leaning into him, her hands flat on his chest, her eyes closed, and she is rising up and kissing him, her lips on his.

  The hat falls to the floor, and with the side of his foot he closes the door. Abruptly all is darkness and shadow, and her arms slide around his back. He quivers when he feels her fingers against his spine.

  “You’re ticklish,” she whispers, breathless, and he burrows his face in her neck, tasting the barest trace of talc on her skin, his jaw brushing the lace at the edge of her chemise beneath her dress. And then his hands are on her back, too, upon the waterfall of eyelets and the ribs and the long, dangling strings of her corset. She pulls his face back up to hers and seems about to say something more, but she doesn’t. Instead she kisses him again, opening her mouth to his, summoning his tongue and the fullness of his lips.

  Briefly they collapse onto the stairs that lead to the second floor, but only for a moment, only for the time it takes him to unbutton the front of her dress. Then she turns her back to him, her knees on the step, so he can more easily untie her corset. He is just starting that work when suddenly she looks back at him over her shoulder. His sight has adjusted enough to the dark that he can see a ripple of wariness amid the want in her eyes.

  “Your wife,” she says. “Have you done this with anyone since …”

  “No.”

  “Were you … were you thinking of her?”

  “No. I was thinking only of you.”

  She looks straight ahead at the stairway. He buries his forehead in her hair. He says, his voice as soft as a draft, “We shouldn’t do this. We won’t.”

  “I want to.”

  He sits on the stairway beside her and tenderly turns her body around by her hips. He is struck by how slight she is. How slender. How—even in the dim light of the corridor with the drapes drawn tight—beautiful. “There is tomorrow,” he says. “Or the next day.”

  “In this place? You just told me: people disappear here all the time.” There is a slight pout to her voice, but she rests her head on his shoulder and her hand on the inside of his knee.

  “I know,” he says. But that’s all. Two compact syllables. He understands now how quickly he is falling in love with her, but that soon—within days—he is indeed going to disappear.

  IN THE SQUARE near the citadel, Nevart watches how some of the children scream like gored animals and some move away from their mothers like the somnambulant. Some of the mothers and aunts have lied to their young ones, telling them that they will be spending but a night or a week at the orphanage, while the others have told their children they will remain there until the end of the war—which then has left the women stymied, at a loss to explain whether the end of the war is months or years distant. The bravest of the mothers do not cry; the same with the bravest of the children. Many of the women are too weak to offer even a last embrace or so close to death that they are grateful that the soldiers and the nuns have come for their children. It’s all, in Nevart’s opinion, one more degrading station on their path to the cross.

  But, she reminds herself, the orphanage is Hatoun’s best chance for survival. And so now, amid the desperate wailing of the toddlers and the strident demands of the nuns and the gendarmes and the Turkish Army officers—a cacophonic jumble of German and Turkish and Armenian—Nevart kneels before Hatoun and places her hands firmly on the child’s gaunt upper arms. “You will be safe with the nuns,” she says. “You’ll have food and a bed.” The words catch in her throat and she looks down at the child’s bare feet. Nearby a teenage gendarme yanks at a rail of a boy who can’t be more than five and is clinging to his mother like a terrified kitten to a tree limb, oblivious to the reality that his mother has died in the night; as the gendarme pulls at the child, he inadvertently drags the cadaver along the stones in the square. At sunrise Nevart had vowed that she would not lie to Hatoun and give the child false hope that someday she would return for her. Now, however, it seems that this is the only way she will be able to let the girl go. She wishes Hatoun would speak—say anything that might reveal what she is feeling.

  “It’s for the best, my sweet,” she tells the child. “Do you understand?”

  The girl might have been about to say something, her lips just starting to part, when the German nun appears behind Hatoun like a mountain.

  “Are you her mother?” she asks in Armenian.

  “No. I am …” And the words drift off. The answer could be either I am merely a woman from the same city, or I am all that she has in the world. Both are equally as precise.

  “Are you an aunt? A family friend?” the nun persists.

  “I am … a family friend,” she answers.

  The nun takes down her name and Hatoun’s, but asks not a thing about the child’s likes and dislikes—her family, her history—and then says to the girl, “Do you have any belongings?”

  Hatoun, her eyes growing a little wide at the reality of the parting, shakes her head no. She is shivering ever so slightly, despite the midmorning heat.

  “Very well then. You’re prepared to come with me?”

  Suddenly Nevart can stand it no longer and she pulls Hatoun to her, squeezing the girl against her chest and closing her eyes tight against her own tears. Meanwhile, the child continues to tremble but says not a word.

  AT NIGHT ARMEN lies on his blanket atop the straw, grateful to Eric and Helmut for all they have done for him this past month. He is appreciative as well of these newly arrived, well-intentioned Americans. And he feels his heart yearning for Elizabeth, alive in a way he had not expected it would be ever again.

  Nevertheless, he has decided that tomorrow he is going to leave Aleppo and work his way south into Egypt. He has heard of Armenians enlisting in the British Army to fight the Turks. And so he will set off at dawn. He has stared long enough at the faces of the women who have been whipped and prodded across the desert, and it’s clear that the details of how his wife and daughter died will be forever lost to the sands. He will go to his grave knowing the approximate date when the column of refugees might have left Harput and roughly when those stragglers arrived in Aleppo. But he will never know where on the route Karine perished.

  Of course, volunteering to fight with the British means it is likely that soon enough he might be fighting Germans as well as Turks—perhaps men as cultured as his fellow engineers. He knows German officers are assisting the Turks in the Dardanelles. He knows the Germans will join the Turks in any defense of the Ottoman Empire’s southern or northwestern flanks.

  He recalls the view of Aleppo from atop the ruined citadel. He is going to become one of those thousands of people who appear briefly in this desert city and then vanish. Eric and Helmut and Elizabeth will wonder at his absence. But not for long. Elizabeth will miss him, but he cannot bring her the happiness she deserves. He has too much history. His people have too much history. She will be much better off without him.

  He rolls onto his side. His last conscious thoughts are of Elizabeth and Karine, the living and the dead, and the cheekbones below the kind, gentle eyes of both women.

  ELIZABETH USES A match to light the oil lamp, a beautiful clay globe with a cork with a wick. It is painted the deep blue of an artist’s night sky, dotted with white stars and one perfect sickle moon. She pulls aside the curtain to her room and starts down the hallway, pausing briefly to notice the way the shadow of her nightgown resembles wings against the wall at the top of the stairs. The stone is cold against the soles of her feet. Then she descends the steps, passes the first-floor corridor to the line of rooms where
the men are asleep—Mr. Martin, his assistant, David Hebert, and her father—and continues down the hallway to the kitchen. She finds the tin can into which the cook tossed the remnants of their dinner and brings it with her outside into the courtyard. There she places the lamp in the center of the black wrought iron table and sits on the ground with the can filled with scraps of gristle and bone. Then she waits, listening again for the yowl that initially awoke her.

  And she waits for easily ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. But she knows the cat is somewhere in the courtyard. She can sense him watching her. Earlier this week she saw him studying Armen and her from a corner behind a potted palm. He is an orange monster with matted fur and a face as round as the oil lamp. Finally she hears him; he is atop the western wall, looking down at her, a Cheshire cat prepared to leap onto the tree branch that extends like a great gnarled finger above the stucco, and then disappear if need be. She makes kissing sounds with her lips. Slowly, so as not to scare him with a sudden movement, she presents the remains of the lamb like an offering, lining up the pieces on the ground beside her.

  Then she waits some more. Once he turns his head quizzically to his side, as if he is trying to understand why she would do this. Unless he is all fur—which she doubts—somehow this animal finds plenty of food. She has two cats at home in Boston. She always had cats growing up. She knows the species well.

  Finally, just when she is about to give up, he jumps down to the ground and crouches perhaps a dozen feet away. She takes one of the small pieces of fat and gently tosses it toward him. He sniffs it, takes it in his mouth, and disappears through a hole in the bottom of the wall. She gazes down at what could have been a feast for him, the bones from which he might have worked the last of the flesh. Sighing, she gathers up the scraps and drops them back into the can.

  To the east the sky is just beginning to lighten. The birds are starting to sing. Soon she will hear the muezzin beckoning the faithful to prayer. She sits back against the legs of a chair and thinks of Armen, and the way the air seems to grow charged whenever they are together. She thinks of the starving in the square and the sick in the hospital. Outside the walls of the courtyard she hears something else. Footsteps. She blows out the blue flame atop the wick and sits motionless, waiting.