The Sandcastle Girls

by Chris Bohjalian

  ARMEN NEARLY HAS to hop over the cat as the animal races around him, an orange streak that vanishes past his ankles, then across the street and down an alley. He reaches the American compound where Elizabeth and her father are staying and pauses with his hands on the bars of the wrought iron fencing beside the imposing double doors, a criminal in a cell in his mind, and peers into the courtyard. He hadn’t planned on stopping here on his way out of town, but it was a detour of only a few blocks and he couldn’t resist. And so here he is, fixing his gaze on the table and chairs and potted palms, a vision of Aleppo that is the antithesis of the despair in the square or inside the hospital or the orphanage.

  Which is when he sees her, sitting alone on the tile beside the chair, rather than in it. She is wearing a nightgown the color of an overcast sky, which she has curled around her feet. She is like a ghost. He wonders if she has noticed him yet in the predawn light, or whether there is still the chance to walk silently backward and disappear into the dawn. Begin his journey to the south. But her presence now is an unexpected gift: he is the boy at the birthday party who has found the one bowl of figs. Of course he wanted to see her. Gazing for a moment at her apartment—wondering which was the window behind which she was sleeping—would have been a consolation prize only, a comfort for someone who has lost everything and expects nothing.

  She looks up and sees him, and for a brief second she appears alarmed. She doesn’t immediately recognize him through the slender wrought iron grate. But then her face transforms from apprehension to mere surprise. She rises to her feet and glides across the courtyard. She removes the bars and the thick wooden beam, briefly struggling beneath its weight, opening the doors and beckoning him inside. She informs him in one breathless sentence that her father and Mr. Martin are asleep and asks him what he is doing here.

  “I am leaving Aleppo,” he says, aware as he speaks that this is the first time he has uttered this sentence aloud. He motions with his eyes at the pack draped over his shoulder. The words surprise him with their utter finality. In a couple of sentences he shares with her his plan to reach Egypt and join the British Army.

  She takes his hand and leads him to the very table where they have sat other days. She tells him a story of a stray cat, and he senses she is sharing this with him because she wants to avoid for a moment the reality that he is leaving. If he could, he would reach out and touch her cheek, the ridge below her eyes so reminiscent of Karine. He longs to wrap his arms around her waist. To rest his forehead on hers. But after what happened amid the shadows just inside the entryway, beside the stairway to the second floor, he doesn’t dare.

  “I didn’t expect to see you,” he murmurs when she is finished, and he is struck by the uncharacteristic quaver in his voice.

  “I didn’t expect to be awake this early myself,” she answers, and she smiles. “But even back home I seem always to be at the mercy of cats. They wake me when they want food. They wake me when they want more of the pillow. They wake me when my mother’s dogs are chasing them.” She hoists her drapes of red hair back behind her ears with her thumbs. “I wish I had a ribbon for it,” she says. “Or a brush.”

  “It looks pretty,” he says.

  “It looks a fright. I was sleeping.” She sighs. Then: “Why are you doing this?” The abruptness of the question stops him like thunder. “Is it because you know she’s gone? Because you’ll never learn any more of what happened to her?”

  “That’s partly why.”

  “Am I …” Her voice trails off, but he finishes the sentence in his mind. Am I not enough to keep you here? The truth is, she could be. She might be. In any other time, she would be.

  “I need to do something,” he answers. “I can’t be a bystander to all this. I can’t die a sheep.”

  “Vengeance? Well, trust me, bandages and good soup accomplish far more than male pride these days.” There is an edge to her voice that he has never heard before. She crosses her arms before her chest and looks away.

  He tries to imagine the college from which she graduated only months earlier. She described for him the campus the other day. He presumes this is the sort of sentiment the women there, firebrands it seems, offered when they discussed the European boys being slaughtered across northeastern France, western Russia, or in the Dardanelles. The Americans wanted nothing to do with the European carnage. And yet some, apparently, wanted to prevent further Armenian massacres. The two ideas were related in his mind: the Americans, most of all, wanted to be civilized. Above the fray.

  “I hope it’s not only vengeance,” he tells her, though that is indeed the largest part of it—that and the rage he feels as a member of a people who have been reduced to victims. As a victim he has felt increasingly unmanned. He was unable to preserve his family. He was unable to protect his people. Still he is relieved now that he chose not to tell her about the Turkish official, about Nezimi.

  “Nevertheless, revenge is an element. Men, you’ll die for it.” The disgust in her voice is evident. But then she offers him a glimpse of what else is driving her frustration. “I will never see you again, will I?”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “We,” she says, repeating the pronoun with thinly veiled abhorrence. “We do know that.”

  “I have to come to Boston,” he reminds her. “You have to teach me to ice-skate.”

  She is silent and the quiet hangs between them like fog. Finally he can stand it no longer and he leans into her, taking her cheeks in his fingers, and kisses her once again. When they pull apart, she breathes in deeply the clean smell of the early morning. Soon, when the sun is up and the crowds have emerged, the more rank odors will monopolize the air. But not yet. “Have you eaten?” she asks him.

  “No.”

  “Well, stay for breakfast. Let me or the cook fix you something,” she says, and then adds, “All of you shouldn’t starve.”

  IN THE MIDDLE of the day Nevart leans against a tent pole and stares at the minaret of the nearby mosque, wondering what time this afternoon they will leave. A whole new batch of refugees arrived a few hours ago, another convoy.

  Yesterday Hatoun was taken to the orphanage. Most of the children are gone now. Either they have died or been brought to the hospital or the orphanage—or, most tragically, they have been picked up in the predawn hours by those despicable ghouls with their cart.

  She recalls watching Hatoun and another child building a castle from sand one morning while everyone else was getting ready to resume their march. They were giggling when their mothers rounded them up. The next day Hatoun’s mother and older sister, a teenager, were among six females who were randomly chosen from the column, stripped naked, and bound to stakes the guards hammered into the ground, somewhere in the desert between Adana and Aleppo. The women were sitting upright, their legs straight before them and their hands tied to the stake behind them so the pole pressed hard against their spines. Then six gendarmes took their swords and mounted their horses, and each took a turn racing toward the captives at high speed, and—as if it were a mere cavalry exercise—decapitated one of the women. Hatoun’s mother had been the last woman to die, and so she had witnessed five heads fall into the hot sand like coconuts, including her older daughter’s.

  At least none of the women had been crucified. Nevart has heard stories of other women who were crucified in the desert, their hands and feet nailed into whatever wood the gendarmes could find. She has also heard stories of women who were impaled on sharp stakes and swords, the pommel and grip planted into the ground so the blade rose like an exotic but lethal plant.

  Nevart finds her loneliness without Hatoun almost unbearable; she misses the girl every bit as much as she feared she would. The child had not been among those who had howled when they were taken away to the orphanage, and in some way that had made the separation even harder for Nevart. When they had been together in the desert, after Hatoun’s mother and sister were dead, the orphan would curl up against her at night, the child’s small bony fr
ame shivering in the cold. In the early morning, before they would resume their trek, Nevart would cradle the girl in her lap. She was thirsty all the time. They were all thirsty all the time. But Hatoun, who was only eight, gamely walked on. She never complained, but only because she had stopped speaking. Now the girl has lost her surrogate mother, too, but apparently she has come to accept inconceivable loss as a part of her lot.

  “Nevart?”

  She turns at the sound of her name and sees the American. Elizabeth. The woman is smiling, but there is nonetheless something slightly manic in her gaze. She has a ribbon in her hair the blue of the iris that Nevart grew in her garden back home in Adana. She has no expectation that she will ever see that garden again. By now there are Turks living in that house.

  “Good morning,” Elizabeth says. “How are you feeling?”

  “A little better each day,” she answers. “It’s always good to be out of the sun. To be getting a little food and water.”

  “There will be more, I promise.”

  “We’re not staying.”

  The American’s eyes grow vacant with surprise. Clearly this is news to her. “What do you mean?” she asks finally.

  “They told us. Sometime today they’re going to move us. Maybe when the sun isn’t so high. They’re taking us to a resettlement camp near Der-el-Zor.”

  “But we have people coming! We have … resources! My father won’t stand for it.”

  “There will be others you can help,” Nevart says, aware of how mordant her tone is. “More arrived just this morning,” she adds, and she points at the newest group of refugees.

  “And where is Hatoun? Did she … is she …”

  “She’s alive. She’s in the orphanage.” Nevart imagines the child in a great room with other girls whose parents either were slaughtered before their eyes or simply swallowed by the miasma of deportation and war.

  “I’ve heard about Der-el-Zor. Mr. Martin told me about it. You can’t go there.”

  “I don’t think I have a choice, do you? I think those fellows over there with the rifles have their orders,” she says, and with a single finger points at two gendarmes.

  “Their orders were to bring you to Aleppo.”

  “And now their orders are to bring us to Der-el-Zor.”

  Elizabeth knows what she is about to say is irrational, but the words are out there before she can stop them. Perhaps because she is in this strange, wild, and utterly foreign world, the sense of propriety that usually would rein her in has evaporated in the stultifying heat. Perhaps it has something to do with the loss of Armen. Perhaps it has to do with meeting Armen in the first place. No matter. “Stay with us,” she is saying. “You said you were a doctor’s wife. Well, we need all the help we can get.”

  “It’s not possible.”

  “Of course it’s possible!”

  “And where would I sleep?”

  “That’s easy, we have space. The apartments where we’re staying have room,” she says, though of course most of that space will be taken by the missionary and the two doctors who are joining them. Nevertheless, if necessary the woman could share Elizabeth’s bedroom.

  Nevart gazes at the emaciated refugees under the canvas. Her immediate reaction still feels like the correct response. Truly, how could she leave these people? How could she desert them? What right has she to live when the others will, in all likelihood, perish in the next stretch of their trek across this torturous wasteland? It was simply that this American saw her first.

  “I am serious, Nevart. You must stay here. Remain with us in Aleppo.”

  “And when you leave?”

  “I don’t know. But at least you’ll be alive. You’ll have regained your health.”

  An idea comes to Nevart. She glances at the impeccable carriage of this American and her elegant skirt and blouse. The complexion that exudes good health and a life that has never wanted for anything. “What really are the conditions in the orphanage?” she asks. “Do you know?”

  “No. But we are going there to visit this afternoon.”

  “May I join you?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I want to see Hatoun. If she wants to stay with me, then I’ll come with you. But you’ll have to take the two of us.”

  Elizabeth smiles and nods. “Yes, absolutely. That would be perfect,” she says. She knows her father will not be happy about this; he will feel it is an improper diminishment of the boundaries that separate the giver and the recipient of a charity. But in her mind, Elizabeth is already imagining she has a new friend and—in Hatoun—a niece. Or, maybe, a younger sister. That’s it: Nevart will be like an older sister and Hatoun a younger one. This is, she realizes, at once an oversimplification and a fantasy. But she is an only child, and there is something appealing about crowding the compound.

  And while Nevart is taller and dramatically thinner, Elizabeth is confident that with a little creativity they will find ways to make her trunk full of clothing fit this Armenian widow. And Hatoun? Fashionable clothing will be the least of her concerns. She’ll be fine.

  They’ll all be fine, she tells herself. They’ll all be just fine. It will be great fun.

  Behind her she hears a commotion. The two German engineers are back. Between them they are hefting a tripod and the great black camera that looks a bit like a small suitcase. She turns to see who they are photographing and feels a great wave of nausea nearly overwhelm her. The engineers have lined up on the ground three women who died in the night, stripping off their rags to record their emaciation. Already rigor mortis has set in, and she worries that the bony legs of one of the women will snap like a pretzel if Eric continues to try to uncurl them for the photograph. Abruptly, out of nowhere it seems, two gendarmes appear, one with his rifle off his shoulder. The other lifts the tripod into the air by two of its three slender legs. Whether he plans to confiscate it or destroy it is unclear to her. But Helmut tries to reason with him. For a moment it looks as if either he is going to succeed or Eric is going to be able to wrestle it back, when the larger of the guards drops his gun so he has two free hands, and whisks the tripod deftly from his comrade’s grasp. Then, as if it is a scarecrow with a pumpkin head he hopes to smash unceremoniously upon the ground, he raises the camera and tripod above him and slams them hard into the earth, where the camera breaks apart with a sound more like splintering crystal than shattering wood.

  MY ARMENIAN GRANDFATHER ONCE SAID, “THE TURKS TREATED us like dogs.” He said this with disgust. He did not say it the way my Bryn Mawr grandmother once remarked, “When I die I want to come back as a golden retriever.” She said this with a gleam in her eye when I was a little girl and she was watching my brother and me smother our golden retriever, Mack, with kisses.

  My Armenian grandfather was simply making a blanket statement that the Turks had treated his people like animals.

  There was, however, an ironic truth to his remark. The Turks really did treat the Armenians like dogs when they walked them into the desert to die. There had been a model, and it involved the dogs of Constantinople. In 1910 the Turkish city was overrun with wild dogs, an inconvenience to a regime trying to appear modern to the ostensibly more civilized Europeans to the northwest, and a legitimate sanitation hazard. There were tens of thousands of these unmoored dogs. They roamed, ate, and defecated at will. Unfortunately the Turks hadn’t the spine to euthanize them. No one was willing to hunt the creatures, no one was willing to poison them. After all, they were dogs.

  The solution? Catch them and ship them to the island of Oxia in the Sea of Marmara. Somewhere in the neighborhood of forty thousand of them were boarded onto boats and unceremoniously dropped off on the uninhabited island. There they were left to die slowly among the rocks and gorse, because there was no food for them on Oxia, no animals that might serve as prey. Sometimes people would row to the island to feed them, but there were far too many dogs and far too little food. The animals baked on the stark cliffs and slowly starved to death. For
months, villagers across the spit of water in Anatolia had to endure their ceaseless barking. The animals’ evident desperation grew so terrifying that even the fishermen began avoiding the waters around the rock, because they were afraid packs of dogs would find the strength to swim to their boats and swamp them. It took a long, long time for all of the dogs to die, because the stronger ones finally began to devour the weaker ones. But eventually that source of food disappeared, too, and the barking grew pathetic and mournful. And, finally, the island was absolutely quiet.

  My point? When the Turks marched the Armenians into the arid Mesopotamian plains, they had had a precedent. The only difference between the Armenians and the dogs was that most of the time the Armenians never chose cannibalism.

  AND SO, BERK. The first boy I kissed in 1979. The teen who looked like a rock star with tresses that would have made Steven Tyler jealous, and who—by the way—just happened to be Turkish. I am not done with him. He wasn’t done with me.

  He was the first boy I kissed in 1979, and two years later he was the first boy I fucked.

  My two children are going to blush when they read this. Actually, that’s not completely accurate: Matthew, who is now in ninth grade, is never going to acknowledge that sentence exists; he will read this book and pretend those words aren’t on the page. Anna, who is two years younger, will ask me why I chose the verb that I did. Both will be silently appalled.

  My husband, Bob, might be, too. But I have chosen the verb carefully. The fact is, Berk and I were teenagers, adolescents in heat. Later we would—choose any euphemism that will suffice—“make love.” But that first time on the chaise beside my family’s swimming pool, a Friday night when my brother and my parents were out at separate parties and we had the house to ourselves? We fucked. It was actually pretty spectacular. I still remember the way I was tingling when I pulled off my bikini bottom. He was awkward with the condom, but then he was as graceful and self-assured as ever. We had dated off and on over the two years between our first kiss and our first coupling.