The Sandcastle Girls

by Chris Bohjalian

  That. Even now I find it revealing that I did not use the word genocide.

  “You people just never forget. Your father—”

  “What about my father?”

  “I know it’s why your family doesn’t like mine.”

  It was a reality that our families only socialized in very big groups, such as at those lake parties. Not once had only the two families ever dined together or the four parents had even a drink together. Did I suspect it was because my father was Armenian and his parents were Turkish? Yes, I did. But I couldn’t have cared less about that lineage personally, and clearly Berk didn’t care at all. Berk loved me, and I think I loved him as much as I was capable of loving a boy at that time in my life. (Remember: I am only part Armenian. My mother was from a line of spectacularly uptight Bryn Mawr Brahmins.) It is highly unlikely that we would have wound up wed even if he hadn’t begun a sentence “you people,” but I took offense. In hindsight, I bristled unfairly—and, yes, I hurt a very, very nice young man.

  ELIZABETH SITS FORWARD on the tapestried ottoman in the compound living room and reaches behind her head, untying the ribbon that is holding her hair back. She feels it fall like drapes against her ears, as she pulls the ribbon tight between her hands. “Your new friend is going to need this,” she says to Hatoun. The girl’s dark eyes grow apprehensive. It dawns on Elizabeth that the child may presume she is about to have another new person foisted upon her. And so she decides that no good can come from drawing out the surprise a moment longer. She reaches under the ottoman’s tasseled skirt and pulls from beneath it the doll. Its face is made of china, and its eyes are so blue that they struck Elizabeth as Scandinavian when she first saw it. She scrubbed the stains off the cheeks so the skin, once again, was whiter than flour. The doll’s hair is the color of cornsilk. Its feet and black shoes are china, too, as are its hands. Its arms and legs and abdomen, however, are as soft as a feather pillow, giving the doll a boneless, jellyfish-like lack of density. It is wearing a plaid smock that is torn and still smells a little of sweat and rank water, despite the wisps of perfume that Elizabeth has sprayed upon it with her atomizer. But it is a doll, about a foot and a half from its tiny feet to its yellow hair. Hatoun does not need to know that Elizabeth got it from a German nurse who, in turn, got it from a child who had died in the hospital with this doll in her arms. How that child got a doll, which Elizabeth is sure should be named Annika, in the first place is beyond her.

  Hatoun stares at it for a moment, but keeps her hands at her sides.

  “It’s for you,” Elizabeth says. “It’s what I meant by your new … friend.”

  Still the girl stands almost completely motionless.

  “Please,” Elizabeth adds. “I want you to have it.”

  Slowly Hatoun glances over her shoulder at Nevart, who has been watching silently behind the child. Nevart smiles at her and nods. “It’s a gift,” she reassures the girl. Reluctantly, as if she is afraid the doll is a desert hamster with sharp teeth and a desperate appetite, she accepts the present, holding it away from her chest.

  “You will have to tell me what you name her,” Elizabeth says, her voice awkward in her head. She had expected the child to embrace the doll gratefully.

  “Doesn’t she have a name already?” Hatoun asks.

  The question catches her off guard, in part because the girl almost never speaks. “Well, I suppose you’re correct. She very well might.”

  Hatoun stares at her, waiting. Apparently, she expects more.

  “If I were to guess,” Elizabeth says, “I would think her name was something like Annika.”

  Carefully Hatoun tries the name out, whispering it to herself. “Where did she come from?” she asks after a moment.

  Elizabeth knows she cannot possibly tell the whole truth. “A friend gave her to me,” she says simply.

  “A friend from the orphanage or a friend from the hospital?”

  Here Elizabeth lies. “Neither,” she says.

  Nevart leans over and whispers something into Hatoun’s ear.

  “Thank you,” Hatoun says.

  “You’re welcome.”

  Then, the doll still held before her as if she expects it to lash out and attack her, Hatoun walks slowly outside and into the courtyard. Through the window Elizabeth and Nevart watch her pause. Finally Hatoun allows herself to hold the doll with but one hand, as she squints up into the sun with her fingers across her forehead like a visor. At first Elizabeth assumes the girl is looking up into the sky. But then she wonders if, perhaps, she is searching for the orange tabby that seems to live at the edge of the walls. She tells herself that Hatoun is going to introduce the cat to the doll and pretend to have a tea party. But she doesn’t believe that for a second.

  RYAN MARTIN STOPS Helmut, the German soldier with the scar on his cheek, and shakes his hand at the edge of the square where, a few days ago, hundreds of Armenian women had been encamped. They’re gone now, somewhere in the desert. He is absolutely unaware of the air of distraction emanating from the soldier, the way his eyes are darting about the square, the sky, and the street—as if he is looking for someone. Ryan Martin rarely wastes time on pleasantries, although not because he is an unpleasant person. It’s simply that he views his entire life right now as a race against time. People are being massacred and tortured and starved, and he sometimes feels as if they’ll all be dead by the time his own government is willing to give a damn and intervene. The idea has crossed his mind that by the end of the year, the two million Armenians who once lived in Turkey will be extinct as a race.

  “Elizabeth told me they destroyed your camera,” he says to Helmut. “That’s horrifying. Absolutely barbaric. I am very, very sorry.”

  “It was indeed a violent end,” he says mordantly.

  “But the photographic plates. Surely you have plates in your room. Will you give them to me? Perhaps I can get them to England or America. I can have the pictures published—disseminated. Have you thought more about my request?”

  Helmut is a big man, easily five inches taller than Ryan and forty pounds heavier. His back stretches out his uniform tunic like a sail. Now he lays one of his heavy hands on Ryan’s shoulder and for the first time meets the American consul’s eyes. “I have new orders. Eric does, too. We’re leaving in two and a half hours. It seems that our commanding officer heard about our photography project and we are being … disciplined.”

  Immediately Ryan presumes their punishment will be the trenches on the Western Front. There is no worse hell for a soldier. Even the introduction of poison gas at Ypres that spring had done little to alter the map or allow the soldiers on one side or the other to rise up from their trenches like human beings. Still, he asks, “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t think it matters if I tell you,” he says aloud, thinking about how he should respond. He withdraws his hand from Ryan’s shoulder and pats his jacket pocket. Then he removes a silver lighter and black cigarette case, and delicately slips a cigarette between his lips.

  “No, it doesn’t matter,” Ryan agrees, though he honestly isn’t sure. But he does want to know.

  “The Dardanelles. The Turks have asked us to see if we can help streamline the supply chain to the edge of the peninsula where they’re fighting. We’ll be joining a group of German engineers there.”

  Ryan is relieved for him. It doesn’t sound as if the punishment will involve actual combat. Still, Gallipoli, like the Western Front, doesn’t discriminate when it comes to unleashing violence and degradation: the Turks may have the high ground in some cases, but he has heard that they are still living like animals in trenches and waiting for either the next very personal bayonet charge or decidedly impersonal shelling from the British dreadnoughts just off the coast. No one is going to charge these two German engineers with bayonets or bombard them here in Aleppo. Moreover, as primitive as life might be for them in this desert city, Aleppo is rather like Berlin compared to the Dardanelles.

  “Where is Eric?” R
yan asks.

  “The lieutenant has a good-bye to take care of,” Helmut says, and Ryan—even as distracted as he is—has the sense that the fellow is probably saying farewell to one of the heavily tattooed prostitutes in the dancehall on the other side of the citadel.

  “Will he mind if you give me the plates?”

  “I think a better question is whether I will mind.”

  Ryan had not expected this response. “Why would you?”

  Helmut offers the American consul a cigarette, and when Ryan declines he finally lights the one in his mouth. “People would know I had taken the photographs. Already I am being punished. The captain who informed us we have been transferred did not use the term court-martial, but he suggested a second offense would be treasonous. Turkey is a critical ally.”

  “But how would anyone know?”

  “Armenians in Aleppo? I was here. I am linked to that camera. I’m not sure I can take the chance. Treason can get a man killed in wartime.”

  “I’ll say I took the photographs.”

  Helmut inhales deeply on his cigarette and then blows the smoke in a slow stream into the sky. “And there is Eric’s life to consider, too. I may choose to risk martyring myself, but I’m not sure I have the right to jeopardize Eric’s life also.”

  “Two plates. Maybe three. That’s all I ask. We choose two or three in which there is no indication where the images were captured.”

  “Two or three images would fail to convey the magnitude of what is occurring,” Helmut says, but Ryan knows he is weakening.

  “Let’s go to your apartment and look at the plates. You don’t have to commit to anything.”

  “Very well,” he murmurs, and he stamps out the cigarette though he has smoked no more than half of it.

  ARMEN HOLDS THE sealed envelope in his hands as if it is a sacred text he has unearthed here in the Holy Land. It isn’t that he flatters himself that anything he has written is so profoundly important. He tore up what he had started on the train, though he expects he will try again to tell Elizabeth about his daughter once he has made it to Egypt. The words have been pressed onto the paper with a stubby pencil, and he has composed them in English, his third language, and so he fears that his sentences are awkward and his grammar will disappoint her. But the idea that this may be the only letter he ever gets to mail her gives the paper and lead lines a totemic significance.

  When he emerges from the post office in Jericho, the sun is directly overhead. He turns up his collar to protect the back of his neck, but here—amid the squat buildings and palms that fan out like basket flowers—there is shade. The sun feels far less deadly in Jericho than out in the desert.

  Tomorrow he will begin trying to make his way to Gaza and the British lines there. He wanders into a café that offers Turkish raki and orders himself a carafe at the lone table by the window. He thinks of the American and wonders what she will make of his letter.

  ELIZABETH DOES NOT share what she has written for the Friends of Armenia with her father. There’s really no need. Instead she places her report on Ryan Martin’s desk in his office in the compound. It’s his feedback that she desires, and the consul has agreed to review her work to make sure that what she has penned will make it safely to America, in the event the document is intercepted by the Turks before leaving Syria. Still, it is going to be sent by diplomatic courier, and her hope is that her small attempts at candor will not be rewarded by censorship or confiscation—that the time she has spent at the writing desk in her bedroom will not have been for naught.

  In her letter she tells the Bostonians about the Armenians and the Turks she has met: Nevart and Hatoun. Dr. Sayied Akcam. Armen. She does not describe the condition of the Armenian women when they arrived in Aleppo or the young guards with their truncheons and their whips, because Ryan has warned her that such honesty will only result in the document being destroyed and her possible—perhaps even likely—deportation.

  So instead she tells of the new guests in the American apartments. She writes that Nevart is a widow whose late husband studied medicine in London. She writes that Hatoun is an orphan whose older sister perished in the desert with their mother. She writes that Armen is a widower and engineer and his eyes …

  No, she tore up the description of his intense, fathomless eyes. She shredded the page on which she had written that he was gone and she missed him.

  She recalls rewriting that whole section. She shared instead with her readers how many languages Armen spoke, that he worked on the railroads, and that he had stayed in Aleppo too briefly.

  She hoped it spoke volumes that of the three Armenians she introduced to their organization and benefactors, one was a widow, one was an orphan, and one was a widower.

  Then she turned her attention to the decency and the dedication of the Muslim physician in the hospital.

  For a long moment she stares at the papers she has left on the blotter on the American consul’s desk. Perhaps he will have a suggestion or two, something she should delete or something she should add. Something she will need to say differently if she expects the document ever to pass through the Ottoman censors.

  Then she leaves the compound to assist Dr. Akcam. She says a small prayer to herself as she walks that today she will watch no one die.

  NEVART STUDIES THE rows of spices and the shelves with jars of flour and sugar in the kitchen in the American compound, gnawing at the fingernail on her pinky. She is reminded of her old kitchen—of the feeling of plenty. The fig trees outside the window. She finds a ceramic bowl with black olives and small cubes of feta cheese on a wooden counter, and pops one of each in her mouth, savoring the slick saltiness. She has been warned by a nurse that she should eat only small portions until her weight has returned. She has seen other refugees learn the hard way that feasting too soon will make them retch violently.

  She peers out the window and is surprised to see Hatoun in the courtyard. The girl is sitting perfectly still with her back against the trunk of a slender, not especially tall palm, and her legs are extended straight before her. She is wearing the sandals that she was given when she was brought to the orphanage. Nevart cannot see her face and imagines that the child is sleeping. But when the girl scratches at one of the scabs on her shoulder, Nevart realizes that she is awake. And so Nevart watches her more closely, especially when it dawns on her that the child’s posture is ramrod perfect; she must have every disc in her spine pressed flat against the bark of the tree. It can’t possibly be very comfortable. And yet Hatoun sits just like that, unmoving. Nevart wonders if she is studying something. A lizard, perhaps. Maybe that cat. Finally, after easily five minutes, the girl’s chin dips against her collarbone, and Nevart takes comfort in the idea that the child has fallen asleep. But the shoulders haven’t slumped over at all, the girl’s back is still rigid. And so Nevart strolls from the kitchen into the courtyard, curious.

  Outside, she sees that Hatoun’s small head remains bowed. As if she is indeed asleep, the girl doesn’t look up at Nevart or acknowledge that she has company. Nor does there seem to be an animal present that might have captured Hatoun’s attention. But there is something about the pose that is disturbingly familiar to Nevart, and then, when she sees the doll that Elizabeth gave the child, she understands and reflexively brings her hand to her mouth. At another small tree, perhaps five yards away, is the doll named Annika. Hatoun has sat the doll against that palm in precisely the same position in which she is sitting, but she has torn its china head from its cloth body and rested it, eyes to the sky, on the courtyard tile like a fallen plum.

  THE GERMAN ENGINEERS have two rooms on the second floor in an elegant guesthouse near the citadel. There are other Germans living there, another pair of soldiers and two railway executives, and Ryan notices that tobacco smoke—from pipes and cigarettes and hookahs—clings to the thick drapes and heavily upholstered furniture on the first floor like a mist. Abruptly Helmut pauses at the foot of the stairs and holds up a single finger, halting them both
. That’s when Ryan becomes aware of the noise, too. Shuffling. The low murmur of voices.

  “There are people upstairs in my room,” Helmut says softly.

  “Eric?”

  He shakes his head. Then he pulls his Luger from its holster, and the weapon seems to be nothing but barrel to Ryan. The soldier flicks off the safety.

  “Are you serious?” Ryan asks him.

  “I’ve been robbed before. I won’t be robbed again, if I can avoid it,” he says. “Wait here.”

  “Absolutely not,” Ryan tells him. He may, in the face of Ottoman bureaucracy, often be spectacularly ineffectual, but he was a soldier once and will not be unmanned now.

  Helmut shrugs and starts slowly up the dark stairway, while Ryan—though behind him—stands upright, trying to see beyond the German’s broad shoulders. Despite Ryan’s shoes and Helmut’s heavy boots, the two of them move quietly, listening to the conversation above them and then down the corridor. Ryan decides there are at least three voices and, perhaps, a fourth. They are speaking Turkish, though one individual may be European. All are male. By the time they have reached the top of the stairs, Ryan feels a wave of disappointment wash over him and nearly take his breath away. He is more fluent than Helmut and has deduced that the governor-general has sent soldiers to Helmut’s room to confiscate his photographic plates. First they destroyed his camera, and now they are going to destroy the evidence of their crimes.

  And if there were any doubts in Ryan’s mind, they evaporate when they reach the door to the apartment. It is perhaps four or five inches ajar, and Helmut pushes it open the rest of the way with his boot. Then he stands there, his fingers tense on the trigger for a long moment, as the room goes completely silent. The one European is Oscar Kretschmer, a doctrinaire and frustratingly officious assistant to Ulrich Lange, the German consul in Aleppo. With Kretschmer is a Turkish major and two soldiers, one of whom has in his arms a wooden crate with the plates. In the room’s lone chair, his hands in his lap and his face a mask of resignation, is the German lieutenant.