The Sandcastle Girls

by Chris Bohjalian

  In the corridor she hears her father and the two American physicians approaching, so she tries quickly to gather herself. She places the letter in her lap and brings her fingers to her eyes, wiping at the tears and calming the sadness that is welling up and threatening to leave her weeping. The men, she knows, have been inventorying the medical supplies they had shipped from Boston or acquired in Port Said and Cairo, and deciding what they will bring with them to the Armenian resettlement area in Der-el-Zor. (“Though bear in mind,” Mr. Martin had said last night at dinner, “people tell me that the term resettlement area is a euphemism at best.”)

  Apparently, a great deal has been stolen between Port Said and Aleppo, and William Forbes has grown cantankerous. It is hard to glean what is rage and what is sunburn on his painfully red face. “The porter had the audacity to claim that sometimes things fall off the backs of the lorries,” he is saying to her father, “and sometimes shipments are ‘accidentally’ diverted. Please. We’re not simpletons.”

  When he notices Elizabeth, he sits beside her, oblivious to the piece of paper in her lap. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I can see you, too, are crestfallen by our losses. But please don’t be. Don’t fret. I did not mean to leave you troubled. We still have sufficient food and medicine to make the journey to Der-el-Zor well worth our time.”

  She nods sheepishly. It is far easier to allow him to believe it is the theft alone that has shaken her, than it would be to tell him of the murder of an infant she’d never met, and why this particular child’s death—one death in the midst of so many thousands—has left her dazed.

  WHEN THE MEN are gone, Elizabeth rereads Armen’s letter. He has instructed her to write back to him via the American consul in Cairo, who will have his forwarding address. But he has added that it might be a very long time before he will receive the correspondence, and without his having to explain, she understands why. He has enlisted in the British Army and is most likely a part of Anzac, the newly formed Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. The British Army had been his plan all along. Since he left, she has been reading about Anzac in the newspapers. He is probably one of the Armenians in what they are calling the “composite division”—a term that, one reporter wrote, meant that the officers contended daily with a bazaar’s worth of languages and dialects. It worries her, and not simply because she fears that orders under fire might be misconstrued by Indians, Aussies, and (yes) Armenians. She imagines poor Armen trying and failing to make sense of an Australian accent. He was fine when Americans and British spoke English, but didn’t the Australians have their own linguistic eccentricities?

  While she had known all along that he was going to try to enlist, she still felt a rush of anxiety when she understood he had succeeded. According to one newspaper article, everyone in Anzac was being taught how to storm beaches, because it was no secret that soon Anzac was going to join the rest of the Brits and the French in Gallipoli. She recalls what it was like to race through the dunes on Cape Cod as a little girl, and how difficult it was to run fast. A person can’t possibly outrun a machine gun, especially not on a beach. She closes her eyes. She fears that she is never going to see Armen again.

  SILAS ENDICOTT IS rather pleased with what he has accomplished when he surveys the long line of wagons and horses at the eastern edge of the city. The caravan has twenty-one strong animals and eight wagons, a testimony to his and Ryan’s hard work and negotiations—and, yes, to their willingness to discreetly offer what in Boston would most certainly have been called bribes. The roads on which they will travel, he has been assured, are just solid enough to support the weight of the wagons as they churn their way east through the desert.

  He and Ryan watch in absolute silence for a long moment, the two Westerners squinting into the sun, as the shirtless boys in their baggy pants load flour, sugar, tea, and medical supplies into the wagons. This is American might, Endicott thinks to himself, though he knows this sort of self-satisfaction is unattractively smug. But how can one not take pride in American muscle? American ingenuity? Isn’t this what happens when civilized people roll up their sleeves to solve a problem? Of course it is. Tomorrow they will leave for Der-el-Zor. He can’t wait.

  ELIZABETH HAS FOUND Nevart an absolutely invaluable interpreter on the streets of Aleppo and in the hospital. Elizabeth’s Armenian and Turkish both have improved enormously since arriving, but on many occasions she has been grateful that Nevart has been with her.

  At the moment, however, another afternoon when the two of them and the American doctors are volunteering at the hospital, it is not Nevart’s skills as a translator or teacher that matter; it is her willingness to jump into a fray among small, violent animals, all of whom are adamantly refusing to nap and two of whom are engaged in an out-and-out brawl. It is she who falls upon the thin boy and grabs both of his wrists, pulling him off a second child on the floor who is even tinier. They are wearing shirts and shorts that might once have been white, but now are the color of the dirt beside the rails along which the electric streetcars run in Boston. The cotton looks stained by ash. The shirts hide the skeletal protrusion of the children’s rib cages, but still their elbows look as sharp as the edge of a wood splitter. Their eyes are sunk so deep into their faces it’s as if each forehead is an escarpment, the sockets empty caves.

  Nevertheless, the boys fight like ferocious, feral cats, and they have eaten just enough in the last few days that they are capable of energetically pounding each other into the floor between the long rows of beds and the entrance to the ward. It is a miracle that they have overturned neither tables nor the cabinet filled with linens and bandages. Elizabeth guesses they are seven or eight. They are ready to be sent to the orphanage, where invariably they will continue their scrapping.

  When Nevart has finally parted them and is standing between them like a human buffer zone, she speaks so quickly and angrily in Armenian that Elizabeth has to repeat what she has heard in her mind to comprehend the specifics of the chastisement. She is in the midst of her translation when, from the corner of her eyes, she sees another boy sit up in bed, his arm raised and a water glass in his hand. He is no more than three or four years old, but he is smiling demonically.

  “No!” she commands him, but it’s too late. He is hurling the glass as hard as he can at either Nevart or the boys, she couldn’t begin to say which, and so reflexively she throws herself in front of it, her hand extended, hoping to bat it into the air and away from her friend and the children flanking both sides of her. But instead Elizabeth bats it straight down, and it shatters against the top of her right foot, the glass splintering and one long piece daggering through the top of the lavender slipper she wears indoors. The room, which had been absolutely raucous only a moment ago, grows silent. Slowly she kneels and studies the triangular shard in her foot. When she pulls it out, there is one tiny geyser of blood, then a more predictable stream. She removes her slipper and sees that her white stocking already has turned red, and she is reminded of a dining room tablecloth after someone has inadvertently toppled a goblet of wine. The stain is spreading before her eyes.

  Nevart kneels beside her and tries to make her smile. “The orphanage is even worse,” she says. “By the time the children get there, they’re healthy enough to behave like real barbarians.” Then she motions for the boys to return to their beds and, terrified by the idea that they have injured this grown-up, they obey. The tiny child who threw the glass has shriveled like a raisin beneath his sheet and hidden his face in his pillow.

  “Tomorrow I am going to leave for Der-el-Zor,” Elizabeth says, but as Nevart helps her to roll down her stocking and pull it over her foot so they can see how badly she is cut, she hears a hollowness in her voice. In the corridor one of the nuns is calling for Dr. Akcam, and she bites the inside of her lip to fight back her tears.

  “NO, I DON’T think you should go,” says Sayied Akcam, as he studies a small glass splinter he is holding between the tips of his tweezers. Elizabeth is sitting up on a gurne
y outside the hospital’s lone operating room. “There is the risk of infection, and you will be far from help if something happens. Besides, you should be off your feet.”

  Over the Turkish physician’s shoulder, Elizabeth watches William Forbes. She knows what he is going to say even before he opens his mouth, and inside she is simultaneously relieved and infuriated.

  “She’ll be fine,” Forbes says, and it is this element in his entirely predictable response that gives her comfort. He is going to lobby on her behalf to be sure that she joins them on their foray into the desert. It is what he says next that she finds so presumptuous: “After all, I’ll be there to take care of her. And she will be off her feet all the way to the resettlement area.”

  “For the last four and a half years, I have done, in my estimation, a reasonable job of caring for myself,” she tells Forbes. “But I appreciate your … enthusiasm.”

  Forbes remains oblivious to the real meaning behind her remark. “I was speaking only as a doctor,” he tells her, grinning too boyishly for a man in his mid-thirties.

  Akcam nods. “Maybe I worry too much. Maybe it’s fine for her to go. It takes five or six days to reach Der-el-Zor. She’ll be sitting in the carriage and healing.”

  “Not a carriage,” says Forbes. “Far more primitive. I’ve seen what Silas has rounded up, and they are carts. Supply wagons.” It sounds to Elizabeth as if he is taking pride in their primitive accommodations.

  “At least she’ll be seated,” Akcam says.

  “And I will be certain that absolutely nothing happens to that pretty little foot of hers.”

  “You make it sound like a pleasure trip,” Akcam tells the younger physician.

  “No. I know it’s not.”

  The Turk gently lowers her foot into the basin of soapy water. She flinches when she feels it sting. “Here is another verse from the Qur’an,” he says, trying to occupy her mind so she thinks less about the pain as he cleans her foot.

  ORHAN SITS IN a patch of shade near the train station with a pair of gendarmes a year younger than he is, who, he has discovered, are from a village near his hometown. They all grew up no more than three hours by horseback from Ankara. The pair have just helped bring another group of Armenians into the city—easily two hundred and fifty women and children.

  “This whole place is being overrun with Armenians,” says one of the gendarmes. “There must be more Armenians here than Syrians.”

  “And Turks.”

  “How difficult was the march?” Orhan asks him.

  He shrugs. “It was just … long,” the gendarme says finally.

  “Tell me about the army.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s more interesting. Where were you before here?”

  “Nowhere. This is my first posting,” Orhan says, but he tells them how his brother and his cousin have given their lives for the empire. “Why don’t you want to talk about the march?” he asks them when he has finished with his own family’s story.

  “There’s nothing to say. You walk them and bury them. You walk them and bury them. We had orders and a schedule. You’re always hot and you’re always hungry and you’re always thirsty. It’s peasant work. It’s not the work of a real soldier.”

  “We did learn one thing,” says the other, his voice just a little mysterious.

  Orhan raises his eyebrows. “Tell me.”

  “We wanted to see how many Armenians you could shoot with one single bullet.” He pauses. “The answer? If you take off their clothes and line them up tits to back, you can shoot ten. But you need a good rifle.”

  Orhan tries not to reveal his disgust or his horror. He feels it would be unmanly to be aghast. Instead he tries to find words to ask the question that has been on his mind since he met these two guards, but the sentence hovers just beyond his reach. “Were there any girls you …” he begins, and then stops, unwilling to finish it.

  “Any what?”

  Orhan has heard stories about how the gendarmes sleep with any of the girls they want. Sometimes they will sleep with four or five or six different virgins in the time it takes to walk from Adana to Aleppo.

  “Any what?” the gendarme asks him again, but his friend understands what Orhan is driving at and scoffs.

  “Orhan wants to know if there were any girls worth fucking,” he explains. He shakes his head and crinkles his nose, trying to convey his utter disgust. “The Kurds took some. The prettiest. But that was before we had gone very far.”

  “There was a young man who pretended to be a woman,” his friend adds. “A real Armenian dog. We took a collar off a sheepdog and made him wear it. It was the kind with spikes on the outside. You know, so a wolf can’t bite the dog’s neck.”

  “Who was he?” Orhan asks. It’s so rare for there to be young men in the convoys. He wonders if the fellow was a priest or a banker or an official so important they had been afraid to kill him before they had set out.

  “I told you. He was a dog. He was pretending to be a woman. He was married and his wife was there. And their baby.”

  “Ah, he was trying to protect them,” Orhan says.

  “No, he was just a dog. A coward,” the gendarme insists. Then he laughs and adds, “We stripped him and made him walk on all fours. He actually tried to keep up for maybe an hour.”

  “Then?”

  “When he couldn’t keep up any longer, we did what anyone does with a worthless dog. We took off his collar and shot him.”

  The other gendarme pulls a cube of white cheese from his sack and studies it for a moment before popping it into his mouth. Then, almost contemplatively, he says, “We did fuck his wife. We all fucked her. That was the only time he did a really good job as a dog. Howled, I tell you. But usually we didn’t fuck the women. Most of them were stinking and dirty and dying by the time we got them. They all had diarrhea. We were too busy digging graves or burning bodies to fuck anybody.”

  Orhan recalls the Germans’ photographic plates, which are still in his corner of the barracks, and the sickening condition of the refugees by the time they arrive here in Aleppo. Of course this gendarme is correct. Orhan wonders what he was thinking.

  • • •

  RYAN KNEW INTELLECTUALLY what they would see on their way into the desert, but on the third day of their journey he found himself on his knees, retching into the sand off to the side of the road. Their long caravan of emergency aid halted before the headless bodies of half a dozen women, hanged by their feet from branches in an oasis-like cluster of oak trees. Wild dogs had eaten away most of the flesh between their waists and their necks, and gnawed the arms completely off two of the cadavers. The next day, in the shadow of one of the buttes that rose out of nowhere every few hours in this long stretch of desert, they saw small mounds of earthenware bowls, cracked jugs, wooden utensils, and—most ominous—passports. Ryan insisted on retrieving the papers so there would be a record should these people’s bodies never be found, and then—for reasons he could not fathom—he had grown sick once again.

  And each time he vomited, he had felt profoundly emasculated. He had—transparently, in his opinion, pathetically—reminded everyone that he was a combat veteran of the Spanish-American War. But even in battle he had seen nothing like those women’s corpses. Elizabeth, her bandaged foot elevated most of the way in one of the wagons, had accompanied them into the desert, and she had hobbled over to him and held his shoulders as he tried to regain a semblance of his usual dignity and assurance. He didn’t like Elizabeth seeing him this way; he didn’t like it at all. Alicia Wells was another story. As a missionary she had traveled widely and seen men in far more dire straits. Moreover, she was a workhorse: resolutely self-contained and independent. And, when he was scrupulously honest with himself, he could admit that the main reason he was less discomfited with Alicia seeing him in this condition was really rather simple: he did not find her in the slightest way attractive; she was more like a dependable sister.

  Now, as the makeshift
tents and the makeshift fences of Der-el-Zor start to appear in a valley in the distance, he pivots on his seat in the wagon and says to Silas Endicott, “I know I have told you this before, but I cannot stress it enough. Your group has been very generous. But even if you had not suffered losses between Cairo and Aleppo, the foodstuffs were going to make a barely perceptible dent in the needs of these people. Know that going in, and you will be less disappointed when we leave. We are simply”—and he struggles a moment to find the right words, before giving up and continuing—“buying some of them time. Days, maybe.”

  Endicott pulls the brim of his hat down a little lower on his forehead and nods. Even now, five days beyond Aleppo, he is traveling in a necktie. “I have never liked that expression,” he says to the consul.

  “No?”

  “As a banker I have always tried to remember what money can and cannot accomplish. And though rhetoricians and scholars might be able to argue the expression’s merits as a figure of speech, my personal belief is that we have on earth exactly the amount of time that has been allotted to us, no more and no less. We really have precious little control.”

  “Have I insulted you, Silas?”

  “No. But I would have chosen my words more precisely.”

  “And what would you have said?”

  He looks back at his daughter. She smiles at her father and then at the diplomat. “I would have said only that we are saving lives,” answers the older Endicott. “We won’t save all. I understand that. But we will save some.”

  Ryan says nothing more because he knows an argument over semantics is a rather foolish waste of energy here in the middle of the desert. He also knows that Endicott doesn’t mean what he has just said; the wealthy banker actually does believe that he and his wagonloads will make a monumental difference in the lives of the refugees. The man is used to getting his way and accomplishing whatever goals he has set before himself. But the distinction of few or many really means very little at the moment; soon enough, Silas Endicott will see for himself how impossible it is to feed tens of thousands of people in the bone-dry world of Der-el-Zor. Clean water alone will be difficult to find in anywhere near the quantities they will need to transform all that flour into bread.