The Sandcastle Girls

by Chris Bohjalian

  When Hatoun reaches the bazaar, she darts among the stalls and the booths and the women browsing among the half-empty crates and wagons. She is chased away by the old man selling coffee beans and by a teenage boy with a few delicious-looking melons in a box. A woman tells her she smells, and Hatoun knows that is a lie. Nevart insists she bathe often. But the woman presumes that she is homeless like Shoushan. Shoushan still has the stench of the long walk on her skin.

  Hatoun is not oblivious to the idea that someday she might be homeless—she and Nevart both. Or that Nevart will be forced to move to one of the resettlement camps while she is sent to the orphanage. But Ryan Martin, who is clearly some sort of prince, doesn’t seem to mind her and Nevart’s presence. Perhaps someday he and Nevart will fall in love. Or maybe Martin and Elizabeth. No, not that. She recalls that Martin has a wife in America who will return when the heat breaks in the late autumn. And Nevart has said that Elizabeth is in love with an Armenian man.

  Hatoun can’t decide how powerful a prince Ryan Martin is. Given the size of the house, one would think he was very powerful. And he is American. She has heard that most Americans are as rich as sultans. Nevertheless, he often seems frustrated with the Turks, and he can’t seem to stop them from killing Armenians.

  But he is very kind. And often men aren’t.

  Suddenly she feels someone wrapping their arms around her from behind and lifting her off the ground. Her heart skips a beat as she kicks out her feet, but then she hears Shoushan giggling and she turns and sees her new friend. Shoushan drops her back onto the ground and says, “I have something magic.”

  Hatoun waits, wondering. Then Shoushan pulls off her shoulder the burlap sack with the logo for a coffee company and opens it wide. Inside is one of those melons Hatoun saw just a moment ago. She doesn’t have to ask Shoushan how she got it.

  ARMEN STANDS ON the wide beach beside the wooden crate he has carted from the transport ship, and is shocked to discover that it’s filled with coffee. The beach here is much broader than the strip he had helped to capture the day they had landed. He had expected the crate would hold more tea. Tea and jam and canned meat. Those are the contents of the crates he has carried for five hours now. One of the coffee tins must have cracked open because he can smell the grounds and—much to his dismay—the aroma makes him think of Nezimi and the fellow’s office in Harput. He closes his eyes and once more sees the painting of Enver Pasha on the wall in the waiting room. Had he and Nezimi really been friends once? Of course they had. Which is what makes the betrayal so unbearable to recall. He had taken the Turk’s advice. Done what he’d said. He had trusted the man with his wife and his baby daughter while he followed orders and joined the Germans laying track in the east. Nezimi had pledged that neither Karine nor Talene would be a part of the deportations. He said he would do whatever was needed to make sure they were exempted.

  But, of course, they were not exempted. The rumors trickled in first to Karine’s family in Van and from them to Armen. The stories were confusing, because it sounded in some cases as if Karine and Talene were living with the official; Karine had renounced Christianity—even applied for her erzuhal, a legal petition to change her religion—and was going to raise Talene as a Muslim. In another version, Talene was in an American orphanage and Karine was somewhere in the desert with the other women of Harput.

  And then the Armenian faculty of Euphrates College was massacred, and the family’s links—and Armen’s—to Harput largely vanished.

  Before Armen could leave Van to see what really had happened to his family, the Turks had surrounded the city, and he and his brothers were suddenly among the men defending the granary. He considered trying to work his way in the night through the Turkish lines to return to Harput, but Garo and Hratch convinced him that he’d never succeed. Consequently, he had not journeyed there until after the Russian Army had joined the Armenian resistance and pushed the Turks almost as far west as Bitlis. Only then had Armen methodically edged his way back to Harput, avoiding rail-cars and the most well-traveled roads. He knew after the fighting in Van that his engineering work on behalf of the empire would not spare him as an Armenian; not even the German officials of the Baghdad Railway could protect him this deep in the Turkish interior.

  When he arrived in Harput, he discovered that his home was no longer his and Karine and Talene were gone. He could see from the street that his apartment now was billeting Turkish officers. So he went straight to Nezimi’s office to see what his friend—or, perhaps, former friend—could tell him.

  He opens his eyes and stares up at the cliff, now held by the Australians and New Zealanders. Behind him he hears the surf and the sound of the men as they banter beneath their burdens. The only place that seems farther away to him than Harput is Aleppo. He thinks of the American girl there with the terra-cotta red hair and lifts the coffee crate back up off the sand.

  SOMETHING HAPPENED AND DARKNESS FELL OVER MY GRANDPARENTS’ house. It was late afternoon, and my mother had dropped off my brother and me after school and then taken the train into Manhattan to meet our father for a business soiree. My brother was perusing old photo albums in the Ottoman living room, and our grandmother had looked briefly over his shoulder and—with the suddenness of a thunderstorm in August—grown morose. And so our grandfather had, too. I don’t know what my brother saw in the pictures, and years later he didn’t recall when I asked him. But the moodiness I had witnessed before in my grandparents I saw once again, and one of them—I have no idea who—called my aunt. The two of them were suddenly too old to manage their grandchildren or too afraid to be alone with us. They needed the cavalry, and that meant their daughter. Right after work, she and two female friends from the ad agency where she was a secretary in Manhattan took the train out to Westchester. She was newly married by then, but her husband had a meeting at the university that night. Her associates had ventured with her to Pelham for what had been advertised as a home-cooked Armenian dinner. (Translation? Lamb. King meal.) My brother and I were in the third grade, and so I am guessing our aunt was just about forty.

  I have told you that she would belly dance when I was a little girl. That night she did again, and in hindsight I think her goal was to ensure that whatever demons had reappeared as her parents’ guests would quickly flee. And so while her friends had coffee and dessert, she went upstairs to the room that had been hers when she was growing up and changed. My grandfather went to the living room to tune his oud and move the coffee table against the wall. When my aunt returned, she had shed the conservative brown skirt and white blouse she had worn to work, and changed into a harem costume straight out of I Dream of Jeannie. The television show had been canceled by then, but my brother and I knew it well from reruns. And we knew that outfit. My aunt had worn it on some of those very same afternoons when my brother had been tricked out in his red velvet knickers and our mother had dressed me in my aspiring young hooker go-go boots.

  For easily twenty minutes my aunt swiveled and gyrated and danced in the living room, while my grandfather strummed his oud and her friends from the ad agency cheered her on. In hindsight, I wonder if they were also a little mystified. It wasn’t that belly dancing was out of character for my aunt; even after she got married, she was a bit of a wild woman. She and her husband had bought a beach house on Fire Island a few years earlier, and even as a child I had the sense that the parties there were downright bacchanalian. As far as I know, the husbands and boyfriends were never throwing car keys into a punch bowl, but I think that’s only because no one brought cars onto Fire Island. In any case, what did my aunt’s friends think of her belly dancing for her parents and nephew and niece? Wasn’t this the stuff of bachelor parties, costume parties, and inappropriate male fantasies? (Here is yet another revelation that will appall everyone except for my brother—who, I swear, has given me permission to tell you: his first erections he can recall as a little boy occurred while watching our aunt belly dance.)

  So my aunt danced for her fam
ily and friends, and she lifted the gloom that had settled once more on her parents’ home. When she was done, I followed her to her old bedroom, where she was going to change back into what she called “normal person clothes.” In a few minutes she and her friends would be taking the train back into Manhattan. As she was buttoning her blouse, I asked her the question that had drawn me upstairs: “Would you teach me to belly dance?” I wouldn’t be surprised if my voice was trembling slightly. I think I felt there was something wanton about my desire.

  “Well, maybe when you have a belly,” my aunt told me. “You really can’t belly dance if you don’t have a belly.”

  There was certainly some truth to that; you do need a little somethin’ somethin’ to jiggle. But even in her late thirties and early forties, my aunt was very slender. So I persisted, unsure why she was being evasive.

  Finally she sat down on the bed beside me. “Here’s the thing, sweetie,” she said. “People would kill for your hair. I would kill for your hair.” My aunt, like most everyone else in my family, had raven black hair. Why we were discussing hair when I wanted to belly dance had me baffled. “To be so blond—and still have those gorgeous dark eyes? You are going to break a lot of hearts. But …” she said, and she paused and rubbed my back.

  “But what?”

  “But here’s the reality,” she went on. “A belly dancer with blond hair? You’d look like—”

  “Barbara Eden,” I piped up.

  She crinkled her nose and mouth as if she were eating something bitter. “Yes and no. Barbara Eden is great. Jeannie is great. But that’s TV. In real life, a blond belly dancer doesn’t look like that. A blond belly dancer looks like …” and again she went silent as she struggled to find the right words. Eventually she smiled and said, “A stripper. Belly dancing and blonds just don’t mix.”

  She never belly danced again after that. Never. And I never learned how.

  INITIALLY, MY HUSBAND tried to make light of my decision to drop everything the week after Mother’s Day and go to Boston. “I could see you doing this if the Red Sox were in town,” Bob said. “But they’re not. They’re in California this whole week.” Then, after pausing, he added, “Of course, there are boatloads of Armenians in California, right? You could probably find some distant relative there and take in a ball game.”

  He also tried to play the parental logistics trump card, reminding me of the reality that we had an eleven-year-old and a thirteen-year-old, and because Bob worked in Manhattan and I was usually done writing for the day by one or two in the afternoon, I was the designated driver. I was the one who shuttled Matthew and Anna to their afterschool music and dance lessons, doctors’ and orthodontists’ appointments, as well as whatever sports were in season.

  The simple truth was that Bob was uneasy with how fixated I was on this photograph and the idea that the woman shared my last name. “Isn’t Petrosian a common Armenian surname?” he asked finally.

  I shrugged. I hadn’t a clue.

  There was a famous Armenian chess player—well, famous by chess standards, which is not an especially high bar—in the 1960s and 1970s named Tigran Vartanovich Petrosian. I told Bob the little I knew about Tigran. He was the world champion in the years my brother and I were infants and small children, defeating the eventually even more famous Boris Spassky before we turned one, and the American Bobby Fischer when we were six. Whenever Fischer would say or do something of interest in the 1970s and chess would have a brief renaissance in the United States, someone would ask me if I was related to Petrosian or, one time that I recall, “Iron Tigran.” That was his nickname, and it probably sounded even better in Russian or Armenian than it did in English. The answer is that we were not related, at least not as far as anyone in my family knew.

  “Really, why are you worried?” I finally pressed my husband that week, the night before I was taking the shuttle to Boston. We were standing by the sink in the kitchen having almost finished the dinner dishes.

  “Well,” he said, “I know what you’ve told me about your grandparents. Their house. Their moodiness. Their strangeness.”

  “They were always very loving and very sweet with me,” I reminded him.

  “Look,” he continued, “we both know how little your own father knows about them. Your aunt and uncle, too. I don’t think that whatever you’ll discover will make you or anyone very happy. Best case? You’ll find no connection to the woman and nothing at all of interest. A lot of work for nothing. Worst case? Good Lord, you’re the novelist, not me. Who knows what the worst case could be. Beside, it’s all ancient history now, isn’t it?”

  It was, of course. But I couldn’t stop thinking of that photo of a breathing cadaver who shared my name. And so I went to Boston as planned.

  HATOUN STANDS JUST outside the arched window of the girls’ wing at the orphanage, wondering where Shoushan is today. For company this afternoon she has only her blond doll’s head, Annika. She places it on the thin stucco windowsill, so it can see inside, too. The window has louvered shutters that are shut tight against the midday heat, but Hatoun knows that if she stands on her toes, she can flip the slats and peer inside. She is not precisely sure why she wants to; she is not precisely sure why she has come. Nevart wouldn’t mind—at least this is what Hatoun has told herself. Nor would Elizabeth. But she has informed neither woman that she has been coming here for weeks, some days standing outside with Shoushan, ever since she and Nevart and Elizabeth passed this end of the orphanage on the way back to the American compound after visiting the telegraph office. Today the inside is quiet except for the sound of one child crying, her sobs a soft, hiccupping bray. The other girls must be in the courtyard or the classroom. Yesterday when she was here, later in the afternoon, there were a dozen girls in the room, some older than her and some younger, and they were talking about a German nun who had a nose like a mushroom and smelled bad. Apparently the woman had demanded that they work through lunch on their mathematics. Then they had started teasing one of the other orphans, suggesting that this poor girl was as homely as the nun, and within moments that child was crying. The other girls were brutal. Merciless. Hatoun found it fascinating—and terrifying. The orphans were supposed to be napping, but they were savoring the subversive nature of their conversation.

  Hatoun worries that she is like them—all of them, the wicked as well as the weak. She worries that she is like the girls who were making fun of first the nun and then the ugly child yesterday, but she knows in her heart that she is also like the child who is right now sobbing all alone. Armenians. Turks. Americans. Germans. Christians. Mohammedans. People are all the same. In the American library in the compound there was a book by an Englishman titled Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Nevart and Elizabeth together had been reading it aloud to her, because it took the two of them to translate the tale from English into Armenian for her, because her English vocabulary is still limited. It had been rather pleasant, and Hatoun had imagined herself being a bit like Alice, but then the story had changed and the women had stopped reading. They had skipped whole sections. In the night, Hatoun had snuck downstairs into the library and found the book, and she had studied the sections that the women had skipped. She could tell from the illustrations and the word head, which she knew, that the strange playing card Queen wanted to chop off Alice’s head. She wanted to chop off everyone’s head.

  Her mind roams to the way Nevart makes her learn her multiplication tables. Only an hour ago they were sitting on the wooden table across from the sink in the kitchen in the American compound. Hatoun had a slate on her lap and a piece of chalk in her hand. She was using an abacus to try to make sense of the equations that Nevart had written and expected her to memorize. It was after lunch and the cook had finished cleaning and gone home for the afternoon. Weeks ago Nevart had decided that the kitchen was a cool, comfortable place where they could study without disturbing Ryan Martin or Silas Endicott or the other Americans as they came and went and worked. Hatoun fears that some of thos
e Americans would prefer she were living here at the orphanage. She has overheard just enough; she has understood the meaning of some of the remarks that the adults presumed were cryptic. She knows it annoys them that she says almost nothing. But she fears if she starts to speak—to offer them more than the occasional, monosyllabic grunt or (rarer still) complete but very short sentence—she will be unable to stop sobbing. She will be like the child on the other side of the shutter, for whom crying has become synonymous with breathing.

  She closes her eyes and thinks of her brief time on the other side of this wall. Perhaps the Americans are the reason that she comes back to the orphanage now; if—when—Nevart and Elizabeth are forced to send her away, she will not have lost all familiarity with the place. Already she can’t recall whether she spent one night here or two before Nevart came for her.

  Down the street she sees a pair of gendarmes strolling toward her, their rifles slung casually over their shoulders. She doesn’t suppose they would have any interest in one more Armenian orphan, but she sees no reason to take any chances. She turns and races around the corner of the orphanage building and down the alley that will bring her to the square and then to the backstreet that leads, eventually, to the nice block with the American compound. She runs fast, and it is only when she has reached the entrance and stopped—bent over, her hands on her knees as she swallows great gulps of the hot Aleppo air—that she realizes she no longer has her doll’s head. Did it fall from her tunic pocket as she raced through the streets, or did she leave it somewhere? Then she remembers: the orphanage window. She had placed it on the sill.