The Sandcastle Girls

by Chris Bohjalian

  Just as she is about to start back for it, the female missionary, Miss Wells, appears at the gate. She is a large, wide woman, with shoulders and hips that can drape a girl Hatoun’s size in shadow. Her moods are mercurial; one moment she can be grandmotherly and kind, urging her to eat, and the next she can be judgmental and harsh. Hatoun knows Alicia Wells believes she belongs at the orphanage. She does not approve of either Nevart or Elizabeth.

  “Ah, Hatoun, come inside. We’ve been looking for you,” she is saying, her tone scolding and vexed. “We were worried about you.”

  Hatoun stands frozen, no more than a meter and a half from the missionary. She wants to get the doll’s head back. She needs to get the doll’s head back. But if she tries to explain this to Miss Wells, the woman will—as she has in the past—express disgust that the child had destroyed a perfectly good doll (the story has spread, Hatoun knows) and now wants this macabre remnant back. But before she can decide whether she must find the words to convey her short plan—return to the orphanage sill for the head—the missionary lunges for her hand. Hatoun darts to the side, and the woman barely grazes her arm. Then the girl turns and races back to the orphanage, aware that Miss Wells is calling her name, demanding she return that very instant. She understands there will be consequences, but she doesn’t care. All she knows now is that she must retrieve that little blond head.

  ELIZABETH IS WRITING another letter to Armen that she does not believe in her heart he will ever receive, when outside the American compound she hears Alicia Wells shouting for Hatoun. She puts her pen down beside the inkwell and rises from the chair at the small desk in the bedroom she shares with the missionary. She glances at the words she was writing to Armen, but then starts down the stairs. At the massive front doors to the main street she meets Nevart, who heard the yelling as well.

  “I thought Hatoun was right here in the courtyard,” Nevart says apologetically. She had lifted her dress so she could move more quickly, and now lowers it back below her ankles.

  “I thought so, too,” Elizabeth agrees.

  Alicia Wells turns to them both and shakes her head, irked. “No. Neither of you were watching her. Again. And the result is that once more she has run off. Once more she is running like one of the homeless through the streets. I don’t have to chronicle for either of you the dangers that poses for a young female,” she says, but then proceeds to ruminate upon the possibilities of the child being commandeered into a harem or brothel, taken by gendarmes who are looking for numbers to bring to Der-el-Zor, outraged by marauding adolescent boys (or men), or merely contracting all manner of disease from the rivers of excrement and urine that stream along some of the streets—the only fluids that don’t seem to evaporate instantly in this dry air. “I will say this as candidly as I possibly can,” she finishes. “Elizabeth, you will be a fine mother someday. But at the moment you are barely more than a child yourself. And Nevart, I will never belittle what you have endured. Never. But because of your recent history, you are in no condition to mother that girl, either. The child barely speaks. Who knows what goes on inside her head? I urge you both to bring her to the orphanage before something irreparably tragic happens to her.”

  Then she pushes her way between the two women and back inside the American compound.

  IN HIS DELIRIUM, Helmut dreams of a Syrian prostitute he slept with one time, and the guilt that overwhelmed him when he was finished. This time, however, the whore has the face of one of the very last refugees he photographed in the square near the citadel—the woman who had struggled in from Harput. In his mind he is back in Aleppo, rather than in a hospital tent on a thin peninsula on the opposite end of this pathetic, fraying empire. He is pulling on his uniform pants, his bare chest still tingling with some aphrodisiac the woman had rubbed into his skin when he had been inside her, her eyes unsettling and alert and focused on his sternum. He doesn’t know how Eric does this—how he can look himself in the mirror in the moments afterward. Helmut finds his self-loathing smothering him like a landslide the moment he withdraws … or, perhaps, like an avalanche. And then, before he knows it, he is thigh-deep in snow in his beloved Germany, back among civilized people, and the only sensation he is experiencing in his fevered dreams is the chills that come from the snow that has fallen from the trees in a copse of pine beneath his jacket collar and over the tops of his boots. It is, in his memory, weeks before he has tumbled onto the blade of his sister’s ice skate, forever scarring his face. His family will be waiting for him when he emerges from the forest; they will be gathered around the heavy-legged table in the kitchen, and he will smell … chocolate. Yes, chocolate. So different from the stench of the dead back in Syria. He smells cocoa even now, and his nostrils flare as he tries to breathe in the aroma. His legs tremble.

  Standing beside him, hoping for any sign of improvement, is his good friend, the lieutenant. When Helmut’s nostrils widen like the mouths of baby birds and his legs spasm, Eric frets. But the doctor has told him there is nothing more to be done but wait and hope that the fever breaks. And so Eric remains there, vigilant and loyal, watching his friend dream, until he can wait no longer.

  IN THE NIGHT, Nevart strokes Hatoun’s soft hair, the child’s breathing quiet with sleep. Her chest rises and falls almost imperceptibly in Nevart’s arms, and this time—unlike another night—she does not awaken. An idea that has dogged the widow for weeks returns to her now and once more prevents her from sleeping: that awful missionary is correct. She is. She is right when she says that Nevart is not meant to be a mother; that is indeed why God never blessed her with a child. Perhaps Hatoun would be better off at the orphanage. Perhaps, Nevart thinks, she is being selfish.

  In a room down the dark corridor Elizabeth is awake, too, gazing at the draped mosquito netting and wondering if she needs to apologize in the morning to the sleeping woman in the other bed. She had been so insulted by Alicia’s suggestion that she was but a child herself that she had retaliated by asking the missionary whether she wanted Hatoun brought to the orphanage simply so she could have a bedroom to herself. In reality, the woman may have some decidedly unattractive traits, but Elizabeth knows that selfishness is not among them. When Elizabeth had raised the idea that Alicia might have had an ulterior motive in wanting Hatoun exiled from the compound, the missionary had ignored the intimation and merely reminded Elizabeth that the child might be safer in the care of adults who were familiar with child-like—and childish—proclivities.

  Just when Elizabeth is finally about to doze off, somewhere in the distance someone discharges a rifle, and instantly she is alert and her mind strays all the way to Egypt. To Armen. She recalls the letter she posted to him that afternoon, and the coded ways she had conveyed what she was feeling—all the while knowing he might never receive the correspondence. He might already be dead. Her letters have grown more honest, more open, increasingly revelatory as the days pass and he grows more present in her mind, rather than less. She looks back on that day in the hallway—on the stairs—and wishes he had not evidenced the restraint she so clearly lacked. Would he be with her now? Would they be together somewhere?

  I see you standing beside me on the balustrade at the top of the palace here. I see you smiling as you make fun of my hats. Please eat well and do not take unnecessary risks. Think of futures beyond this war, because no war lasts forever—not even this one. I hope you will remember that. I miss you. I hope you will remember that, too.

  And in another quarter of the city, the Turkish private, Orhan, thinks of the elegant, lone reddish pine at the edge of the abandoned monastery east of town. The monastery walls are decrepit and only desert animals live behind them now. But that tree? Twenty-five meters high. Fan-like, regal boughs. And the fissures on the bark on one side make a face. A girl’s face. A virgin. That is what drew him there one afternoon and what has enticed him back every day since. And it is at the foot of that tree that he has carefully sealed and buried the crate with the photographic plates he had been ordered to de
stroy.

  YEARS LATER I WOULD ASK MY FATHER ABOUT HIS PARENTS’ MOODINESS. “It was your grandmother, mostly—and it really wasn’t an issue in my childhood. She was fine. It was later in life that she grew a little … unpredictable. And I suspect you know a lot more about it than I do. You’re the one who went to Watertown and found her letters and diaries.” Maybe. I do know more about 1915 than my father, my uncle, and my aunt do. I know more about Armen and Elizabeth when they were young. And I have tried to learn what occurred nearly a century ago between the Armenians and the Turks, accepting fully that my husband is correct: it is indeed ancient history. The world has changed a lot in the last one hundred years, arguably more than in any one century block in human history.

  I am, however, left bemused by that single word: history. A lot of Armenians are. Of course, a lot aren’t. My brother thinks trying to chronicle our grandparents’ story is a spectacular waste of literary capital and can only inflame tensions between Turks and Armenians. It is, in his mind, a bad decision personally as well as a public disservice. Everyone would be better off, he told me—echoing Bob—if I just wrote another domestic comedy about New Agey women on the social margins, the sort of thing on which I have built my career. My children, who do not have my last name, were mystified as well by my choice of subject matter. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that despite having Gemignani as their last name, neither of my children feels much connection to their Italian heritage, either. Bob is always going to pick a beer over a Brunello, and the kids’ idea of fine Tuscan cuisine begins and ends with the Olive Garden.)

  But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Serbs and the Rwandans. There are obviously more, but, really, how much genocide can one sentence handle? You get the point. Besides, my grandparents’ story deserves to be told, regardless of their nationalities.

  In any case, here is one more historical footnote to put their story in context. I promise, this is my very last digression.

  The three Young Turks who took over the reins of the Turkish government in the revolution of 1908 were Talat Pasha, Enver Pasha, and Djemal Pasha. A pasha is an honorary title—akin, in some ways, to a British lord. In other words, Talat, Enver, and Djemal were not the Brothers Pasha. They were the dictatorial troika who initiated and managed the genocide, though it was Talat Pasha who was the real visionary behind the killing and perhaps the most responsible as the minister of the interior. During the war, American correspondent S. S. McClure characterized him as “the strongest man between Berlin and Hell.” Perhaps. He was certainly the most brazen. One day he summoned the American ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, into his office and reminded Morgenthau that the New York Life Insurance Company and Equitable Life of New York did an enormous amount of business with Armenians. Now he wanted Morgenthau to get him a complete list of the two companies’ Armenian policyholders. Why? Talat observed they were practically all dead now, as were their heirs. That meant the Turkish government was the beneficiary. Morgenthau, who had been trying to convince Turkish leaders to halt the deportations and the slaughter since the very beginning, was furious. In his memoir, he says he stormed out of the office.

  And as for Talat Pasha? Soon after the war and Turkey’s defeat, a Turkish court found him guilty of, among other charges, “the massacre and destruction of the Armenians.” He was condemned to death in absentia. By then he was living under an assumed name in Germany, where he remained until 1921, when he was assassinated by a young Armenian student—who was acquitted of the murder because the jury found Talat’s crimes during the war unforgivable. His body was not returned to Turkey until 1943, when the Nazis shipped the corpse back with state honors.

  Ironic? Arguably. But not compared to the following historical postscript, which really gets at the nature of memory and what our descendants will believe. If you visit Ankara or Istanbul today, you will find streets and schools named after Talat Pasha. Enver, too. In other words, the nation that found Talat Pasha guilty of attempting to wipe out a race of people later named concourses after him.

  How is that possible? Because, to much of the nation—though, thankfully, not all—that genocide in the desert never happened. Even now, labeling the slaughter of 1915 “genocide” can land a Turkish citizen in jail and get a Turkish Armenian journalist killed.

  ARMEN SHARES A cramped tent with two other soldiers, both Armenian, though their accommodations are more of a lean-to than a tent. They sleep under a canvas sheet that is hitched on one side to the cliff wall and on the other to a seven-foot-high barrier of sandbags. The two remaining sides are open, but it hasn’t rained since they landed and so he presumes this doesn’t matter. It is as stiflingly hot here as it was in the desert. He is grateful for the occasional breezes those nights when he sleeps—when he isn’t on duty instead in one of the half-finished forward trenches, wondering if there will be an attack before their own troops have dug in. The Turks, he has been told, only attack at night. The ocean is less than a kilometer distant, and he listens to the waves after dark when he is here; when he is up on the line, he listens for the Turks, because they are in their own trenches, sometimes no more than fifty meters away.

  His duties so far have been simple, and although the days have been unpleasant, they have not been especially terrifying since that awful first morning. Eventually the naval shelling had caused the Turks on the beach to withdraw to their trenches on the plains atop the hill. At the time, this had seemed to the Anzac soldiers to be the harbinger of a great, if costly, victory. Within a few days, however, they had figured out that the Turks had never intended to defend the beach for all that long. Instead they had built a veritable city of trenches, rows of them, with machine-gun nests perfectly angled to enfilade any infantrymen stupid enough to attack, and no one at this point has any illusions that it will be easy—or even possible—to press much farther inland. The soldiers know that the rest of the British Empire’s troops on this long peninsula have been pinned down with their backs to the ocean for months.

  For most of the last ten days, Armen and another private have been using pack mules to bring lumber up off the beach to fortify their own newly constructed trenches and build rifle platforms. Yesterday he noticed that for the first time they were making more trips with ammunition than with wood. This feels like progress. He has come to love the mules. They are not nearly as stubborn as he had been led to expect. He can’t imagine what soldiers would do in this land of sand and rock and scrub pine without them.

  So far he has killed, he estimates, easily two thousand flies—an approximation based on the number he swats every hour and the number of waking hours since the invasion. He does not believe he has killed any Turks here, though the day they landed he fired his rifle into the gorse until he ran out of bullets. He imagined every Turk had Nezimi’s long face. But the flies? They are everywhere and on everything. They seem to flock instantly to the jam the moment he opens a tin, same with the tea and the water, and it is conceivable to him that he has eaten as many flies as he has swatted. He works shirtless and holds up his pants with suspenders. His tent smells rank with sweat, and the mules are pleasantly aromatic by comparison. One day he had two hours off and couldn’t sleep, and he was taught to play auction bridge by a trio of Aussies who needed a fourth. He has written Elizabeth daily and twice sent the long letters back out to the boats in the harbor to be posted someday. No one can tell him when correspondence will be resumed—the answer always is any day now—and this is a source of frustration for all of the soldiers. The veterans view the lack of mail so far as an unforgivable sin in the army’s landings preparation. It has been seven weeks since he left Aleppo and since he last saw Elizabeth. When he reconstructs her in his mind, he begins with her luminous red hair and then sees those cheekbones that reminded him of his wife’s. Sometimes he finds himself gazing down at the skin in the crook of his elbow, because it was there that she first touched him, hooking her arm casually in his
as they walked.

  Now, his tenth day here, there is a rumor; he hears it first from an Armenian named Artak and then, twenty minutes later, from a New Zealander named Sydney. No more waiting and building and staring nervously into the dark from the lip of a ditch. Tomorrow night they are going to emerge from their trenches and attack the Turks.

  “Ever build a bomb?” Sydney asks him, after he has corroborated the story that an assault is in the offing. He scratches at a row of bug bites visible even through the thick mat of hair on his chest.

  “I haven’t,” Armen answers. He, along with the other cannon fodder who showed up in Egypt, were given a crash course in rifles and bayonets and (in Armen’s opinion) how to get shot wading in waist-high water while encumbered with sixty-plus pounds on their backs.

  “The Germans have grenades. You know, bombs the size of, I don’t know, a pear. A big pear. So some of the Turks got ’em now, too. Well, we don’t. Only if you’re fightin’ in France do the English give ’em to you. Here? Hell, no. But I just learnt how to make a jam-tin bomb,” he says, and he proceeds to explain to Armen how to pack a jam tin with guncotton and scraps of metal and then stick a fuse through the top. “Tonight, ’fore lights out, we’re gonna make some. Join us, mate.”

  “I have trench duty,” Armen tells him.

  “Up all night the night before a charge? Bad luck.”