The Sandcastle Girls

by Chris Bohjalian

  Still, he has to find a way to get the plates into Egypt. Or, better still, the United Kingdom. Or France. Or, best of all, America. He has told people what he witnessed at Der-el-Zor and what he sees here in Aleppo every day, but it’s clear that they find this scale of civilian slaughter inconceivable. He can see in their eyes that they suppose he is exaggerating or that they presume he has led such a sheltered existence since the Spanish-American War that the realities of a modern conflict are too much for his diplomatic sensibilities. Yes, he can read in their faces or hear in the conciliatory, sympathetic tone of their voices, it must be terrible. But it can’t possibly be worse than what the poor boys are enduring in the trenches.

  Meanwhile, the box of plates sits beside his desk in his office. Now, a little before midnight, the sky alive with constellations and stars, he smokes a cigarette and stares at the crate. He wonders what he should do. Because, of course, he has to do something.

  It’s been two weeks since even a small convoy of refugees has arrived here in Aleppo. He wonders if the government’s deportation process has hit a snag or whether there are simply no Armenians left to banish and starve.

  • • •

  ARMEN SITS ON a dock, dangling his legs over the side, largely oblivious to the brawly stevedores who pass by within feet of him with their massive crates and boxes. The smell of the fish reminds him of the beaches in the Dardanelles, but otherwise the Mediterranean here in no way resembles the sea beyond the thin peninsula where he had lived and fought through the end of the summer. Alexandria is a booming port, and though his view of the warships in the harbor is not unlike what he might have seen on the water off Gallipoli, behind him—across the street from the dock on which he is sitting with Elizabeth’s letters—is a city that dwarfs Aleppo and drifts back far inland from the shore. The sea is black with oil and white with foam, and the sky is lined with the acrid plumes from a dozen ships’ funnels.

  He has been reading and rereading the letters, almost without pause, since they arrived earlier that week. He has run his fingers over her script; he has tried to find a trace of her scent on the paper. He stares over and over at one single four-word sentence she has written, his heart throbbing, his head a murmuring swarm of memory and desire: Come back to me. She is still in Aleppo. At least, based on the dates of the letters, she was. She has written that she is not returning to America with her father and the mission team. And then there is her own injury. I limp, but they tell me I will heal if I just stay off my foot. In Gallipoli—and here in Alexandria—he has seen gangrene and amputation and all manner of death from infection. The doctors worried more about gangrene in his wound than anything else. He thinks of the cadaver-like, chloroformed men he saw on the tables in the hospital tent on the beach as their legs or their arms were cut away. The crude bone saws, the blades dipped in buckets of alcohol, the metal dull as tin. Here in Egypt he has seen the soldiers with their crutches and canes limping down the streets and struggling up (and down) stairs, one of their pants legs tied off where there once was a knee. He has watched the men in their rolling chairs with both of their legs gone. For all he knows, already Elizabeth has had a limb taken from her at the hospital in Aleppo.

  No, not her. It can’t be.

  But, of course, it could. He knows well how quickly it can all fall apart, how suddenly everything can be lost.

  Behind him he hears laughter and looks up from the letter in his hands. There, emerging from the fish market in the salt white building at the end of the pier, is a young, light-haired couple, most likely British. He supposes she’s a nurse and he’s a diplomat. He’s dressed far too well to be a soldier. She is laughing at something he has said, the two of them positively shimmering with anticipation and confidence. They feel their future—either moments from now in a bed in a shuttered room, the light separating the slats and louvering the walls, or many decades from now in a Tudor house in the countryside beyond London, a raft of grandchildren at their feet—is assured. The fellow wraps his arm around her shoulders, pulling her into him.

  Armen pushes himself to his feet, holding the packet of Elizabeth’s letters against his chest. He feels a pang where the stitches had been in his leg. He tries to convince himself that her father would never have left if her foot had turned gangrenous. He reminds himself that she had written of the two American doctors in the compound. Surely, she’s fine.

  Surely.

  But if she’s not? Perhaps, in the end, her father never did leave because his daughter was so badly wounded. He has no letters from Elizabeth that were posted after Silas Endicott had, in theory, returned to America. There is only the one that says he was planning to depart.

  As Armen walks along the dock and then back toward the hospital, his limp all but gone, he decides it doesn’t matter whether Elizabeth’s foot is fine. It doesn’t matter whether she’s alone in that compound. He’s not going to France to fight. He’s not going to wait to see where they want to send him next. He’s going to return to Aleppo.

  • • •

  KARINE PETROSIAN IS on her hands and knees, drowsily scrubbing the floor of the office of the German consul, now that she has finished with the kitchen and the selamlik. Her thoughts move vaguely between the shapes and the shadows cast on the wooden boards and the elephantine thickness of the desk that rises above them. She is careful not to accidentally knock over the magnificent gramophone with the wild roses carved onto its walls. She knows it was a gift to the consul from the governor-general here.

  Through her fingertips she feels footsteps down the corridor, and a moment later, over her shoulder, she hears the voices of Ulrich Lange’s two German assistants. Although she is already on the ground, she bows her head ever so slightly when they pass, but they are largely oblivious to her.

  “It’s a shame,” one is saying, stepping around her to drop a sheaf of papers on Lange’s desk. “The Turks need all the engineers we can spare.”

  “It’s more than a shame. It’s horrible and it’s tragic,” the other young diplomat says. “I knew the two of them—Helmut in particular. Awful scar, and nothing at all to do with the war. Imagine. I liked them.”

  “Well, they did ask for it. Why they felt the need to photograph the Armenians is beyond me. It was ridiculous. I’m sure that friend of theirs, that Armenian engineer—Armen—talked them into it. He’s the one who cost them their lives. He killed them as surely as any British offensive.”

  “Is he still here?”

  “In Aleppo? No idea. Ryan Martin might know. He also has an … an agenda.”

  They are just starting to walk past her when reflexively she starts to rise, blocking their way. The men pause.

  “Can I help you?” asks the shorter of the two, a fellow she knows is named Paul.

  There is a thrumming in her ears, a murmur of voices long dead, and it is taking her a moment to frame her question.

  “She probably doesn’t speak German,” says his associate, Oscar.

  “I do,” she manages to croak. “A little.”

  But Paul resorts to Turkish anyway and repeats his question: “Can I help you?”

  She tries to regain a semblance of her composure, but she is trembling.

  “Go ahead,” he commands.

  “We really don’t have time for this,” Oscar mutters to his friend, exasperated. “Let’s go.”

  But she can’t let them leave, not yet. “You mentioned an Armenian engineer,” she says finally, her voice quavering. “You said his name was Armen.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know his last name?”

  “No. Sorry,” he replies simply. Then, perhaps because her face must be a carnival mask of anguish and desperation, he adds, “Visit the American consul. Ryan Donald Martin. You never know, he might be able to tell you the Armenian’s full name.”

  Then they disappear down the corridor, and the last thing she hears is one of them saying to the other, “Who knows why she wanted to know. Maybe she had a brother or cousin named
Armen.”

  Meanwhile, she collapses back onto the wooden floor and sits with her head in her hands. She tries to be calm. But her heart is racing, and she has a sense that something inside her is coming alive.

  THE THIRD DEADLIEST EARTHQUAKE IN RECORDED HISTORY occurred in Aleppo. It was August 9, 1138. We’ll never know the magnitude, but it was impressive. The death toll—and remember this was nearly nine hundred years ago, so view the figure the way we view old prices and currencies—was 230,000 people. Aleppo was Syria’s second largest city at the time. Buildings crumbled like dry cookies and rocks fell onto the streets like giant blocks of hail. The walls of the citadel seemed to melt, according to one witness. So did the fortress built by the crusaders in Harim. And the Muslim fort at Al-Atarib? Completely leveled. Contemporary accounts said the residents of Damascus felt the earth move, and Damascus and Aleppo are separated by 220 miles.

  Peter Vartanian told me about the earthquake as I was leaving the museum with photocopies of close to one hundred pages of correspondence, private diary entries, and newsletter entries. He brought it up, I presume, because so much of our time together had been spent discussing Aleppo. But he may also have thought of the quake because of the number of dead. He had tried putting into context the murder of one and a half million people: Imagine an earthquake that kills nearly a quarter of a million people. Horrific beyond words. Well, that’s only a sixth or so of the number of Armenians who perished in our genocide. That, perhaps, was the subterranean thought that flowed beneath the story.

  And, suddenly, I was sobbing in the back of the cab that was taking me to Logan Airport. The driver turned to look at me at a stoplight, and I put up my hands and tried to smile. I sniffled that I was fine, I was fine, and then I continued to cry. I cried all the way to the entrance to the terminal. I cried on the plane and in my own car as I drove to my daughter’s elementary school. I stood in the dark in the back of the auditorium beside Bob during Anna’s concert, and I cried there, too. I am confident that the assistant principal and the woman running the sound board supposed I was crying because our daughter was soon going to graduate and move on to middle school. The two administrators thought my tears were sweet.

  Only Bob suspected the truth and understood that in reality I was crying for my grandparents. I was crying for Karine. I was crying for an infant named Talene who never lived to see her first birthday. I was crying over the deaths of one and a half million people, and a civilization in eastern Turkey that had been reduced to a mountain of bones in the ginger sands of Der-el-Zor.

  But mostly I was crying for the losses and the secrets that Armen and Elizabeth had brought to their graves.

  ELIZABETH SITS ACROSS from Sayied Akcam as the physician reaches for the tin pot on the table and freshens the coffee in her small cup. His office is really just a curtained-off corner of the children’s ward, but there is a thin window facing west, and sunlight cheers the nook this time of the day.

  It took Elizabeth a few weeks to get used to the coffee here in Syria—so much thicker and darker than what she would drink in Boston—but now she cannot imagine ever drinking American coffee again. Last night Nevart had showed her how to use the hookah that had sat unused in the compound selamlik like a piece of treasured pottery. They had smoked tobacco after the staff and Hatoun were in bed, as if they were ungoverned adolescents. In America she would never even have smoked a cigarette.

  “We are all much better telling somebody good news than bad,” Akcam says, after he has taken another sip from his own cup. “We find other words for bad news.” He is referring to his bedside manner, his work as a doctor. But Elizabeth knows there is a broader issue behind what he is saying.

  “In some ways,” she says, “you would have an even greater need for euphemisms if these children had parents—or if these women had husbands or sisters or brothers. I would think most of your hedging is for the family. It’s for them you need to cushion the blow of bad news.”

  He motions toward the rows of beds on the other side of the drape. “We edge toward death incrementally here. It affects our language. In the desert, too.”

  “But not always,” she corrects him, recalling the way that Hatoun’s mother and sister were killed. “Sometimes they are murdered suddenly out there.”

  “I know,” he agrees. “And, arguably, they are the more fortunate ones.” She has the sense he is about to teach her another proverb from the Qur’an. But then from the other side of the curtain they hear the sounds of a little girl starting to cry. Elizabeth suspects it is the seven-year-old from Van who was here months ago and then sent to the orphanage. She was brought back here last night because she had been unable to keep food down for three days.

  Akcam exhales heavily. He makes a resigned pyramid of resignation with his thick eyebrows and pushes himself to his feet. She follows him out onto the ward.

  HATOUN DOES NOT recognize the woman who appears in the middle of the afternoon on the other side of the iron grate that borders the compound’s imposing wooden doors. The girl stands inside the courtyard, Alice’s small blond head in one hand, and looks up at the stranger. Clearly the woman is Armenian. At least Hatoun assumes that she is. Her skin hangs like Nevart’s, but she is no longer the sort of walking skeleton Hatoun recalls from the last days of the long march or their days in the square near the citadel. Her hair is beautiful, thick and lustrous and newly brushed.

  “Hello,” the woman says simply. When Hatoun says nothing in response, she continues, “I am looking for a man named Ryan Donald Martin. Is he here?”

  Hatoun shakes her head no. The American prince and his assistant are both out. Only Nevart and the cook are with her in the compound at the moment. She is considering fetching Nevart, when the woman continues, “I’ll come back. Do you have a name?”

  “Hatoun,” she answers simply.

  “And hers?” the stranger asks, pointing at Alice’s head.

  “Alice.”

  The woman smiles, her lips a little crooked. For the briefest of seconds the grin reminds her of her lost friend’s—of Shoushan’s—in its slightly manic, slightly crazed edges. But there is also something maternal about it, something that makes Hatoun think of her own mother’s face. Of Nevart’s, too, when the woman kneels and embraces her, once she has returned here after playing somewhere far from the compound.

  “My name is Karine,” the stranger says. “Hatoun and Alice are beautiful names.” She gazes into the courtyard and sees the remnants of the sandcastle beneath the date palms.

  “Did you build that?” she asks Hatoun.

  The girl nods. She wishes it hadn’t wilted in the night from dew and in the day from the sun. Earlier in the week it had looked better than it does now. Really, nothing ever lasts.

  “It’s very impressive,” Karine says.

  “Thank you,” Hatoun murmurs, sure that this woman is only trying to be polite. Then Karine turns and walks away, down the street and into the sun.

  ELIZABETH DOES NOT tell Nevart at dinner that another girl died in the hospital that afternoon. She does not tell Hatoun that another nun from the orphanage came by the ward asking about her. She sits between the two of them and eats her lamb and rice pilaf and describes for them instead the phantasmagoric shades of purple and yellow and red that mark the foliage when you leave Boston and venture out toward Concord in the autumn. She tries to convey the magic of the warm, sweet steam from a sugarhouse in the spring, and what it was like to watch sap boil down into syrup. She does not mention that the sugarhouse in her mind belonged to the family of a professor with whom she had entangled herself at Mount Holyoke. She tries not to think of him. But tonight she wants to talk of home because—as Dr. Akcam and she discussed that very day—sometimes the soul needs to talk only around the edges.

  She wonders what her mother would think if she brought Nevart and Hatoun to Boston with her. If she brought home a hookah and smoked tobacco in front of her. Arguably, the idea of the tobacco and a pipe would be even more
troubling and problematic for her mother than two “exotics” rescued from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Her mother might actually enjoy their presence in much the same way that she takes pleasure from her dogs. Still, it is a serious issue in Elizabeth’s mind. At some point she will book passage home to America. What then will happen to these two? They cannot stay forever in the American compound.

  Meanwhile, as every day passes with no letter from Armen, the idea that she may be returning to America without ever seeing him again becomes more real. The possibility that he is long dead makes her wince. And yet her time with him was so short and so long ago now that it feels more like a dream than a series of linear experiences that actually happened. It’s as if she conjured him in the small hours of the night and only pretended to stand with him atop the citadel or stroll with him through the market. She glances now in the direction of the front door and the stairs to the second floor and recalls that morning when he had emerged from the shadows and surprised her. She wishes …

  She is not precisely sure what she wishes. She knows only that she had fallen in love with him in a way that she hadn’t with any man previously. Likewise, she is sure that she loves Hatoun more profoundly than she could ever love a niece or a nephew or a cousin. And she has feelings for Nevart that transcend the affection she believes she would ever have shared with a sibling.