Abruptly—at least it feels abrupt, because Hatoun speaks so rarely—the girl says, “A stranger came here today.”
Elizabeth and Nevart turn to her simultaneously. “Please,” Elizabeth says, trying to keep her tone even, the pang of concern quiet. “Tell us more.”
“A woman.”
“She knocked on the door?”
“She looked through the grate.”
“Was she Turkish? Armenian? European?”
“Armenian. She wanted to see the American prince,” the girl says, directing a measure of her response to the blond doll’s head that is resting on the table beside her plate.
“Did she say why she wanted to see Mr. Martin?” Nevart asks.
Hatoun shakes her head no.
“She’s probably heard that Hatoun and I are here and wants refuge,” Nevart says, sighing. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Elizabeth says. “If that’s why she was coming by, so be it.” Then she turns to Hatoun and adds, “If the woman returns, send her to me. No sense in bothering Mr. Martin unless absolutely necessary.”
KARINE LIES IN repose like a sculpture atop a sepulchre, trying to calm herself so she might doze. But it is impossible for her mind to grow still. She does not know for a fact that her husband is alive, but suddenly it seems reasonable to hope. Perhaps this was why she was spared Der-el-Zor. Perhaps this was why a nun whose name she no longer knows found her work at the German consulate. So she might live and be reconciled with Armen. She imagines their reunion, two corpses brought back from the dead and given a second chance together. She feels herself in his arms. He lifts her off the ground the way he did in Van when she said she would marry him. She wraps her arms around the back of his neck as he kisses her.
She tries to remind herself that she is getting ahead of herself. He may have left Aleppo by now. Most likely he has. Yet she should not lose sight of the fact that Aleppo is large, and it is possible—especially given the smallness of her own world, and how little time she spends anywhere but cleaning at the German consulate or mourning Talene (and, yes, Armen) in this small room—that he is somewhere nearby. Regardless, this Ryan Donald Martin might know. Or someone else at the American consulate.
She rubs at the phantom pains she presumes she will always feel where her shoulder meets her chest, the place where she had cradled her baby for days. She had pressed Talene against her there, unwilling to allow any of the other women to take the girl. They had decided that she was mad—that she was unaware the child was dead. But she had known. She had simply been unwilling to let her go. Now, once more, their pleas echo around her, punctuated by the occasional shouts of the gendarmes, so she raises her arms above her, palms open, and silences them. She pushes them all away. Then she returns her arms to her sides and, in an act of enormous will, thinks only of her husband, Armen. She visualizes their bed in Harput and the lake—seemingly bottomless when the sky was right—in Van. She takes in slow, deep breaths, and coddles in her mind the word future. She breathes life into it carefully, as if blowing flower petals into the wind.
It is almost light in her room by the time she finally falls asleep.
ARMEN HAS HEARD the rumors of a planned British offensive in the Sinai desert and Palestine. It might be in a week, it might be in a month. Now, in a crisp new army uniform, he prowls the marketplace in search of clothes he can wear that will both help him to pass as a Muslim and give him a fighting chance of recrossing the vast ocean of sand between one civilization and another. He hopes to leave for Aleppo tomorrow, since he is going to be discharged from the hospital any moment now, and it will be much more difficult to desert from the expeditionary force barracks than from the considerably less disciplined world of the convalescing sick and the slackers.
As he is walking he sees an Australian named Adrian whom he met in the hospital. The fellow is moving gingerly with a cane. Like Armen, he is spectacularly fortunate. The bullets he took in his leg ripped through muscle and fat, but only nicked bone. It looked horrific, Adrian told him, but even as he was crawling back to the Anzac lines he was pretty sure his wounds were good for what would amount, more or less, to a month’s respite here in Egypt.
“Looking for anything special?” Adrian asks him, his voice as booming and good-natured as ever.
“No,” Armen lies. “Just passing the time.”
“I love the boredom here. Love it. Could play rummy with those poor, crippled bastards round us forever. I tell you, I am in no hurry to go back. I’ll go when it’s time. But I’m in no hurry.”
In one of the stalls is a fellow selling lambskin bonnets. Beside him is a boy offering scarves. Armen makes a mental note of the location, but otherwise keeps walking past them. He’ll return once he and Adrian have separated.
WHEN KARINE IS not emptying the chamber pots or scrubbing the floors or changing the linens on the Germans’ beds, she is praying. She has prayed almost all the time now that she knows there is a chance that her husband is alive. How many Armenian engineers named Armen could there possibly be? She considers asking Ulrich Lange, the German consul, for more information, even though it’s clear that his two assistants know little and hold the Armenian responsible for the death of their two friends. But in the end she doesn’t dare ask him. Besides, she, too, had felt an unexpected pang at the idea that the German photographers were dead. She remembers allowing the pair to take her picture when she had first arrived in Aleppo. They had asked, and she had agreed. Shrugged her bony shoulders and murmured fine. Answered their few questions about her past. The memory of the moment is as fuzzy as everything else that happened in those first days in the city. She had expected to die within hours.
And yet she hadn’t. She’d been among those who had been brought to the hospital, rather than left to die in the square or marched ever deeper into the desert.
She recalls what little she can of the day the German engineers had taken her picture. The rough wall of the building against which they had posed her, the scabrous stone against her spine. The patch of shade in which she collapsed. Her throat was too raw to speak above a whisper and her feet were imbrued with the miles and miles she had walked: they were swollen, awash in lesions and cuts, the smaller bones chipped and cracked. But the Germans were sympathetic and good-natured, and she felt that by leaving behind an image of her suffering she would give her death meaning. Not much. But some. Someone someday might see her emaciation and degradation and realize what the Turks had done in the desert. The photograph would never communicate the death of Talene, but it might convey the sadness that would, she thought, enshroud her people forever. Likewise, it wouldn’t incriminate the Turk who had claimed to be her husband’s friend and then, after she had renounced her faith, insisted she marry him. (How could he have asked unless he had known that Armen would never return to Harput? When she had refused his proposal, he had been the first of the men to rape her.) But the photograph would suggest the torture to which she had been subjected since she and her baby girl had been sent on a caravan into the wasteland, with nothing but the clothes she’d been wearing and the blanket in which Talene had been swaddled. The image would be a record and she knew the importance of records.
Until she had learned that Armen might be alive, she had tried not to reminisce about him or their daughter. It wasn’t that she supposed memories would only make the healing take longer; rather, it was that thinking about what she had lost made her grieving unbearable. But slowly her health had returned. Her feet healed and she was able to put on a little weight. Most of the time she lay in her hospital bed with a surreal detachment, almost wishing she would succumb to an absolute mental breakdown—a collapse that would forever divide her from her past. But it didn’t happen.
And, perhaps, it didn’t happen because there was a God in heaven after all. Maybe he had spared her precisely because he had spared Armen. She assumed he had been killed in the fighting in Van or slaughtered by the sorts of mobs she had seen hatcheting and bayone
ting the Armenian men in Harput. But maybe not. Maybe they were meant to find each other and start again. Have another child, start another family. Was that so very naïve? Of course not.
Tomorrow she will return to the American consul’s office. She will go the next day, too. And the day after that. And, if necessary, she will wait. Or, if she is feeling courageous, she may even ask where the consul is at that moment and go to him, wherever he is. She will be braver this time. She will find this Ryan Donald Martin and then she will learn what she can about her husband.
THIS AFTERNOON IT is a boy who peers through the grate beside the double doors at the compound and stares in at Hatoun. She guesses he is a little older than she is—nine or ten, maybe—but it is hard to decide for sure because he is so scrawny and small. For all she knows, he’s twelve or thirteen. Or seven or eight. He’s all ears and eyes and skeletal fingers that are so dirty and thin they remind her of leafless winter twigs. She has never met this survivor before or seen him on the streets.
“It’s been weeks since I’ve seen Shoushan. Have you seen her?” he asks, and it is after he has spoken that she begins to get a better sense of his age. She decides he is a few years older than she is. Then she shakes her head no, she hasn’t seen the girl. Her friend, she knows, is long gone. No one who played with her in the alley or square near the citadel will ever see her again.
“She said you lived here,” he continues, motioning with his head inside at the expansive courtyard behind her and the elegant white buildings with the ornate shutters on the windows. When she says nothing, he smiles and adds, “And you don’t like to talk. She said that, too.”
On the table on the patio is a bowl of figs. She glances back at it and then scampers to the table to retrieve it. She motions for the boy to make a cup with his hands. Instead he makes a basket with the bottom of his shirt, using those talon-like fingers of his as hooks, and she drops handfuls of figs through the bars and into his shirt.
When she is done, they stare at each other for a long moment. “I’m going to the orphanage,” he says finally. “It’s getting too dangerous out here. Too scary. Shoushan isn’t the only one who has disappeared. The orphanage can’t be any worse, right?”
She takes a deep breath through her nose, hoping to find the courage to say something in response—perhaps tell him that she had witnessed Shoushan being abducted and how none of the grown-ups had cared. How some had just laughed. Maybe she could tell him that she had been at the orphanage briefly and reassure him that it didn’t seem so bad. Yes, he would be giving up his freedom, but he would have food and he would indeed be safer there. Before she has opened her mouth, however, he says, “But I’d rather be at a place like this. Will they let you stay?”
Will they let you stay? The words echo in her mind as she contemplates the notion that someday she won’t live here. Nevart would never send her away. Never. Neither would Elizabeth. But she understands that someday Elizabeth will go back to America to live. She is aware that a nun from the orphanage has been asking about her. And she knows that eventually that American missionary, Miss Wells, will return from Damascus. What then will become of her? What will become of Nevart and her?
“If you see Shoushan,” the boy says, “tell her that Atom said hi. And if they send you to the orphanage, I won’t forget these figs. I’ll look out for you. Okay?”
“Okay,” she says softly.
He smiles. “See? You do talk. That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Then he turns and leaves her alone on her side of the grate in the courtyard. He hadn’t meant to unsettle her, but the resurrection of her memories of Shoushan coupled with the reality that someday she might need this Atom to protect her at the orphanage has left her anxious. She puts the empty bowl back on the patio table and races inside the main building to find Nevart.
REMEMBER THAT FAMOUS ARMENIAN CHESS PLAYER? TIGRAN VARTANOVICH Petrosian, known also as “Iron Tigran”?
My brother, Greg, is one of those chess nerds who plays the game online with other chess geeks around the world. He admits that his interest may have been fueled on some deep, subconscious level by Tigran and our shared surname. But he was in his mid-thirties when he took up the game in earnest, three decades after “Iron Tigran” was at the top of the pyramid, and so it may have been just a coincidence. Nevertheless, when I asked Greg to tell me something about the great Armenian player, he thought for a moment and then said that the fellow earned his nickname because his game focused largely on defense. He wasn’t a risky player, but he was relentless. He would wait for his opponent to make that one critical mistake.
Thus Tigran was, it seems to me, a very different sort from our grandfather. Armen took enormous risks, and I’m not sure if he ever thought more than one move ahead.
Moreover, he was a killer. I would not learn this until midlife, and even now I am not precisely sure how much my father knew. But, to be honest, I do not believe he knew much. Most likely he viewed his father as a soldier, one of the heroic defenders of Van, a volunteer member of Anzac. A Gallipoli grunt. My father certainly understood that his father had killed people, but in his mind it had been with a rifle and at a distance. He saw his father the way we view the men who fought in most twentieth-century wars: they did the awful work that had to be done, and then they came home and got jobs and raised their families. Most of them (though far from all) managed to smother at least the most obvious manifestations of post-traumatic stress disorder. (Me? I would have been left a catatonic wreck at the kitchen table.) And that meant my father respected Armen’s privacy and was careful not to dredge up the traumatizing details of 1915. Until I told him, my father never knew that his father had murdered an official in Harput who had once been his friend, or that he had killed a pair of Turkish administrators in a train car. In both cases it was self-defense. But it was still personal and violent and savage.
Likewise, it was from me that my father learned that Armen had been befriended by three elderly Bedouins as he desperately worked his way north through the Sinai desert. They proved to be an eminently charitable trio, feeding and shielding him for four days as they traveled together, until he was well behind the Turkish lines and able to climb surreptitiously aboard a train he could ride back to Aleppo. Later he admitted to Elizabeth that he almost hadn’t revealed himself to them, fearful that they would shoot if he materialized from the dunes beside their small encampment. But in the end he had decided that despite the long rifles they kept near them as they ate, he would emerge peacefully from the dark and take his chances. He would ask for their help. Later he was glad that he had.
Now, did my father know that Armen Petrosian had lost a wife and a daughter in 1915 before he met a woman from Boston in Aleppo? Yes, he admitted he did. But he had never mentioned this part of my family history to me when I was a girl, and neither did my mother. Consequently, my brother and I grew up with the assumption that Elizabeth Endicott, our grandmother, had been Armen’s first and only wife.
• • •
“I ALWAYS EXPECTED to die, and I never expected to die. I know that makes no sense,” Armen tells the seemingly ageless Bedouin beside him as they watch sparks from their fire add stars to the night sky. The Bedouins have assured him that they will reach a railhead tomorrow and he will be able to finish his journey to Aleppo by train.
“It makes sense,” the old fellow says simply.
“The closest I came to giving up—just surrendering to fate—was the day before the night I saw all of you.”
This time the Bedouin waits for him to continue.
“Actually, it would have been surrendering to the desert. Not fate. Fate is too … imprecise. But I saw something in the desert. A mirage—and it turned out to be a bad one. I thought it was an omen and I thought I was done. The desert had won and I was not, in fact, ever going to make it back to Aleppo.”
“If you view the desert as an opponent, you will lose. No one defeats the desert. No one should try.”
“I agree.”
&nbs
p; Another of the Bedouins breaks off a piece of the warm fetir bread with his fingers and chews it slowly. When he is done, he asks, “What was the mirage?”
How do you describe something as frivolous as a sandcastle to Bedouins? Armen thinks to himself. The notion is ridiculous. What was that expression that the British sergeant had used when they had been training in Egypt? Bringing coals to Newcastle. Nevertheless, he tells them.
“I saw in the distance—in the dunes—a group of women and children playing. Mothers and daughters. They were building a castle in the sand. It was very elaborate. Far more ornate than one could ever build with the sand out here. There were at least a dozen of them—people, that is, not sandcastles. And one of the women was my wife.”
“You said she was dead.”
“She is. And one of the children was my daughter—which was absurd, because my daughter, even if she were alive, would only have been a year and a half old. But she was five or six in this … mirage. And she and her mother started waving when they saw me, and so I started to run to them.”
“And what was it really? What did you find after all that running?”
He shakes his head and pauses. “A tree. A single, dead spiky tree.”
The older Bedouin sips his tea and shrugs. “Often,” he says, “you find nothing at all.”
HATOUN BREATHES IN the aroma from the jasmine bouquet that Elizabeth brought back today to the selamlik in the American prince’s compound. The flowers are whiter than clouds and rest in a glass vase with baby angels carved into the sides. It’s hard to believe that anyone could find jasmine flowers this time of year, but the Americans seem capable of anything. For a moment she loses herself in the flowers—their fragrance, the shape of the petals, their sheer and simple cleanliness—and abruptly she is catapulted back to her mother and father’s bedroom. There is the atomizer with the pearl stopper on her mother’s dresser with one of her perfumes, jasmine. Her mother was getting ready to join their father at an elegant dinner somewhere, tying a lavender-colored sash around her dress. Hatoun and her sister were not going. The girls had sprayed some of the perfume into the air before them, and then lost themselves in the mist. Hatoun recalls noticing the long, squat bookcase across the room with her father’s history books, the middle of the three shelves bowing ever so slightly beneath the weight of the past.
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