The Sandcastle Girls

by Chris Bohjalian

  He is not positive, but he believes the woman had been here at the hospital this summer. The faces tend to blur, but he prides himself on his memory, imperfect as it may be at his age. He recalls her almond-shaped eyes and—when he draws back one lid—the beautiful, elegant gray of her pupils.

  Over his shoulder he hears laughter, and when he turns he sees Elizabeth and Nevart and Hatoun approaching down the corridor. He has noticed that lately Nevart has been more likely to bring Hatoun with her when she comes to the hospital to help. Sometimes the child sits at a small side table just outside his office and does the schoolwork Nevart has given her, or she walks behind the woman or one of the nurses and carries water to those patients who are well on their path to recovery.

  “Good morning, Dr. Akcam,” Elizabeth says to him, her voice bubbly and her eyes alight.

  He smiles at the three of them, but moves his body so that the girl, at least, is less likely to see the dying woman on the bed behind him. “You seem very happy this morning, Miss Endicott. It appears that yesterday’s rain agreed with you.”

  “Maybe it rained all day, but it was sunny all night,” Nevart tells him.

  “I don’t understand,” he admits, though it’s clear to him that the American has received good news of some sort.

  “Elizabeth’s friend returned—healthy and unharmed,” Nevart says.

  “Your Armenian friend? The engineer from Van?” Akcam inquires, hoping his tone doesn’t betray his utter astonishment. Elizabeth has told him stories of Armen, and he presumed the fellow had been forever lost in the maelstrom of war.

  And this time Elizabeth herself answers, her grin so broad it’s almost a little wild. “Yes. At first I thought he was a Bedouin,” she admits, and then she laughs. “There he was, standing in front of the compound last night: a Persian tribesman who had struggled in from the desert.”

  Good news is so precious and rare that he considers embracing her, but fears that would be presumptuous. And so instead he only nods and bows ever so slightly. But as he moves, Hatoun peers around him, and he realizes that the girl has seen the dying woman in the bed. He takes her shoulders to steer her away, but the child is as immovable as a stone column. She stands there, rigid and staring, and although Akcam knows she has witnessed far worse, he doesn’t want her seeing this patient whose breathing is growing ever more shallow and weak. He is shocked the woman has lasted as long as she has, and he says precisely this to Elizabeth and Nevart. He tells them that she pitched herself from one of the ramparts at the citadel. Still Hatoun resists him, even shaking him off with her shoulders. Quickly Nevart scoots beside him and also tries pulling at the girl, murmuring that they should step back, but Hatoun surprises them all when she opens her mouth and says, “This is the woman who wanted Prince Ryan. This is the woman from the gate. Her name is Karine.”

  Akcam has no idea what she is referring to when she says this patient once approached the American consul, but he finds it sweet that the child refers to her benefactor as a prince. The irony of a “royal” American is just starting to settle on him like a fallen leaf when he notes that the two women—especially Elizabeth—have grown alert.

  “Hatoun, tell me,” Elizabeth asks, bending over with her hands on her knees so she is eye level with the girl, her face intense. “Do you mean this is the lady who came to the compound a few days ago?”

  Hatoun nods, gazing at the woman in the bed.

  “You’re positive?” Elizabeth asks.

  “Yes.”

  She stands up and looks at the dying woman in the bed. Elizabeth can feel both the physician and Nevart watching her. She isn’t positive, but she thinks it is at least possible that this was the individual she had passed on the street yesterday just before she saw Armen. Had this refugee been on her way once more to see Mr. Martin? Or—and she finds herself agitated and unnerved by this possibility—had the woman been looking for Armen? She is shocked at how quickly her mood has darkened, and she tries to reassure herself that she is overreacting. “And you said her name was … Karine?” she asks, trying to control the unexpected quaver in her voice. My God, she thinks, she saw us embracing, and she tries desperately to bury the thought. “Did she say anything more? Did she say why she wanted to see the American consul? Did she give you her last name?”

  “Oh, we know her full name,” Akcam says. He hopes this will comfort Elizabeth. “She worked for the German consul. I don’t recall her last name right this second, but I have it written down in my office. Let me go get it.”

  Somehow he is able to guide Hatoun with him away from the side of the thin mattress, and as Elizabeth watches the man and the girl receding down the corridor between the beds, she knows already what the woman’s last name is going to be and why she leapt from atop the citadel last night. She knows this as surely as she has known anything in her life. Her fingers are trembling as she sits gently on the bed and strokes the side of the woman’s face that has not been broken by the stones at the base of the fortress. She is surprised at how cold the skin is, so she reaches for Karine’s hand and finds that it is almost like ice. She wonders if she should ask Nevart to run back to the compound now—Go! Go now! she hears herself pleading in her mind—to race as fast as she can and bring back Armen. But before she can decide what to do, before she can open her mouth, the woman’s body has one barely perceptible spasm—a twitch, really.

  And then she is gone.

  Somewhere—very far away, it seems—Nevart is asking her if she is all right. Elizabeth squeezes the dead woman’s hand and kisses her forehead. She takes a breath to try to compose herself, though the tremors that before had resided only in her fingers have now traveled up through her arms and into her shoulders. But she makes a decision. She cannot bring back the dead; she can only resurrect the pain of longing and loss, the unbearable wailing of ghosts. Armen has shouldered Karine’s loss once already. He has borne the grief, the heartbreak, and the chasm-like hole in his soul. And finally—almost miraculously—he has started to heal. Should he now have to share in the guilt and the knowledge that Elizabeth suspects will color her sunsets forever? Should he have to carry that cross as well?

  Maybe someday she will regret this moment and what she is about to do. Maybe not. She knows only that in an instant she has made up her mind. And so she blinks back her tears and finds within her a small, wan smile for Nevart.

  “Yes, I’m fine,” Elizabeth says, forcing a resolute firmness into her voice. “It’s just so sad that we’ll never know what this poor woman wanted from Mr. Martin—or how he might have been able to help her.”

  WHEN I WAS RESEARCHING MY GRANDPARENTS’ STORY IN 2011, I had a cup of tea with a survivor of the Armenian genocide. It’s hard to believe, but there are actually some witnesses who remain on this planet. Remember that old television commercial in which an elderly couple in the Caucasus Mountains attributes their longevity to yogurt? Well, apparently we really do have extraordinarily resilient genes. This Armenian survivor was one hundred and two years old when we met. He worked as a butcher until he was ninety-one, retiring only a decade and change before we sat down together. He was born in a village near Zeitun in 1909, and at the age of six he was marched into the Syrian desert with his mother and three sisters. Two of his sisters died there, but he and his mother and one of the girls survived. Rather than remain in the Middle East after the war or immigrate to France or the United States like so many other walking skeletons, their mother brought them to Armenia. Not back to Zeitun in Turkey. To the fledgling independent nation born from the ashes of a cataclysmic and savage war, and the rubble of two dying empires: the Ottoman and the Russian. That nation didn’t last long. By 1922 Armenia was a republic in the Soviet Union.

  Which brings me back to that one-hundred-and-two-year-old man. He was pressed into service to defend Mother Russia from the Nazis in 1941, when he was thirty-two years old. In October of 1942, while fighting on the outskirts of Stalingrad, he was among a group of infantrymen overrun by German
tanks and forced to surrender. He would spend the next two and a half years in a Nazi prison camp, treated—along with all the other Russian prisoners—as a Slavic subhuman. For the second time in his life he was nearly done in by starvation and disease. Briefly he was sent from the camp to Berlin, where he was the only man to make it back from his work detail removing unexploded American and British bombs from the debris in the city. Not long after he was rescued by his own army in April 1945, he learned that his wife and his son had died, though no one could tell him how. Initially he was treated as a coward for surrendering, and then as a collaborator for surviving. He expected he would be sent to a gulag. He wasn’t. Instead he was deported. Exiled. He has no idea why, but he shrugged when I asked him. “My luck had to change sometime,” he said simply.

  He arrived in the United States in 1948, remarried in 1951, and fathered two more sons and two daughters, all of whom are still alive, too. His wife was with him when I interviewed him, because she is a mere eighty-three and has much better hearing. He has lived quite happily here in the U.S. for the last six and a half decades. There is no way to know this for sure, but I believe he must be one among a very small cohort: an Armenian who survived both the genocide and a Nazi prison camp.

  THE OLD MAN watches the child carefully balance the blond doll’s head on the side of his stall, on a plank overlooking his pickles and olives. He has figured out by now that she is not among the starving who appear and beg him for food, so he no longer drives her away. Somewhere in this city, he assumes, she has a mother or an aunt or an older sister. When the child arrives, she seems content to watch the bazaar from his spot, gazing quietly at the people who appear in great crowds in the morning and then dissipate as the day progresses. She comes less frequently now than she once did, and her visits are shorter. He is not sure he has ever heard her speak. He wonders if they cut out her tongue.

  For a time she had a friend with her, a difficult child—and this one, clearly, an orphan—who saw it as a game to try to steal a pickle each day, but the other girl seems to have disappeared.

  “Is she yours?” a new woman asks him this morning as she makes her purchases, motioning with her head at the girl, and he tells her that she is just a stray who seems to like the view. After the customer disappears into the crowd he glances down at the child. Her eyes have grown alert. He would ask her what she sees, but he knows there wouldn’t be a point; the girl would never answer. So he follows her gaze, curious. There, perhaps two or two and a half dozen meters away, is a woman in the dress and blouse of a European or an American, but her hair is the color of a blackbird and she is almost certainly an Armenian. She has a basket draped over one arm, but from here he can’t tell what’s in it. He has never before seen her at his stall, which means either she has a cook or she gets her pickles and olives elsewhere.

  “Your mother doesn’t know you play here, does she?” he says to this quiet girl, teasing her. Because he is quite sure the woman is her mother—or maybe her aunt. He is considering whether he should call out to the stranger that her daughter is here, right here, when he sees why the child has grown fixated and alert. Behind the woman, shadowing her, are two young hoodlums, sixteen or seventeen years old he would guess. A thought passes fleetingly behind his eyes: if he were younger or more courageous or simply more willing to get involved, he would cry out to the woman—tell her to run or turn around or drop her basket and bring her arms to her face. Perhaps he will take this risk anyway. But then the child beside him suddenly and unexpectedly finds her voice.

  “Nevart!” this usually silent girl screams. “Nevart!” The voice cuts through the air like a horn, louder than all the bartering and debate from the stalls and the bells on the animals in the midst of the human throng. And then the child is sprinting in her sandals toward this woman named Nevart, crossing the distance in barely a heartbeart. The lady crouches before the girl, her face transforming from preoccupation to surprise to relief. And then the two teenage boys are upon her. Not, the old man observes, upon both the woman and the child. Only upon the woman.

  He watches enrapt, wondering if someone else—a younger or stronger man—will come to her aid, fully expecting that otherwise the thugs will beat her and then steal her basket. He can tell by their dress that they are not emissaries from a sheik or merchant who wants Nevart for his harem. Besides, she is pretty, but not pretty enough. Or young enough.

  Then, however, he finds himself surprised a second time, this one even more pronounced than the small jolt he had received when the little girl had opened her mouth and cried out the name Nevart. Just as the girl starts kicking at one of the young brutes, the woman wraps her arms around him, not trying to resist him at all. Because he isn’t trying to harm her. He is embracing her, laughing. Both hoodlums are. And then the woman is crying, shaking her head and sobbing. She places her lips upon the girl’s cheeks and whispers something through her tears. The girl looks at the young men, a little quizzically and a little relieved. Around them a crowd starts to gather, and the old vendor leaves his stall and joins them.

  He watches and listens and nods. He was correct that this woman was somebody’s aunt. Just not the aunt of this girl who has hovered for days at the bazaar. She’s the aunt of these teenage boys, who—like her, like the girl—have survived both deportation and the tumult that marks Aleppo.

  He finds himself moved and wonders as he returns to his olives and pickles if he is getting sentimental in his old age. When he is back at his cart, he notices the blond doll’s head. He plucks it from the plank and starts back toward the child, but already she is walking down the center of the bazaar with Nevart and her nephews.

  “You!” he calls out, wishing now that he had thought to ask the girl her name. “Young lady!”

  The child turns to him. They all do. He holds up the doll’s head. And suddenly feeling young and playful in a way that he hasn’t in decades, he grins and lobs it underhand to the girl. One of the teenage boys catches it for her, studies it for a brief moment, and hands it like a treasured orange to the child. She looks up at the young man and then at the vendor. Then—and he knows he has never before seen this from the girl—she smiles. She smiles and waves and puts the doll’s head in the pocket of her dress. He is certain he will never see her again. He isn’t sure how he knows this or why he is so confident. But he is positive, and the realization causes him a strange and unexpected pang of sadness. He shakes his head and tells himself he is getting soft. Then he turns his attention to the Syrian woman who has appeared at his stall and wants to buy olives.

  IN THE SELAMLIK after dinner, Ryan lights another cigarette and watches as Armen and Elizabeth share long draws from the hose on the hookah, the elegant bowl glowing between them like a firefly. The American woman has seemed alternately reckless and morose tonight—he can’t imagine she would be smoking even a cigarette were her father still here—but she insists that she’s fine. She’s fine, she has said, she is absolutely fine. She says she is simply still overwhelmed that Armen has returned safely to Aleppo. Now Ryan tries to take her at her word. But he finds himself watching her.

  He is at once fascinated and appalled when Armen tells the two of them that there is little awareness of the Armenian situation among the Australians and New Zealanders he has met. “The British in Egypt know a bit more,” he says.

  “How much is a bit?” Ryan asks the engineer.

  “Survivors have started trickling into Cairo. Port Said. Alexandria. But the stories seem almost impossible to believe. And so while the British understand that some Armenians in Anatolia are dying as the Turks relocate them, the magnitude of the slaughter is unclear.”

  “Do they see that it’s part of a plan?”

  He shakes his head. “No, they don’t. They view it as … as something that happens in a modern war.”

  “What did people say when you told them your story at the hospital?” Ryan asks.

  “My story? I didn’t tell people my story. I was surrounded by men who
were dying or crippled for life. Soldiers who were blind or had lost arms or legs. Or parts of their faces. A nose. A jaw. We all have our losses.”

  The American consul appreciates the engineer’s stoicism, but is nonetheless frustrated. “You didn’t tell them of your daughter? Of your wife?” he asks, allowing his tone to express his incredulity.

  Before Armen can respond, however, Elizabeth says, “We cannot dwell forever on our personal losses.”

  “What?” Ryan asks her reflexively. He is surprised by what strikes him as her uncharacteristic callousness. He is about to elaborate on his short question, when she continues.

  “What I mean,” she says, “is that a person can only bear so much heartache and gloom in this world. Really, how much sorrow are we expected to endure? How much?” Ryan watches as she looks almost pleadingly into Armen’s eyes. The engineer nods and gently cradles the young American’s hand in both of his. And Ryan begins to understand what she is thinking. He does not know everything. Far from it. But he understands that the spark he has seen between this pair is far brighter than the embers in the hookah they are sharing, and likely to be far more enduring. He rises, aware that her questions have no answers and that she expects none. At the sideboard, he half fills his glass with the last of the arak.

  IN THE SMALLEST hours of the morning, the compound floats amid shadows and moonlight. Armen feels the mattress move and he opens his eyes. Blinks. He sees that Elizabeth has risen from the bed and is silhouetted now in the window, her nightgown gossamer—phosphorescent—as if illuminated by the beam from an electric torch. Her breathing is silent; he hears nothing.