The Sandcastle Girls

by Chris Bohjalian

  “What do you see?” he asks, sitting up.

  She continues to gaze out the window, her arms folded across her chest. Then: “I am looking at the moon. I’m going to miss it in America.”

  “As I understand it, you can see it there, too.”

  “But I look at the sky here more than I ever did there,” she says, her voice tinged with wistfulness. “I’m not sure I knew there were stars in America.”

  “I will remind you to look up now and then.”

  “It won’t be the same,” she says. “Oh—” the word is little more than a small exclamation of surprise that she reins in before it can grow into a sentence. He sits up straighter, buttressing his back with his arms.

  “What is it?” he asks, alert now.

  “That cat. He just caught something, I think. Suddenly he was like a falcon and dove off the wall.”

  He relaxes and she returns to the bed, sitting beside him with her bare feet on the wooden floor. She bows her head against his chest and he pulls her against him. He wonders what scars she will bring with her to Boston, how changed she will seem to her mother. She has seen the worst the world can do, been flung hard against a grim mural of madness and loss.

  Meanwhile, in their bedroom on the other side of the floor, Nevart and Hatoun are asleep. Downstairs, Ryan Martin’s assistant slumbers, too. The American consul, however, lies awake in his bed in his room, once more staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. He comforts himself that tonight the ancient citadel looms over a city square empty of people, but still sleep remains elusive.

  WHEN I WAS ALMOST DONE WITH THIS BOOK, I DROVE DEEP INTO the Syrian desert and to the mountain of bones called Der-el-Zor. I went there months after the season of Middle Eastern unrest and the government’s crackdown that would leave thousands dead, arriving in Syria in the autumn. It was still a sauna and I wondered constantly how my grandmother had endured it in corsets and stockings and high-collared dresses. I flew to Beirut and then drove into Syria, and I remember approaching the first checkpoint with my heart a jackhammer because my visa acknowledged that I was a novelist, and the previous April Syria had expelled all western reporters. It had crossed my mind as I was making my travel plans that there was a chance I would wind up the star of an Al Jazeera video or detained for months in the bowels of a Damascus police station while diplomats negotiated my release. My husband shared my anxiety. He wasn’t coming with me both because someone had to care for the children and because—and though this was meant as merely a little good-natured gallows humor between us, there was a subterranean current of truth to it—we didn’t want them to be orphans.

  I went with two Armenians, one an American citizen who teaches at Hunter College in Manhattan, and one a Lebanese citizen who edits an Armenian newspaper here in the United States and lives in Watertown. They were both in their early thirties, nearly a decade and a half younger than me.

  It was actually an uneventful drive to Der-el-Zor, the landscape always desolate, but also panoramically rough and bleak and beautiful along some stretches. But, then, I was in an air-conditioned car and had a water bottle in my hands whenever I felt the slightest urge for a drink. I couldn’t imagine I would have made it far on foot. When we reached the city, my new friends took me by the hand and led me to the Armenian Genocide Memorial, the two of them—veterans of this pilgrimage—guiding me slowly along this passage into our ancestors’ shared inferno. When we went inside the church, we stood together before the Column of Resurrection that rises up like a missile from the center of the earth, and the bones of the martyrs that bear witness. I said nothing because there was nothing for me to say. Nor did I say anything in the museum. Silently, however, I seemed to be murmuring prayers wherever we went in the memorial complex at Der-el-Zor, and then when we wandered outside beneath the scorching sun and scratched at the soil to touch the fragments of rib and skull, the bleached remnants of a slaughtered civilization.

  Now, I do not know for a fact that a German nun named Irmingard was responsible for bringing Helmut Krause’s photographs from Syria to the United States almost a century ago. But according to a newsletter story the Friends of Armenia published in January 1916, the woman was scheduled to speak that month at the Unitarian Church on Arlington Street in Boston. She was a guest of an American missionary named Alicia Wells. And I would find one of Krause’s images—not the devastating portrait of Karine Petrosian, which was most likely deemed too explicit for a newspaper reader’s gentle sensibilities then—on a microfiche of a story in The Boston Globe headlined “Barbarism in the Desert.” Consequently, I am going to presume that Sister Irmingard, perhaps in collusion with the formidable Miss Wells, brought the plates to America. It is clear that my grandmother thought little of both women—particularly Alicia Wells—but my sense is that the missionary and the nun believed in their work, and when Ryan Martin needed them, they risked their lives to secretly squire the images to America.

  Meanwhile, Martin remained in Aleppo through 1923. He worked tirelessly on behalf of the Armenian survivors. After Aleppo, he would serve in Livorno, Italy—what had to have been an infinitely more civilized post—and then finished his career in Ontario.

  My grandparents left Aleppo together in March 1916 and married in Boston in 1917. After the war, my grandfather tried to find his brother, Garo, through the Red Cross and different aid agencies that were working in the Caucasus Mountains and Armenia, but he never had any success. He and my grandmother eventually settled in Westchester rather than in or around Boston because Armen was offered a job as a civil engineer with the ever-expanding commuter railroad north of Manhattan. He would work there until he retired.

  The last correspondence I found between Elizabeth and Nevart was a letter my grandmother received from her friend that was dated October 13, 1921. Nevart was living with Hatoun in Yerevan, and clearly life in the city was dire. The Armenians in the preceding years had battled Turks, Georgians, and Azerbaijanis. (Who knows? Perhaps we don’t play well in the sandbox.) Nevart and Hatoun never did move in with Dr. Akcam and his wife, but I do not know whether it was because he passed away from cholera—which, based on one cryptic reference in a letter, might have been the case—or because she was reunited with her nephews in Aleppo and there wasn’t room for them, too, at the physician’s. In any event, food was scarce in Yerevan in 1921 and so was fuel: Nevart was worried that when winter set in she and Hatoun wouldn’t be able to heat the tiny room in which they lived. The one-hundred-and-two-year-old butcher I interviewed told me those years were horrific, and while he hated to be pessimistic, he rather doubted the pair had survived far into the Stalin regime. But, he said, Armenians are survivors and you never know.

  Indeed. You never do know. As Nevart had said about herself and Hatoun when Elizabeth had first come upon them in the square beneath that great hulking citadel, half-dead from hunger, the sun, and the long walk through the desert, they were unkillable. Which is why, perhaps, I have one last footnote to share. When I was writing this book, I gave a speech about my research and my grandparents’ experience at a library in Pasadena, California. Among the people in the audience was a young buyer for a bookstore there. Her name was Jessica. After my talk, she approached me because she was part Armenian and happened to have what she thought was a pleasant coincidence to impart: she had a grandmother named Hatoun who had died when Jessica had been a little girl. But her mother had told her that Hatoun had been born in Adana and lived in Aleppo and Yerevan before being sent to Lebanon with other orphans in 1922, and then on to America. Jessica knew nothing about a Nevart in her family’s history. Nevart—if there was any connection here—had disappeared, in all likelihood perishing in the tempests and epidemics that convulsed the Armenian republic in its brief postwar incarnation.

  But Jessica told me that no one viewed her grandmother as especially troubled or dark. Everyone knew well that Hatoun had been a survivor, but the woman didn’t dwell on it. Nor had Hatoun struck her daughter or granddaughter as inordinately so
mber.

  “Tell me anything at all you can remember about your grandmother,” I said to Jessica. “Anything. Any memory at all.”

  She sighed, a woman half my age with auburn hair and round eyes and the most lovely tattoo of a rose on the side of her neck. “One time,” she began, “when she and my grandfather were visiting my family, there was a blackout. I guess I was five. We were without power for hours and hours, it seemed—remember, I was really little—and she read to me by flashlight almost the whole time.”

  “She must have gone through a lot of books,” I said, imagining the picture books my husband and I had read to our children when they were that age.

  Jessica shook her head. “Just one—and we didn’t come close to finishing it that night. But it was my grandmother’s favorite book, and she read it to me whenever she visited or whenever I went to my grandparents’ house. Good Lord, she named my mother after the girl.”

  I felt a small shiver and I knew instantly that this was indeed Nevart’s and Elizabeth’s Hatoun, the child they had saved nearly a century ago. “Your mother’s name is Alice, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “God, how did you know?”

  I tried to tell her, I tried my best to explain. But my words were lost to my visions of the sweeping desert sands that will forever hold the bones of Jessica’s ancestors—and mine. My body trembled with the sorts of hiccupping sobs that had engulfed me when I had been leaving the museum in Watertown a year earlier and when I had stood in the back of an elementary school auditorium and watched my own daughter sing. This time, however, there was a ripple of happiness amid all those tears, because among the cadavers who would be raised from the Aleppo dead was this woman’s grandmother: a quiet, watchful, intense little girl named Hatoun.

  Author’s Note

  The centennial of the Armenian genocide is nearing. April 24, 2015, marks the one-hundred-year anniversary of the roundup of the Armenian intellectuals, professionals, editors, and religious leaders in Constantinople, most of whom eventually were executed. It was, arguably, the start of the most nightmarish eight years in Armenian history—though the very worst would occur in the subsequent eighteen months, culminating with the 1916 massacres at Ras-el-Ain and Der-el-Zor.

  I have tried to ground this fiction in the historical particulars of the genocide and to convey a sense of what Aleppo and Gallipoli might have been like in 1915. But although I used the memoirs of some of the women and men who were there, this novel is a work of imagination. Consequently, although Ryan Donald Martin was inspired by the American consul in Aleppo, Jesse B. Jackson; and Ulrich Lange was inspired by the German consul there, Walter Rossler, so little is really known about either individual that it seemed unfair to drop the real men into the novel. Nevertheless, some of Martin’s and Lange’s writing or remarks in this story come directly from Jackson’s and Rossler’s actual correspondence.

  Acknowledgments

  This is my fourteenth novel, and I am as dependent as ever on the wisdom of others. First of all, I am grateful to my Armenian grandparents, dead three and four decades now, who provided the living room—the Ottoman Annex, as my mother once called it—that on some level inspired this novel. Armen and Elizabeth most assuredly are not a loosely veiled version of my grandparents, but this book might not exist were it not for their oud and pool table and boregs—and the thick books filled with an alphabet I could not begin to decipher but that my grandmother always wanted me to read. Likewise, Rose Mary Muench, my beloved aunt and a second mother to me in ways too many to count, and my father, Aram Bohjalian, were always there to provide a glimpse into my family’s history—or to offer conjecture, speculation, and incredibly interesting fabrication when the truth was elusive.

  Khatchig Mouradian, editor of The Armenian Weekly and a tireless voice of reason in Armenian/Turkish dialogues, was both an early advocate of this novel and then an early reader. His counsel was invaluable and always offered with patience. I’m not sure I would have embarked on this book without his encouragement. Likewise, I am indebted to Peter Balakian—poet and memoirist and historian—whose writings were profoundly inspirational and educational. I am also deeply grateful to Nicole Vartanian at Hunter College for reading the manuscript and offering advice on—among other things—my choice of names; to Todd Gustofson at the Eastman House in Rochester for the background he offered on the Ernemann Minor falling plate camera that Helmut uses; and to Gary Lind-Sinanian of the Armenian Library and Museum of America in Watertown, Massachusetts, for the extra time he spent with me when I toured the museum.

  A great many books, memoirs, and articles were invaluable resources, including Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1918, by Grigoris Balakian; Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past: A Memoir and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, both by Peter Balakian; “ ‘A Fate Worse than Dying’: Sexual Violence during the Armenian Genocide” by Matthias Bjørnlund, in Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century, Dagmar Herzog, editor; “Power Politics, Prejudice, Protest, and Propaganda: A Reassessment of the German Role in the Armenian Genocide in WWI,” by Donald Bloxham, in The Armenian Genocide and the Shoah, Hans-Lukas Kieser and Dominik J. Schaller, editors; “The Baghdad Railway and the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1916: A Case Study in German Resistance and Complicity,” by Hilmar Kaiser, in Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide, Richard G. Hovannisian, editor; The Tragedy of Bitlis, by Grace H. Knapp; and Armenian Atrocities, The Murder of a Nation, by Arnold Joseph Toynbee and James Bryce. There were also three novels that were at once deeply moving and helpful from a historical perspective: Carol Edgarian’s Rise the Euphrates; Mark T. Mustian’s The Gendarme; and Franz Werfel’s magisterial 1933 epic, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.

  Big thanks as well to Jane Gelfman and her staff at Gelfman Schneider—Cathy Gleason and Victoria Marini; to Arlynn Greenbaum at Authors Unlimited; to Dean Schramm at the Schramm Group; and to Todd Doughty, Suzanne Herz, Sonny Mehta, Anne Messitte, Roz Parr, Russell Perreault, John Pitts, Alison Rich, Kate Runde, Bill Thomas, and the whole wondrous team at the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group—and, of course, monumentally big thanks to my editor there, Jenny Jackson, who was insightful and wise and often very, very funny as she helped steer this boat of a book in ways great and small and far too numerous to list here. Jenny, it has been such a pleasure to work with you.

  Finally, I am unbelievably blessed to be married to Victoria Blewer, who patiently reads every single word—and has read every single word since we were freshmen in college. That is no less than two and a quarter million words, and might be considerably more.

  I thank you all so, so much.

  A Note About the Author

  Chris Bohjalian is the author of fifteen books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Double Bind, The Night Strangers, and Skeletons at the Feast. His novel Midwives was a number one New York Times bestseller and a selection of Oprah’s Book Club. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages, and three of his novels have become movies (Secrets of Eden, Midwives, and Past the Bleachers). He lives in Vermont with his wife and daughter.

  Visit him at www.chrisbohjalian.com, find him on www.facebook.com, or follow him on www.twitter.com.

  Books by Chris Bohjalian

  NOVELS

  The Night Strangers (2011)

  Secrets of Eden (2010)

  Skeletons at the Feast (2008)

  The Double Bind (2007)

  Before You Know Kindness (2004)

  The Buffalo Soldier (2002)

  Trans-Sister Radio (2000)

  The Law of Similars (1999)

  Midwives (1997)

  Water Witches (1995)

  Past the Bleachers (1992)

  Hangman (1991)

  A Killing in the Real World (1988)

  ESSAY COLLECTION

  Idyll Banter (2003)

  ; Chris Bohjalian, The Sandcastle Girls

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