The Sandcastle Girls

by Chris Bohjalian

  Now she is sitting before him in the American compound’s living room, in a high-backed armchair that is too gaudy and too ornate for his tastes. The cushions are purple and have gold tassels. There is an animal’s face that appears to be a lion carved into the end of each armrest. It is unseemly. Belongs in a palace. He stands with his hands in his jacket pockets, hoping he exudes calmness and reason. “She would remind you that although we are in a different world, decorum remains constant,” he says. “That is especially true when you are around soldiers. Soldiers on leave—”

  “They weren’t on leave, Father,” she corrects him.

  “Soldiers, period, tend to presume that they can take liberties. I want you to remember yourself—and to be wary.” He is glad she is with him; she can do good here and see how she has been blessed. Then she can return to Boston, marry, and settle down. Her life will resume a proper course.

  She rises and kisses him at the very edge of his sideburns on his cheek. Already his forehead has started to burn. “I will remember myself,” she says to him, smiling. “Thank you. Now, I am going to go and write down what we saw today and all that we did. Good night.” As she climbs the dark stairway to her room, she finds it interesting that her father assumed she had reciprocated the attraction that the German soldiers seemed to feel for her. But, then again, perhaps she should not be surprised. They were tall and blond. Still, the truth was that she hadn’t thought much about that pair at all. She had thought almost entirely of the Armenian.

  MY GRANDMOTHER WAS AN ODAR—AN OUTSIDER. SO WAS MY mother, technically, though by then my Armenian lineage already had been diluted by the Bostonians. Moreover, my Armenian grandfather had no family remaining by the time he immigrated to the United States, so it was far more likely that it would have been he who would have been the outsider in my grandmother’s world in New England. Yet that didn’t happen. My grandmother wound up the odar in a circle of Armenians in a Westchester suburb of New York City, in large measure because she was, pure and simple, as strong-willed as her father, and because she wanted to be free of the Brahmins who had raised her.

  Now, I don’t believe that Armenians are any more or less clannish than any number of nationalities that have flocked to the United States over the last four hundred years, and my parents’ wedding is a case in point. It was actually my Philadelphia grandfather—my mother’s father—who refused to attend. My Armenian grandfather? His son was doing exactly what he had done years earlier and marrying an American girl. Another Wasp, as a matter of fact. He had no objections at all. My Philly grandfather, however, would not witness his daughter marrying that “son of a rug maker.” My Armenian grandfather never made rugs—and why making rugs was a slur remains unfathomable to me—but you get the drift. And so my parents got married without him. My mother stopped speaking to her father—who had not, in any event, played a large role in her life since her parents had divorced years earlier.

  Eleven months after the wedding, my mother’s father was going to be in Manhattan on business and offered to take her to lunch. He had left Philadelphia by then and was living in Chicago with a woman precariously close to his daughter’s age. My mother agreed to meet him in the restaurant inside B. Altman, one of those stuffy “Ladies’ Mile” department stores in Manhattan that, along with Arnold Constable and Best & Co., are now all but extinct. I always associate them in my mind with hatboxes. As soon as they had sat down at the table he said, “I can’t believe how you’re dressed. Can’t that husband of yours afford to buy you a decent skirt? Right after lunch we’re getting you some decent clothes.” And that was the end. My mother stood up and left the restaurant, disappeared into the store, and never spoke to her father again.

  My Armenian grandfather, on the other hand, could not have missed the hints of his own wife in his daughter-in-law—How nice, another odar!—and was downright euphoric when she gave birth to twins. He doted on my brother and me and seemed to find our blond hair a source of unending wonder and, yes, humor. (Over the years, my brother’s hair grew steadily darker, and by the time we were in the third grade, no one who hadn’t known us since we were toddlers would have believed we were twins and that, once upon a time, he had been as towheaded as I.) We grew up ten minutes from my Armenian grandfather and his American wife, but three hours from our Philadelphia grandmother, so I spent considerably more time with the Armenians than with what my father referred to affectionately as the Bryn Mawr mafia.

  Obviously my ancestors from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts were immigrants, too. Even those original Bostonians were fleeing religious persecution. And that, in some ways, is what the Turkish Armenian hostilities were all about. A new regime in a largely Muslim nation decided to try to rid itself of its Christian minority. Is that an oversimplification? Of course. The Muslims and Christians had lived side by side for centuries. It was, arguably, the notions of nationalism and modernization—the idea of a homogeneous Turkey—that led to the slaughter. But I can’t resist finding parallels between my Puritan and my Armenian ancestors. The big difference? The Bostonians simply came here three centuries before the Armenians.

  EARLY IN THE evening, Elizabeth leans against the doorway and stares at her bedroom on the second floor of the American compound, oddly entranced by the mists of mosquito netting that drape the bed. The room is at least as large as her bedroom in Boston, and dwarfs the rooms that she shared over the past four years with students at Mount Holyoke. She can’t decide how this makes her feel; she had anticipated that her quarters would be more primitive, and had rather liked the sense of heroism that she had expected would accompany a little deprivation. Moreover, there are all those refugees encamped in the square, the lucky ones with some rags or a tattered blanket for a mattress, but many sleeping on stone. There is Nevart, the woman whose husband went to medical school in London. She sighs, aware that she has done nothing wrong, but finding herself nonetheless awash in both guilt and the unexpected beauty of her corner of this ancient world.

  Downstairs, she hears commotion and leans into the hallway.

  “Yes, I believe she’s upstairs,” Consul Martin’s assistant, David Hebert, is saying in response to an inquiry. “Is she expecting you?”

  “No. I just thought …”

  “Go ahead,” David urges.

  But already Elizabeth is standing before the small mirror on the dresser, the glass bronzed and splotchy with age, but still sufficiently functional that she can appraise her hair and her cheeks and the collar of her blouse against her neck. She is no longer listening to the exchange downstairs because she recognized instantly the voice of their guest: it was the Armenian engineer they had met yesterday at the café. She takes a breath to calm herself, to still the pleasantly frenzied ferment bubbling inside her. Just then she hears David call up to her from the landing, informing her that a gentleman has arrived who says they are friends and was hoping to see her. His voice, she decides, lacks its usual ironic detachment; he is impressed with Armen’s presumption. She is, too. She adjusts her sleeves and her corset and then turns on her heels and starts down the corridor toward the stairs, restraining her desire to run.

  ARMEN SPEAKS ENGLISH because he attended Euphrates College in Harput. He tells Elizabeth that he was long gone by the time the Turks executed most of the faculty there and transformed the school buildings into military barracks. By then he was with his two brothers in the hills outside of Van. Clearly there is much more to his story—a family history that remains unfathomable to Elizabeth—but she doesn’t dare ask. At least not yet.

  “I was sure your father was a minister,” he says now, the sun but a thin red band on the western horizon. They are sitting beside each other in the ornate wrought iron chairs in the courtyard of the American compound. Her father and Ryan Martin have returned and are in the consul’s office, sending a letter to the American ambassador in Constantinople and her first, lengthy journal entry to Endicott’s group, the Friends of Armenia, back in Boston. The courtyard has high stone wa
lls, with one grand archway opening onto the street. At night, massive double-leaved wooden doors seal the Americans inside; the doors are locked shut with three thick iron bars and a wooden girder that Elizabeth has guessed is six inches square. On each side of the doors, surrounding them like sentinels, is a slender break in the stone walls filled with yet more wrought iron: a jail-like grid that allows a person inside to see out, but no outsider ever to slide in.

  “Nothing so honorable as a minister. Just a banker,” she tells him. “Not that there is anything dishonorable about being a banker. Actually, I come from a long line of well-intentioned bankers. My grandfather and great-grandfather were both bankers—and abolitionists.”

  “I don’t know that word,” Armen says, and so she gives him a brief history. As she speaks, however, she finds herself periodically losing her train of thought as she casts sideways glances at him. It seems as if he never takes his gaze off her, and when their eyes meet, the air has the promise of a burgeoning thunderstorm.

  “Your country always seems so sane compared to Turkey,” he says when she is finished. “So normal. But it’s not, is it?”

  “We have our oddities,” she admits.

  “You and your father should be praised for coming here.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Why perhaps?”

  She smiles. “I also come from a long line of people who question our own motives. Even the best intentions can be suspect. And the truth is, neither my father nor I bring any special qualifications to the venture. The other members of our party will be much more valuable.”

  “Then why have you traveled here?”

  “My father is attracted to accountability. It’s the banker in him. He raised a good amount of money. He gave a good amount of money. And he has heard that only a portion of the relief ever makes its way here from Egypt or America.”

  “And you?”

  She is not discomfited by the question, but it defies easy explanation. “Well, I am not a teacher, but I could be. And while I am not a nurse, I have some training in nursing—though it all did seem rather fruitless the other day. But, honestly, I am not scared of sickness. I was not at my best our first hours here, but I have since regained my footing. My expectation is that I will be of most use in the hospital.”

  “Once you perfect your Armenian,” he says, teasing her.

  “Is it that bad?”

  “I can help you with your verbs. Verbs help most sentences.”

  She smiles. “But there is work I can do even before I am fluent.”

  He nods. “And in the meantime?”

  “I am in charge of our correspondence with the Friends of Armenia back home. I am keeping them abreast of our work. We want to be sure that Americans know how dire the situation here has become.”

  “I knew the Americans in Van and Harput. Missionaries and teachers. They were very …” and he pauses, incapable in the end of choosing the right word. Finally he continues, “They loved Van. They loved the gardens. The lake. It’s beautiful. And the city was mostly Armenian. Fifty thousand people and more than half of them Armenian.”

  “I’ve never been there, of course. Until recently, it seems, I had never been anywhere—other than the breadth of Massachusetts. Ask me about Boston. Or South Hadley. Or Cape Cod. But this is my first trip abroad. Maybe, in the end, that’s the real reason why I’ve come,” she says, and in her mind she sees the faces of the man who asked her to marry him and the man who, it was clear, was no longer capable of such a commitment. Both, in their own ways, were crestfallen when she ended their relationships.

  “They’re almost all dead now,” he says with a sigh, and instantly she is back in the moment. “Or gone. There are no Armenians left in Van.”

  “Is your family from Van or Harput? You said you went to Euphrates College.”

  “Van.”

  Two birds alight on the branches of a spindly poplar. At first she presumes they are hawks. On a second look, however, she realizes they are vultures.

  THE NEXT DAY, Elizabeth is wearing a large-brimmed straw hat against the sun. It is not quite as grandiose as a merry widow, but it came with two ostentatious ostrich feathers in the crown, which she removed prior to leaving the compound this morning. She meets Ryan Martin in the square with the women, and he appears to be almost giddy. He has with him a young Turkish boy about eleven or twelve who works in the hospital kitchen, and each of them is carrying a great burlap sack of bread.

  “It’s not real bread,” he says, dropping his sack on the ground and wiping his brow with the sleeve of his jacket. “It’s only hospital bread. But it’s filling.”

  “What does that mean?” she asks him.

  “Hospital bread? It’s dark, half-baked stuff, filled out with grit and straw. But we fried it in some butter this boy commandeered—I didn’t ask where—and it’s more or less edible.”

  They begin to distribute it to the women, some of whom are too weak to show much enthusiasm. One elderly refugee, her mouth collapsed in upon itself because all of her teeth are gone, says something in Armenian to Ryan that Elizabeth only half understands. But he shakes his head no and pushes a thick piece of the fried bread into her gnarled, sunburned hands.

  “Did she not want any bread?” she asks him a moment later.

  “She wanted me to bring her share to the orphanage. She has two small children there.”

  “I thought …” she begins, and then stops, puckering her lips as she digests this information.

  “You thought what?” he asks.

  “I thought she was a grandmother.”

  “Severe malnourishment will do that to you—as will the sun,” he says, and he motions toward her hat. “Very wise,” he adds. “And very pretty. You won’t see many hats like that in Aleppo.” Then he turns his attention to the far corner of the square, where he sees a wall of women—nine or ten of them—standing with their backs to him. “I wonder what in the world that’s all about,” he murmurs, and he motions for the Turkish boy to continue distributing the bread. Then he starts toward the group, Elizabeth following close on his heels.

  In a moment she sees what they are watching and her heart sinks. Then she finds herself growing angry: the two German soldiers she met the other day are using a box camera to photograph a woman deportee. Helmut, the fellow with the scar, is behind the tripod while Eric is posing her, and the lieutenant is actually laughing at something as he pulls down her tattered check blouse and positions her. He seems to want her to do something ridiculous and demeaning with her arms, perhaps stand like a ballerina. Elizabeth is about to race into the circle to stop him—How dare they reduce these women to a carnival freak show?—when Ryan takes her arm and says, “Please. Let me.” He, too, is excited, but he isn’t angry at all. Instantly she understands her mistake: the Germans aren’t making fun of the Armenians; they are chronicling what they are seeing as if they are journalists. The woman has a line of hideous, suppurating sores running like a necklace across her collarbone and along the left side of her face.

  “Is this your camera?” Ryan asks the lieutenant.

  “No. It’s Helmut’s,” he answers, extending his hand to Ryan. Then he bows slightly toward Elizabeth. “Good morning,” he says to her.

  “The Turks cannot possibly be allowing you to photograph this,” the American consul continues excitedly. “You know it’s illegal to take pictures of the refugees or the deportations. You could be jailed. Court-martialed.”

  “Obviously we have not advertised what we’re doing,” Helmut answers. “We have not put up posters asking for models.”

  “Djemal Pasha himself has made it clear: photographing the Armenians is like photographing in a war zone. It’s espionage. It’s treasonous.”

  “Well, then, please don’t tell him,” Eric says, his tone almost playful. Djemal Pasha is the commander of the Ottoman Fourth Army, the Turkish Army group in Syria and Palestine.

  “How long have you been doing this?” Ryan asks Helmut.
/>   “Two weeks.”

  “And no one knows?”

  “No one knows.”

  “Except the victims,” Elizabeth observes, watching as the woman with the sores begins to wilt in the heat. She leans against the wall and modestly pulls her blouse back over her collarbone.

  “Well, yes,” Helmut agrees. “There was a gendarme on the other side of the square. Is he still dozing?”

  “I believe so,” Ryan says.

  “Good. Just in case, we have these women shielding our work. Someday we’re going to bring the plates back to Europe. I’m not sure what we’ll do with them there,” Helmut explains. “Some Germans are as appalled at what is occurring as you Americans. But Turkey is an ally, and the government has other issues. The last thing Germany wants is to create a rift with an ally who is tying up Russians in the Caucasus and British and French in the Dardanelles.”

  “Time is everything,” Ryan reminds them, his agitation causing his voice to grow a little desperate and shrill. “It’s up to us to get the word out—and bring help in. Can’t you ship the plates back now or send them to Germany via courier?”

  “Oh, the Turks would never allow that,” the lieutenant says. “They would be confiscated and destroyed. You know that. You know how rigid the censorship is around the deportations.”

  “Then give them to us,” Ryan says. “Give them to me. Maybe I can find a way to get them developed.”

  Eric and Helmut glance at each other. “Let me think about it,” Helmut says. “I never planned on letting the material out of my sight until I had printed the photographs myself.”

  “But you understand the urgency, don’t you?”

  Helmut rubs the scar on the side of his face thoughtfully, but says nothing. Meanwhile, Elizabeth turns to Eric. “When we arrived, you were laughing,” she begins. “I thought … I actually thought …”