The Sandcastle Girls

by Chris Bohjalian

  “You thought what?”

  “Never mind.”

  But he understands, nodding, and smiles boyishly. Once again he is in her mind a big jolly dog: “I was probably observing Helmut here pretending that he’s an artist. There’s nothing more comic than when an engineer uses words like composition.”

  Abruptly one of the standing women—part of the shield, as Helmut had described it—taps the photographer on the shoulder and motions behind her. The gendarme has awoken and is marching toward them with his rifle slung over his shoulder. As if the tripod with the camera is a bride on her wedding night, Helmut scoops it up off the ground with both arms, while Eric grabs the box with the photographic plates. The Germans smile at Ryan and Elizabeth—Helmut raises his eyebrows almost roguishly—and then disappear down the nearby alley without saying a word.

  “The women were looking at that refugee’s neck,” Ryan says casually to the gendarme, a sleepy-faced young man with eyes that are lost to the bridge of his nose and lips that are scabbed over from days and days in the sun. The guard glances at the woman himself, shrugs, and without saying a word returns to the spit of shade beneath a tent flap where he had been napping. On his way there he sees the boy with the sack of bread and reaches in for a great handful.

  ARMEN RETURNS TO the square, as he does most days, and gently washes the face of the girl with seashell-like ears because she won’t wash it herself. He presumes they will insist she bathe properly once the child is brought from this encampment in the center of the square to the orphanage. The water in the shallow bowl is warm; nothing here stays cold for very long. A nurse told him the temperature yesterday reached 115 degrees in the center of the city.

  “Her name is Hatoun,” Nevart tells him. “She doesn’t like to touch her face.”

  “Why not?” he asks her. He imagines that she had once been the sort of rough-and-tumble girl who outran and outfought the boys. He has a niece like that. Had. There is no reason to believe she is still alive.

  But Nevart doesn’t answer. She seems about to respond, when Hatoun—who, he realizes, has not spoken a word—looks at the woman and her eyes are defiant and charged. So instead of answering his question, Nevart simply shrugs.

  LATER THAT DAY Ryan Martin stands for a long, quiet moment in the afternoon sun on the steps outside the hospital and tries to clear his mind of the Armenian woman—the sheer razor ridge of her cheekbones—who had just died in her bed. Her clavicle was so pronounced that her corpse had reminded him of a bat. The skin on her stomach had hung in almost perfectly symmetrical ripples. A doctor had presumed he could save her; he had been mistaken. She mattered to Ryan because she was a music teacher who had gone to school at Oberlin and lived for seven years in Ohio before returning to Zeitun. Ryan himself had grown up in tiny Paulding, Ohio.

  He dabs at his forehead with a handkerchief. He closes his eyes as a dagger of guilt pricks his heart: they all should matter to him. He reminds himself that they all do. But this woman? They had a friend in common from Oberlin. A classics professor there.

  How in the name of God does a woman go from a conservatory in Ohio to this nightmarish hospital at the edge of a desert in Aleppo? How in the name of God did he wind up here? He thinks of his wife and wishes she were with him this summer, rather than tending to her ailing parents in America.

  Viewing this Armenian’s body had felt to him a violation in a way that viewing the bodies of the myriad others did not. Those others had been strangers.

  Back at the American compound he is handed a lengthy note from Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador in Constantinople. It seems that the Armenian patriarch there met with the grand vizier, but had left in frustration. The Turks are adamant that they will protect themselves from the Armenians and their collusion with the Russians. This is a war and they haven’t a choice.

  • • •

  ELIZABETH STANDS BESIDE Armen on a balcony, her arms resting on a stone balustrade near the top of the ruined, now uninhabited palace. It once was a part of the citadel here. Armen has brought her up the hill to the castle and then another 150 feet into the air. To reach this balcony, they crossed a moat, walked gingerly across a narrow bridge linking great mounds of rubble, passed through iron gates, and climbed a winding staircase in a tower that must have dwarfed most buildings in Boston. When he had taken her hand the first time to help her up and over the debris that littered the courtyard, she had trembled ever so slightly and felt her heart beat a little faster.

  The fortress is millennia older than any structure in Massachusetts and rises from the city like a volcano. It is even more ancient than the Anasazi ruins she has heard about in the American southwest. She makes a mental note to add this detail to the correspondence she will be sharing with her mother and the Friends of Armenia. The stones and tiling, though largely faded and chipped, still have ghosts of their original, palatial grandeur. In her mind’s eye she sees extravagant tapestries and a lacquered ceiling studded with jewels, and an Ottoman sultan on a canopied throne. She envisions eunuchs and harem girls. Tasseled throw pillows and precious carpets. Tiles of turquoise and titian and cobalt blue. Once more she was unprepared for such beauty in the midst of such pain.

  He smiles when she tells him of her imaginings and suggests that Massachusetts would seem exotic to him. She shakes her head and tells him of Boston and South Hadley. She describes for him her mother’s obsession with her two cocker spaniels, and her Mount Holyoke roommate’s immense gifts as a soprano. She shares with him stories of the voyage across the Atlantic: the old fellow on the ship who had been a student with Woodrow Wilson, the Frenchman who could not understand why the United States had not entered the war. She describes how much softer the sand in the dunes on Cape Cod feels compared to the grit here in Syria, and how she once built a sandcastle near Truro. She tells him she gets seasick. She prefers cats. She likes Dickens. She talks and talks because whenever she is silent she finds herself looking at him and her breath grows a little short.

  HELMUT KRAUSE KNEELS on the floor and slides the carton with the last of the unused photographic plates under his bed. Beside them is a crate with the images he has taken already, and beside that is his Ernemann Minor falling plate camera. And alongside all of them is the wooden tripod, currently folded shut. It is a small production to find room for everything.

  “Sometimes I think it would be easier for you to paint them,” Armen says to him, after exhaling a blue stream of tobacco smoke. He is referring to the Armenian deportees. After the haze has disappeared, he sits back and stares at the metal mouthpiece at the tip of the hookah.

  “Paints and easels take up space, too. Besides …” Helmut pauses after he has stood up.

  “Besides what?”

  He stands and brushes dust off the knees of his pants. “You’ve never been to Italy, right?”

  “Never,” Armen agrees.

  “Well, a painting would be like the frescoes inside the Duomo in Florence. In the cathedral.” Helmut had studied the construction of Brunelleschi’s dome when he was in engineering school, and saw Vasari’s and Zuccari’s gruesome presentation of the damned in Hell. The frescoes were part of The Last Judgment. “The images of the people are horrible, but inconceivable. They are too ghastly to be moving.”

  “Any gluttons?” Armen asks.

  “Among the damned? Probably.”

  He shrugs. “That’s different, too. I’d wager the dead in the Duomo at least have a little meat on their bones.”

  Helmut allows himself a small, mordant laugh, but then grows serious once again. “Were any of the women in the latest convoy from Harput?” he inquires.

  “No.”

  “You asked?”

  “I always ask,” Armen tells him. “I ask everyone.”

  “Just because …”

  “I understand they’re dead. I do. I understand what the women in the first convoy from Harput told me. But maybe someday I’ll know where. How.”

  “And that would make you
feel better?”

  “Knowing is always better than not knowing,” he tells Helmut.

  “I suppose.” He motions for Armen to pass him the hookah, and the German cradles the base in one hand and the hose in the other and takes a long drag. Then: “Someday I want to photograph you.”

  “I’m neither starving nor sick. What could I possibly add to your portraits of a dying race?”

  Helmut studies his face. On the stairs they hear the lieutenant taking the steps two at a time. A moment later Eric races into the room and throws his rucksack on a wicker chair.

  “You Armenians have very big eyes,” Helmut says, almost oblivious to his roommate’s return. “Especially some of the girls. Huge round eyes. You must know that. They seem to absorb everything—the good and the bad. And your eyes are no exception.”

  “Listen to him,” Eric says to Armen. “Let the man take your picture. You know he does very good work.” Then Eric grabs his shaving brush and razor from a thin shelf on the windowless wall, and smiles in a way that he knows is at once rakish and silly. “I just met a German girl. A missionary, but still: a German girl! You may go for those Armenian girls’ eyes, Helmut, but give me a girl from Cologne any day.” Then he is off to shave, and Armen is left wondering how much longer he will stay here in Aleppo and search the convoys of dying women for anyone who can tell him anything more about where and how his wife and young daughter most likely perished.

  YOU THINK I WANT TO DEMONIZE THE TURKS. I DON’T. I HARBOR no grudge.

  The first boy I ever kissed—seriously kissed, that is, not dry, awkward pecks on the cheek or the lips—was Turkish. He knew I was Armenian. I knew he was Turkish. Hormones mattered far more than history.

  Just before I started ninth grade, three years after my Armenian grandfather died, my family moved to Miami, Florida, from a suburb of New York City, and we moved there the Friday before Labor Day weekend. Then, on that first Tuesday, I went to my new orthodontist—a sadist, it would turn out, if ever there was one. (Just for the record, my brother has always had perfect teeth. This has never seemed fair. Why the female twin should have been the one cursed in adolescence with a ramshackle picket fence inside her mouth was always incomprehensible to me.) The doctor gave me some orthodontic headgear that looked like the business end of a backhoe, and I had to wear the device for four hours a day, no more and no less, which meant I could not wear it when I was sleeping. And since being the most awkward girl in Hialeah-Miami Lakes Senior High School—the girl with the excavating bucket cuddling her upper gums—was not high on my list of aspirations, I would come home from school, put in my headgear, and sit alone with my homework on the dock beside the man-made lake in our backyard. There wasn’t much privacy, because the homes in the development were built side by side like Monopoly houses and the neighborhood was so new that there wasn’t more than a single palm tree in any backyard, but the only other teenagers on my street were two older boys who played varsity football and thus were at practice at that time of the day, and a senior girl who, as far as I could tell, was a queen bee who was never going to acknowledge the presence of an awkward ninth grader.

  Across the lake, however, was a boy with a small sailboat, and on my third day on the dock he took his Sunfish and tacked his way into the wind toward me. As he neared, I recognized him from the hallways at school. He was in my grade. Quickly I removed my headgear and waited, wondering. He was wearing a Miami Dolphins practice jersey and white tennis shorts, and when he was within a dozen yards of the dock he introduced himself to me as Berk. It was 1979. I presumed he was the son of Cuban émigrés—our neighborhood seemed to be filled entirely with people from New York, Michigan, and Cuba—and that Berk was a nickname. No, he would tell me, he was Turkish. His skin was copper, and rock stars would have killed for his hair. It was coal black and fell like a manic thrill ride over his shoulders. The next day, on the screened porch that covered my family’s small pool like a dome, we kissed for the first time.

  When, some weeks later, it was clear to my parents that we were dating, outwardly my father seemed only bemused. But occasionally I would understand his feelings were at once deeper and more complex. One evening at dinner, after he had returned home from the video production company he ran, he asked me, “So Berk. Your new friend. Have you wondered how his grandparents and yours would have gotten along?”

  My brother, who at the time was far more of a student of history than I was, answered, “Now? They would have played shuffleboard and been fine. But in World War One? Berk’s family would have either killed Grandpa or hidden him. But probably killed him.”

  I understood he was only trying to be funny, but I was awash in self-pity. Unlike my brother—who was on the junior varsity football team and fitting in rather nicely in South Florida—I had never been happy about the move. I had no close friends yet, and the last thing I wanted was the character of my new boyfriend impugned. After all, he had done nothing, and anything the Turks had done had occurred six and a half decades earlier. The genocide—there it is, there’s the word!—might just as well have occurred during the Peloponnesian War.

  My mother took one of her typical, mannered rabbit bites of the chicken breast on her plate, chewed carefully, and said to my father, “Honey, does it really matter?”

  “It’s true, Dad,” said my brother, and for the briefest of moments I thought I was going to be spared the toxins that usually spill from siblings over family dinners. Nope. After a pause he added, “I mean, if Laura and Berk want to suck face all afternoon at the pool when they come home from school, who cares? Beats doing homework.”

  I started to deny we did anything of the sort, but my father gently raised one hand like a stop sign. “That’s not what this is about. This is about history and what your grandfather survived—and what he lost. You have no idea, and I just want to be sure that …”

  He was being completely unreasonable. I hadn’t forgotten the bits and pieces of my grandparents’ stories that I had picked up over the years. But the only good thing I had at that point in my life, in my opinion, was a boy named Berk, and so I pushed myself away from the table and with spectacular melodramatic fury screamed at my father for moving us all to Miami, and went to my room, where I sobbed until I grew bored.

  Then I walked over to Berk’s.

  ARMEN FINDS HIMSELF describing for Elizabeth a picnic on a cliff overlooking Lake Van, just days after he and Karine were married. The next day he was going to return to Harput, and she was going to be joining him there as his wife. But that would be tomorrow. In this memory, they are seated on a blanket on a moss-covered stretch of rock, and occasionally he plays something for her on his brother’s oud.

  His mind is in two moments as he speaks with this American, as together they walk the streets of Aleppo. He is, ostensibly, showing her around: Here is the telegraph office, here is the post office, here is another café where she and her father might enjoy small cups of thick Turkish coffee. This street leads to the quarter of the city where the Turkish Army has rows of barracks.

  In reality, however, this walk is merely an excuse to be with her. Perhaps because they are both staring straight ahead or at whatever point of interest they are passing, he is finding it easier to relive that picnic three summers distant. He tells Elizabeth of how warm the sun had felt on his forehead and the sound of the small but relentless waves in the water below. He does not describe for her the feel of Karine’s fingers on the palm of his hand, but the sensation returns with the clarity of a church bell. Her touch was so gentle as she ran the tip of her finger—and occasionally her nail—over the lines there that he found himself shivering. He feels it again now. This is why it seems to him as if his mind is moving liminally between two places at once.

  “I had brought a bottle of pomegranate wine with me,” he tells Elizabeth. He recalls the aroma when he had finally uncorked it. “I am sure you have never had pomegranate wine.”

  “It’s true. I’m not sure I have ever even tasted a
pomegranate.”

  At that picnic he had gone on and on about how much Karine would love the light in their bedroom when she joined him in Harput, and the view of the city they would have from the roof. His apartment was atop one of the western hills, and he was confident that she would love the vista. Now he says simply to this American, “I will show you how to enjoy them. The long market—the bazaar—is down this alley. Some days there isn’t much because of the war. But maybe today we’ll find a pomegranate.” She surprises him by hooking her arm through his at their elbows, and that shiver he had felt in his palm long ago runs up his arm to the back of his neck.

  “What did you like best about Harput?” she asks him as they reach the market. As Armen had predicted, many of the vats and bins are empty, or there are vacancies where there might usually have been different vendors’ canopies and stalls. Still, there is a crate with fava beans. There is one boy selling dates and another with a few rings of white bread left in his basket. An elderly man with a single eye is selling radishes and red peppers. But it’s clear to Armen that much of the food costs far more than anyone except the city’s most successful merchants or the foreigners or the vali himself can afford. There is no sign of pomegranates today, though one vendor offers to bring some pomegranate molasses tomorrow.

  “I had so many friends in the city: Armenians and Turks. Germans and Americans,” Armen answers, though his mind is traveling up the stairs from a café where he spent hours with all of those friends to his apartment and the headboard of the bed he and Karine shared, the wood shellacked and inlaid with mother of pearl. At that picnic overlooking the lake, he had rambled on for easily fifteen minutes about the apartment, desperate to make Karine as comfortable as possible with the reality that he was uprooting her from her family in Van, when (finally) she had pressed one of her long slender fingers to his lips to silence him. She would be fine, she said. They would be fine. Then she had brought his hand to her mouth and kissed it.