The Sandcastle Girls

by Chris Bohjalian

  There are a variety of reasons that we would break up and reconcile with seasonal frequency between ninth and twelfth grade, but none had anything at all to do with the fact that he was Turkish and I was half Armenian. They involved the petty jealousies and overwrought dramas that mark most adolescent romances. Once he was jealous because the boy opposite me in the high school musical had a crush on me; once I was jealous of his friendship with a female violinist at a summer camp for young musicians.

  There was, however, an interesting moment in tenth grade that had absolutely no effect on Berk and me, but involved our families. Years later I would ask my father about it and press him for details. One Saturday night Berk’s parents had a neighborhood party—a lake party, we called it at the time, because most of the families who lived around that man-made lake were invited—and my family was there. In addition, there were friends of Berk’s family, mostly Turks, who did not live on the lake but lived within driving distance in Fort Lauderdale or Miami Beach. The party was around New Year’s, but it wasn’t a New Year’s Eve party. It was a cocktail party in the late afternoon. Still, it was early January, and so by the time my parents and my brother and I left, it was dark out. I remember the festive balloon lights around Berk’s pool were lit, and we could see into the living rooms of the houses around the lake that had their lights on.

  Berk said good-bye to me without even a dry peck on my cheek because all of our parents were present. And then our two fathers had a brief exchange—strangely edgy—in a language that, if I had to guess, was Turkish.

  It was. I hadn’t even realized that my father spoke Turkish.

  “Really, not very much,” he told me years later. “I spoke a little because my father was fluent and my mother learned it when she was living overseas.”

  “What did you say to Berk’s father that night?” I asked. At that time, when Berk and I had been tenth graders, he had refused to tell me. He’d been evasive and changed the subject.

  When I brought it up again years later, he shrugged and smiled a little wanly. He was in his late sixties by then, and we were having this conversation twelve months after my mother had died of lung cancer. My family was visiting him on the anniversary of my mother’s death because we knew it was going to be a difficult week for him. “That party was a long time ago,” he said. “I was being stupid. We both were.”

  “But what did you say?” I pressed him.

  “I said good night and thank you. I said it in Turkish so he would think I knew more of the language than I did. It was a … a dig.”

  “Why would that be a dig?”

  “Honey, do you really want to pull at this thread?” he asked.

  “I’m just curious.”

  He was standing beside one of the mantel clocks his father had made. My grandfather the engineer handcrafted ornate clocks as a hobby. This one was a French figural in which the base had three cherubs playing amid gold leaf. The numerals were Roman. It chimed hourly. My grandmother, when she had been alive, had tolerated it. My father and his siblings had been ambivalent.

  “Well,” my father said, and he took the key from beneath the clock’s base and proceeded to wind it as he spoke, in all likelihood because it meant he could avoid eye contact with me. “I wanted to make him uncomfortable. I wanted him to know that I had understood what he and some of his friends had been saying earlier that evening when they had been speaking in Turkish.”

  “They’d been speaking in Turkish?”

  “In the kitchen, yes. Berk’s father and two other men.”

  “What did they say?”

  “It’s stupid. It’s stupid what they said and it’s stupid that I cared.”

  “Well, now you have to tell me. If it’s stupid, you know I’ll find it irresistible.”

  “I’m sure they only said it because they had had too much to drink. They were tipsy. They said the Armenian men had all been traitors—back in the First World War. Then …”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, it’s the sort of thing I’ve made jokes about myself. Basically, they were joking that I had married your mother precisely because she wasn’t Armenian. They said the Armenian men were all traitors and the Armenian women all had moustaches.”

  “That’s so … babyish! It’s just ridiculous!”

  “See what I mean? It’s stupid. Immature. But I wanted Berk’s father to know that I had understood what he was saying.”

  “How come you wouldn’t tell me about it at the time?”

  “You and Berk were friends. I didn’t want to interfere with that friendship.”

  “But sometimes you had reservations about that—because he was Turkish.”

  “And I tried to get past that. So did Berk’s family.”

  It was Aldous Huxley who observed, “Every man’s memory is his private literature.” My father was the son of a survivor and a witness. His memories offered a profoundly brighter story than either of his parents would have. He never saw the things they did; he never endured the sorts of trials that left millions just like them dead. Yet he knew intellectually what they had experienced, and he would marry a woman remarkably similar in carriage and breeding and ferocity to his own mother.

  And what of Berk’s grandparents? Where were they in 1915 and what did they do—or fail to do? I never asked, and now I will never know. Those who participate in a genocide as well as those who merely look away rarely volunteer much in the way of anecdote or observation. Same with the heroic and the righteous. Usually it’s only the survivors who speak—and often they don’t want to talk much about it either. Berk’s grandmother may have sheltered Armenian children in her home in Ankara; or his grandfather may have been a gendarme who walked Armenian women to their deaths in the desert. Or, most likely, they were uninvolved. In 1915 and 1916 they probably raised their children, went to work, and endured the privations of war.

  Perhaps someday Berk asked his parents and now he knows. Perhaps not.

  Whatever the men said in Turkish that night long ago at a party on a lake when I was in tenth grade was childish and silly. But it grazed a scab on my father’s soul and caused him to flinch and, in a small way, to strike back.

  HATOUN STANDS AT the rectangular hole that serves as a window and watches half a dozen children use chalk to draw flowers and trees on the concrete walls in the orphanage courtyard and on the stone sidewalk. A boy she guesses is ten or eleven is drawing a kite. They have been here weeks longer than she has and their strength already is returning—in some cases, has returned completely. Earlier this morning a Syrian teacher told her that she, too, would get better. She said children were durable. But Hatoun is not entirely convinced. The boys here are violent and fierce and are constantly brawling—and the brutality is markedly different from the schoolyard scuffles she recalls from Adana. Their parents and older siblings are dead, and it’s almost as if they view the gendarmes as role models.

  And then there are other children, the girls and the weakest of the boys, who are more like her. Their eyes are red from crying, or they stare, wide-eyed and terrified, whenever a grown-up enters the long room with the rows of bunk beds against the walls. They speak little or not at all. The girl who slept in the bunk below Hatoun last night is probably twelve, but she only leaves the bed when she limps to the nearby room with the holes in the tile floor into which they are expected to pee. Last night Hatoun overheard adult women whispering that this twelve-year-old had been violated. Outraged. Hatoun thought she knew what that meant: it was what had happened to her mother and her sister the day before they had been killed. To Nevart the day after.

  It has been only a day, but already she misses Nevart. She misses her mother. All night long, it seemed, she was drying her tears in the coarse wool of the blanket.

  She is not sure what she thinks of sleeping on a bunk so close to the ceiling. She worries that she will sit up in bed and smack her head in the dark. She frets that when she climbs down, suspending her feet below her as her toes search for th
e mattress, she will accidentally step on the twelve-year-old in the bunk beneath her. She told herself this was why she didn’t move from the moment the nun left until the woman returned just after sunrise.

  “You should go outside, too.”

  She turns around, surprised at the sound of a voice, and looks behind her. Standing there, gazing at her, is a barefoot girl roughly her age with hair that looks as if it has never been brushed. She wonders why the teachers or nuns here haven’t tried combing it out. “Come play,” the girl adds, and she scratches at a line of scabs on her left arm. Her white smock is a mass of stains, and there is a skin of mustard-colored mud along the hem.

  Hatoun knows that the older child is still in bed, perhaps curled up in a ball. Or maybe she is craning her head now, watching this particularly unkempt orphan from behind.

  “They’ve drawn a maze,” the child continues, referring to the group in the courtyard.

  Finally Hatoun finds the courage to speak. “I’ll stay here,” she mumbles. But she is honestly not sure if what she said was audible. Did she just mouth the words?

  “It’s a maze,” the child repeats. “You have to hop inside the lines they drew on the blocks. I did it. It’s fun.” Then: “What’s your name?”

  “Hatoun.” Again she can’t decide if she actually made any noise.

  “I’m Ramela.” The child skips a dozen steps down the room and turns her attention to the twelve-year-old girl in the bottom bunk. “And who are you?”

  When Ramela is greeted only with silence, she says to Hatoun, “She’s like you, isn’t she? She won’t talk. How come?”

  Indeed, how come? Hatoun understands there is a connection between the older girl having been outraged and her failure to speak, but the link is unclear. Does a girl automatically lose her ability to talk when a man does that to her? Or was this just a coincidence? The truth is, Hatoun herself has said very little. What is there to say? Mostly she has been either hungry or thirsty or scared, and what is the point of talking or crying if your pleas all go unanswered? First she had a mother and a sister. Then, for a few weeks, she had Nevart. Now the grown-ups always get killed or taken away. Everything is different than it was in the spring. Everything.

  Outside she hears a girl squealing and turns her attention back to the window. The boy who drew the kite is tickling the girl, running his fingers under her arms and along her ribs. Inside Ramela runs back toward Hatoun, surprising her by climbing up onto the windowsill right beside her and then pulling herself through the slender hole and down into the courtyard. She lands with a thud, stands up, and without brushing off the dust from the ground races into the fracas and starts tickling both the boy and the girl.

  Hatoun turns around and stares at the twelve-year-old. For a second their eyes meet and Hatoun is brought back instantly to a moment in the desert. There is her sister, once again bound to the post, as the gendarmes climb onto their horses. Her sister looks to her mother and then to Hatoun. Their eyes had met, too. Her sister was crying and Hatoun recalls looking away. This feels to her unforgivable now. Then another refugee swept Hatoun up and twirled her away from the women on the ground, pressing Hatoun’s face into her chest and neck so she couldn’t see, even if she had wanted to. But, still, she heard. She heard the horses’ hooves as they charged faster than they ever had on this endless march in the desert, and she heard the sound of the swords as they slashed through the air. She heard the euphoric, giddy cries of the gendarmes and the way they teased one rider who needed three passes to finish off one of the women. She might have heard more, but the woman managed to cover her ears with her elbows and hands, while holding her tight.

  Hatoun allows her body to slide down against the orphanage wall, and once on the floor she stares at the corridor between the beds. She straightens her legs before her in exactly the way her mother and her sister did before they were executed. She presses her spine against the wall, still cool, as if it’s a wooden pole in the sand. She waits, but for what she’s not sure.

  She has no idea how long she has been sitting like that when the door at the far end of the room opens. She sees one of the teachers, a Syrian with a streak of white in her black hair, leading the young American woman and Nevart. When they spot her, they gaze at her a little quizzically. Then, with great purposeful strides, they march down the long room toward her.

  THERE IS THE camel route and there is the train. Armen uses some of the money Eric and Helmut have loaned him—they have been clear that he is not to kill himself in some harebrained charge across no-man’s-land somewhere, and they expect someday to be repaid—and purchases a train ticket to Damascus. Then, if there is an engine running on the next spur, he will edge closer still to the British and continue on to Jericho. How he will manage the rest of the journey is a mystery to him. He can’t imagine ingratiating himself into either a caravan or a column of Turkish troops approaching the front. But he reminds himself that the desert is vast and people disappear and—he hopes—reappear among the dunes all the time.

  The train car is empty except for a pair of men he presumes are merchants, each in a western suit and a fez, who smoke and play cards on the rounded wooden seats as they wait to depart. In another car are half a dozen Turkish soldiers, and his body tenses when he contemplates the likely exchange should, for some reason, they wander into this car. It was one thing to be in Aleppo, especially since he had the protection—should he have needed it—of a pair of German soldiers. The Turks looked up to the Germans the way a little brother eyes an older one. Still, he really can’t imagine these Turkish businessmen are going to waste their time on him. And if they did? He could make up some legitimate business in Damascus and conjure a family there. A sister. A brother. A wife. All would be lies, but all would be plausible. Eric had offered him a pistol, but Armen didn’t dare accept it. Armenians are not allowed to own weapons. Besides, the next train would be the tricky one, because then he would be edging ever closer to the British. And that will be suspicious. The Turks already presume that any Armenian male still standing is intent on joining an opposing army. The Russians, usually, the way Garo had planned. But it is not unheard-of for an Armenian to sign up with the British.

  One of the merchants looks over and smiles at him congenially as the train bumps its way south. For an hour Armen simply sits and daydreams, growing oblivious to the gaze of the merchants. Eventually he reaches into his satchel and pulls out a pencil and paper and starts to write Elizabeth. He expects to post the letter from either Damascus or Al Qatrana. Somewhere on this train line, traveling in the opposite direction, may be the two doctors and the missionary she is expecting. He writes with the paper pressed against the wooden bench.

  He begins his note, “Dear Elizabeth,” and then adds, “my red-haired Armenian.” He continues, despite the way the train is taking its time finding a steady rhythm, to write in a slow, measured hand. He tells her the sorts of details that he would never have shared with Eric or Helmut, the moments of domesticity in Harput that preceded the end of the world in Van. He tells her that once he had had a daughter. He had almost shared this with Elizabeth any number of times, but the words had always caught in his throat, and each time he had spoken instead of anything but his little girl. Pomegranates. His brothers. Karine. The infant had lived not quite twelve months. Only this morning had he finally told Elizabeth how he feared his wife had died—what he had learned of the deportation and the massacre, some of it rumor, some of it wild allegation. Only now does he write that he was a father and his only child was dead before she had reached her first birthday. In the letter he mentions nothing of the battle in Van or the slaughter in Bitlis. He writes not a word of what he did when he returned to Harput and confronted Nezimi. He doesn’t dare, because the letter will most certainly be read before it is delivered, and if he describes what he has seen and heard and done, it will never reach her.

  “How can you write when the train jostles like this?” one of the merchants asks him in Turkish. His moustache
is more gray than black and his skin is deeply weathered.

  “Just notes,” he answers evasively, also in Turkish, unsure whether this is small talk or something more.

  His associate shrugs and then says, his tone strangely ominous, “I don’t know. I wouldn’t risk it, young man.”

  “And what am I risking?” he asks.

  “That depends on what you are writing,” says the fellow who initiated the conversation. He snuffs out his cigarette on the floor of the train car and eyes a fly. Then he stands, balancing himself on the back of the seat, and allows his suit jacket to fall open, revealing a pistol with a pearl handle. “There are people who want the Arabs to revolt.”

  “Some Arabs are as unpatriotic as Armenians,” observes the other.

  There is nothing incriminating in his letter to Elizabeth. Nevertheless, carefully he folds it in half and places it inside his satchel. He holds tight to the pencil. It’s not much of a weapon, but it is all that he has.

  “I’m not planning to foster rebellion anywhere,” Armen tells them and he raises his eyebrows.

  “But you are an Armenian,” says the Turk with the handgun.

  “I am.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Damascus.”

  “Why?”

  “My sister lives there.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m an engineer. I’m working on the Baghdad Railway—the spur from Aleppo to Nusaybin.”

  “The British have captured Nasiriyah.”

  “I hadn’t heard that.”

  He nods. “Had you heard that an Armenian murdered a Turkish officer in Aleppo?”