The Sandcastle Girls

by Chris Bohjalian

  “Make me one, will you?” he asks the New Zealander.

  “One? God, I’ll make you two. I’m makin’ me as many bombs as I can carry.”

  “Thank you,” Armen says. In the distance, back toward the beach, he watches one of the battleships and realizes by the black steam rising abruptly from the funnels that it is starting to move. To withdraw. Sydney notices it, too.

  “Now that’s just perfect,” he says. “Just perfect. Fuckin’ navy. Fuckin’ generals.”

  Armen raises his eyebrows quizzically.

  “They’re leavin’ right ’fore an offensive! Worse than the goddamn rats. How many guns will there be firin’ now on them Turk trenches? One gunboat less,” he says, and he spits.

  Armen nods, but he doesn’t believe one gunboat will make much of a difference. Besides, they are so close to the enemy trenches that any covering fire will probably kill as many of them as it will Turks. And for one specific reason he is actually pleased to see the ship steam from the harbor; it means his letters to Elizabeth may finally be on their way to Aleppo.

  “THE ORPHANAGE IS a perfectly safe environment,” William Forbes is saying, his hands behind him and his shoulders back. He stands beside the window in the compound’s living room, but his face is nonetheless in shadow with the sun so far to the west. He speaks quietly, with assurance, as if reciting a speech he has rehearsed. Elizabeth decides now, if there had ever been any doubt, that she loathes him. He is a capable physician; she saw that at Der-el-Zor and she witnesses it daily in the hospital. But the world is probably filled with capable physicians whom she would find altogether despicable. It isn’t simply that he is yet another of the sort of men her father and mother expect her to marry—another Jonathan Peckham. It is that he is interested in her solely because in his mind she is the only woman here in Aleppo suitable for him to romance. She is confident that his motivation for siding with her father and Alicia Wells and arguing that Hatoun should be taken from Nevart and sent to the orphanage is simply to curry favor with Silas Endicott. Her father also reacts to the presence of the little girl with annoyance, and Elizabeth in truth finds that ironic. Her father has always subscribed to the school of parenting that suggests a child should be seen and not heard; in that regard, Hatoun is a model child.

  “I respect your view that some of the children there are wild animals after what they have endured,” Forbes says, “but at least there is supervision and education—and the children, more times than not, are kept securely behind the walls.”

  The thick book she had been eyeing—not precisely reading, because her concentration is shot—lays open on her lap like a cat. “Nevart needs her and she needs Nevart,” she replies simply.

  “I am seeing little progress, however. Are you?”

  “Progress is a much inflated ideal.”

  He turns, offering her his profile. She has discovered that he rather likes his profile, and his silhouette against the window is not unappealing. He is a handsome man—just not one she is ever going to like. Finally, after what he must presume has been a suitable pause, he says, “I think you’re growing fond of the sheer backwardness of this place. So far I have been able to resist most of its charms.” Then he smiles knowingly at her and adds, “Although not all of them. Most certainly not all of them.”

  Before she can respond, her father says, “There are issues here far more concrete than debating precisely how backward this nation is. In little more than a week all of us except for Miss Wells will be returning to the United States. It does not seem fair to me to continue to allow an Armenian widow and an Armenian orphan to remain in the American compound after we’re gone. Their care will become an onerous and unfair burden on Ryan and his small staff.”

  “Miss Wells is remaining here. Why is she not a burden?”

  Forbes chuckles. “Miss Wells is a force of nature. One of these days she will single-handedly convince all of Ankara and Constantinople to embrace democracy and religious tolerance.”

  “Actually,” her father says, “Miss Wells soon will be spending as much time in Damascus as she will in Aleppo. I’m sorry, but in my opinion, it simply makes no sense at all for the two Armenians to stay here after we’ve left. Good heavens, it makes no sense for them to be here right now! I’m not sure why either of them is deserving of such preferential treatment. I will talk to Ryan.”

  “I will, too,” Elizabeth says, and for the first time an idea comes to her: what would happen if she remained here in Aleppo as well? Her father and the two physicians could return to America as scheduled, but she could continue to assist Dr. Akcam in the hospital and chronicle the plight of the Armenians for their group back home. Would Ryan Martin mind? Perhaps not. She could offer to help care for Hatoun as well and make sure that the presence of the two refugees is neither a distraction nor an impediment to his work.

  Besides, if she returns to Boston it will be that much more difficult for Armen to find her—assuming he is even still alive. An ocean will separate them. She has not received a letter from him in weeks now. But if he is still somewhere in this world, either on the other side of the Ottoman Empire in the Dardanelles or in Egypt, someday he will retrace his steps and come back here to Aleppo. He has said so in the letters she has received. And she knows it in her heart.

  LATE IN THE day the gendarme, no more than sixteen or seventeen years old, sleeps on the shady side of the street, just outside the door to a mysterious place where Shoushan and Hatoun have been watching the men go in and out. Beside him is a tin plate with three lamb dumplings he hasn’t touched, and Shoushan has been rubbing her hands together mischievously and pretending to salivate. Hatoun has tried to warn her to leave the dumplings alone because it is hard to tell how deeply the guard is actually sleeping. She has even volunteered to bring Shoushan yet more food from inside the American prince’s compound—this morning Hatoun brought her bread and figs—but her friend has made it clear: she wants those dumplings; nothing else will do.

  The music on the inside of the building behind the gendarme is seductive, and the girls smell incense and opium wafting through the slats in the shuttered windows. Shoushan has shown her with her fingers and hands what she insists the men and the women do behind those walls. She thrust her hips like a wild animal, giggling a little maniacally.

  But Hatoun remains dubious. There is no screaming from inside. And whenever men did that to women on the long march, the women screamed. Maybe that’s why the mothers and the daughters would say nothing afterward. They had screamed away all their sound.

  No, she thinks now. Not always. She pulls at the memories, drawing them from the back of her mind like recalcitrant donkeys on a lead line. Sometimes the women only sobbed quietly. And some made absolutely no noise at all.

  Still, it is the shrieking she recalls first, and it is the shrieking she associates with—and this is a new word to Hatoun—rape. A man would do that to a woman and usually she would howl or cry out, and then he would hitch up his pants and all would grow quiet.

  Shoushan tugs at her arm and points. Three German soldiers are snuffing out their cigarettes with their massive boots and then knocking on the door. A tall woman whose face is lost in tattoos greets them with a broad smile and ushers them inside. The guard coughs in his sleep, but his eyes remain shut tight.

  “Now?” Shoushan asks her.

  “Don’t do it,” Hatoun tells her friend. “If he wakes up, he’ll kill you.”

  “No. He’d only do this,” Shoushan says, and she thrusts forward her hips two times and laughs.

  Hatoun offers to prod Nevart into asking the Americans’ cook to make something with lamb for supper, so she can bring it to the girl later that night or tomorrow morning. But Shoushan is obsessed with those dumplings and starts walking slowly across the street, moving as silently as the orange tabby that lives just outside the walls of the American compound. She looks back one time at Hatoun, her eyes as wild as ever. When she reaches the gendarme, she hovers for a long moment, her
face lost in the shadows. Then she squats. Hatoun is confident that her friend, as she often does, is tempting fate. She imagines Shoushan making faces at the young man for no other reason than that it’s fun and it excites her. Hatoun wants her to grab the dumplings quickly and run, so together the two of them can scamper down a side street and disappear into the city’s late afternoon quiet.

  Abruptly the gendarme’s right arm strikes out like a snake, his fingers grabbing Shoushan by her ankle. He opens his eyes as the girl shrieks and tries desperately to stand, kicking out her leg and sending the tin plate of dumplings flying a few feet into the air. He growls something that Hatoun cannot quite understand, and smacks Shoushan on the cheek with the back of his hand. But he has hit her so hard that she tumbles two or three yards away, almost rolling like a ball. Hatoun races into the street as fast as she can and pulls at her friend’s arms, dragging the girl to her feet, and then back down the nearby alley.

  When they emerge a block away, breathless, the sun feels a little brighter. And though Shoushan rubs at her cheek where the gendarme slapped her, she is nevertheless laughing. “I’ll bet that pig will eat the dumplings off the street,” she says to Hatoun, her tone almost gleeful. “Just like me!”

  NEAR SUNSET, HELMUT Krause stands on a bluff surveying the hulking gray profiles of the British dreadnoughts in the distance through a pair of binoculars with badly scratched lenses. A slender crevice in the clouds allows the sky to rain an angelic spray of red upon the calm waters of the Mediterranean. Helmut grew up near Kolberg. In his mind, the Baltic was never this calm—nor this comforting shade of blue green. He wonders what the light would look like through a camera. He misses his Ernemann.

  Beside him, Eric claps him on the shoulder. “It’s so good to have you back,” he says cheerfully.

  Helmut lowers his field glasses and smiles at his friend, but says nothing. Is he back? He is so weak, he is not entirely sure. He wonders if any moment his legs will give out and he will be returned to a cot in the Land of the Damned. His uniform hangs on him a bit like a sack, and he is still weak after a long bout with dysentery. He has found the Dardanelles a despicable place. It isn’t merely that he has dropped nearly twenty-five pounds and spent a large measure of his six weeks here on his back in a primitive hospital tent, sweating, or spewing indescribable horrors from his rectum and his mouth; it is also that even now, walking about once more among the healthy, he and the other men are living like underground animals. From this ridge he can gaze at the labyrinthine warren of Turkish trenches, spreading from the base of the hill and zigzagging in rows along the plain. They are carved deep into the arid earth and have small wooden road signs. He has heard that the trenches in France usually have a foot or two of water in them. Not here. These are largely dry. Still, the men rarely dare peer above them, so they move with the rats and the insects below the lips of wood and dirt.

  “While you were napping the last couple of weeks, I made a few enhancements,” Eric tells him, and Helmut nods. He can barely recall what this stretch of the defense looked like when they arrived, because he was laid up so quickly; it’s all a fog now. It doesn’t matter. Now the trenches have well-built fire steps and strategically placed machine guns pillowed by sandbags. He counts two batteries of mountain guns, three batteries of field guns, and a group of men managing a pair of howitzers. There are long curlicues of barbed wire at the forward edges. Moreover, he knows the soldiers here are very, very motivated. This is their homeland they are defending. Some of them are the very soldiers who, months ago, prevented the first Anzac landing from pressing inland. Their commander, Mustafa Kemal, told them, “I don’t order you to fight, I order you to die.” Many did, but many more were inspired and lived. Already that order is legendary. At some point the Australians and New Zealanders in their trenches are going to throw themselves against these lines of defense and it won’t be pretty.

  “They only attack at night,” Eric is saying. “Like the Turks. No one in their right mind tries anything when it’s daylight.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” the lieutenant says.

  “You think that Armenian is out there somewhere?”

  “Armen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Stop thinking about that. There was absolutely nothing you could have done.”

  “But do you think he made it? Do you think he could be out there?”

  “Not likely,” Eric says, a little exasperated. Then, his tone regaining its usual equilibrium, he points at a machine gun and adds, “I’d hate to think I was the one who created the enfilade that killed him.”

  Helmut nods. He recalls the photographs he took of the Armenian just before his friend left. Was it merely hatred that he saw in the pure flatness of Armen’s lips and the forwardness in his eyes—the desire for revenge he had expressed? Or was there more? When Helmut wasn’t taking his portrait, when they were sitting together in a café and talking, he thought he saw mournfulness in those eyes, too. Regret. Armen had hinted at least once about his own culpability, his own guilt. He wishes Armen had been willing to tell him more. Those photographic plates are gone now, destroyed with all of the images of the emaciated women and children of Aleppo, most near death and some already dead. And he is here in the Dardanelles, barely recovered from dysentery. He has accomplished nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  “Look there,” Eric says, motioning out toward the Mediterranean.

  Helmut raises his binoculars back to his eyes. He sees a flash from one of the battleships. Then the whistle of an incoming shell. No, Helmut thinks, incoming shells. Plural. A barrage. There is a deafening blast as the first shell detonates and Eric disappears in a spray of pebbles and dirt and human flesh. Helmut starts to scream out his friend’s name when suddenly he, too, is lifted off the ground and the world is strangely silent until he falls hard back to earth, aware that the whole world around him is trembling and oddly wet. Has he been blown into the one puddle in this whole peninsula? He rolls his head to look for Eric, but the lieutenant is nowhere to be seen. While he wants to believe that Eric rolled into one of the trenches for cover, Helmut knows in his heart that the soldier was vaporized, blown into millions of unidentifiable fragments of bone and strips of skin. So now he must find cover himself. He tries to press his hands against the ground to sit up, but for some reason he can’t. For a moment he is utterly mystified. Then he looks down at his chest and understands why. He sees only his binoculars, which have come to rest upon his sternum. He no longer has arms. They’re just … gone. That wetness near his ears, what he presumed at first was a puddle? It’s the rivulets of blood from the gaping holes where once there had been shoulders. He opens his mouth, terrified, and tries to scream, unsure in this lurid world of silent explosions and upturned earth whether he has actually made any sound. But it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter at all, because he knows he’s dying here on this ridge. This really is the end. He starts to pray—Please, God, I’m coming, take me now, take me now!—but the words soon become a jumble of meaningless syllables. His last coherent thought before he loses consciousness forever? It is Eric’s offhand remark, They only attack at night.

  Those poor bastards from Anzac; he realizes they’re about to get themselves killed, too.

  MY GRANDPARENTS RARELY SPOKE TO ME ABOUT THE FIRST WORLD War and the genocide. That moment I shared about my brother, our grandfather, and the toy soldier was an anomaly—which is, no doubt, why it stayed with me. They never told me stories in a linear or chronological fashion. Instead they were likely to offer anecdotes or recollections that usually came out of left field and only years later, in conversations with my father, my uncle, and my aunt, began to make any sense.

  Moreover, it wasn’t until I was forty-four years old that I learned my grandmother’s letters and diaries and the reports she wrote for the Friends of Armenia still existed in the archives of a museum outside of Boston—and that they filled a substantial archival preservation box. She had never told even my fat
her. So it was only at midlife that I would begin to pore over the papers that Elizabeth Endicott had left behind, and try to link obscure references from my childhood—something one of them had said, such as my grandfather’s recollection of an Aussie named Taylor as he studied an antique toy soldier—with something my grandmother had written years earlier.

  Another example would be the strange link between an inedible meat and an ocean liner sunk by a U-boat nine months into the First World War. The meat was basturma. My grandfather loved his basturma, and it was a testimony to my grandmother’s great love for him that she would make it. Basturma—sometimes called pastirma—is a sort of Armenian jerky. It’s dried beef that is seasoned with enough garlic to keep vampires in the next time zone. My grandparents’ house would reek for days after my grandmother had prepared a batch, and I have to assume that my grandparents did, too. I would stare at the dark, dry strips of meat in my grandmother’s elegant blue tile Tiffany serving tray and imagine the cartoon plumes of toxicity that wafted into the air around Pepé Le Pew, the Looney Tunes animated skunk.

  The boat was the RMS Lusitania, which was torpedoed by the Germans off the coast of Ireland on May 7, 1915, and sank in a mere eighteen minutes. Roughly twelve hundred passengers and crew died, out of the 1,959 people who had climbed aboard the ship in New York City not quite a week earlier.

  I was six at the time that basturma and disasters at sea were forever linked in my mind. It was Easter Sunday and I was sitting on the deacon’s bench in my grandparents’ kitchen as my grandmother was placing dolma—grape leaves stuffed with onions and currants and rice—on one tray and basturma on another. My grandfather, my father, and my aunt were there as well, though only my aunt was helping my grandmother. The men were just hovering. There was a bigger crowd in the living room, and, invariably, my brother and some of my cousins were downstairs in the basement playing pool. It was at least ninety minutes before we would assemble in the dining room for Easter supper. No doubt, the kitchen smelled of the dried meat, which is why I was sitting on the deacon’s bench. I wanted to hear the grown-ups’ conversation, but I wanted to be as far as I could from the counter with the basturma.