The Sandcastle Girls

by Chris Bohjalian

  Krikor, the fellow who is the subject of the exchange, was an Armenian friend of my grandparents whom they met after they settled in America after the First World War. Ironically, given my professed frustration with people stereotyping Armenians as rug salesmen, he owned what I have been told was a massive carpet store just outside Princeton, New Jersey.

  AUNT: Mom, you have got to stop making this stuff. Dried beef cannot be good for Pop. It’s … it’s poisonous.

  GRANDFATHER: Food of the gods.

  GRANDMOTHER: He’s lasted this long.

  GRANDFATHER: Krikor ate it until he died two years ago.

  FATHER (reaching for a strip of the basturma on the Tiffany tray): Yes, but think of how tough Krikor was. Remember, he survived the Lusitania. He did, right?

  GRANDMOTHER: Krikor was always a storyteller. More so than your father. But, yes, he was on the Lusitania when it sank. He had been living in America for maybe ten years by then, and he was going back to Europe to fight with the Armenians in the Russian Army when the boat went down.

  AUNT: Did he really swim to the boat that rescued him?

  GRANDFATHER: No, of course not. But he hung on to a piece of driftwood for hours. At least that’s what he always said. It’s a wonder he didn’t freeze to death.

  AUNT: If he’d eaten any basturma, he could have kept warm by exhaling.

  GRANDMOTHER: I remember I had been terrified on the whole trip over that year—because of the Lusitania. It was obviously fresh in all of our minds.

  FATHER: They weren’t going to torpedo another ship. It was a public relations disaster for the Germans.

  GRANDMOTHER: I was scared.

  GRANDFATHER: Nonsense. Nothing scared you back then. Ryan Martin thought you were the bravest woman he ever met.

  My grandfather then put his arm around her to embrace her, but she pushed him away, laughing. “You are getting nowhere near me with your basturma breath. You have made your choice for the day and chosen the basturma over me. So live with it, old man.”

  This is one of my favorite memories of my grandparents: no sadness, no unmoored wistfulness. But even it opened up questions that would stay with me as I grew up and learned the rudiments of their story. How had Krikor really managed to survive the Lusitania? What sorts of things had my grandmother done that struck this Ryan Martin as so very brave? I would never learn any more about that first question. But eventually I would get answers to the second.

  NEVART STARES AT the face on the other side of the iron bars. It is a Turkish soldier in his yellow-brown uniform; he is young, his moustache that of an adolescent. Initially his eyes strike her as sleepy, but then she decides, no, that isn’t right. They’re deferential. Other than the cook, she and Hatoun are alone at the American compound. Elizabeth, Alicia, and the two physicians are at the hospital, and Ryan Martin, his assistant, and Elizabeth’s father are meeting with the vali. She has overheard the American consul and Mr. Endicott discussing how they will express their anger at what is occurring at Der-el-Zor, as well as the fact that Farhat Sahin had engineered the theft of so much of the aid they were bringing to the camp. But they—and Nevart—know that the vali will do nothing about it. He certainly won’t do anything about Der-el-Zor, and he certainly won’t discipline his underling. If he does anything to Farhat Sahin, it will involve praise.

  The soldier pulls off his cap respectfully when he sees that Nevart has noticed him peering through the grate beside the thick wooden doors. It is just after lunch, a time when the city slows beneath the high desert sun. Hatoun, focused on the math problems that Nevart has presented to her, has not yet noticed the soldier. She is staring down intently at the slate, the chalk a small stump between her fingers and thumb.

  “Wait here,” Nevart says to the child, and she rises from her chair, aware that the girl’s eyes are following her and—in all likelihood—now registering the presence of the soldier. She tries to stifle the small prick of unease she feels along the back of her neck; she reminds herself that she sees Turkish soldiers all the time on the streets of Aleppo.

  At the grate she asks simply, “Yes?”

  “I am sorry. I am looking for the American diplomat.”

  “Mr. Martin?”

  “I don’t know his name.”

  “He is meeting with the vali,” she tells him.

  The soldier seems to think about this. Then: “When will he be back?”

  Behind her Nevart hears Hatoun sliding her chair back from the table. In a moment, the girl is beside her, leaning against her. Nevart feels the child weaving her fingers through hers.

  “I don’t know. Can I give him a message?”

  He looks down the street in both directions. Then he shakes his head. “He doesn’t know me. My name is Orhan. I’ll come back.” He bows ever so slightly, puts his cap back on his head, and departs.

  ELIZABETH DROPS THE last of the bedpans she has emptied in the tin sink in the hospital bathroom. Her strategy is to dump them en masse and then clean them en masse. She breathes almost entirely through her mouth as she works. When she turns, she sees Alicia Wells and a nun she recognizes from the orphanage but has not formally met.

  “Elizabeth, do you have a moment?” the missionary asks. Her voice is uncharacteristically friendly. Their détente has been tested lately, and the bedroom they share has felt particularly cramped and cell-like to Elizabeth.

  “Yes, of course,” she says, trying to sound equally as agreeable. She rinses her hands and then motions for the two women to follow her outside the bathroom, into the wide corridor near the window where they are removed from the stench from the bedpans.

  “I want you to meet Sister Irmingard,” Alicia says. “This is Elizabeth Endicott.”

  “It is a pleasure to meet you,” she says to the nun. The woman has a face that is frog-like, but not unsympathetic. She is probably fifty. Elizabeth is confident that she knows why Alicia has brought the sister here. “I have seen you at the orphanage. I’m sorry we’ve not spoken sooner.”

  “We both, it seems, have a great deal to do. There are too few hours in the day for idle conversation for either of us,” Sister Irmingard tells her, her voice as cool and business-like as Elizabeth’s father’s. Then the nun thaws ever so slightly and squeezes Elizabeth’s fingers in her hands, adding, “God bless you and the Friends of Armenia. It is so good of you and your associates to have come to Aleppo. It was such gifts you brought to Der-el-Zor.”

  “Thank you. But it really was very, very little,” she says to the nun. “We would have needed a loaves and fishes miracle to have made a difference there. It was all profoundly disappointing.”

  “You are being too hard on yourself and your father,” Alicia says, though her voice is as stern as ever. “You are being too hard on all of us. Yes, we lost four wagons. But the doctors saved lives at the camp and here in the hospital.”

  Elizabeth sighs. This exchange is irrelevant to the real reason that Alicia has brought Sister Irmingard here. Finally she decides that she can wait no longer and decides to bring up the subject herself. “I suppose you have come to discuss Hatoun,” she says.

  “Yes, I have described for the sister the situation in the compound and the difficulties we’re all having with the child,” Alicia admits.

  “Can you tell me why the girl is not in the orphanage?” the nun asks Elizabeth.

  “Because she has a mother. Nevart. I would think you would be grateful that the child has found a home and is likely to be adopted. Isn’t that the goal of the orphanage? To care for the children until they find permanent homes?”

  “She has a deeply scarred woman looking after her who seems distracted and morose—not a mother,” Alicia corrects her. “Moreover, the woman herself has no ‘permanent’ home and no prospects of one. She lives on the goodwill and the charity of the American consul. She’s a widow. She has no husband. Meanwhile, the child—and there is no kind way to say this—needs far more help than Nevart can provide. She has a mental infirmity. That
is the tragic truth. Why—”

  “You don’t know that!” Elizabeth snaps, her voice more shrill than she would have liked. But she has heard enough. “You don’t know that at all,” she repeats. “And it seems to me, it wouldn’t matter if the child did have a mental infirmity. Why would she thus be better off in the orphanage? What precisely would be better for her there? Are you referring to her chances of being bullied by more vocal children? Of being lost in the throngs of the other orphans? Of having to dodge hurled drinking goblets? I see no reason why she would be more likely to improve at the orphanage. Further …” She pauses, slowly regaining at least a semblance of control.

  “Go on,” Alicia says flatly. “I’m waiting.”

  “There is something decidedly uncharitable in your view of this whole situation—and of Nevart in particular.”

  The missionary snorts and shakes her head. “This sort of drama might serve you well in your relations with men in South Hadley and Boston—even with that Armenian engineer you met here,” says Alicia. “But it has no place when we are discussing the children, given the precariousness of their situation.”

  Elizabeth has told Alicia nothing of her relationships with either her widower friend at Mount Holyoke or Jonathan Peckham. They have discussed Armen, but only in the most formal terms. Clearly, however, her father has said something to the missionary. “I do not see what relevance my past friendships can possibly have on where it is best to raise Hatoun,” she says defensively.

  “I did not say they should have any bearing at all,” Alicia insists. “I was only suggesting that you were becoming needlessly dramatic. Here, very simply, is where we disagree: You seem to believe that the orphanage is filled entirely with unsupervised wild animals. You seem to believe there is no one there capable of encouraging the child to emerge from her shell. I disagree. I have seen firsthand the good work of Sister Irmingard and her associates.”

  “Thank you,” the nun says. “Miss Endicott, I know you have had a bad experience with children here in Aleppo. I heard about the glass and your foot. I trust it is healing now?”

  “Yes. Slowly.”

  “Good.” Then she turns back to Alicia and continues, “I am not convinced the girl does have a mental infirmity. Granted, she was only in the orphanage a short while. A day or two according to the records, I believe.”

  “She may not have been born with one,” Alicia argues, “but whatever she witnessed on the march has left her with one.”

  “Regardless,” says Sister Irmingard, spreading wide her arms and speaking to both women, “let us look for a moment at the point where you two agree. The reality is that your mission is the same: to do whatever you can to preserve what remains of the Armenian race. Am I correct?”

  “Of course you are,” Elizabeth answers, uncaring that her tone is petulant.

  “Then allow those of us with proper training to care for this child,” she says. “Allow us to—”

  “The girl will remain with Nevart. I will allow for nothing else,” Elizabeth says, cutting the woman off. She finds the nun’s tone condescending, even if the woman has acknowledged that Hatoun may not be dim-witted or mad. “I thank you both for coming. Alicia, I will see you back at the compound. In the meantime, I have work to do,” she finishes, and then she turns on her heels and leaves the two women alone in the corridor.

  ELIZABETH’S EYES HAVE grown tired in the dim light of the living room, and her index finger is sore from where the pen has been pressing against her knuckle. She would prefer to be in her bedroom upstairs, but she feels only vexation when she is there and Alicia is present, and the missionary is sleeping there now. And so once more she has found a reason to remain awake here on the first floor of the compound, though it is after midnight. She is writing Armen, though increasingly she is viewing her letters to him as more of a private journal than one side of a correspondence.

  I limp, but they tell me I will heal if I just stay off my foot. But that’s simply not possible. Why am I in Aleppo if it is only to convalesce? Surely that’s not why I have traveled this far.

  And most of what she shares is—as it is always—about the Armenians.

  There are no infants, because they never survive the journey. But somehow a toddler who can’t be more than two or two and a half arrived in a column this week, carried by her sister who is twelve. Their mother and their two siblings died days (or weeks) ago. The twelve-year-old is in the orphanage and the toddler—a girl—is in the hospital. Both will survive. I am telling you of them because they lived in a village near Harput, and whenever refugees arrive from Harput I think of you. Van, also, but it is rare these days that someone stumbles into Aleppo with a connection to Van.

  And, of course, the fact that the toddler was female made me imagine your lost little girl. How do you do it? Truly, how do you do it? I wish you had told me of her before you left.

  I have made a decision: I am not returning to the United States with my father and the physicians. I am remaining here.

  This means we may meet again. I hope so.

  Come back

  She lifts her pen quickly from the paper and rests it in the tin groove beside the inkwell. She sits back in her chair. She has written these last two words without trying them out in her mind beforehand and now worries that they are plaintive and despairing all alone on that line, a window into her heartbreak. She contemplates adding the word soon, but she isn’t sure if that would make the short sentence any more appropriate or any less needy.

  Why, she wonders, is she so lonely here—and yet why is she so determined to stay?

  She could simply complete the sentence as it is. Drop a small dot after the k in back. She retrieves the pen and dips it into the inkwell, holding the nib perhaps two inches above the paper. In the end she does not add a period. Instead she writes the two words to me.

  She studies the sheer nakedness of the sentence and the meaning in those four brief syllables:

  Come back to me.

  The words leave her wistful and satisfied at once. When a life is stripped down to tending the starving in the square and the sick in the hospital, why should propriety matter at all? It shouldn’t. Besides, she doubts Armen will ever read a single word she has written tonight.

  ALMOST THE MOMENT the shelling from the British ships ceases—easily five hours of a nearly deafening roar, a barrage so long that the sun has set and the stars are alight in the heavens—a corporal walks down the trench and pours whiskey into Armen’s tin cup. The fellow provides a swallow’s worth into the tin cups of all the men along this length of trench. Then an officer from Auckland orders the men to fix bayonets, and the fellow beside Armen—whose hands, even in the dark, Armen can see have become palsied with fear—swears because he has sliced open his thumb on the blade. Then the officer brings his whistle to his mouth and blows, and the noise sounds oddly muted after the endless blasts from the naval guns. Still, Armen knows this is their cue, so he reaches over the lip of the trench and pulls himself up with the other soldiers, aware that he is going to charge forward into the night both because this is what he has been ordered to do and because of his memories of his wife and his daughter and his older brother. Because before him move the people who have slaughtered his family and are endeavoring now to exterminate all traces of his race. It is better to die here, fighting, than be slaughtered like sheep on a ravine beside the Euphrates or starved in the Syrian desert.

  The assignment is straightforward: they are to run toward the Turkish trenches, capture them, and then climb the slope called Chunuk Bair and hold the high ground. And for perhaps half a minute Armen deludes himself into believing that this really won’t be all that dangerous because the battleships have indeed butchered all life in those enemy trenches, save for the rats and the flies that exist in numbers too great to be obliterated by mere naval gunfire. The men are racing forward on either side of him, falling only because they are tripping on the roots and dry gullies that ripple across the land. He, too, catc
hes the toe of his boot and tumbles once, but his principal concern when he rises back to his feet isn’t a bruise or a cut; it’s his discovery that it is in fact so dark that for a moment he isn’t precisely sure in which direction he should be charging.

  Any confusion is almost instantly resolved, however, when the Turkish machine guns start firing and the men on his left fall as if scythed, some yelling, some not. And then it is as if Armen is advancing alone, running headlong toward the Turks, when suddenly he is falling headfirst into a ravine, a fissure that he could not see in the night. For a moment it is impossible to breathe, and he wonders if somewhere he has been shot. But, no, it is only that the wind was knocked from him when he tumbled into the washout. As he feels with his hands for the edge so he can climb back up, his fingers touch smooth wood and steps and then a cold face beneath a helmet. It’s a dead man, a Turk, and with a sensation closer to elation than terror he understands that he has fallen into the forwardmost of the enemy trenches. Abruptly the Armenian named Artak dives into the channel beside him, and then a pair of Aussies and the corporal himself. He says something, but Armen can’t hear him over the sound of the battle, so the corporal starts gesturing wildly and that’s when Armen understands: they need to keep moving, they need to press on. Armen wants to assure him that this was indeed his plan, too, when all at once the night becomes day as the Turks light up the ridge with hundreds of flares, and he doesn’t dare poke even a finger above the lip of the trench. Behind him the Aussies and New Zealanders and Maoris and Armenians still on the flat are being massacred. Enraged he feels for one of the jam-tin bombs that Sydney built for him, pulls it from his belt loop, and lights it. Then he hurls it over the side of the trench in the general direction of the nearest Turkish machine gun and wonders if the bomb will actually work. Seconds later there is an improbably loud explosion and dirt rains down upon him. Apparently, it does.