Much the way Nezimi did.
Armen, I had no choice. If I could have protected them, I would have. You know that.
Clearly the official had been lying. He’d been terrified; Armen recalled the quaver in the man’s voice.
To save my daughter, Armen reminded him, my wife did what you asked. She renounced her God. She gave herself and my daughter to you to protect. And you did what? You did nothing!
I took them in. I tried, Nezimi had insisted. I offered to marry her! You know a woman’s conversion can only be ratified by marriage.
For a long moment Armen contemplated that single sentence, and finally its meaning grew clear. All along Nezimi had believed that Armen would never return to Harput—even after the war. Either he would die in the fighting in Van, or he would be massacred with other Armenian men in some riverbed or ravine not far from the outskirts of the city. And so Nezimi had had the audacity to ask Karine to marry him. Had the official also tried to seduce her? It was possible. It was conceivable, these days, that he had raped her—or, at least, had tried to rape her.
You were my friend, Armen had said simply, but already the Turk was reaching into a drawer in his desk for his military revolver.
Over Armen’s shoulder he hears Australian voices. Orders. There is a likelihood of a Turkish counterattack and they need to prepare the trenches for an assault from the opposite direction. So he does what the Anzac soldiers on either side of him are doing. He takes the corpse of the dead Turk and pushes it over the parados—the rear lip of the trench. Then he fluffs it up like a sandbag.
FROM THE WINDOW of the bedroom Elizabeth shares with Alicia Wells she can see that the light is still on in Ryan Martin’s first-floor office across the courtyard. It’s the only part of the compound that has electricity. She has found herself comfortable here living at night amid oil lamps and candles. After all, her dormitory at Mount Holyoke didn’t have electric lights.
In the other bed the missionary’s breathing is calm; Alicia always sleeps soundly. Elizabeth wonders what sorts of images fill the woman’s dreams. Are there men in them? A husband, a lover? Does she dream of the children here with their dark eyes, or the mothers whose breasts are no longer capable of feeding their starving babies?
She pulls her robe from the back of the door and silently makes her way down the stairs and then down the hallway past the selamlik, the library, and the corridor to the kitchen. When she reaches the section of the compound with Mr. Martin’s office, she pauses momentarily. But then she stands up a little straighter and approaches the door. It is half open, but she cannot see the consul behind his desk. Softly she knocks.
“Yes, come in,” he murmurs, his voice a little hoarse. When he sees her he rises from his chair, but because she is in her robe he averts his eyes momentarily. He has removed his jacket, but he is still wearing a vest over his shirt. She is surprised that her presence in her nightgown and robe has made him uncomfortable after all they experienced together at Der-el-Zor. “You are up late,” he says, his voice growing slightly more companionable. He puts his pen down in its tray.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she explains. “I have a great deal on my mind.”
He shakes his head. “Don’t we all,” he agrees. “Is it your father’s return to America?”
“No. It’s Nevart and Hatoun.”
He rubs his temples, gazing down at the papers on his desk. He says nothing.
“I’m sorry I’ve disturbed you,” she says.
Finally he sighs. Then: “There is nothing to apologize for. I was writing Ambassador Morgenthau. I need a distraction badly.”
“Still, it’s late.”
“Nevart and Hatoun,” he says. “You are worried that I am going to evict them once the party has broken up? Once most of you have returned to America?”
This is, of course, precisely why she has come: to learn whether he is going to send them away or allow them to remain in the compound. When he speaks so bluntly, she realizes instantly that her fears were unfounded. Evicting them would be the sort of profound cruelty that is well beyond his ken.
“Yes, I am interested in your plans,” she says. She fears she has insulted him.
“The race is dying,” he says in response. “The whole race. It’s … biblical. The proportions are positively biblical.”
“Have you shared that analogy with Alicia? She might like it,” Elizabeth asks. She had not expected to find him like this and hopes to cheer him with the small joke.
But he seems almost oblivious. “It is a level of barbarism that is unimaginable outside of literature—at least it was unimaginable. I just don’t know what to do anymore. I try to stop it, but I can’t. I implore their ally, the Germans, to try to stop it, but they can’t.”
She thinks of the Germans she has met here: the nuns and the missionaries and those two soldiers who were engineers. Helmut and Eric. She wonders where they are now. “Do you think we will ever enter the war?” she asks him, referring to the United States.
“If it lasts long enough. If it lasts long enough, it will drag the whole world in. It’s a bloody vortex.”
“It would be a shame to see us fighting the Germans,” she says. “How the Germans can remain allies with the Turks is beyond me. No European nation would ever commit the sorts of crimes that this regime is blithely committing right now.” He lifts his pen from the tray, dips the nib in the inkwell, and underlines something he has written. Then: “Certainly Nevart and Hatoun will remain here in the compound. Your father and Dr. Forbes worry needlessly. They are no inconvenience. I barely see them. Besides …”
“Yes.”
He offers her a dark, beaten smile. “The way things are going, it might be those two who have to repopulate the race.”
She considers telling him that Nevart believes she is barren, but keeps the thought to herself. “I know Nevart will be very grateful,” she says instead.
“It’s nothing,” he says, waving his hand. “Given the slaughter that surrounds us, it is absolutely nothing at all.”
ONE NIGHT AFTER I HAD RETURNED FROM BOSTON, I WAS CHECKING my e-mail before bed. It was just after eleven and I was about to shut down my computer. The house was silent, but outside the window I heard and felt a spring breeze through the screen. Among the e-mail in my in-box was an innocuous bit of spam from Bloomingdale’s featuring a monthly calendar. And all it took was the iconic face of a calendar month—seven columns and five rows of squares—for a question to lodge itself soundly in my mind and for my stomach to lurch as if I were on a plane that had just dropped half a mile in turbulence. The question was tragically simple: by how many hours did Armen miss Karine in Aleppo?
Because, it dawned on me at that moment, the issue was hours. Not days. It certainly wasn’t weeks. After all, Helmut Krause most likely photographed Karine Petrosian after Armen had begun his long journey south. Had he found her before Armen left, he would have told his friend that a woman arrived who might be his wife. And while I did not know the precise day in July when Armen left for Egypt, I could narrow it down to a three-day period, based on the date of his first letter to Elizabeth. Moreover, I recalled how very soon it was after Armen had left Aleppo that Helmut Krause’s camera was destroyed by the gendarmes. Karine had to have been photographed in that slim window between when Armen started working his way toward Egypt and when the Ernemann was smashed to pieces in the citadel square. She may very well have been among those refugees who arrived in the square midmorning on the very day when the remnants of Nevart’s convoy started southeast for Der-el-Zor.
“Honey, are you coming to bed?”
I swiveled in my chair and saw Bob in the navy T-shirt and sweats that were as close as he ever came to pajamas. His hair was wild with sleep, and he looked a bit like a little boy as he leaned against the doorframe and squinted against the light in the library.
“Yeah, I am,” I said, and I watched him shuffle almost like a sleepwalker back down the corridor and upstairs.
&n
bsp; When I glanced back at my computer, I deleted the Bloomingdale’s ad. I couldn’t look at it any longer. It had that calendar, and calendars were as cruelly detached as the cosmos. Time, I thought, gives us hope; it shouldn’t. Time is indifferent. I knew that if I managed any sleep that night, it was going to be fitful and rich in dreams.
WHEN I WAS a little girl I used to love to go with my mother to an ice-cream shop in the mannered Fairfield County hamlet of Westport, Connecticut. The town was smaller then, and at least marginally less moneyed. Less Martha Stewart. My mother, my brother, and I would go there in the summer on our way home from the beach at Sherwood Island. We were likely to have just finished the second or third grade. But what I loved even more than the ice-cream emporium in Westport was the head shop below it. Yup, a head shop. My mother enjoyed the place, too. Quite happily the three of us would eat our ice-cream cones while browsing the blacklight posters—the psychedelic kamasutra, Jimi Hendrix (already dead and haloed), the Keep on Truckin’ dudes—as well as the lava lamps, the lighters, the artistically packaged rolling papers, and the racks and racks of incense. Often there was a strobe light flickering in the room in the back, which was separated from the front room by phantasmagorically colorful beaded drapes, and on the walls there were the posters that were especially mesmerizing: stairways to nowhere, argyle patterns that spun, great spreading tree boughs in a woman’s wild hair. That whole, small world was carefully designed to overwhelm sight, scent, and sound, and I was fascinated.
But what without question were of greatest interest to me were the glass display counters near the register that housed the roach clips, the pipes, and the bongs. Those items fascinated me because they were eerily reminiscent of the strangest articles on display in my grandparents’ Armenian living room. How was it that my father’s parents casually flaunted the sorts of illicit toys that were sold to hippies in head shops? There were three pipes in the Pelham living room and they were sometimes referred to as nargilehs. A nargileh is, in essence, a hookah. Imagine a spectacularly ornate bong with a hose. I knew they had belonged to my grandfather, though supposedly he had ceased using them by the time I was born. The tallest of the three sat on a side table near the bay window in the living room, as if the pipe were a work of art on a pedestal. The other two were placed behind glass doors on a shelf in a china cabinet. Each looked a bit like a magic lamp with a base for the water and a bowl for the tobacco. Or the hashish. Or the opium. The base on the taller pipe in the bay window showed a scantily clad harem girl, her top and her pants a robin’s egg blue and edged with fourteen-carat gold leaf. At least my parents said it was actual gold. Certainly that was a part of its mystique. A number of times my brother and I sucked on the hoses of all three of the nargilehs, despite the fact they were bitter with age and use and whatever illicit smoke had once passed through them. It was sort of like the way some kids (okay, include my brother and me in that group) will wander through the debris of their parents’ Dionysian dinner parties the morning after and sip the glasses still half-filled with red wine or Scotch.
One time when I was a little girl I asked my mother about the hookahs. It was not long after a Christmas at my grandparents’ house, and, as always, my brother had ogled the harem girl on the largest of the pipes, and my cousins and I had rubbed the bases of the smaller ones as if we honestly expected a genie to emerge. “Did Grandma and Grandpa really use them instead of cigarettes?” I asked.
“Supposedly. But mostly your grandfather and not very often. I think your grandmother only used them to drive her own father a little crazy,” my mother said. My mother, I have told you, smoked Eve cigarettes. Those mornings after my own parents’ parties, I always knew which still half filled Scotch glass had been my mother’s, because it was the one with the Eve cigarette butt floating (and starting to decompose) on the surface. There was often a smear of her lipstick on the filter.
“Did you ever see him?”
“When your father and I were first engaged, he used it once around me. I think he wanted to shock me a little bit.”
“Which one did he use?”
“Oh, he always used Anahid.”
I didn’t know what that word meant, and I must have looked quizzically at my mother.
“Sorry,” she continued. “Anahid is the pipe on the table by the windows in the living room. Anahid is a girl’s name. An Armenian name. That’s what we used to call that pipe.”
“Because of the dancing girl.”
“Yes. But don’t call it that around your grandparents. It’s a joke. Your father and your aunt and uncle gave the pipe that nickname when, I guess, your father was in high school.”
It might have been the words high school that made me think about the head shop we would visit in the summer. “I know that store in Westport—the place by the ice-cream shop—sells things for people who smoke marijuana. Did Grandma and Grandpa use the pipe to smoke marijuana?”
Without missing a beat my mother answered firmly, “No. I do not believe they ever used Anahid to smoke marijuana.” Nevertheless, even as a little girl I detected a precision to her answer that suggested she was being technically honest, but not authentically honest. It was the sort of distinction that a sitting president might make to a grand jury when parsing the definition of “sexual relations.”
Years later, when I knew a little more about drugs and drug culture, I asked my mother if her in-laws had ever used Anahid to smoke hashish or opium. She was cleaning up the dinner dishes, and I was keeping her company in the kitchen and making a halfhearted effort to finish some math homework. Again, my mother’s answer was revealing.
“Opium? Good Lord, no! Your grandfather was an engineer. He worked for railroad companies, you know that. Where in the world would your grandparents have even gotten opium?”
I was not oblivious to the fact that she had denied their use of opium only—not hashish. I considered pressing the issue, but then my father wandered in from the dining room with a couple of glasses I had forgotten to clear from the table. He kissed my mother on the back of her neck after depositing them in the sink, and my mother said to me, “How do you like your new math teacher?” I understood she wanted to change the subject, perhaps because my father had walked in. And so I obliged, in part because I thought I had my answer.
ELIZABETH WATCHES THE two porters load the trunks and valises onto the back of the oxcart outside the American compound and finds herself at once nervous and elated. The riot of feelings is triggered by the same basic reality: she is about to be more or less on her own here in Aleppo. Oh, Ryan Martin has vowed to her father that he will keep an eye on her, but she isn’t a child and the American consul knows this. Besides, he has his own responsibilities to occupy him. And she has the sense that Dr. Akcam will look out for her, as much as he can. Nevart, too. But once the train departs this afternoon for Damascus with the four Americans aboard, she will be—and the word reverberates in her mind—independent. She likes the way it sounds in her head.
“And if Ryan’s not around, you know where the telegraph office is, correct?” her father is saying. They have been over this. They have discussed at length money and communication and safety. She is a little touched by his concern.
“Yes, Father,” she reminds him. She finds herself smiling. When she looks back toward the compound she sees William Forbes in the shade of the great double doors, his expression unreadable in the shadows. But he is standing perfectly still. “Really, you needn’t worry.”
“I do worry. And, of course, your mother is frantic at the idea you’re remaining.”
“I doubt that. Nothing but the health of her dogs is capable of eliciting that sort of emotion from Mother,” she says, hoping a joke will restore her father’s usual equanimity. “You and me? Mother seldom worries.”
Forbes emerges from the doorway and positions himself beside her father. “In your father’s absence, be careful whom you befriend,” he says.
“I have always chosen my company with care,”
she tells him, not quite sure what to make of this unsolicited advice.
He raises an eyebrow and smirks. “You seem to gravitate toward the strays and the Mohammedans,” he says.
She takes the remark in. She knows that Forbes does not approve of the presence of Nevart and Hatoun in the compound. She is well aware that both he and her father are appalled that Mr. Martin is allowing the two Armenian deportees to remain here. But until this moment she had not appreciated the depth of Forbes’s distaste for Dr. Akcam and her friendship with the older physician. She can’t tell how much is jealousy and how much is contempt because Akcam is Turkish. “I expect to be well occupied,” she tells him. “I will continue to keep the Friends of Armenia abreast of our efforts, and I will continue to work at the hospital.”
“My advice?”
“Had I requested it?”
“Stay with the Christians,” he tells her.
There is so much she could say to him in response, but she does not want to upset her father by skirmishing with one of the physicians as they are leaving. There has been enough of that. But she also cannot allow his bigotry to pass without comment. And so she says, “He who does not travel does not know the value of a man.”
He frowns. “I suppose that is one of those meaningless proverbs you have grown so fond of.”
“It is. Dr. Akcam taught me to say it in Turkish, too.”
“Well, bully for him.”
“I find it has great significance.”
One of the porters approaches Forbes and asks if he would like his leather doctor’s bag in the back of the cart or in his seat with him. The physician takes it from the porter and says to Silas, “I know nothing here ever runs on time. But it will be our luck that—for once—our train will, and we’ll miss it. So I’ll go find Hugh and then we should probably get moving.”
The Sandcastle Girls Page 22