The Sandcastle Girls

by Chris Bohjalian

  He walks past her into the compound without saying a word, and her father turns to her. She can see in his eyes how much this place has changed him; they are actually a little moist.

  AT THE HOSPITAL Nevart uses a stethoscope that reminds her of her late husband and listens to the boy’s heart. His belly is distended from hunger, and his face seems forever chiseled into that of an angry old man’s. But his spirits are rather good as he sits up in his bed and pulls down his loose shirt to accommodate the chestpiece. He has said he is nine, but she is confident that he’s lying. Something about him suggests he’s on the cusp of adolescence: eleven or twelve, at least. Perhaps even thirteen. Many of the starved children have bodies that appear older—the sagging skin, the protruding bones, the spectacular weakness—but this boy has the frame of a teenager and the first downy wisps of hair on his chest.

  “You have a good heart,” she says to him, standing up and dropping the tubes around her neck. He takes the chestpiece and bats it playfully. She, in turn, takes his hand and uncurls his fingers. She pretends to study his palm as if it’s a book. “And it seems you’re going to live a long, long time.”

  “So you’re a palm reader?” he asks and—once more—she is struck by the way his voice sounds like an adolescent’s. The tone of the question was almost … flirtatious.

  “Not formally schooled in the art,” she replies. “But your life line is long like a river.” In truth she knows nothing about life lines. She was just being silly. She puts no stock in palm reading. But his heart did indeed sound strong. She hadn’t been making that up.

  In the corridor she runs into Sayied Akcam, a leather binder in one hand and an unopened bottle of iodine in the other. She motions toward the boy in the bed and asks the physician, “How old do you think that child is?”

  “He says he’s nine.”

  “Do you think he is?”

  The doctor smiles. “Heavens no. He might be fourteen or fifteen.”

  She is about to ask why the teenager would lie, but before she has opened her mouth she understands. The boy has figured out that he has no place to go when he gets better. He can either wander homeless through the streets of Aleppo or be sent to one of the resettlement camps—and neither prospect offers much chance of survival. His best hope is the orphanage, and that means cutting several years off his age.

  “But he is on the small side, frail, and very smart,” Akcam continues. “And, apparently, lucky. We don’t see a lot of teenage boys in the convoys. Usually they’re slaughtered with the men. But if he can last long enough in the orphanage, this war might be over.” He opens his binder and flips to a page, pointing to a specific line. She sees that beside the child’s name and city of origin Akcam has written his birth date. He has corroborated the boy’s age as nine. When Nevart looks up from the binder, the doctor is smiling conspiratorially and his eyes have an uncharacteristic twinkle to them.

  HATOUN FOLLOWS SHOUSHAN to the sound of the boisterous Janizary music—the music of the sultans—the two of them racing down one of the narrow alleys that converge on the square beneath the citadel. Hatoun tries clinging to the girl’s fingers, but Shoushan runs like a rabbit; she leaps and darts and seems oblivious to stoops and garbage and even people. Soon she is just a smocked smudge that appears and disappears until, finally, they emerge in the square, and there is the Turkish military band. Hatoun sees that the musicians are soldiers and immediately halts. There is one man holding a heavy drum against his chest, but the rest are playing clarinets, cymbals, and the most beautiful crescents she has ever spied. Altogether she counts seven musicians. Around them are easily fifty or sixty people, mostly men, Turks all, some clapping, but most merely smiling and nodding.

  Shoushan jumps onto the cobblestones and starts dancing between the musicians and the crowd, moving like a wild woman and occasionally beckoning Hatoun to join her. Hatoun watches enrapt, but she knows in her heart that Shoushan is playing a dangerous game and drawing too much attention to herself. The musicians seem only amused, however, especially when Shoushan tries to mimic a belly dance—no small endeavor since she has no belly at all. And the crowd seems to be enjoying her antics. But then a massive middle-aged fellow in a western suit and shoes and a fez emerges from the crush with two younger men, slimmer and stronger, beside him. Hatoun can’t decide if they are bodyguards or assistants of some sort. They are also in European dress. The older fellow studies Shoushan for a long moment, and Shoushan seems to grow even more animated, her dancing yet more suggestive, in the glow of this attention. And then—and it happens so quickly that for a second Hatoun is not precisely sure what she has witnessed—one of the two younger men lifts Shoushan up from behind and starts to carry her into the crowd. The girl is screaming so loud to be released, to be put down, that she can be heard over the drums and the cymbals and the crescents, but no one is making any effort to stop the men. It’s as if this abduction is, like the music, a part of the entertainment. And so reflexively Hatoun runs after them, aware that some of the people are laughing now—laughing at the idiot orphan girl who has been scooped up and the idiot orphan girl who is chasing after her. She pushes her way through the throng and sees the men and her friend—still shrieking and flailing her arms futilely—halfway across the very same square in which Hatoun had curled up beside Nevart when they had first arrived in Aleppo. She runs even faster than she did a few minutes ago down the alley, and when she catches up to them Shoushan howls her name, one long ululation of despair. Hatoun tries tugging at her friend, pulling her from the man’s arms by her bony legs and then by her smock. The fellow can’t be more than twenty, Hatoun thinks, when the fat man says something she doesn’t understand, and his other assistant slaps her so hard on the side of her face—two of his fingers have thick, heavy rings—that she feels her head whip around as the stinging pain starts to register. Then she collapses, stunned, onto the cobblestones. She tries to stand, pushing herself off the ground with both hands, but she is so dizzy that her legs buckle. She looks up, her vision fuzzy, and watches as her wailing friend disappears with the men down another of the narrow streets that throb like veins in this terrifying city at the edge of the desert.

  ARMEN TRIES BREATHING through his mouth and finds himself swallowing warm, wet dirt, which is like sludge on his lips and tongue. He moves his head back, barely, and spits, and the mud drools down his chin. He guesses that for a time he has been breathing only through his nose—though now that he’s conscious, he realizes this will not be pleasant. It will mean inhaling as well the stink of deep earth and rotting flesh. Somewhere far away (or, perhaps, not far away) he can also smell smoke. He tries opening his eyes, but when he does dirt falls into them and stings. And even in that brief second when he widened his lids, he wasn’t sure he could see more than a bit of vague, hazy light. Is it possible he is blind now? It might be just that simple; maybe the Turks did him in with poison gas. He read about the gas in Ypres. But there is something more complicated going on, something different from blindness. He tries to comprehend what it is, but his mind is moving sluggishly. It’s as if whatever this weight is that is making it hard to breathe and is pressing against his chest is also making it difficult to think. Somewhere in the distance he hears the sound of Australians and New Zealanders, and it confuses him because he has a vague recollection of people yelling and then screaming in Turkish. Soldiers. He tries to make sense of the English, but the conversation has stopped. Or whoever was speaking is no longer within earshot.

  He tries to stand, but he can’t. There is far too much earth on top of him and far too much … something else. He can move his fingers a bit, especially on his right hand, so he starts clawing at the dirt, crabbing his way toward his chest so he can try to determine what else is upon him. In a moment, he has found something, and he flinches. He has discovered cloth and an arm and an abdomen. Not his. He follows the shape of the corpse (assuming it is a corpse, and not someone—like himself—who is still, apparently, very much alive) with his
fingers, pushing away the dirt as he goes, until he understands how he has been able to breathe. The other body is more or less perpendicular to his, and a part of the back is atop his chest, creating a cavity around his face. He runs his hand over the corpse (and now, it seems, it really is a cadaver), until he has found the head and the other arm. The body is intact.

  He smacks his lips, thirsty. His throat is raw. The smell of smoke grows a little more evident, and he wonders what’s on fire. There is no gunfire, no shelling, no indication of battle. Is it a field kitchen? It smells like burning meat.

  Clearly there was a fight. A battle. It starts to come back to him, slowly, as if he is waking from a dream. He had been in the Turkish trenches—the trenches they had captured. It was dark but he hadn’t eaten yet, because they had to reset the firing platforms so they would face in the opposite direction. And then … then nothing.

  No, there had been something. Had they been shelled? Or had there been an infantry charge? He honestly can’t recall.

  He has the sense it is daylight now, if only because the world hadn’t been completely black when he briefly opened his eyes. Perhaps if he uses his right hand to clear this body off him, he can push away some of the dirt.

  For the first time the idea crosses his mind that he may be badly hurt. Something has happened to his right leg. When he tries to move his foot or stretch his shin, a dagger of pain slices from his ankle to the back of his neck, and he winces. He recalls the wetness he had felt when his hand was creeping along the earth beside his abdomen and then along the body on top of him. He has to hope the blood that moistened the dirt there is from the dead man, but based on the agony that has left him nearly spasming here in the ground, he doubts it.

  Regardless, he needs to start digging his way out. He needs to get this corpse off of him. It’s like …

  It’s like Nezimi. That day in the administrator’s office in Harput.

  You were my friend, Armen had said, and clearly the Turk had understood where this conversation was leading. He started to open a desk drawer to his right, reaching for his pistol, so instantly Armen shoved the desk into the official as hard and as fast as he could, toppling Nezimi backward in his chair and into the wall. Climbing atop and over the desk, Armen leapt onto him. But Nezimi was strong and he was fast, and he wrestled Armen to the floor, his knee on Armen’s chest, and the weight was reminiscent of what he is feeling now.

  No, that was more painful. That was a knee on his sternum. This is just … buried.

  Buried. Had someone presumed he was dead and tossed him into this ditch? Some Turkish private? He worries that the smoke is a pyre; they’re burning corpses. But he heard English. Which means, perhaps, that it was an Aussie soldier who tossed him here, presuming he was an enemy infantryman. Or maybe he has been here so long that it was the Turks who heaved him into this pit a day or two ago, and the Aussies have since recaptured this section of hill.

  And maybe it isn’t a burial pit at all. Wasn’t his first thought that he was in a trench?

  None of this matters. If he’s going to live, he needs to get out. And so—and, again, briefly he is back with Nezimi, struggling madly to lift the official off him—he uses his one free arm to push the body away, moving it half an inch or an inch at a time, the dirt always spilling onto him until, finally, the corpse is beside him rather than on him. Then he rests, listening.

  Once again he hears soldiers speaking in English. They’re back. Or, perhaps, they’d never left.

  He thinks of the rage he had seen in Nezimi’s eyes. And maybe that was the reason, Armen decides, he is alive now and the fellow who had betrayed him is dead. Nezimi had had good reason to feel guilty or scared that afternoon, but not angry. He—Armen—was the one whose fury was justified. He was the one whose wife and daughter had been sent into the desert to die by this administrative pedant who had vowed to protect them. He was the one whose wife and daughter were dead. Somehow Armen had gotten the official off of him. Had scrambled to his feet above Nezimi. Kicked him hard under his chin before the bastard could rise, perhaps severing his spine right then. Armen will never know. Because he grabbed the ceremonial scimitar that hung on the wall and cut the man’s throat.

  He had expected to feel that sort of rage here in the Dardanelles. Isn’t that why he enlisted? But it has never been that personal here. He has never experienced anywhere near that level of hatred.

  The smoke brings him back, and he starts probing straight up with his right arm, clawing against the loam. He uses his elbows to try to push his body ever upward, again moving in increments that could only be measured in half and even quarter inches. Suddenly he has the distinct sense that his fingers have reached the surface and are moving like mice along the top of the pile.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Brian, what?”

  The voices are clear now, two of them. Australian.

  “Look! It’s a fucking hand!”

  He feels the ground above him shuddering as they run toward him, and then they are using their hands and digging, digging, and in a moment there is sun and even a wisp of wind, and it feels so good that he almost chokes because he is breathing it all in so deeply.

  “Good Christ, he’s one of us,” says one of the soldiers, as he and his partner lift Armen up under his arms and hoist him from the hole. The two men are on their knees, shirtless, inspecting him now. The second fellow glances at Armen’s leg and the massive red stain on the right side of his shirt.

  “Looks like you’re going to Alexandria, mate. Egypt! You know that, don’t you?” the soldier says. “That wound’s your ticket off this bloody peninsula!”

  Armen thinks about this, his breath raspy and hoarse. Over the soldiers’ shoulders he sees a bonfire, and two other men with masks heaving a dead Turkish private into the flames.

  RYAN MARTIN STANDS with his hands on his hips beside his young assistant, David Hebert, and gazes at the walls of the abandoned monastery. They are red this time of the day, as the sun sinks into the sands to the west. David has planted the blade of the shovel into the ground and stood it upright like a walking stick, resting both hands upon the tip of the handle. Orhan told Ryan to look for a solitary pine that is roughly twenty-five meters tall and has the face of a virgin in the bark.

  “Is this girl happy she’s a virgin or spinsterish?” David asks. “Frankly, I see her as rather cranky about her predicament.”

  “I think we can assume virgin in this case was merely a synonym for pretty and young,” he answers.

  “Well, she can’t be happy about being trapped in a tree. I say we look for a girl with a scowl.”

  Ryan sees a disorderly copse of pine near one section of the wall and a line of cypress beside another. He starts around the corner near what he guesses, based on the fact it is a rather squat section of rubble with a chimney, once was the frater—the monastery dining room. He marches over there and stands on the hillock. And there it is. A tall, single pine.

  “I see the tree!” he calls back to David. “It’s over here.”

  “Is she pretty and young? If we have to dig holes in this heat, at least give me someone pretty and young to look at while I work—and she doesn’t have to be a virgin, I assure you,” David says, speaking as much to himself as he is to Ryan. He pulls the shovel blade from the dry soil and starts over to the consul.

  “So,” he adds, when he reaches him, “this is it?”

  The branches begin about five feet up the trunk. Ryan can see clearly where, over time, the lower ones withered and fell. “It might be,” he says to David. “But I do not want either of us to get our hopes up.” He walks slowly around the trunk. There is one section where the hysterical imagination might see a face: a pair of knots, a stub from a dead bough. A horizontal fissure in the bark that, perhaps, does have a vaguely enigmatic, Mona Lisa–like smile. But it seems to Ryan to be an enormous stretch, and, on second thought, he can’t decide whether it’s even worth digging here.

  Over his shoul
der he hears David murmuring, “Good Lord. I have no idea if she’s a virgin, but I’d consider asking her out for tea.”

  He turns to his assistant: “You see a face here? Really?” And he points at the section with the two knots.

  “No, not there,” David says. He motions instead at a section a foot lower and to the right. “There. I’d point her out to you by touching her, but I fear she’d think I was rather forward. Besides, a finger in the eye is never pleasant.”

  Ryan stares at the section of trunk and sees absolutely nothing; he sees no trace of a face at all. “Are you pulling my leg?”

  “No.”

  “You honestly see a face?”

  “You honestly don’t?”

  “I don’t,” Ryan admits. “But if you believe we should dig here, I’m game.”

  “Did your Turkish friend say how deep the box is?”

  “Three or four feet.”

  “Okay, then,” David says, and immediately thrusts the blade into a patch of soil in front of the face on the pine—or, at least, on the side of the tree where David insists he has seen a face. He digs steadily, shoveling perhaps three feet into the earth before he starts widening the circle, expanding it steadily like the ripples flowing out from a pebble that has broken the surface of a still pond. At first the ground is sandy, but once he is two feet down it grows moist and dark, and he starts hitting rocks nearly the size of baseballs. The piles of dirt look to Ryan as if they have come from two different spots on the globe.

  “Want a break?” he asks David. “Why don’t you rest for a moment and I’ll take over?”

  The young man shakes his head. “I think I’ve found something.”

  “You’re not serious?”