The Sandcastle Girls (10 page)

Elizabeth smiles and nods. “Yes, absolutely. That would be perfect,” she says. She knows her father will not be happy about this; he will feel it is an improper diminishment of the boundaries that separate the giver and the recipient of a charity. But in her mind, Elizabeth is already imagining she has a new friend and—in Hatoun—a niece. Or, maybe, a younger sister. That’s it: Nevart will be like an older sister and Hatoun a younger one. This is, she realizes, at once an oversimplification and a fantasy. But she is an only child, and there is something appealing about crowding the compound.

And while Nevart is taller and dramatically thinner, Elizabeth is confident that with a little creativity they will find ways to make her trunk full of clothing fit this Armenian widow. And Hatoun? Fashionable clothing will be the least of her concerns. She’ll be fine.

They’ll all be fine, she tells herself. They’ll all be just fine. It will be great fun.

Behind her she hears a commotion. The two German engineers are back. Between them they are hefting a tripod and the great black camera that looks a bit like a small suitcase. She turns to see who they are photographing and feels a great wave of nausea nearly overwhelm her. The engineers have lined up on the ground three women who died in the night, stripping off their rags to record their emaciation. Already rigor mortis has set in, and she worries that the bony legs of one of the women will snap like a pretzel if Eric continues to try to uncurl them for the photograph. Abruptly, out of nowhere it seems, two gendarmes appear, one with his rifle off his shoulder. The other lifts the tripod into the air by two of its
three slender legs. Whether he plans to confiscate it or destroy it is unclear to her. But Helmut tries to reason with him. For a moment it looks as if either he is going to succeed or Eric is going to be able to wrestle it back, when the larger of the guards drops his gun so he has two free hands, and whisks the tripod deftly from his comrade’s grasp. Then, as if it is a scarecrow with a pumpkin head he hopes to smash unceremoniously upon the ground, he raises the camera and tripod above him and slams them hard into the earth, where the camera breaks apart with a sound more like splintering crystal than shattering wood.

M
Y
A
RMENIAN GRANDFATHER ONCE SAID
, “T
HE
T
URKS TREATED
us like dogs.” He said this with disgust. He did not say it the way my Bryn Mawr grandmother once remarked, “When I die I want to come back as a golden retriever.” She said this with a gleam in her eye when I was a little girl and she was watching my brother and me smother our golden retriever, Mack, with kisses.

My Armenian grandfather was simply making a blanket statement that the Turks had treated his people like animals.

There was, however, an ironic truth to his remark. The Turks really did treat the Armenians like dogs when they walked them into the desert to die. There had been a model, and it involved the dogs of Constantinople. In 1910 the Turkish city was overrun with wild dogs, an inconvenience to a regime trying to appear modern to the ostensibly more civilized Europeans to the northwest, and a legitimate sanitation hazard. There were tens of thousands of these unmoored dogs. They roamed, ate, and defecated at will. Unfortunately the Turks hadn’t the spine to euthanize them. No one was willing to hunt the creatures, no one was willing to poison them. After all, they were dogs.

The solution? Catch them and ship them to the island of Oxia in the Sea of Marmara. Somewhere in the neighborhood of forty thousand of them were boarded onto boats and unceremoniously dropped off on the uninhabited island. There they were left to die
slowly among the rocks and gorse, because there was no food for them on Oxia, no animals that might serve as prey. Sometimes people would row to the island to feed them, but there were far too many dogs and far too little food. The animals baked on the stark cliffs and slowly starved to death. For months, villagers across the spit of water in Anatolia had to endure their ceaseless barking. The animals’ evident desperation grew so terrifying that even the fishermen began avoiding the waters around the rock, because they were afraid packs of dogs would find the strength to swim to their boats and swamp them. It took a long, long time for all of the dogs to die, because the stronger ones finally began to devour the weaker ones. But eventually that source of food disappeared, too, and the barking grew pathetic and mournful. And, finally, the island was absolutely quiet.

My point? When the Turks marched the Armenians into the arid Mesopotamian plains, they had had a precedent. The only difference between the Armenians and the dogs was that most of the time the Armenians never chose cannibalism.

A
ND SO
, B
ERK
. The first boy I kissed in 1979. The teen who looked like a rock star with tresses that would have made Steven Tyler jealous, and who—by the way—just happened to be Turkish. I am not done with him. He wasn’t done with me.

He was the first boy I kissed in 1979, and two years later he was the first boy I fucked.

My two children are going to blush when they read this. Actually, that’s not completely accurate: Matthew, who is now in ninth grade, is never going to acknowledge that sentence exists; he will read this book and pretend those words aren’t on the page. Anna, who is two years younger, will ask me why I chose the verb that I did. Both will be silently appalled.

My husband, Bob, might be, too. But I have chosen the verb carefully. The fact is, Berk and I were teenagers, adolescents in heat. Later we would—choose any euphemism that will suffice—“make
love.” But that first time on the chaise beside my family’s swimming pool, a Friday night when my brother and my parents were out at separate parties and we had the house to ourselves? We fucked. It was actually pretty spectacular. I still remember the way I was tingling when I pulled off my bikini bottom. He was awkward with the condom, but then he was as graceful and self-assured as ever. We had dated off and on over the two years between our first kiss and our first coupling.

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.

H
ATOUN 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.