The Sandcastle Girls (11 page)

It has been only a day, but already she misses Nevart. She misses her mother. All night long, it seemed, she was drying her tears in the coarse wool of the blanket.

She is not sure what she thinks of sleeping on a bunk so close to the ceiling. She worries that she will sit up in bed and smack her head in the dark. She frets that when she climbs down, suspending her feet below her as her toes search for the mattress, she will accidentally step on the twelve-year-old in the bunk beneath her. She told herself this was why she didn’t move from the moment the nun left until the woman returned just after sunrise.

“You should go outside, too.”

She turns around, surprised at the sound of a voice, and looks behind her. Standing there, gazing at her, is a barefoot girl roughly her age with hair that looks as if it has never been brushed. She wonders why the teachers or nuns here haven’t tried combing it out. “Come play,” the girl adds, and she scratches at a line of scabs on her left arm. Her white smock is a mass of stains, and there is a skin of mustard-colored mud along the hem.

Hatoun knows that the older child is still in bed, perhaps curled up in a ball. Or maybe she is craning her head now, watching this particularly unkempt orphan from behind.

“They’ve drawn a maze,” the child continues, referring to the group in the courtyard.

Finally Hatoun finds the courage to speak. “I’ll stay here,” she mumbles. But she is honestly not sure if what she said was audible. Did she just mouth the words?

“It’s a maze,” the child repeats. “You have to hop inside the lines they drew on the blocks. I did it. It’s fun.” Then: “What’s your name?”

“Hatoun.” Again she can’t decide if she actually made any noise.

“I’m Ramela.” The child skips a dozen steps down the room and turns her attention to the twelve-year-old girl in the bottom bunk. “And who are you?”

When Ramela is greeted only with silence, she says to Hatoun, “She’s like you, isn’t she? She won’t talk. How come?”

Indeed, how come? Hatoun understands there is a connection between the older girl having been outraged and her failure to speak, but the link is unclear. Does a girl automatically lose her ability to talk when a man does that to her? Or was this just a coincidence? The truth is, Hatoun herself has said very little. What is there to say? Mostly she has been either hungry or thirsty or scared, and what is the point of talking or crying if your pleas all go unanswered? First she had a mother and a sister. Then, for a few weeks, she had Nevart. Now the grown-ups always get killed or taken away. Everything is different than it was in the spring. Everything.

Outside she hears a girl squealing and turns her attention back to the window. The boy who drew the kite is tickling the girl, running his fingers under her arms and along her ribs. Inside Ramela runs back toward Hatoun, surprising her by climbing up onto the windowsill right beside her and then pulling herself through the slender hole and down into the courtyard. She lands with a thud, stands up, and without brushing off the dust from the ground races into the fracas and starts tickling both the boy and the girl.

Hatoun turns around and stares at the twelve-year-old. For a second their eyes meet and Hatoun is brought back instantly to a moment in the desert. There is her sister, once again bound to the post, as the gendarmes climb onto their horses. Her sister looks to her mother and then to Hatoun. Their eyes had met, too. Her sister was crying and Hatoun recalls looking away. This feels to her unforgivable now. Then another refugee swept Hatoun up and twirled her away from the women on the ground, pressing Hatoun’s face into her chest and neck so she couldn’t see, even if she had wanted to. But, still, she heard. She heard the horses’ hooves as they charged faster than they ever had on this endless march in the desert, and she heard the sound of the swords as they
slashed through the air. She heard the euphoric, giddy cries of the gendarmes and the way they teased one rider who needed three passes to finish off one of the women. She might have heard more, but the woman managed to cover her ears with her elbows and hands, while holding her tight.

Hatoun allows her body to slide down against the orphanage wall, and once on the floor she stares at the corridor between the beds. She straightens her legs before her in exactly the way her mother and her sister did before they were executed. She presses her spine against the wall, still cool, as if it’s a wooden pole in the sand. She waits, but for what she’s not sure.

She has no idea how long she has been sitting like that when the door at the far end of the room opens. She sees one of the teachers, a Syrian with a streak of white in her black hair, leading the young American woman and Nevart. When they spot her, they gaze at her a little quizzically. Then, with great purposeful strides, they march down the long room toward her.

T
HERE IS THE
camel route and there is the train. Armen uses some of the money Eric and Helmut have loaned him—they have been clear that he is not to kill himself in some harebrained charge across no-man’s-land somewhere, and they expect someday to be repaid—and purchases a train ticket to Damascus. Then, if there is an engine running on the next spur, he will edge closer still to the British and continue on to Jericho. How he will manage the rest of the journey is a mystery to him. He can’t imagine ingratiating himself into either a caravan or a column of Turkish troops approaching the front. But he reminds himself that the desert is vast and people disappear and—he hopes—reappear among the dunes all the time.

The train car is empty except for a pair of men he presumes are merchants, each in a western suit and a fez, who smoke and play cards on the rounded wooden seats as they wait to depart. In another car are half a dozen Turkish soldiers, and his body tenses
when he contemplates the likely exchange should, for some reason, they wander into this car. It was one thing to be in Aleppo, especially since he had the protection—should he have needed it—of a pair of German soldiers. The Turks looked up to the Germans the way a little brother eyes an older one. Still, he really can’t imagine these Turkish businessmen are going to waste their time on him. And if they did? He could make up some legitimate business in Damascus and conjure a family there. A sister. A brother. A wife. All would be lies, but all would be plausible. Eric had offered him a pistol, but Armen didn’t dare accept it. Armenians are not allowed to own weapons. Besides, the next train would be the tricky one, because then he would be edging ever closer to the British. And that will be suspicious. The Turks already presume that any Armenian male still standing is intent on joining an opposing army. The Russians, usually, the way Garo had planned. But it is not unheard-of for an Armenian to sign up with the British.

One of the merchants looks over and smiles at him congenially as the train bumps its way south. For an hour Armen simply sits and daydreams, growing oblivious to the gaze of the merchants. Eventually he reaches into his satchel and pulls out a pencil and paper and starts to write Elizabeth. He expects to post the letter from either Damascus or Al Qatrana. Somewhere on this train line, traveling in the opposite direction, may be the two doctors and the missionary she is expecting. He writes with the paper pressed against the wooden bench.

He begins his note, “Dear Elizabeth,” and then adds, “my red-haired Armenian.” He continues, despite the way the train is taking its time finding a steady rhythm, to write in a slow, measured hand. He tells her the sorts of details that he would never have shared with Eric or Helmut, the moments of domesticity in Harput that preceded the end of the world in Van. He tells her that once he had had a daughter. He had almost shared this with Elizabeth any number of times, but the words had always caught in his throat, and each time he had spoken instead of anything but his little girl. Pomegranates. His brothers. Karine. The infant had lived
not quite twelve months. Only this morning had he finally told Elizabeth how he feared his wife had died—what he had learned of the deportation and the massacre, some of it rumor, some of it wild allegation. Only now does he write that he was a father and his only child was dead before she had reached her first birthday. In the letter he mentions nothing of the battle in Van or the slaughter in Bitlis. He writes not a word of what he did when he returned to Harput and confronted Nezimi. He doesn’t dare, because the letter will most certainly be read before it is delivered, and if he describes what he has seen and heard and done, it will never reach her.

“How can you write when the train jostles like this?” one of the merchants asks him in Turkish. His moustache is more gray than black and his skin is deeply weathered.

“Just notes,” he answers evasively, also in Turkish, unsure whether this is small talk or something more.

His associate shrugs and then says, his tone strangely ominous, “I don’t know. I wouldn’t risk it, young man.”

“And what am I risking?” he asks.

“That depends on what you are writing,” says the fellow who initiated the conversation. He snuffs out his cigarette on the floor of the train car and eyes a fly. Then he stands, balancing himself on the back of the seat, and allows his suit jacket to fall open, revealing a pistol with a pearl handle. “There are people who want the Arabs to revolt.”

“Some Arabs are as unpatriotic as Armenians,” observes the other.

There is nothing incriminating in his letter to Elizabeth. Nevertheless, carefully he folds it in half and places it inside his satchel. He holds tight to the pencil. It’s not much of a weapon, but it is all that he has.

“I’m not planning to foster rebellion anywhere,” Armen tells them and he raises his eyebrows.

“But you are an Armenian,” says the Turk with the handgun.

“I am.”

“Where are you going?”

“Damascus.”

“Why?”

“My sister lives there.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m an engineer. I’m working on the Baghdad Railway—the spur from Aleppo to Nusaybin.”

“The British have captured Nasiriyah.”

“I hadn’t heard that.”

He nods. “Had you heard that an Armenian murdered a Turkish officer in Aleppo?”

“No.”

“A young man roughly your age, according to witnesses—the Armenian criminal, that is.”

“Did they catch him?”

“Not yet,” he says, and he snorts dismissively. “May I see your papers? We work for the governor-general of the vilayet of Aleppo. And I also know Germans. Herr Lange is a very good friend,” he says, referring to the German consul in Aleppo.

Armen guesses that each of the men is close to twice his age. They are in their early to mid-fifties. But they outnumber him and at least one of them is armed. He gazes at the carriage door and briefly considers his options. He has no papers, no passport—neither one for international travel nor even a
teskere
, the passport that allows him passage throughout the Ottoman Empire. Both were confiscated by the Turks months ago, the first step in the annihilation of his people. Still, if only to buy himself a moment, he makes a show of searching inside his satchel, standing and turning the canvas bag toward the window as if he expects the sunlight will help him to uncover a passport. And then behind him he hears one of the Turks warning, “Shoot him, he’s getting a weapon!” and instantly Armen realizes his mistake, but already it’s too late. He turns and the administrator has crossed the car and pulled out the pearl-handled gun, aiming it at his chest. So Armen raises his arms slowly and carefully. Then he slams the pencil as hard as he can into the left eye of the Turk, the point deflating the
white orb like a balloon and spraying a warm, colorless gel onto the front of his hand and his face. The point penetrates deeply, the lead snapping off inside the brain at precisely the moment when the administrator reflexively closes his finger around the trigger and fires the weapon, his body pitching forward and then collapsing long after the bullet has grazed Armen’s ear and shattered the window behind him. And then, though Armen’s ears are ringing and he understands instinctively that the back of his head could be awash in shards of glass and splintered wood, he swings his bag into the other Turk, throwing himself upon him. He pins him to the floor of the railcar, accidentally banging his kneecaps hard on the wood there, and from the corner of his eye sees that the pistol is no more than four or five feet away. The pencil protrudes from the other man’s socket like a fencepost and the body is twitching spastically. He’s still alive, but he’s making no effort to remove the pencil from his skull.

And so Armen dives for the weapon, and the Turk beneath him takes advantage of his freedom to lunge for it, too. But Armen reaches the gun first, and, though his own body feels strangely sluggish, he grabs it and fires point-blank into the face of the official, the world once more exploding in sound and rage, and it feels to Armen as if it is raining inside the train car.

And then, in part because his ears have been stunned by the gunshots and in part because there really is only the sound of the metal train wheels spinning against the rails, the world seems to grow almost pleasantly hushed. He pushes the body off him and sits up. He notices the other Turk has stopped jerking.

For a moment he sits against the legs of the wooden bench, catching his breath. He wonders if the Turkish soldiers in the other car heard the two gunshots, and—if they did—whether it was possible they mistook the sounds for backfiring within the steam engine. He decides he isn’t going to stay and find out. Quickly he gathers up the pistol and his satchel, opens the train car door, and dives into the sand, hurling his body as far from the rolling carriage as he can.

•   •   •

H
ATOUN CLINGS TO
Nevart as the two Armenians trail behind Elizabeth, the young American leading them from the orphanage in Aleppo to the compound where the U.S. consul lives and his visitors are staying. Nevart finds herself fretting, sinking into a swamp of second thoughts. Yes, the Turks might close the orphanage; yes, it might be a world where some of the children are brutish and others are dying, where perhaps only a small percentage will emerge better off. Nevertheless, she worries that she is making an egregious and spectacularly selfish mistake with Hatoun. Why in the name of God should she presume that she can give this child a better life than the orphanage can? She knows nothing, nothing at all, about being a mother. She and Serge had failed to conceive a child in seven years of marriage. The two of them had come to believe they never would. For a time the reality had cast a pall over their lovemaking. But in the end? Her inability to conceive had been a disappointment, and eventually they had moved on. Sex, once again, had been about sex—not starting a family. The two of them were all the family they would ever have, other than their parents and siblings and cousins.