The Sandcastle Girls (15 page)

“But how would anyone know?”

“Armenians in Aleppo? I was here. I am linked to that camera. I’m not sure I can take the chance. Treason can get a man killed in wartime.”

“I’ll say I took the photographs.”

Helmut inhales deeply on his cigarette and then blows the smoke in a slow stream into the sky. “And there is Eric’s life to consider, too. I may choose to risk martyring myself, but I’m not sure I have the right to jeopardize Eric’s life also.”

“Two plates. Maybe three. That’s all I ask. We choose two or three in which there is no indication where the images were captured.”

“Two or three images would fail to convey the magnitude of what is occurring,” Helmut says, but Ryan knows he is weakening.

“Let’s go to your apartment and look at the plates. You don’t have to commit to anything.”

“Very well,” he murmurs, and he stamps out the cigarette though he has smoked no more than half of it.

A
RMEN HOLDS THE
sealed envelope in his hands as if it is a sacred text he has unearthed here in the Holy Land. It isn’t that he flatters
himself that anything he has written is so profoundly important. He tore up what he had started on the train, though he expects he will try again to tell Elizabeth about his daughter once he has made it to Egypt. The words have been pressed onto the paper with a stubby pencil, and he has composed them in English, his third language, and so he fears that his sentences are awkward and his grammar will disappoint her. But the idea that this may be the only letter he ever gets to mail her gives the paper and lead lines a totemic significance.

When he emerges from the post office in Jericho, the sun is directly overhead. He turns up his collar to protect the back of his neck, but here—amid the squat buildings and palms that fan out like basket flowers—there is shade. The sun feels far less deadly in Jericho than out in the desert.

Tomorrow he will begin trying to make his way to Gaza and the British lines there. He wanders into a café that offers Turkish raki and orders himself a carafe at the lone table by the window. He thinks of the American and wonders what she will make of his letter.

E
LIZABETH DOES NOT
share what she has written for the Friends of Armenia with her father. There’s really no need. Instead she places her report on Ryan Martin’s desk in his office in the compound. It’s his feedback that she desires, and the consul has agreed to review her work to make sure that what she has penned will make it safely to America, in the event the document is intercepted by the Turks before leaving Syria. Still, it is going to be sent by diplomatic courier, and her hope is that her small attempts at candor will not be rewarded by censorship or confiscation—that the time she has spent at the writing desk in her bedroom will not have been for naught.

In her letter she tells the Bostonians about the Armenians and the Turks she has met: Nevart and Hatoun. Dr. Sayied Akcam. Armen. She does not describe the condition of the Armenian
women when they arrived in Aleppo or the young guards with their truncheons and their whips, because Ryan has warned her that such honesty will only result in the document being destroyed and her possible—perhaps even likely—deportation.

So instead she tells of the new guests in the American apartments. She writes that Nevart is a widow whose late husband studied medicine in London. She writes that Hatoun is an orphan whose older sister perished in the desert with their mother. She writes that Armen is a widower and engineer and his eyes …

No, she tore up the description of his intense, fathomless eyes. She shredded the page on which she had written that he was gone and she missed him.

She recalls rewriting that whole section. She shared instead with her readers how many languages Armen spoke, that he worked on the railroads, and that he had stayed in Aleppo too briefly.

She hoped it spoke volumes that of the three Armenians she introduced to their organization and benefactors, one was a widow, one was an orphan, and one was a widower.

Then she turned her attention to the decency and the dedication of the Muslim physician in the hospital.

For a long moment she stares at the papers she has left on the blotter on the American consul’s desk. Perhaps he will have a suggestion or two, something she should delete or something she should add. Something she will need to say differently if she expects the document ever to pass through the Ottoman censors.

Then she leaves the compound to assist Dr. Akcam. She says a small prayer to herself as she walks that today she will watch no one die.

N
EVART STUDIES THE
rows of spices and the shelves with jars of flour and sugar in the kitchen in the American compound, gnawing at the fingernail on her pinky. She is reminded of her old kitchen—of the feeling of plenty. The fig trees outside the window. She finds
a ceramic bowl with black olives and small cubes of feta cheese on a wooden counter, and pops one of each in her mouth, savoring the slick saltiness. She has been warned by a nurse that she should eat only small portions until her weight has returned. She has seen other refugees learn the hard way that feasting too soon will make them retch violently.

She peers out the window and is surprised to see Hatoun in the courtyard. The girl is sitting perfectly still with her back against the trunk of a slender, not especially tall palm, and her legs are extended straight before her. She is wearing the sandals that she was given when she was brought to the orphanage. Nevart cannot see her face and imagines that the child is sleeping. But when the girl scratches at one of the scabs on her shoulder, Nevart realizes that she is awake. And so Nevart watches her more closely, especially when it dawns on her that the child’s posture is ramrod perfect; she must have every disc in her spine pressed flat against the bark of the tree. It can’t possibly be very comfortable. And yet Hatoun sits just like that, unmoving. Nevart wonders if she is studying something. A lizard, perhaps. Maybe that cat. Finally, after easily five minutes, the girl’s chin dips against her collarbone, and Nevart takes comfort in the idea that the child has fallen asleep. But the shoulders haven’t slumped over at all, the girl’s back is still rigid. And so Nevart strolls from the kitchen into the courtyard, curious.

Outside, she sees that Hatoun’s small head remains bowed. As if she is indeed asleep, the girl doesn’t look up at Nevart or acknowledge that she has company. Nor does there seem to be an animal present that might have captured Hatoun’s attention. But there is something about the pose that is disturbingly familiar to Nevart, and then, when she sees the doll that Elizabeth gave the child, she understands and reflexively brings her hand to her mouth. At another small tree, perhaps five yards away, is the doll named Annika. Hatoun has sat the doll against that palm in precisely the same position in which she is sitting, but she has torn its
china head from its cloth body and rested it, eyes to the sky, on the courtyard tile like a fallen plum.

T
HE
G
ERMAN ENGINEERS
have two rooms on the second floor in an elegant guesthouse near the citadel. There are other Germans living there, another pair of soldiers and two railway executives, and Ryan notices that tobacco smoke—from pipes and cigarettes and hookahs—clings to the thick drapes and heavily upholstered furniture on the first floor like a mist. Abruptly Helmut pauses at the foot of the stairs and holds up a single finger, halting them both. That’s when Ryan becomes aware of the noise, too. Shuffling. The low murmur of voices.

“There are people upstairs in my room,” Helmut says softly.

“Eric?”

He shakes his head. Then he pulls his Luger from its holster, and the weapon seems to be nothing but barrel to Ryan. The soldier flicks off the safety.

“Are you serious?” Ryan asks him.

“I’ve been robbed before. I won’t be robbed again, if I can avoid it,” he says. “Wait here.”

“Absolutely not,” Ryan tells him. He may, in the face of Ottoman bureaucracy, often be spectacularly ineffectual, but he was a soldier once and will not be unmanned now.

Helmut shrugs and starts slowly up the dark stairway, while Ryan—though behind him—stands upright, trying to see beyond the German’s broad shoulders. Despite Ryan’s shoes and Helmut’s heavy boots, the two of them move quietly, listening to the conversation above them and then down the corridor. Ryan decides there are at least three voices and, perhaps, a fourth. They are speaking Turkish, though one individual may be European. All are male. By the time they have reached the top of the stairs, Ryan feels a wave of disappointment wash over him and nearly take his breath away. He is more fluent than Helmut and has deduced that the
governor-general has sent soldiers to Helmut’s room to confiscate his photographic plates. First they destroyed his camera, and now they are going to destroy the evidence of their crimes.

And if there were any doubts in Ryan’s mind, they evaporate when they reach the door to the apartment. It is perhaps four or five inches ajar, and Helmut pushes it open the rest of the way with his boot. Then he stands there, his fingers tense on the trigger for a long moment, as the room goes completely silent. The one European is Oscar Kretschmer, a doctrinaire and frustratingly officious assistant to Ulrich Lange, the German consul in Aleppo. With Kretschmer is a Turkish major and two soldiers, one of whom has in his arms a wooden crate with the plates. In the room’s lone chair, his hands in his lap and his face a mask of resignation, is the German lieutenant.

“Hello, Helmut,” Eric says. A small smile of acknowledgment forms on his lips. “We have guests.”

Helmut returns the Luger to safety and holsters it.

“It looks like we will be traveling light when we leave this fine city,” Eric adds.

Kretschmer’s forehead becomes creased as he frowns, and it is clear to Ryan that he is struggling mightily to retain his ambassadorial dignity. He is a fastidious man—Ryan has always presumed that Kretschmer believes he should be the consul here, not Lange. But he can’t hide his reaction; he’s livid. Finally he says to Helmut, “I will tell you what I just told the lieutenant. We could have you both before a firing squad and shot as spies. As traitors. These pictures? They are treasonous. They’re propaganda. They don’t tell the real story.”

“And what is the real story, Herr Kretschmer?” Ryan asks.

The German official motions dramatically with one hand at the Turkish major and his soldiers—as if he is conducting an opera. “These people are in a brutal struggle with the Russians. And the Armenians are doing all that they possibly can to undermine their own nation’s efforts. Either they are sabotaging the Turkish war
effort in the rear or they are defecting and joining the Russian Army en masse.”

“I assure you, the women and children who have been arriving almost daily this summer had no plans to join the Russians,” Ryan says.

The Turkish major finally speaks. “Can you say the same about their husbands and brothers?” he asks, his voice exuding the sultry aromas of sandalwood and frankincense. He is, it seems at least in his own mind, a reasonable man. His eyes have a sympathetic twinkle. “No. And we brought many of these women here to keep them safe. They were living in a war zone. And while I am sorry we could not provide better rations en route, the soldiers and gendarmes accompanying them rarely ate much better. Your country may be neutral, but the rest of us are, sadly, in the midst of a war. Things happen in a war. Terrible things. But there are thousands of Armenians now living in Syria, and they are safer here than when they were within a stone’s throw of battling armies.”

Ryan knows there will be no reasoning with either Kretschmer or the Turks. But he wants that photographic evidence. “I’ll buy those plates from you,” he says to the Turkish major. Kretschmer may not approve of bribery, but it is one of the ways in which business is transacted here in the desert. The Turks think nothing of it. “Name your price.”

But the major surprises Ryan by shaking his head. “No, these will be destroyed. But you are very generous.” He bows ever so slightly.

Ryan glances back and forth between Eric and Helmut. Eric is staring down at the floor and Helmut leans against the door and shrugs. Ryan wonders what would happen if he tried to grab the crate and run from the room. Would Kretschmer or this Turkish major risk an incident by shooting him? Probably not. But the soldiers would tackle him quickly, in all likelihood before he had even reached the top of the stairs. He realizes that the plates are lost
to him, and the frustration is so pronounced that he is trembling. And then, as if the major can read his mind, he orders his men to follow him from the room with the photographic images, and Ryan can only watch as the pictures of the deceased and the walking dead of Aleppo pass directly under his nose.

A
MONG THE STRANGEST, MOST UNEXPECTED ELEMENTS DEEP
within my DNA is the reality that I am able to work seamlessly with phyllo dough. In all other ways I am an unbelievably bad cook and my kitchen is a very scary place. I am just like my mother in that regard. I cannot bake a cake unless it comes from a mix, I have never roasted a turkey that did not wind up dry as a bloated vacuum bag, and my rice is either soggy or burned. The inside bottoms of a lot of my pots and pans have been scorched black.