The Sandcastle Girls (20 page)

“I am Ryan Donald Martin, American consul, Aleppo,” he says, trying to counter the lieutenant’s tone with one that is both friendly and firm. “We’re Americans. We have permission to bring aid to Der-el-Zor.” Then, afraid that even that short sentence could be perceived as confrontational, he continues, “We are hoping to assist the government to care for its refugees here.”

The lieutenant focuses on Elizabeth, and Ryan wonders briefly if they would have been better served if they had ignored the order not to carry weapons. But, other than the porters, he is traveling with a banker, a missionary, two doctors, and a woman with a degree from Mount Holyoke and some last-minute schooling as a
nurse before leaving Boston. They were never going to be much of a fighting force, either in spirit or by training. A pistol or a hunting rifle right now would have been absolutely no help.

Beside him Silas is surveying the horsemen, and Ryan can feel the bluster drifting from him like perspiration. The old man is already seething, and so Ryan speaks quickly, planning to diffuse the diplomatic situation before this proud Boston banker says something stupid and escalates the tension further. He worries that both Endicotts will find his diplomacy unmanly, but he continues, “Do you need to see our papers, Lieutenant? I have them right here.”

“Papers? Passports? Why not? Show them to me,” the officer says, again peppering his short utterances with ominous pauses. Ryan finds himself further unnerved by the way the Turkish soldiers chuckle at the lieutenant’s response. And so he doesn’t surrender the papers just yet and motions for Silas to wait a moment before offering his own passport.

“What is your name, sir?” he asks the lieutenant.

“Hasan Sabri,” the Turk says, bowing his head ever so slightly. “At your service.” The gendarme beside him laughs again, and Ryan has to restrain himself from asking what is so funny. He doesn’t believe they would massacre half a dozen Americans and eight Syrian porters, but they might commandeer the medical supplies and food they have brought. Moreover, there are two women with them, and if these men are indeed renegades or outlaws, then Elizabeth’s and Alicia’s honor is in jeopardy.

Sabri climbs off his horse and the gendarme beside him takes the animal’s reins. He walks up to the wagon and says—again, a dark veil in the pauses—“So, Ryan Donald Martin, show me your permission to be here.”

“Fine,” Ryan says, “here it is,” and he hands him the papers explaining that the group has authorization to bring these wagonloads of food into Der-el-Zor. Sabri gives the vali’s document a cursory glance at best before slowly tearing it into long thin strips and then tossing them into the air. There is a trace of a breeze, and
they float for a brief moment before landing near the hooves of the horses and a front wheel of the wagon.

I
N
A
LEPPO
, Nevart wanders among the stalls in the market, some empty and some with only a few bags or half-empty crates of rotting oranges or putrid meat. She tries to convince herself that she shouldn’t grow frantic, though already she is. How could she not be frantic? Once more Hatoun has left the compound and disappeared. And this time Nevart has no one at all to help her find the girl. Everyone else is days east in the desert. In the past when Hatoun has disobeyed her and disappeared, the child has always been fine; she always returned on her own well before dark—well before dinner. She has never revealed precisely where she goes because that would demand more of a conversation than the girl is willing to have.

Nevart recalls the last time she saw the child. It had been shortly before noon, while she had been putting a tray of cheese and fruit together for the two of them. As always, Nevart had found herself marveling at the bounty inside the walls of the American compound, at the way these people seem never to want for anything. Once she herself had taken food like this for granted. Never again. Meanwhile, Hatoun had been sitting in the shade of a palm tree in the courtyard with her slate and a piece of chalk. Nevart had told her—as she has daily—that she is not to leave without an adult. Never. The child nodded and seemed willing to obey. But, Nevart knows, she always nods and seems willing to obey. And then she is gone, like a desert mesa when a sandstorm whirls in: one moment there, one moment not. Briefly, before leaving for the streets, Nevart had searched the apartments, the bedrooms and offices, but clearly Hatoun had gone on one of her mysterious journeys into Aleppo’s backstreets and alleys.

As Nevart left the compound, she noted the slate and the chalk on the ground by the tree. It made her imagine a castaway on a desert island.

Now, as she runs like a madwoman through Aleppo, her eyes scanning always for Hatoun, she curses herself. She is not fit to be a mother. She has no idea what she’s doing, none at all. She doesn’t deserve this child and—more to the point—this girl deserves better than her.

“T
HAT LETTER DID
look very official,” the Turkish lieutenant says to Ryan, and he walks back to the wagon behind them that is filled with sacks of flour and tells the porter on the front seat to get down. When the porter hesitates, glancing at Ryan for guidance, two of the soldiers behind Sabri pull their rifles off their shoulders and unlatch the safeties.

“There is no need for that,” Ryan says. “Surely you—”

“Surely you know that we are going to have to confiscate the wagons. There was a train car full of provisions for the army that was commandeered by brigands. It included precisely the sorts of items that you have here. Coincidence? Unlikely. The honorable Farhat Sahin himself told me to keep watch for the stolen goods.”

“You know that we stole nothing from the empire’s army,” Ryan tells him, struggling mightily to keep his voice even. “All of the food here was purchased with money raised by Americans. It’s part of their effort to relieve the suffering of …” He stops, aware that he is about to say something profoundly impolitic.

“Continue,” says Sabri. “Whose suffering do these Americans hope to relieve?”

Behind them the drivers of all of the wagons are climbing down from their seats at the front of their carts. Forbes and Pettigrew and Alicia Wells are stepping down into the light brown sand, too. It is then that the full meaning of the lieutenant’s words becomes clear to Ryan and he realizes it is a lost cause; the lieutenant has heard directly from Farhat Sahin—the administrator in Aleppo who provided the “permissions” for this endeavor. This was all a setup; they were never going to be allowed to bring aid to the Armenians.
These men are going to steal the food and the bandages and the medicine. If the Americans are lucky, the soldiers and gendarmes will leave them with a wagon and some horses on which they can limp back to Aleppo. The best he can hope for now is to keep the people in his convoy safe. And that means acquiescing. He is so angry at Sahin that he feels his eyes growing wet. He glances once more at the camp in the distance, buffered ever so slightly by the waves of heat undulating up from the sand. From so far away it does not look inhospitable. But he knows this is an illusion.

And that is when he feels, once again, Elizabeth Endicott’s hand on his shoulder, the fingers in almost the same place they had been a few minutes ago when she had first seen the soldiers and gendarmes riding toward them across the desert. This time, however, she is using him for purchase as she climbs to her feet. Briefly he presumes that she, too, is about to step down from the wagon, but then she surprises him by remarking, “Allah has full knowledge and is well acquainted with all things.” There is fire in her eyes but her tone is almost serene.

The lieutenant turns his whole attention upon her. “The woman speaks a little Turkish, too,” he remarks. “And now she wants to risk blasphemy by speaking of Allah?”

“Tell them she means no harm,” her father says urgently to Ryan, and then he looks up and commands his daughter to take her seat.

But she ignores Silas and shakes her head at Ryan. The consul feels the world has gone silent except for Elizabeth Endicott. The gendarmes, the soldiers, and their traveling party watch the woman intently, absolutely unsure how this is going to end. “Allah says, when it comes to charity, give what is beyond your needs.”

“What do you, an American girl, know of the Qur’an?” the Turkish lieutenant asks.

“In the hospital—in Aleppo—there is a Muslim doctor,” she says, and though she smiles deferentially at the lieutenant, she has the distinct sense that all her life up until now has been mere
apprenticeship.
Let me be scared
, she prays,
but let me do this. Let my voice not tremble
. “He believes,” she continues, “that someday a righteous God will punish the wicked for murdering children.”

One of the gendarmes behind the lieutenant, a heavyset fellow with a round, adolescent, almost boyish face, calls out, “Did the doctor tell you how a righteous God feels about killing infidel adults?”

The lieutenant stares the gendarme into silence and then says to Elizabeth, “And you say this doctor was Muslim?”

“Yes.”

“I presume he was helping Armenian children.”

“He was helping everyone who was in the hospital: Christians and Muslims, adults and children,” Elizabeth tells him. “Like you, he was simply doing his job as best he could.”

The officer gazes at the line of wagons and the Americans and porters standing nervously in the brown sand.

Ryan feels the need to say something after Elizabeth has spoken so eloquently. “We are on an errand of mercy to those citizens of the Ottoman Empire,” he says, and he points in the direction of the camp. “We are from a neutral nation and hope simply to alleviate the suffering of civilians. I urge you to allow us to proceed.”

The lieutenant stares at him for a long moment, his eyes unreadable, and Ryan fears that he has allowed his ego—his desire not to appear weak before either Elizabeth Endicott or her father—to cloud his judgment. Finally the Turk nods almost imperceptibly, more to himself than to anyone else, and says, “We will take four carts—half the load. My soldiers are also citizens of the Ottoman Empire. But you may bring the other half to the Armenians.” Then he orders his men to commandeer the four wagons at the rear.

Ryan starts to object, but Silas Endicott pats him on the leg and shakes his head. “It’s fine, Ryan,” he says. “I think we’ve done about as well as we can.” The fellow wipes at his brow and sighs.

Behind them, Elizabeth says something that Ryan doesn’t quite hear and sits down. So he looks back at her quizzically and she
repeats herself, though, again, her voice has grown so small that he can barely understand what she is saying.

“Selam alekum,”
she murmurs once more. Peace upon you. He sees that she is shaking.

A
T THE
A
MERICAN COMPOUND
, Hatoun sleeps soundly beside Nevart, and the woman wonders if the child is dreaming. Her breathing is slow and silent and deep. The night air feels a little moist and Nevart can see the stars from their bed, despite the gauzy mosquito netting.

Once more the girl was vague and uncommunicative about where she had been that afternoon. She was back by three-thirty this time, returning soon after Nevart. The child seemed more curious than contrite when she was subject to Nevart’s frustration and panic, and she was no more forthcoming than ever. Nevart had wanted to shake her, to scream at her. In her mind she heard herself yelling,
Talk to me! Please, please, talk to me!
Somehow she had restrained herself. She knows what the child has endured, what—worse—the child has seen. Nevart believes that she should discipline the girl, but she doesn’t know how, she doesn’t know where to begin. Besides, how could anyone punish a child who has survived what Hatoun has? Nevart couldn’t. She wouldn’t.

But Nevart fears also that other women—real mothers—would know precisely what to do and how to reach this strange girl, and she is sleepless with a nagging sense of failure and worthlessness. She tries to tell herself that tomorrow will be better. She won’t let the girl out of her sight. But she feels her eyes welling up, and she has a sickening feeling in her heart that she will indeed lose the child once more. Hatoun is a lithe animal. She will evaporate into the air like the dew on a palm frond. And someday she won’t return. It’s just that simple.

Suddenly she feels one of the girl’s tiny fingers on her face, wiping away the tears that are dribbling down her cheeks. Hatoun’s
eyes are open, too; Nevart can see them in the dark. She pulls the girl against her and kisses her on her forehead. She asks her what she is doing awake, but the child burrows against her and says not a word.

E
LIZABETH GAZES DOWN
at the boy on the long, torn strip of blanket and gently dabs watered-down iodine into the cavernous gouges on the soles of his feet. The gendarmes won’t tell her why they were subjecting a ten- or eleven-year-old boy to a punishment they call the bastinado: lashing the bottoms of his feet. His wounds cannot help but remind her of her own injury, though she has but a single, yawning cut along the top of her right foot.

One of the gendarmes stands above her now as she works, a petulant fellow her age who keeps his bayonet at the end of his rifle and whose sweat reeks of garlic. The fact is, all of the Americans seem to have a gendarme assigned to them, each a vaguely thuggish young man who prevents them from asking questions of any consequence of the Armenians, taking their photographs, or trying in any way to get to know them. The Americans are allowed in only this one small section of Der-el-Zor, what a Turkish Army officer referred to as the camp prison. He insists these refugees, women and children all, are the criminal element—which explains, he says, why they are the last to be fed and the last to be cared for. The contradiction to his logic—the fact that it is these very Armenians who have been given the wagonloads of medicine and food they have brought—is lost on him. The Americans all know he is lying.

Now she squints at the rows of the dead and the dying in the desert sand, many of them already carrion for the vultures. The bodies stretch all the way to the small hill covered with yellow scrub grass to the north and the shallow stream from the Euphrates to the south. The scene is reminiscent of what Elizabeth had seen in the square on her first day in Aleppo, but only vaguely; it would be like comparing a canoe with the ocean liner on which she crossed the Atlantic. Both are boats, but really the monumental
difference in scale suggests a Linnean distinction: they are not the same species, not the same genus. She is not even sure if they are in the same family.