The Sandcastle Girls (21 page)

This is death on a scale that yesterday caused even her unflappable, business-like father to remain in his seat in the wagon with his head in his hands, unable to stand, driven to a despair she had never before witnessed in him. His voice trembling, he had murmured, “There are no ovens. They said there would be field kitchens and brick ovens in the ground. And all this flour? What in the name of God are we supposed to do with it?”

She remembers turning to him. He’d continued, “Yes, ovens! They said there would be someone to help us bake the bread. They said there would be kitchens. Primitive, certainly. But kitchens!”

But, no, there are no field kitchens or brick ovens built into the sand. There are no bakers. There are no huts or houses. There are tents, but mostly there are only lean-tos cobbled together from sticks and tree limbs, with some tattered muslin or rags serving as a screen against the relentless sun. There are trenches where children huddle, hollow-eyed and sick in their own excrement and filth, trying to shield themselves from the inexorable heat. And there are the long rows of that ridiculous prairie fencing. But mostly there are just the tens of thousands of women and children curled into small balls against the sun and their thirst and the agonizing pain of their hunger.

At one point, moments after they had arrived yesterday, one of the horses had defecated, and two boys had crabwalked over to the pile and started fingering it for feed the animal hadn’t digested.

She sees a fly on the sleeve of her blouse and brushes it away with the backs of her fingers. The flies are everywhere. Then, silently, she dabs more iodine on the child’s feet. He barely flinches because he is barely conscious.

Alicia Wells and William Forbes approach her, each holding a full bucket of water, a pair of gendarmes strolling beside them, their hands empty. The two Americans pause, staring off at the dead, too. Then Alicia murmurs aloud Ezekiel 37, the chapter with
the story of the bones in the desert: “The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the Spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones.”

Elizabeth looks up at her, and the missionary meets her gaze and speaks a little louder: “There were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were dry.”

“Indeed,” says William Forbes, shaking his head.

“Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live.” Then she adds, speaking directly to Elizabeth, “Some of us prefer quoting the Bible to the Qur’an.”

Elizabeth says nothing, exasperated that the woman is still annoyed at her over what happened yesterday. It’s ridiculous. Meanwhile, Forbes points at the hill. “Are those caves?”

She squints in the direction. “Yes, I think they might be,” Elizabeth says.

“I’d wager there are people there, too,” he observes, and then he and Alicia and their escort move on, barely glancing at the pile of skulls thirty yards distant that is roughly the size and shape of an igloo, and the shadowy vines or weeds that are growing upon it. Elizabeth, in turn, resumes cleaning the wounds on the boy’s soles. When she has finished, she squeezes his hand and he nods back at her ever so slightly. He opens his eyes the tiniest bit. Then she recorks the iodine and stands up, wincing reflexively at the pain in her own foot. Her stocking and her boot must be sponging up whatever blood or discharge is there. Later today she probably should have one of the physicians look at the cut.

She turns to the gendarme, rubs at the small of her back, and gazes at the weeds among the skulls. “What is the name of the black grass in the bones?” she asks him, pointing.

For a moment he looks confused. Then, understanding her question, he rolls his eyes. “Not grass,” he says.

“No?”

He shakes his head. “Hair.”

She looks again. Indeed, those are not vines or weeds. It’s hair. The skulls are sprouting great black tresses of hair.

I
KNEW
A
RSHILE
G
ORKY WAS
A
RMENIAN, BUT IT WAS NOT UNTIL
2002, when I saw Atom Egoyan’s film
Ararat
, that I learned the painter had been in Van at the same time as my ancestors. My husband and I saw the film the weekend it opened in Manhattan, and then went to the Whitney to see the Gorky painting that Egoyan had used to frame the movie. The 1936 canvas, based on a photograph taken of Gorky and his mother not long before the start of the genocide and the siege of Van, shows the boy and his mother. He is standing, a child of perhaps nine or ten, and she is sitting with her hands in her lap and a scarf around her head. (Gorky removed the woman’s hands, swallowing them up in two smooth, round swirls of eggshell-colored paint.) The child looks decidedly like a product of the twentieth century; his mother seems dressed for the nineteenth. Gorky would immigrate to the United States in 1920.

Neither my grandfather, who was from Van, nor his wife ever mentioned Gorky’s family. They may simply have not known that the Gorkys—then the Adoyans—had been there in the years before the war. Perhaps the families never met. Or maybe, like so much else of my grandparents’ history, for any one of a number of reasons they had not wanted to discuss it; like so much else in their past—including the secrets they had never even shared with each other—speaking of it would only have opened old wounds. The
fact is, I know far more about what my grandfather experienced in Gallipoli than I do about his time in Van, because he and my grandmother were corresponding by then. Likewise, my grandmother chronicled moments in her diary that she never revealed to her husband.

Gorky would hang himself in Connecticut in 1948, twenty-nine years after his mother had died of starvation. I have no idea how or when my Armenian great-grandparents died. And with my grandparents now dead as well, I never will know. But it is safe to suppose that Armen Petrosian’s mother and father were among the million and a half who were swallowed up by the poisonous fog that marked the end of the Ottoman Empire.

O
NE OF THOSE
afternoons when I was a little girl and my family was visiting my grandparents, I climbed the steps to their attic. I found my father’s tin soldiers from the late 1930s or early 1940s and brought the box downstairs to show my brother. This was, in hindsight, uncharacteristic sibling goodwill on my part. I was always a girls-in-white-dresses sort of female and had absolutely no interest at all in the army men myself. But I knew that my brother would get a kick out of them. The soldiers were at least an inch and a half larger than the plastic ones he used to play with in our own backyard or his bedroom. He brought them into our grandparents’ Pelham living room and started moving them silently around on one of the thick Oriental carpets, while the grown-ups continued to sip their coffee and smoke their cigarettes. Our grandfather noticed him, and although by then Armen was too old to actually sit on the floor, he beckoned my brother to bring him some of the soldiers. Then he leaned over in his chair. My parents, my grandmother, my aunt, and two elderly Armenian friends of my grandparents who were visiting also, all turned their attention to Armen, but my grandfather motioned for them to continue with their conversation. So they did. I, however, scooted across the rug so I could listen in. My grandfather picked up one of the soldiers
and said, “This fellow, I knew him. He was from Australia and his name was Taylor.”

I wasn’t sure if our grandfather was pulling our leg or whether the company that made the tin soldiers sent artists into camps somewhere to select the men they would immortalize. (As I recall, this was not all that long after I had finally figured out that actual bands did not sit around on benches at radio stations waiting for their turn to play one of their songs. As late as kindergarten, I still imagined the Beatles, the Archies, and the 5th Dimension sitting around in a recording studio in New York City, their instruments beside them, waiting for the DJ to summon them forth to play. It hadn’t crossed my mind that the radio stations simply used the same vinyl discs that my parents played on their turntable, or that rock bands hadn’t the time to sit around all day at WABC in New York.) There was a wistful undercurrent to my grandfather’s voice, and that baffled me further.

My brother, however, knew enough not to believe him—or, at least, to understand that even if our grandfather was being sincere, he meant only that once he had known a soldier whose face resembled this toy one’s. “You’re teasing us, Grandpa,” he said.

“No. I knew lots of Australians once. Lots. And men from India and New Zealand, too. But I will never forget Taylor.”

I thought of the department store, Lord & Taylor, and wondered if that’s where this story might be headed. It wasn’t.

“Why?” my brother asked.

“He …” He stopped after that single syllable and nodded slowly, lost in thought. His memory was starting to fray by then, but that afternoon I didn’t presume he had grown silent because the recollection had evaporated.

“He what?” my brother urged.

Our grandmother suddenly jumped in and said, “No doubt, he played soccer on the beach with your grandfather. Or cards. They were always playing soccer and cards.”

Our grandfather looked across at Elizabeth and his eyes grew uncharacteristically vacant. His body was so tired by then.

Why would our grandfather never forget an Australian named Taylor? Because the soldier would die in our grandfather’s arms. But I would not learn that until decades later, long after Armen himself had passed away.

T
HE BOAT BOBS
amid the powerful currents like driftwood, parallel to the shore, and a person might briefly have believed that the smoke on the beach was merely mist, and the men were only sculling energetically beyond the breakers. The steam tow that pulled the boat this close to the shore has now been disengaged because the water is too shallow, and the shelling from the great battleships behind the boat has, for the moment, ceased. But then, just as the seaman at the rear of the boat twists the rudder hard and tries once more to turn the small craft toward the beach, the machine guns in the thick gorse beyond the sand start firing toward the water, and the men start screaming as they are hit, their voices nowhere near as loud as the guns but still audible and still horrifying to the soldiers in the boats farther from the shore—and out of range of the guns. These other men, Australians and New Zealanders and, in one of the crafts, a handful of Armenians, watch the soldiers in the forward boat fall into the water or collapse over the sides of the gunnels like marionettes whose strings have been cut. In a few cases, they watch the soldiers try to crouch behind the low wooden walls of the pinnace or behind the dead in the seats ahead of them. But they have absolutely no chance. The bullets splinter wood and then they splinter bone. Each of the boats in that first wave has forty-eight men, and each craft is experiencing essentially the same fate: All or almost all of the soldiers in each landing craft are being dropped like wheat before a newly sharpened scythe, and now the boats, largely devoid of the living, are drifting away from the land. Armen, one of the Armenians in the next wave, wonders who will retrieve them, or whether these boats of the dead will drift away from the Dardanelles, past the battleships, and out into the Mediterranean. Eventually they will come ashore. But where?

He doesn’t have a chance to contemplate that notion long, however, because now their boat is falling into a swell and he can see the sand and rocks no more than three feet below the froth, and the captain is yelling for them to move, move, move, and the Aussie named Taylor in the seat ahead of him is falling into him. Armen presumes at first that Taylor has lost his footing as he stood up in the swaying boat, but when he wraps his arms around the soldier’s chest to help him regain his balance, his fingers against the man’s buttons, he feels the warmth of the man’s blood. Then Armen sees that Taylor’s pale blue eyes are open but vacant, and the fellow’s knees are transformed from girders to straw in a second, and he is—literally—deadweight in Armen’s arms. And still there is the roar of the guns and the acrid smell of gunpowder.

And so he drops Taylor and, with perhaps half a dozen other soldiers, jumps into the sea and wades through the waist-high water, the waves burnished with ruby currents from the dead as they crash against the side of the boat. The rocks on the bottom are the size of helmets and covered with slime, and two of the soldiers instantly slip up to their necks before grabbing the side of the boat and managing to regain at least a semblance of their footing. Armen’s pack feels even heavier in the water than it was when he had climbed into the boat, and the water is colder than he had expected. But he—like all the survivors—knows that their only hope of living now is to reach the sand and the ten- or twelve-foot-high cliff perhaps a dozen yards in from the edge of the water.

Meanwhile, the captain continues to yell forward, to move, to show good form, until a series of bullets saws through his neck, all but decapitating him. He falls into the slick sheen the color of claret that surrounds each of the boats, his pack visible atop the waves like a turtle’s shell.