The Sandcastle Girls (22 page)

When Armen reaches the shore, he hears someone crying for help and pauses for a brief moment. He sees it is a soldier named Robin. The private is no more than seventeen, but—perhaps because he is so very young—he thought it made all the sense in the world for Armen to work his way through Palestine into
Egypt, where he could be a part of what the younger man was positive would be a ripping good adventure. Now he is lying on his side in the sand flapping his right arm spastically, a bird with a broken wing, and Armen is hopeful that only his arm or his hand has been hit. But his relief is short-lived, because then the sand is churned up by an explosion a dozen yards away from the young private, and when Armen looks again, Robin is perfectly still and his tunic is laced with holes which—before Armen’s eyes—are filling with blood.

And so Armen runs headlong toward that sandy bank and hurls himself against it, the first of the men in the company to reach it. In seconds there are three, four, then eight soldiers wedged there, and though his heart is pounding hard against his chest and he is swallowing great gulps of the smoke-filled air, he realizes both that he is alive and that he is far from alone. He cannot see the Turks up on the small hill, but in the other direction he can see more rows of small boats churning their way through the water and, in the distance, the three British battleships. He waits for his eyes to adjust to the shade.

“What next?” someone is asking, and Armen turns toward the soldier. He recognizes him from their training in Egypt but has no idea what his name is. He is a burly fellow with ginger hair and a complexion pockmarked from measles. The sand is sticking like yet another layer of clothing to all of their uniforms, and already their boots are caked with mud. The soldier is in his mid-twenties, and Armen presumes that in someplace with a magical name—a place like Christchurch in New Zealand—he has a wife and a child or two. At first Armen believes this is a serious inquiry on the fellow’s part, but when the New Zealander repeats himself, shaking his head in wonderment and disgust, Armen understands that it is a rhetorical question. “They saw no barbed wire on the beach, and so some wanker figures there won’t be any bloody Turks? Jesus, what did they think? We were just going to walk in the fucking front door?” he says, and he spits once into the sand.

Still, that first question remains anchored in Armen’s mind. They really can’t stay here. Indeed, what next?

E
LIZABETH, STILL LIMPING
, places a cold compress on the forehead of a little boy in the hospital bed in Aleppo. He told her the other day that he is nine, but he is so small and frail that she would have guessed he was five. He has been unable to keep food down since arriving, and two days ago he stopped crying. Hadn’t the strength. Soon, she fears, he will lapse into a coma and die. The fever is showing no signs of breaking, and the rash has spread across his abdomen and chest.

The boy’s eyes reminded her of Armen’s when they were open. But, then, so many of these children’s faces remind her of Armen. This child is not unique. It was like that in the desert, too, in the days they spent at Der-el-Zor. All of the food the Turkish lieutenant had allowed them to keep was unloaded and distributed within hours, though equally as quickly the desert rats had started gnawing their way through the bags of flour. Her father had cried at the utter futility of their journey. Eight wagons or four. It made no difference. Never before in her life had she seen him cry. Meanwhile, Alicia had remained angry at Elizabeth for what she deemed a dangerous and childish theatrical outburst before the Turkish lieutenant and his “hooligans.” Only the physicians remained solidly composed, the two men working for nearly every moment of the forty-eight hours they remained at the refugee camp, though Dr. Pettigrew periodically took time away from the Armenian triage to clean Elizabeth’s foot and check on the stitching. William Forbes had hovered, wanting to be her caregiver and savior, but she finally managed to make it evident that his attentions were unwanted. He had pouted briefly like a spoiled schoolboy, but his disappointment had never affected his efforts on behalf of the deportees. She found him tolerable only when he kept his distance. Pettigrew had worried incessantly that her foot might wind up gangrenous, but—perhaps
naïvely in hindsight—she had never fretted. Now it is sore only. Clearly it is healing, and she regrets even mentioning it in one of her long letters to Armen. She shouldn’t have done that; she shouldn’t have shared Pettigrew’s fears, even in the context of telling Armen about how thoroughly everyone was looking out for her and how (in this case) prone they were to overreaction. She was hoping to reassure him, but in hindsight she had most likely caused him only anxiety.

Assuming, of course, that he ever received the letter—or that he is even still alive.

Abruptly the boy in the bed opens his eyes and his whole body spasms, arching up and away from the thin mattress. She looks at him and speaks his name, but he doesn’t seem to see her. He doesn’t seem to hear her. Then he falls back onto the bed, his eyes closed once more, and his breathing stops with one long, soft wheeze. She calls out for Dr. Akcam, but she knows that there will be nothing at all the Turkish physician can do. There is nothing at all that anyone here can do.

She wonders where Armen is and holds the boy’s hand. When, she thinks to herself, had his extremities started to grow cold?

H
ATOUN WATCHES TWO
men stroll by, each in a black burnous, their hoods cloaking their ears and the tops of their heads. Then she curls into the doorway, hoping she is almost invisible. Not far behind the two men is a pair of Turkish soldiers, laughing. One notices her and makes kissing noises with his mouth, but they leave her alone and continue on their way, too. She waits until they have reached the end of the block and rounded the corner, and then she emerges from the doorway and resumes her journey toward the market—her destination today. Yesterday she met another girl there who is also terrified of the orphanage. The child, Shoushan, is two years older than her and lives in the ruins of the citadel. She frequents the market because she has found one of the merchants
there will give her a little food, and it is easy to steal from the others. The girl is from Adana, the same city as Nevart and her. Hatoun finds it revealing that the child would rather sleep alone amid the rubble of the old fortress than with the beasts in the orphanage.

When Hatoun reaches the bazaar, she darts among the stalls and the booths and the women browsing among the half-empty crates and wagons. She is chased away by the old man selling coffee beans and by a teenage boy with a few delicious-looking melons in a box. A woman tells her she smells, and Hatoun knows that is a lie. Nevart insists she bathe often. But the woman presumes that she is homeless like Shoushan. Shoushan still has the stench of the long walk on her skin.

Hatoun is not oblivious to the idea that someday she might be homeless—she and Nevart both. Or that Nevart will be forced to move to one of the resettlement camps while she is sent to the orphanage. But Ryan Martin, who is clearly some sort of prince, doesn’t seem to mind her and Nevart’s presence. Perhaps someday he and Nevart will fall in love. Or maybe Martin and Elizabeth. No, not that. She recalls that Martin has a wife in America who will return when the heat breaks in the late autumn. And Nevart has said that Elizabeth is in love with an Armenian man.

Hatoun can’t decide how powerful a prince Ryan Martin is. Given the size of the house, one would think he was very powerful. And he is American. She has heard that most Americans are as rich as sultans. Nevertheless, he often seems frustrated with the Turks, and he can’t seem to stop them from killing Armenians.

But he is very kind. And often men aren’t.

Suddenly she feels someone wrapping their arms around her from behind and lifting her off the ground. Her heart skips a beat as she kicks out her feet, but then she hears Shoushan giggling and she turns and sees her new friend. Shoushan drops her back onto the ground and says, “I have something magic.”

Hatoun waits, wondering. Then Shoushan pulls off her shoulder
the burlap sack with the logo for a coffee company and opens it wide. Inside is one of those melons Hatoun saw just a moment ago. She doesn’t have to ask Shoushan how she got it.

A
RMEN STANDS ON
the wide beach beside the wooden crate he has carted from the transport ship, and is shocked to discover that it’s filled with coffee. The beach here is much broader than the strip he had helped to capture the day they had landed. He had expected the crate would hold more tea. Tea and jam and canned meat. Those are the contents of the crates he has carried for five hours now. One of the coffee tins must have cracked open because he can smell the grounds and—much to his dismay—the aroma makes him think of Nezimi and the fellow’s office in Harput. He closes his eyes and once more sees the painting of Enver Pasha on the wall in the waiting room. Had he and Nezimi really been friends once? Of course they had. Which is what makes the betrayal so unbearable to recall. He had taken the Turk’s advice. Done what he’d said. He had trusted the man with his wife and his baby daughter while he followed orders and joined the Germans laying track in the east. Nezimi had pledged that neither Karine nor Talene would be a part of the deportations. He said he would do whatever was needed to make sure they were exempted.

But, of course, they were not exempted. The rumors trickled in first to Karine’s family in Van and from them to Armen. The stories were confusing, because it sounded in some cases as if Karine and Talene were living with the official; Karine had renounced Christianity—even applied for her
erzuhal
, a legal petition to change her religion—and was going to raise Talene as a Muslim. In another version, Talene was in an American orphanage and Karine was somewhere in the desert with the other women of Harput.

And then the Armenian faculty of Euphrates College was massacred, and the family’s links—and Armen’s—to Harput largely vanished.

Before Armen could leave Van to see what really had happened
to his family, the Turks had surrounded the city, and he and his brothers were suddenly among the men defending the granary. He considered trying to work his way in the night through the Turkish lines to return to Harput, but Garo and Hratch convinced him that he’d never succeed. Consequently, he had not journeyed there until after the Russian Army had joined the Armenian resistance and pushed the Turks almost as far west as Bitlis. Only then had Armen methodically edged his way back to Harput, avoiding rail-cars and the most well-traveled roads. He knew after the fighting in Van that his engineering work on behalf of the empire would not spare him as an Armenian; not even the German officials of the Baghdad Railway could protect him this deep in the Turkish interior.

When he arrived in Harput, he discovered that his home was no longer his and Karine and Talene were gone. He could see from the street that his apartment now was billeting Turkish officers. So he went straight to Nezimi’s office to see what his friend—or, perhaps, former friend—could tell him.

He opens his eyes and stares up at the cliff, now held by the Australians and New Zealanders. Behind him he hears the surf and the sound of the men as they banter beneath their burdens. The only place that seems farther away to him than Harput is Aleppo. He thinks of the American girl there with the terra-cotta red hair and lifts the coffee crate back up off the sand.

S
OMETHING HAPPENED AND DARKNESS FELL OVER MY GRANDPARENTS’
house. It was late afternoon, and my mother had dropped off my brother and me after school and then taken the train into Manhattan to meet our father for a business soiree. My brother was perusing old photo albums in the Ottoman living room, and our grandmother had looked briefly over his shoulder and—with the suddenness of a thunderstorm in August—grown morose. And so our grandfather had, too. I don’t know what my brother saw in the pictures, and years later he didn’t recall when I asked him. But the moodiness I had witnessed before in my grandparents I saw once again, and one of them—I have no idea who—called my aunt. The two of them were suddenly too old to manage their grandchildren or too afraid to be alone with us. They needed the cavalry, and that meant their daughter. Right after work, she and two female friends from the ad agency where she was a secretary in Manhattan took the train out to Westchester. She was newly married by then, but her husband had a meeting at the university that night. Her associates had ventured with her to Pelham for what had been advertised as a home-cooked Armenian dinner. (Translation? Lamb. King meal.) My brother and I were in the third grade, and so I am guessing our aunt was just about forty.

I have told you that she would belly dance when I was a little girl. That night she did again, and in hindsight I think her goal
was to ensure that whatever demons had reappeared as her parents’ guests would quickly flee. And so while her friends had coffee and dessert, she went upstairs to the room that had been hers when she was growing up and changed. My grandfather went to the living room to tune his oud and move the coffee table against the wall. When my aunt returned, she had shed the conservative brown skirt and white blouse she had worn to work, and changed into a harem costume straight out of
I Dream of Jeannie
. The television show had been canceled by then, but my brother and I knew it well from reruns. And we knew that outfit. My aunt had worn it on some of those very same afternoons when my brother had been tricked out in his red velvet knickers and our mother had dressed me in my aspiring young hooker go-go boots.