The Sandcastle Girls (23 page)

For easily twenty minutes my aunt swiveled and gyrated and danced in the living room, while my grandfather strummed his oud and her friends from the ad agency cheered her on. In hindsight, I wonder if they were also a little mystified. It wasn’t that belly dancing was out of character for my aunt; even after she got married, she was a bit of a wild woman. She and her husband had bought a beach house on Fire Island a few years earlier, and even as a child I had the sense that the parties there were downright bacchanalian. As far as I know, the husbands and boyfriends were never throwing car keys into a punch bowl, but I think that’s only because no one brought cars onto Fire Island. In any case, what did my aunt’s friends think of her belly dancing for her parents and nephew and niece? Wasn’t this the stuff of bachelor parties, costume parties, and inappropriate male fantasies? (Here is yet another revelation that will appall everyone except for my brother—who, I swear, has given me permission to tell you: his first erections he can recall as a little boy occurred while watching our aunt belly dance.)

So my aunt danced for her family and friends, and she lifted the gloom that had settled once more on her parents’ home. When she was done, I followed her to her old bedroom, where she was going to change back into what she called “normal person clothes.” In a few minutes she and her friends would be taking the train back
into Manhattan. As she was buttoning her blouse, I asked her the question that had drawn me upstairs: “Would you teach me to belly dance?” I wouldn’t be surprised if my voice was trembling slightly. I think I felt there was something wanton about my desire.

“Well, maybe when you have a belly,” my aunt told me. “You really can’t belly dance if you don’t have a belly.”

There was certainly some truth to that; you do need a little somethin’ somethin’ to jiggle. But even in her late thirties and early forties, my aunt was very slender. So I persisted, unsure why she was being evasive.

Finally she sat down on the bed beside me. “Here’s the thing, sweetie,” she said. “People would kill for your hair. I would kill for your hair.” My aunt, like most everyone else in my family, had raven black hair. Why we were discussing hair when I wanted to belly dance had me baffled. “To be so blond—and still have those gorgeous dark eyes? You are going to break a lot of hearts. But …” she said, and she paused and rubbed my back.

“But what?”

“But here’s the reality,” she went on. “A belly dancer with blond hair? You’d look like—”

“Barbara Eden,” I piped up.

She crinkled her nose and mouth as if she were eating something bitter. “Yes and no. Barbara Eden is great. Jeannie is great. But that’s TV. In real life, a blond belly dancer doesn’t look like that. A blond belly dancer looks like …” and again she went silent as she struggled to find the right words. Eventually she smiled and said, “A stripper. Belly dancing and blonds just don’t mix.”

She never belly danced again after that. Never. And I never learned how.

I
NITIALLY, MY HUSBAND
tried to make light of my decision to drop everything the week after Mother’s Day and go to Boston. “I could see you doing this if the Red Sox were in town,” Bob said. “But they’re not. They’re in California this whole week.” Then, after
pausing, he added, “Of course, there are boatloads of Armenians in California, right? You could probably find some distant relative there
and
take in a ball game.”

He also tried to play the parental logistics trump card, reminding me of the reality that we had an eleven-year-old and a thirteen-year-old, and because Bob worked in Manhattan and I was usually done writing for the day by one or two in the afternoon, I was the designated driver. I was the one who shuttled Matthew and Anna to their afterschool music and dance lessons, doctors’ and orthodontists’ appointments, as well as whatever sports were in season.

The simple truth was that Bob was uneasy with how fixated I was on this photograph and the idea that the woman shared my last name. “Isn’t Petrosian a common Armenian surname?” he asked finally.

I shrugged. I hadn’t a clue.

There was a famous Armenian chess player—well, famous by chess standards, which is not an especially high bar—in the 1960s and 1970s named Tigran Vartanovich Petrosian. I told Bob the little I knew about Tigran. He was the world champion in the years my brother and I were infants and small children, defeating the eventually even more famous Boris Spassky before we turned one, and the American Bobby Fischer when we were six. Whenever Fischer would say or do something of interest in the 1970s and chess would have a brief renaissance in the United States, someone would ask me if I was related to Petrosian or, one time that I recall, “Iron Tigran.” That was his nickname, and it probably sounded even better in Russian or Armenian than it did in English. The answer is that we were not related, at least not as far as anyone in my family knew.

“Really, why are you worried?” I finally pressed my husband that week, the night before I was taking the shuttle to Boston. We were standing by the sink in the kitchen having almost finished the dinner dishes.

“Well,” he said, “I know what you’ve told me about your grandparents. Their house. Their moodiness. Their strangeness.”

“They were always very loving and very sweet with me,” I reminded him.

“Look,” he continued, “we both know how little your own father knows about them. Your aunt and uncle, too. I don’t think that whatever you’ll discover will make you or anyone very happy. Best case? You’ll find no connection to the woman and nothing at all of interest. A lot of work for nothing. Worst case? Good Lord, you’re the novelist, not me. Who knows what the worst case could be. Beside, it’s all ancient history now, isn’t it?”

It was, of course. But I couldn’t stop thinking of that photo of a breathing cadaver who shared my name. And so I went to Boston as planned.

H
ATOUN STANDS JUST
outside the arched window of the girls’ wing at the orphanage, wondering where Shoushan is today. For company this afternoon she has only her blond doll’s head, Annika. She places it on the thin stucco windowsill, so it can see inside, too. The window has louvered shutters that are shut tight against the midday heat, but Hatoun knows that if she stands on her toes, she can flip the slats and peer inside. She is not precisely sure why she wants to; she is not precisely sure why she has come. Nevart wouldn’t mind—at least this is what Hatoun has told herself. Nor would Elizabeth. But she has informed neither woman that she has been coming here for weeks, some days standing outside with Shoushan, ever since she and Nevart and Elizabeth passed this end of the orphanage on the way back to the American compound after visiting the telegraph office. Today the inside is quiet except for the sound of one child crying, her sobs a soft, hiccupping bray. The other girls must be in the courtyard or the classroom. Yesterday when she was here, later in the afternoon, there were a dozen girls in the room, some older than her and some younger, and they were talking about a German nun who had a nose like a mushroom and smelled bad. Apparently the woman had demanded that they work through lunch on their mathematics. Then they had started teasing
one of the other orphans, suggesting that this poor girl was as homely as the nun, and within moments that child was crying. The other girls were brutal. Merciless. Hatoun found it fascinating—and terrifying. The orphans were supposed to be napping, but they were savoring the subversive nature of their conversation.

Hatoun worries that she is like them—all of them, the wicked as well as the weak. She worries that she is like the girls who were making fun of first the nun and then the ugly child yesterday, but she knows in her heart that she is also like the child who is right now sobbing all alone. Armenians. Turks. Americans. Germans. Christians. Mohammedans. People are all the same. In the American library in the compound there was a book by an Englishman titled
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
. Nevart and Elizabeth together had been reading it aloud to her, because it took the two of them to translate the tale from English into Armenian for her, because her English vocabulary is still limited. It had been rather pleasant, and Hatoun had imagined herself being a bit like Alice, but then the story had changed and the women had stopped reading. They had skipped whole sections. In the night, Hatoun had snuck downstairs into the library and found the book, and she had studied the sections that the women had skipped. She could tell from the illustrations and the word
head
, which she knew, that the strange playing card Queen wanted to chop off Alice’s head. She wanted to chop off everyone’s head.

Her mind roams to the way Nevart makes her learn her multiplication tables. Only an hour ago they were sitting on the wooden table across from the sink in the kitchen in the American compound. Hatoun had a slate on her lap and a piece of chalk in her hand. She was using an abacus to try to make sense of the equations that Nevart had written and expected her to memorize. It was after lunch and the cook had finished cleaning and gone home for the afternoon. Weeks ago Nevart had decided that the kitchen was a cool, comfortable place where they could study without disturbing Ryan Martin or Silas Endicott or the other Americans as they came and went and worked. Hatoun fears that some of those Americans
would prefer she were living here at the orphanage. She has overheard just enough; she has understood the meaning of some of the remarks that the adults presumed were cryptic. She knows it annoys them that she says almost nothing. But she fears if she starts to speak—to offer them more than the occasional, monosyllabic grunt or (rarer still) complete but very short sentence—she will be unable to stop sobbing. She will be like the child on the other side of the shutter, for whom crying has become synonymous with breathing.

She closes her eyes and thinks of her brief time on the other side of this wall. Perhaps the Americans are the reason that she comes back to the orphanage now; if—when—Nevart and Elizabeth are forced to send her away, she will not have lost all familiarity with the place. Already she can’t recall whether she spent one night here or two before Nevart came for her.

Down the street she sees a pair of gendarmes strolling toward her, their rifles slung casually over their shoulders. She doesn’t suppose they would have any interest in one more Armenian orphan, but she sees no reason to take any chances. She turns and races around the corner of the orphanage building and down the alley that will bring her to the square and then to the backstreet that leads, eventually, to the nice block with the American compound. She runs fast, and it is only when she has reached the entrance and stopped—bent over, her hands on her knees as she swallows great gulps of the hot Aleppo air—that she realizes she no longer has her doll’s head. Did it fall from her tunic pocket as she raced through the streets, or did she leave it somewhere? Then she remembers: the orphanage window. She had placed it on the sill.

Just as she is about to start back for it, the female missionary, Miss Wells, appears at the gate. She is a large, wide woman, with shoulders and hips that can drape a girl Hatoun’s size in shadow. Her moods are mercurial; one moment she can be grandmotherly and kind, urging her to eat, and the next she can be judgmental and harsh. Hatoun knows Alicia Wells believes she belongs at the orphanage. She does not approve of either Nevart or Elizabeth.

“Ah, Hatoun, come inside. We’ve been looking for you,” she is saying, her tone scolding and vexed. “We were worried about you.”

Hatoun stands frozen, no more than a meter and a half from the missionary. She wants to get the doll’s head back. She
needs
to get the doll’s head back. But if she tries to explain this to Miss Wells, the woman will—as she has in the past—express disgust that the child had destroyed a perfectly good doll (the story has spread, Hatoun knows) and now wants this macabre remnant back. But before she can decide whether she must find the words to convey her short plan—return to the orphanage sill for the head—the missionary lunges for her hand. Hatoun darts to the side, and the woman barely grazes her arm. Then the girl turns and races back to the orphanage, aware that Miss Wells is calling her name, demanding she return that very instant. She understands there will be consequences, but she doesn’t care. All she knows now is that she must retrieve that little blond head.

E
LIZABETH IS WRITING
another letter to Armen that she does not believe in her heart he will ever receive, when outside the American compound she hears Alicia Wells shouting for Hatoun. She puts her pen down beside the inkwell and rises from the chair at the small desk in the bedroom she shares with the missionary. She glances at the words she was writing to Armen, but then starts down the stairs. At the massive front doors to the main street she meets Nevart, who heard the yelling as well.

“I thought Hatoun was right here in the courtyard,” Nevart says apologetically. She had lifted her dress so she could move more quickly, and now lowers it back below her ankles.

“I thought so, too,” Elizabeth agrees.

Alicia Wells turns to them both and shakes her head, irked. “No. Neither of you were watching her. Again. And the result is that once more she has run off. Once more she is running like one of the homeless through the streets. I don’t have to chronicle for
either of you the dangers that poses for a young female,” she says, but then proceeds to ruminate upon the possibilities of the child being commandeered into a harem or brothel, taken by gendarmes who are looking for numbers to bring to Der-el-Zor, outraged by marauding adolescent boys (or men), or merely contracting all manner of disease from the rivers of excrement and urine that stream along some of the streets—the only fluids that don’t seem to evaporate instantly in this dry air. “I will say this as candidly as I possibly can,” she finishes. “Elizabeth, you will be a fine mother someday. But at the moment you are barely more than a child yourself. And Nevart, I will never belittle what you have endured. Never. But because of your recent history, you are in no condition to mother that girl, either. The child barely speaks. Who knows what goes on inside her head? I urge you both to bring her to the orphanage before something irreparably tragic happens to her.”