The Sandcastle Girls (26 page)

Helmut nods. He recalls the photographs he took of the Armenian just before his friend left. Was it merely hatred that he saw in the pure flatness of Armen’s lips and the forwardness in his eyes—the desire for revenge he had expressed? Or was there more? When Helmut wasn’t taking his portrait, when they were sitting together in a café and talking, he thought he saw mournfulness in those eyes, too. Regret. Armen had hinted at least once about his own culpability, his own guilt. He wishes Armen had been willing to tell him more. Those photographic plates are gone now, destroyed with all of the images of the emaciated women and children of Aleppo, most near death and some already dead. And he is here in the Dardanelles, barely recovered from dysentery. He has accomplished nothing. Absolutely nothing.

“Look there,” Eric says, motioning out toward the Mediterranean.

Helmut raises his binoculars back to his eyes. He sees a flash from one of the battleships. Then the whistle of an incoming shell. No, Helmut thinks, incoming shells. Plural. A barrage. There is a deafening blast as the first shell detonates and Eric disappears in a spray of pebbles and dirt and human flesh. Helmut starts to scream out his friend’s name when suddenly he, too, is lifted off the ground and the world is strangely silent until he falls hard back to earth, aware that the whole world around him is trembling and oddly wet. Has he been blown into the one puddle in this whole peninsula? He rolls his head to look for Eric, but the lieutenant is nowhere to be seen. While he wants to believe that Eric rolled into one of the trenches for cover, Helmut knows in his heart that the soldier was vaporized, blown into millions of unidentifiable fragments of bone and strips of skin. So now he must find cover himself. He tries to press his hands against the ground to sit up, but for some reason he can’t. For a moment he is utterly mystified. Then he looks down at his chest and understands why. He sees only his binoculars, which have come to rest upon his sternum. He no longer has arms. They’re just … gone. That wetness near his ears, what he presumed at first was a puddle? It’s the rivulets of blood from the gaping holes where once there had been shoulders. He opens his mouth, terrified, and tries to scream, unsure in this lurid world of silent explosions and upturned earth whether he has actually made any sound. But it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter at all, because he knows he’s dying here on this ridge. This really is the end. He starts to pray—
Please, God, I’m coming, take me now, take me now!
—but the words soon become a jumble of meaningless syllables. His last coherent thought before he loses consciousness forever? It is Eric’s offhand remark,
They only attack at night
.

Those poor bastards from Anzac; he realizes they’re about to get themselves killed, too.

M
Y GRANDPARENTS RARELY SPOKE TO ME ABOUT THE
F
IRST
W
ORLD
War and the genocide. That moment I shared about my brother, our grandfather, and the toy soldier was an anomaly—which is, no doubt, why it stayed with me. They never told me stories in a linear or chronological fashion. Instead they were likely to offer anecdotes or recollections that usually came out of left field and only years later, in conversations with my father, my uncle, and my aunt, began to make any sense.

Moreover, it wasn’t until I was forty-four years old that I learned my grandmother’s letters and diaries and the reports she wrote for the Friends of Armenia still existed in the archives of a museum outside of Boston—and that they filled a substantial archival preservation box. She had never told even my father. So it was only at midlife that I would begin to pore over the papers that Elizabeth Endicott had left behind, and try to link obscure references from my childhood—something one of them had said, such as my grandfather’s recollection of an Aussie named Taylor as he studied an antique toy soldier—with something my grandmother had written years earlier.

Another example would be the strange link between an inedible meat and an ocean liner sunk by a U-boat nine months into the First World War. The meat was basturma. My grandfather loved his basturma, and it was a testimony to my grandmother’s great
love for him that she would make it. Basturma—sometimes called pastirma—is a sort of Armenian jerky. It’s dried beef that is seasoned with enough garlic to keep vampires in the next time zone. My grandparents’ house would reek for days after my grandmother had prepared a batch, and I have to assume that my grandparents did, too. I would stare at the dark, dry strips of meat in my grandmother’s elegant blue tile Tiffany serving tray and imagine the cartoon plumes of toxicity that wafted into the air around Pepé Le Pew, the Looney Tunes animated skunk.

The boat was the RMS
Lusitania
, which was torpedoed by the Germans off the coast of Ireland on May 7, 1915, and sank in a mere eighteen minutes. Roughly twelve hundred passengers and crew died, out of the 1,959 people who had climbed aboard the ship in New York City not quite a week earlier.

I was six at the time that basturma and disasters at sea were forever linked in my mind. It was Easter Sunday and I was sitting on the deacon’s bench in my grandparents’ kitchen as my grandmother was placing dolma—grape leaves stuffed with onions and currants and rice—on one tray and basturma on another. My grandfather, my father, and my aunt were there as well, though only my aunt was helping my grandmother. The men were just hovering. There was a bigger crowd in the living room, and, invariably, my brother and some of my cousins were downstairs in the basement playing pool. It was at least ninety minutes before we would assemble in the dining room for Easter supper. No doubt, the kitchen smelled of the dried meat, which is why I was sitting on the deacon’s bench. I wanted to hear the grown-ups’ conversation, but I wanted to be as far as I could from the counter with the basturma.

Krikor, the fellow who is the subject of the exchange, was an Armenian friend of my grandparents whom they met after they settled in America after the First World War. Ironically, given my professed frustration with people stereotyping Armenians as rug salesmen, he owned what I have been told was a massive carpet store just outside Princeton, New Jersey.

      AUNT: Mom, you have got to stop making this stuff. Dried beef cannot be good for Pop. It’s … it’s poisonous.

      GRANDFATHER: Food of the gods.

      GRANDMOTHER: He’s lasted this long.

      GRANDFATHER: Krikor ate it until he died two years ago.

      FATHER (
reaching for a strip of the basturma on the Tiffany tray
): Yes, but think of how tough Krikor was. Remember, he survived the
Lusitania
. He did, right?

      GRANDMOTHER: Krikor was always a storyteller. More so than your father. But, yes, he was on the
Lusitania
when it sank. He had been living in America for maybe ten years by then, and he was going back to Europe to fight with the Armenians in the Russian Army when the boat went down.

      AUNT: Did he really swim to the boat that rescued him?

      GRANDFATHER: No, of course not. But he hung on to a piece of driftwood for hours. At least that’s what he always said. It’s a wonder he didn’t freeze to death.

      AUNT: If he’d eaten any basturma, he could have kept warm by exhaling.

      GRANDMOTHER: I remember I had been terrified on the whole trip over that year—because of the
Lusitania
. It was obviously fresh in all of our minds.

      FATHER: They weren’t going to torpedo another ship. It was a public relations disaster for the Germans.

      GRANDMOTHER: I was scared.

      GRANDFATHER: Nonsense. Nothing scared you back then. Ryan Martin thought you were the bravest woman he ever met.

My grandfather then put his arm around her to embrace her, but she pushed him away, laughing. “You are getting nowhere near me with your basturma breath. You have made your choice for the day and chosen the basturma over me. So live with it, old man.”

This is one of my favorite memories of my grandparents: no sadness, no unmoored wistfulness. But even it opened up questions that would stay with me as I grew up and learned the rudiments
of their story. How had Krikor really managed to survive the
Lusitania
? What sorts of things had my grandmother done that struck this Ryan Martin as so very brave? I would never learn any more about that first question. But eventually I would get answers to the second.

N
EVART STARES AT
the face on the other side of the iron bars. It is a Turkish soldier in his yellow-brown uniform; he is young, his moustache that of an adolescent. Initially his eyes strike her as sleepy, but then she decides, no, that isn’t right. They’re deferential. Other than the cook, she and Hatoun are alone at the American compound. Elizabeth, Alicia, and the two physicians are at the hospital, and Ryan Martin, his assistant, and Elizabeth’s father are meeting with the vali. She has overheard the American consul and Mr. Endicott discussing how they will express their anger at what is occurring at Der-el-Zor, as well as the fact that Farhat Sahin had engineered the theft of so much of the aid they were bringing to the camp. But they—and Nevart—know that the vali will do nothing about it. He certainly won’t do anything about Der-el-Zor, and he certainly won’t discipline his underling. If he does anything to Farhat Sahin, it will involve praise.

The soldier pulls off his cap respectfully when he sees that Nevart has noticed him peering through the grate beside the thick wooden doors. It is just after lunch, a time when the city slows beneath the high desert sun. Hatoun, focused on the math problems that Nevart has presented to her, has not yet noticed the soldier. She is staring down intently at the slate, the chalk a small stump between her fingers and thumb.

“Wait here,” Nevart says to the child, and she rises from her chair, aware that the girl’s eyes are following her and—in all likelihood—now registering the presence of the soldier. She tries to stifle the small prick of unease she feels along the back of her neck; she reminds herself that she sees Turkish soldiers all the time on the streets of Aleppo.

At the grate she asks simply, “Yes?”

“I am sorry. I am looking for the American diplomat.”

“Mr. Martin?”

“I don’t know his name.”

“He is meeting with the vali,” she tells him.

The soldier seems to think about this. Then: “When will he be back?”

Behind her Nevart hears Hatoun sliding her chair back from the table. In a moment, the girl is beside her, leaning against her. Nevart feels the child weaving her fingers through hers.

“I don’t know. Can I give him a message?”

He looks down the street in both directions. Then he shakes his head. “He doesn’t know me. My name is Orhan. I’ll come back.” He bows ever so slightly, puts his cap back on his head, and departs.

E
LIZABETH DROPS THE
last of the bedpans she has emptied in the tin sink in the hospital bathroom. Her strategy is to dump them en masse and then clean them en masse. She breathes almost entirely through her mouth as she works. When she turns, she sees Alicia Wells and a nun she recognizes from the orphanage but has not formally met.

“Elizabeth, do you have a moment?” the missionary asks. Her voice is uncharacteristically friendly. Their détente has been tested lately, and the bedroom they share has felt particularly cramped and cell-like to Elizabeth.

“Yes, of course,” she says, trying to sound equally as agreeable. She rinses her hands and then motions for the two women to follow her outside the bathroom, into the wide corridor near the window where they are removed from the stench from the bedpans.

“I want you to meet Sister Irmingard,” Alicia says. “This is Elizabeth Endicott.”

“It is a pleasure to meet you,” she says to the nun. The woman has a face that is frog-like, but not unsympathetic. She is probably
fifty. Elizabeth is confident that she knows why Alicia has brought the sister here. “I have seen you at the orphanage. I’m sorry we’ve not spoken sooner.”

“We both, it seems, have a great deal to do. There are too few hours in the day for idle conversation for either of us,” Sister Irmingard tells her, her voice as cool and business-like as Elizabeth’s father’s. Then the nun thaws ever so slightly and squeezes Elizabeth’s fingers in her hands, adding, “God bless you and the Friends of Armenia. It is so good of you and your associates to have come to Aleppo. It was such gifts you brought to Der-el-Zor.”

“Thank you. But it really was very, very little,” she says to the nun. “We would have needed a loaves and fishes miracle to have made a difference there. It was all profoundly disappointing.”