The Sandcastle Girls (29 page)

Hatoun knows that two days from now the Americans are leaving—at least the men are. Mr. Endicott and the two doctors. They’re returning to the United States. Separately, Miss Wells is going to leave for the American mission in Damascus, but for how long is unclear. It might be just a short visit.

But Elizabeth has said that she is going to remain in Aleppo,
and the American prince doesn’t seem to mind. Perhaps he will allow her and Nevart to stay, too. She hopes so. There is so much in this city that terrifies her, but there is much that is interesting, too. And it seems that as long as she has Nevart at night and Shoushan by day, she will never wind up like her family or that blond girl in that strange children’s book. Alice.

She reaches into her smock pocket and pulls from it Annika’s head. She kisses the doll’s forehead and in her mind renames the skull Alice.

A
FTER THE BATTLE
, much of the brush has been burned black, but the fires mostly are out. Armen squats on his haunches and finds that the dirt is warm and a layer of ash—delicate and ethereal—coats the empty helmets, the boulders, and the tree stumps made jagged by artillery. He notes a single, snapped bayonet blade, also dusted with ash, and surveys the Turkish trenches they have captured. Though the shelling from the British dreadnoughts has churned up much of the earth here at the top of the ridge, evidence of the trenches’ solidity and permanence remains. Because the trenches are built in zigzags rather than straight rows, Armen guesses that no Turkish soldier could see more than eight or ten meters down the line—and so it was impossible for the Aussies and New Zealanders to enfilade any long stretch of the defense. The walls are made of sandbags and wooden beams, and the floors are duckboard platforms elevated a foot above the earth—and the muck. The dirt is banked into parapets and already he has discovered three periscope rifles among the debris.

Now he finds another corpse half buried beneath a firing stand, the ground made muddy with the dead man’s blood. He grabs the Turk by his boots and pulls him onto a segment of the wooden platform that has been splintered by the bombs. Though Armen has tied a scarf around his mouth and his nose, the cadaver’s stink is unescapable. As he glances down at the man’s face, the eyes open but vacant and his hair matted with dirt, he notices the long gash
along the upper part of his neck; the shrapnel from a shell carved a deep line from one end of his jaw to the other. If the fellow didn’t die instantly in the blast, he must have bled out quickly.

Much the way Nezimi did.

Armen, I had no choice. If I could have protected them, I would have. You know that
.

Clearly the official had been lying. He’d been terrified; Armen recalled the quaver in the man’s voice.

To save my daughter
, Armen reminded him,
my wife did what you asked. She renounced her God. She gave herself and my daughter to you to protect. And you did what? You did nothing!

I took them in. I tried
, Nezimi had insisted.
I offered to marry her! You know a woman’s conversion can only be ratified by marriage
.

For a long moment Armen contemplated that single sentence, and finally its meaning grew clear. All along Nezimi had believed that Armen would never return to Harput—even after the war. Either he would die in the fighting in Van, or he would be massacred with other Armenian men in some riverbed or ravine not far from the outskirts of the city. And so Nezimi had had the audacity to ask Karine to marry him. Had the official also tried to seduce her? It was possible. It was conceivable, these days, that he had raped her—or, at least, had tried to rape her.

You were my friend
, Armen had said simply, but already the Turk was reaching into a drawer in his desk for his military revolver.

Over Armen’s shoulder he hears Australian voices. Orders. There is a likelihood of a Turkish counterattack and they need to prepare the trenches for an assault from the opposite direction. So he does what the Anzac soldiers on either side of him are doing. He takes the corpse of the dead Turk and pushes it over the parados—the rear lip of the trench. Then he fluffs it up like a sandbag.

F
ROM THE WINDOW
of the bedroom Elizabeth shares with Alicia Wells she can see that the light is still on in Ryan Martin’s first-floor office across the courtyard. It’s the only part of the compound
that has electricity. She has found herself comfortable here living at night amid oil lamps and candles. After all, her dormitory at Mount Holyoke didn’t have electric lights.

In the other bed the missionary’s breathing is calm; Alicia always sleeps soundly. Elizabeth wonders what sorts of images fill the woman’s dreams. Are there men in them? A husband, a lover? Does she dream of the children here with their dark eyes, or the mothers whose breasts are no longer capable of feeding their starving babies?

She pulls her robe from the back of the door and silently makes her way down the stairs and then down the hallway past the
selamlik
, the library, and the corridor to the kitchen. When she reaches the section of the compound with Mr. Martin’s office, she pauses momentarily. But then she stands up a little straighter and approaches the door. It is half open, but she cannot see the consul behind his desk. Softly she knocks.

“Yes, come in,” he murmurs, his voice a little hoarse. When he sees her he rises from his chair, but because she is in her robe he averts his eyes momentarily. He has removed his jacket, but he is still wearing a vest over his shirt. She is surprised that her presence in her nightgown and robe has made him uncomfortable after all they experienced together at Der-el-Zor. “You are up late,” he says, his voice growing slightly more companionable. He puts his pen down in its tray.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she explains. “I have a great deal on my mind.”

He shakes his head. “Don’t we all,” he agrees. “Is it your father’s return to America?”

“No. It’s Nevart and Hatoun.”

He rubs his temples, gazing down at the papers on his desk. He says nothing.

“I’m sorry I’ve disturbed you,” she says.

Finally he sighs. Then: “There is nothing to apologize for. I was writing Ambassador Morgenthau. I need a distraction badly.”

“Still, it’s late.”

“Nevart and Hatoun,” he says. “You are worried that I am going to evict them once the party has broken up? Once most of you have returned to America?”

This is, of course, precisely why she has come: to learn whether he is going to send them away or allow them to remain in the compound. When he speaks so bluntly, she realizes instantly that her fears were unfounded. Evicting them would be the sort of profound cruelty that is well beyond his ken.

“Yes, I am interested in your plans,” she says. She fears she has insulted him.

“The race is dying,” he says in response. “The whole race. It’s … biblical. The proportions are positively biblical.”

“Have you shared that analogy with Alicia? She might like it,” Elizabeth asks. She had not expected to find him like this and hopes to cheer him with the small joke.

But he seems almost oblivious. “It is a level of barbarism that is unimaginable outside of literature—at least it was unimaginable. I just don’t know what to do anymore. I try to stop it, but I can’t. I implore their ally, the Germans, to try to stop it, but they can’t.”

She thinks of the Germans she has met here: the nuns and the missionaries and those two soldiers who were engineers. Helmut and Eric. She wonders where they are now. “Do you think we will ever enter the war?” she asks him, referring to the United States.

“If it lasts long enough. If it lasts long enough, it will drag the whole world in. It’s a bloody vortex.”

“It would be a shame to see us fighting the Germans,” she says. “How the Germans can remain allies with the Turks is beyond me. No European nation would ever commit the sorts of crimes that this regime is blithely committing right now.” He lifts his pen from the tray, dips the nib in the inkwell, and underlines something he has written. Then: “Certainly Nevart and Hatoun will remain here in the compound. Your father and Dr. Forbes worry needlessly. They are no inconvenience. I barely see them. Besides …”

“Yes.”

He offers her a dark, beaten smile. “The way things are going, it might be those two who have to repopulate the race.”

She considers telling him that Nevart believes she is barren, but keeps the thought to herself. “I know Nevart will be very grateful,” she says instead.

“It’s nothing,” he says, waving his hand. “Given the slaughter that surrounds us, it is absolutely nothing at all.”

O
NE NIGHT AFTER
I
HAD RETURNED FROM
B
OSTON
, I
WAS CHECKING
my e-mail before bed. It was just after eleven and I was about to shut down my computer. The house was silent, but outside the window I heard and felt a spring breeze through the screen. Among the e-mail in my in-box was an innocuous bit of spam from Bloomingdale’s featuring a monthly calendar. And all it took was the iconic face of a calendar month—seven columns and five rows of squares—for a question to lodge itself soundly in my mind and for my stomach to lurch as if I were on a plane that had just dropped half a mile in turbulence. The question was tragically simple: by how many hours did Armen miss Karine in Aleppo?

Because, it dawned on me at that moment, the issue was hours. Not days. It certainly wasn’t weeks. After all, Helmut Krause most likely photographed Karine Petrosian after Armen had begun his long journey south. Had he found her before Armen left, he would have told his friend that a woman arrived who might be his wife. And while I did not know the precise day in July when Armen left for Egypt, I could narrow it down to a three-day period, based on the date of his first letter to Elizabeth. Moreover, I recalled how very soon it was after Armen had left Aleppo that Helmut Krause’s camera was destroyed by the gendarmes. Karine had to have been photographed in that slim window between when Armen started
working his way toward Egypt and when the Ernemann was smashed to pieces in the citadel square. She may very well have been among those refugees who arrived in the square midmorning on the very day when the remnants of Nevart’s convoy started southeast for Der-el-Zor.

“Honey, are you coming to bed?”

I swiveled in my chair and saw Bob in the navy T-shirt and sweats that were as close as he ever came to pajamas. His hair was wild with sleep, and he looked a bit like a little boy as he leaned against the doorframe and squinted against the light in the library.

“Yeah, I am,” I said, and I watched him shuffle almost like a sleepwalker back down the corridor and upstairs.

When I glanced back at my computer, I deleted the Bloomingdale’s ad. I couldn’t look at it any longer. It had that calendar, and calendars were as cruelly detached as the cosmos. Time, I thought, gives us hope; it shouldn’t. Time is indifferent. I knew that if I managed any sleep that night, it was going to be fitful and rich in dreams.

W
HEN
I
WAS
a little girl I used to love to go with my mother to an ice-cream shop in the mannered Fairfield County hamlet of Westport, Connecticut. The town was smaller then, and at least marginally less moneyed. Less Martha Stewart. My mother, my brother, and I would go there in the summer on our way home from the beach at Sherwood Island. We were likely to have just finished the second or third grade. But what I loved even more than the ice-cream emporium in Westport was the head shop below it. Yup, a head shop. My mother enjoyed the place, too. Quite happily the three of us would eat our ice-cream cones while browsing the blacklight posters—the psychedelic kamasutra, Jimi Hendrix (already dead and haloed), the Keep on Truckin’ dudes—as well as the lava lamps, the lighters, the artistically packaged rolling papers, and the racks and racks of incense. Often there was a strobe light flickering in the room in the back, which was separated from the
front room by phantasmagorically colorful beaded drapes, and on the walls there were the posters that were especially mesmerizing: stairways to nowhere, argyle patterns that spun, great spreading tree boughs in a woman’s wild hair. That whole, small world was carefully designed to overwhelm sight, scent, and sound, and I was fascinated.

But what without question were of greatest interest to me were the glass display counters near the register that housed the roach clips, the pipes, and the bongs. Those items fascinated me because they were eerily reminiscent of the strangest articles on display in my grandparents’ Armenian living room. How was it that my father’s parents casually flaunted the sorts of illicit toys that were sold to hippies in head shops? There were three pipes in the Pelham living room and they were sometimes referred to as nargilehs. A nargileh is, in essence, a hookah. Imagine a spectacularly ornate bong with a hose. I knew they had belonged to my grandfather, though supposedly he had ceased using them by the time I was born. The tallest of the three sat on a side table near the bay window in the living room, as if the pipe were a work of art on a pedestal. The other two were placed behind glass doors on a shelf in a china cabinet. Each looked a bit like a magic lamp with a base for the water and a bowl for the tobacco. Or the hashish. Or the opium. The base on the taller pipe in the bay window showed a scantily clad harem girl, her top and her pants a robin’s egg blue and edged with fourteen-carat gold leaf. At least my parents said it was actual gold. Certainly that was a part of its mystique. A number of times my brother and I sucked on the hoses of all three of the nargilehs, despite the fact they were bitter with age and use and whatever illicit smoke had once passed through them. It was sort of like the way some kids (okay, include my brother and me in that group) will wander through the debris of their parents’ Dionysian dinner parties the morning after and sip the glasses still half-filled with red wine or Scotch.