The Sandcastle Girls (3 page)

“I’m Nevart,” the Armenian offers, and Elizabeth carefully rolls the name around in her mind. A small girl sleeps beside the woman, the child’s collarbone rising and falling ever so slightly with each breath. Elizabeth guesses that she is seven or eight. “Where in America?” Nevart asks.

“Boston,” Elizabeth answers. “It’s in the state of Massachusetts.” The woman’s nails are as brown as her skin. “Sip that soup slowly,” she adds.

Nevart nods and places the bowl in her lap. “I know where
Boston is,” she says. “I heard you speaking Armenian a minute ago. How much do you know?”

“A little. Very little, actually. I know mostly vocabulary. I know words, not grammar.” Then Elizabeth asks the woman, “How did you learn English?”

“My husband went to college in London. He was a doctor.”

Elizabeth thinks about this, imagining this wraith of a woman living in England. As if Nevart can read her mind, the deportee continues, “I wasn’t with him most of the time. I have been to London, but only for a visit.” She sighs and looks into Elizabeth’s eyes. “I’m not going to die,” she murmurs, and she almost sounds disappointed.

“No, of course, you won’t. I know that.” Elizabeth hopes she sounds reassuring. She honestly isn’t sure whether this woman will live.

“You’re just saying that. But I know it because I was a doctor’s wife. I have survived dysentery. Starvation. Dehydration. They … never mind what they did to me. I am still alive.”

“Is that your little girl?” Elizabeth asks.

The woman shakes her head. “No,” she answers, gently massaging the child’s neck. “This is Hatoun. Like me, she is unkillable.”

Elizabeth wants to ask about the woman’s husband, but she doesn’t dare. The man is almost certainly dead. Likewise, she wonders if Nevart has lost her children as well, but again she knows no good can come from this inquiry. Wouldn’t the Armenian have said something about her own children if they were with her now—if they were alive?

Over the woman’s shoulder Elizabeth spies her father in the distance. He is ladling out the soup from a black cauldron and handing it to the women strong enough to stand and bring it to those who are collapsed under the tent. His sideburns and his beard, so much thicker and grayer than the thin whorls of cinnamon atop his scalp, look almost white in this light. They are expecting flour and sugar and tea in the next day or so—the first of two shipments they have
arranged this month—though Ryan has warned her father and her that it is likely only a small fraction of what they have acquired will actually arrive in Aleppo.

“Where do we go next?” Nevart asks her. “They brought us here, but they won’t let us stay.”

“I’ve only been here a day myself, so I don’t know very much. I’m sorry.”

“The people of Aleppo, they don’t want us in their square. Would you want us in yours?”

“I do know there’s an orphanage in the city for the children,” Elizabeth answers, trying to be reassuring. “I haven’t seen it yet.”

Nevart offers a hint of a dark smile. “I am sure there is,” she says. She balances her bowl on her knee with one hand, and strokes Hatoun’s hair with the other. “Soon there will be nothing but orphans.” She gazes down at the girl and then, carefully, takes another sip of her soup.

R
YAN
M
ARTIN HAS
warned Elizabeth that in the desert there are thousands and thousands more. Sometimes the gendarmes bring the deportees here to Aleppo, but other times they will march them east another week, following the Euphrates River until they get to the camps—though the word
camps
, he stresses, is a misnomer. “I am told that
slaughterhouse
is more apt,” he says.

Now he is sitting on a pillow on the floor of a restaurant, across from her father and her, as a plump boy with a lazy left eye brings them tall glasses of watery yogurt and mint. Away from the emaciated women and children in the square, Elizabeth feels relief and guilt simultaneously. She accompanied her father to this corner of the Ottoman Empire because she felt this would be a meaningful culmination of her studies at Mount Holyoke, especially given her school’s existing outreach in eastern Turkey. Prior to the war, Mount Holyoke had had both a school and a seminary in the Armenian quarter in Bitlis. If Europe had not been a battlefield, she might simply have followed the path of her older male cousins
and taken a grand tour of London, Paris, Rome, and Berlin. That had been possible just a few years ago. No longer.

“Will we go there, too?” she asks, hoping the tremor she is feeling inside her has not crept into her voice.

“To the camps in the desert? Yes, if they’ll let us,” Ryan says. “But that’s no sure thing. I am in discussions with the governor-general here—the vali—as well as with some of his underlings. If I do garner the necessary permissions, it will be no small accomplishment, I assure you. The Turks don’t want any foreign aid brought to the Armenians—nor do they want us to witness what they’re doing. They haven’t even allowed the Red Cross to visit.”

There is a commotion at the door, and she turns to see two young German soldiers, their uniforms immaculate despite the stultifying heat outside, and a third man, a Turk, in wool trousers and a white linen shirt. The soldiers remove their caps and hold them deferentially before their hearts, and the heavyset woman who owns the restaurant emerges from the kitchen behind the drapes and seats them at a low table beside the American diplomat and the Endicotts. The soldiers are blond, but the Turk has a thick mane the color of creosote and eyes that are just as dark. They are, like all soldiers in her opinion, brash and happy and a bit like well-meaning big dogs that get their muddy paws on the couch. She knows intellectually that they kill people; it is what they have been trained to do. One even has a long, thin scar running along his cheek from his ear to his nose—a longitude line on a globe. But she will never witness the sort of violence that leaves a man dead in a trench or his face forever disfigured. Instead she sees soldiers only in moments like these, when with good-natured bonhomie they descend like tourists for their coffee or beer or—here—the aniseed-flavored arak.

“I can tell that you people are Americans,” says the soldier whose face has not yet been marked by battle, his accent heavy, but he has pronounced each word with care. She has met other Germans since crossing into the Ottoman Empire earlier this week. He is a lieutenant. Then he extends his hand to her father, who takes
it uncomfortably. “My name is Eric,” he says. “This is Helmut and this is Armen.”

They nod as her father and Ryan introduce themselves. The diplomat evidences marginally more enthusiasm than her father, but both are barely more than cordial. “This is my daughter, Elizabeth,” her father adds simply.

“I have a sister named Elli,” says the lieutenant, apparently oblivious to the chill in her father’s voice. “That’s like Elizabeth, isn’t it? Are you ever an Elli?” He raises an eyebrow mischievously as he inquires. “Like you, she is very pretty.”

“I could be an Elli,” she answers, aware that her father might try to quash the flirtation, but still desirous of taking the risk. “So far, however, I’ve always been Elizabeth.”

“Or Miss Endicott,” her father says flatly, and he seems about to say something to the soldiers that will signal that their brief exchange is finished—perhaps then turn his back to them, even if it means moving awkwardly on the thick pillow on the floor—but then the Turk with the eyes darker than night speaks up.

“You’re here for the Armenians, aren’t you,” he says, his accent different from the others’.

“Yes, we are,” her father answers. “We are part of a small philanthropic expedition.”

“Thank you,” he says, the corners of his mouth curling up ever so slightly. “We can always use … philanthropy.” And that’s when it dawns on her. He’s not Turkish; he’s Armenian. Ryan has gleaned this as well, swiveling so quickly that he almost upends his yogurt with his knee. And before she can reply to the fellow’s remark, the American consul jumps in.

“You’re Armenian! I suspected it, but I didn’t want to be presumptuous. I thought, perhaps, I had heard your name incorrectly when you were introduced. But it was Armen, wasn’t it?” he says, speaking with that same frenzied, unguarded tone he uses whenever he is excited. She wonders whether her father, with his reserve and meticulous cadences, will ever warm up to Ryan Martin. She doubts it. “Where are you from?” the consul asks Armen.

“Van.”

“Van, really? How in the world did you get out?”

Armen seems to think about this—about how much information he wants to share. Finally he shrugs, his face growing a little taut. “My brothers and I fought,” he says evenly. “And then, when it was time, we left. There were three of us.”

“And your brothers—”

“One is fighting somewhere with the Russians—at least that was his plan—and one is dead.”

“I’m sorry,” Ryan says.

“I am, too,” he agrees, and then adds, “Thank you.”

“And yet you’re friends with these—” The diplomat stops himself midsentence, aware that he is on the verge of saying something profoundly impolitic. But the German with the scar on his cheek—Helmut—rescues Ryan from embarrassment.

“Germany and Turkey are allies. Armen is a Turkish citizen,” he says.

“Although I am an infidel. At least technically,” Armen adds. “That does mean a second-class status in Turkey in this life and—so I am told—a pretty nasty experience in the next one.”

“Regardless, he has never fought against the German Army,” Helmut continues. “Besides, we’re infidels, too.”

“How did the three of you meet?” Ryan asks.

The lieutenant slaps Armen hard on the back: “He is an engineer, like us. Maps for the railroad and lays track—at least he used to. Helmut and I have been working on the railroad spur from here to Nusaybin. We met at the telegraph station around the corner last week.”

Elizabeth eyes the Germans carefully. “So you don’t approve of what your ally is doing to the Armenians?”

“Heavens, no!” the lieutenant tells her.

Helmut folds his arms before his chest, and Elizabeth realizes for the first time how very broad his shoulders are. “It’s barbaric,” he adds. As he speaks, his scar stretches ever so slightly. “Ask Armen here what he’s seen.”

“Yes, tell us!” Ryan says, his voice so urgent that if a person didn’t understand his motives, he would presume the man was merely a ghoulish voyeur.

Armen glances at Elizabeth and their eyes meet for a brief second before he gazes back down at the low table. His skin is the color of coffee with cream, at once inviting and exotic in her mind. His lips are thin beneath a raven moustache, and his chin, though masked by a ripple of dark stubble, has the trace of a dimple. His forehead reminds her of her father’s—a little high—but it is his moist, burdened eyes that keep drawing her in. His eyelashes are long and unexpectedly girlish.

“There is too much to tell. I wouldn’t know where to begin,” he says finally, speaking to the group as a whole. Then he turns his attention on her. “I would rather hear more about why you’ve come to Aleppo—or your world, Elli.”

“Elizabeth,” she says, aware of her father’s scrutiny.

“Elizabeth,” says Armen apologetically.

“Please, I understand you have been through a great deal,” the American consul insists, his voice animated and impassioned, his fingers on both hands splayed as if clutching a large stone. “But people need to know what the Turks are doing! The Turks have—” He stops abruptly, remembering where he is, and grows silent. And so one of the Germans jumps in.

“To our brave ally! To Talat Pasha and the Committee of Union and Progress!” Eric says—his voice, like Ryan’s, also far too loud for the small room—and he raises his glass in a mock toast. “Hear, hear!” And once more Elizabeth finds herself imagining these soldiers as overly enthusiastic, absolutely unaware big dogs. Or, worse, as boys.

But then, perhaps, they are one and the same.

“I
F YOUR MOTHER
were with us,” Silas Endicott says to his daughter, unsure precisely how to convey what he wants because it involves his daughter and men, and there is absolutely no subject in the
world that makes him more uncomfortable, “I am sure she would offer good counsel.” He had always presumed that he understood Elizabeth, but then last year she had surprised everyone by rejecting Jonathan Peckham, a perfectly reasonable suitor from a very good family. Silas would have welcomed the fellow quite happily into the bank. And, after that, he had heard something unpleasant about how Elizabeth had kept inappropriate company with one of her professors in South Hadley. A widower who, apparently, had a history of taking a fancy to one of his students each year.

Now she is sitting before him in the American compound’s living room, in a high-backed armchair that is too gaudy and too ornate for his tastes. The cushions are purple and have gold tassels. There is an animal’s face that appears to be a lion carved into the end of each armrest. It is unseemly. Belongs in a palace. He stands with his hands in his jacket pockets, hoping he exudes calmness and reason. “She would remind you that although we are in a different world, decorum remains constant,” he says. “That is especially true when you are around soldiers. Soldiers on leave—”

“They weren’t on leave, Father,” she corrects him.

“Soldiers, period, tend to presume that they can take liberties. I want you to remember yourself—and to be wary.” He is glad she is with him; she can do good here and see how she has been blessed. Then she can return to Boston, marry, and settle down. Her life will resume a proper course.

She rises and kisses him at the very edge of his sideburns on his cheek. Already his forehead has started to burn. “I will remember myself,” she says to him, smiling. “Thank you. Now, I am going to go and write down what we saw today and all that we did. Good night.” As she climbs the dark stairway to her room, she finds it interesting that her father assumed she had reciprocated the attraction that the German soldiers seemed to feel for her. But, then again, perhaps she should not be surprised. They were tall and blond. Still, the truth was that she hadn’t thought much about that pair at all. She had thought almost entirely of the Armenian.