The Sandcastle Girls (30 page)

One time when I was a little girl I asked my mother about the hookahs. It was not long after a Christmas at my grandparents’
house, and, as always, my brother had ogled the harem girl on the largest of the pipes, and my cousins and I had rubbed the bases of the smaller ones as if we honestly expected a genie to emerge. “Did Grandma and Grandpa really use them instead of cigarettes?” I asked.

“Supposedly. But mostly your grandfather and not very often. I think your grandmother only used them to drive her own father a little crazy,” my mother said. My mother, I have told you, smoked Eve cigarettes. Those mornings after my own parents’ parties, I always knew which still half filled Scotch glass had been my mother’s, because it was the one with the Eve cigarette butt floating (and starting to decompose) on the surface. There was often a smear of her lipstick on the filter.

“Did you ever see him?”

“When your father and I were first engaged, he used it once around me. I think he wanted to shock me a little bit.”

“Which one did he use?”

“Oh, he always used Anahid.”

I didn’t know what that word meant, and I must have looked quizzically at my mother.

“Sorry,” she continued. “Anahid is the pipe on the table by the windows in the living room. Anahid is a girl’s name. An Armenian name. That’s what we used to call that pipe.”

“Because of the dancing girl.”

“Yes. But don’t call it that around your grandparents. It’s a joke. Your father and your aunt and uncle gave the pipe that nickname when, I guess, your father was in high school.”

It might have been the words
high school
that made me think about the head shop we would visit in the summer. “I know that store in Westport—the place by the ice-cream shop—sells things for people who smoke marijuana. Did Grandma and Grandpa use the pipe to smoke marijuana?”

Without missing a beat my mother answered firmly, “No. I do not believe they ever used Anahid to smoke marijuana.” Nevertheless, even as a little girl I detected a precision to her answer that
suggested she was being technically honest, but not authentically honest. It was the sort of distinction that a sitting president might make to a grand jury when parsing the definition of “sexual relations.”

Years later, when I knew a little more about drugs and drug culture, I asked my mother if her in-laws had ever used Anahid to smoke hashish or opium. She was cleaning up the dinner dishes, and I was keeping her company in the kitchen and making a halfhearted effort to finish some math homework. Again, my mother’s answer was revealing.

“Opium? Good Lord, no! Your grandfather was an engineer. He worked for railroad companies, you know that. Where in the world would your grandparents have even gotten opium?”

I was not oblivious to the fact that she had denied their use of opium only—not hashish. I considered pressing the issue, but then my father wandered in from the dining room with a couple of glasses I had forgotten to clear from the table. He kissed my mother on the back of her neck after depositing them in the sink, and my mother said to me, “How do you like your new math teacher?” I understood she wanted to change the subject, perhaps because my father had walked in. And so I obliged, in part because I thought I had my answer.

E
LIZABETH WATCHES THE
two porters load the trunks and valises onto the back of the oxcart outside the American compound and finds herself at once nervous and elated. The riot of feelings is triggered by the same basic reality: she is about to be more or less on her own here in Aleppo. Oh, Ryan Martin has vowed to her father that he will keep an eye on her, but she isn’t a child and the American consul knows this. Besides, he has his own responsibilities to occupy him. And she has the sense that Dr. Akcam will look out for her, as much as he can. Nevart, too. But once the train departs this afternoon for Damascus with the four Americans aboard, she
will be—and the word reverberates in her mind—independent. She likes the way it sounds in her head.

“And if Ryan’s not around, you know where the telegraph office is, correct?” her father is saying. They have been over this. They have discussed at length money and communication and safety. She is a little touched by his concern.

“Yes, Father,” she reminds him. She finds herself smiling. When she looks back toward the compound she sees William Forbes in the shade of the great double doors, his expression unreadable in the shadows. But he is standing perfectly still. “Really, you needn’t worry.”

“I do worry. And, of course, your mother is frantic at the idea you’re remaining.”

“I doubt that. Nothing but the health of her dogs is capable of eliciting that sort of emotion from Mother,” she says, hoping a joke will restore her father’s usual equanimity. “You and me? Mother seldom worries.”

Forbes emerges from the doorway and positions himself beside her father. “In your father’s absence, be careful whom you befriend,” he says.

“I have always chosen my company with care,” she tells him, not quite sure what to make of this unsolicited advice.

He raises an eyebrow and smirks. “You seem to gravitate toward the strays and the Mohammedans,” he says.

She takes the remark in. She knows that Forbes does not approve of the presence of Nevart and Hatoun in the compound. She is well aware that both he and her father are appalled that Mr. Martin is allowing the two Armenian deportees to remain here. But until this moment she had not appreciated the depth of Forbes’s distaste for Dr. Akcam and her friendship with the older physician. She can’t tell how much is jealousy and how much is contempt because Akcam is Turkish. “I expect to be well occupied,” she tells him. “I will continue to keep the Friends of Armenia abreast of our efforts, and I will continue to work at the hospital.”

“My advice?”

“Had I requested it?”

“Stay with the Christians,” he tells her.

There is so much she could say to him in response, but she does not want to upset her father by skirmishing with one of the physicians as they are leaving. There has been enough of that. But she also cannot allow his bigotry to pass without comment. And so she says, “He who does not travel does not know the value of a man.”

He frowns. “I suppose that is one of those meaningless proverbs you have grown so fond of.”

“It is. Dr. Akcam taught me to say it in Turkish, too.”

“Well, bully for him.”

“I find it has great significance.”

One of the porters approaches Forbes and asks if he would like his leather doctor’s bag in the back of the cart or in his seat with him. The physician takes it from the porter and says to Silas, “I know nothing here ever runs on time. But it will be our luck that—for once—our train will, and we’ll miss it. So I’ll go find Hugh and then we should probably get moving.”

He walks past her into the compound without saying a word, and her father turns to her. She can see in his eyes how much this place has changed him; they are actually a little moist.

A
T THE HOSPITAL
Nevart uses a stethoscope that reminds her of her late husband and listens to the boy’s heart. His belly is distended from hunger, and his face seems forever chiseled into that of an angry old man’s. But his spirits are rather good as he sits up in his bed and pulls down his loose shirt to accommodate the chestpiece. He has said he is nine, but she is confident that he’s lying. Something about him suggests he’s on the cusp of adolescence: eleven or twelve, at least. Perhaps even thirteen. Many of the starved children have bodies that appear older—the sagging skin, the protruding bones, the spectacular weakness—but this boy has the frame of a teenager and the first downy wisps of hair on his chest.

“You have a good heart,” she says to him, standing up and dropping the tubes around her neck. He takes the chestpiece and bats it playfully. She, in turn, takes his hand and uncurls his fingers. She pretends to study his palm as if it’s a book. “And it seems you’re going to live a long, long time.”

“So you’re a palm reader?” he asks and—once more—she is struck by the way his voice sounds like an adolescent’s. The tone of the question was almost … flirtatious.

“Not formally schooled in the art,” she replies. “But your life line is long like a river.” In truth she knows nothing about life lines. She was just being silly. She puts no stock in palm reading. But his heart did indeed sound strong. She hadn’t been making that up.

In the corridor she runs into Sayied Akcam, a leather binder in one hand and an unopened bottle of iodine in the other. She motions toward the boy in the bed and asks the physician, “How old do you think that child is?”

“He says he’s nine.”

“Do you think he is?”

The doctor smiles. “Heavens no. He might be fourteen or fifteen.”

She is about to ask why the teenager would lie, but before she has opened her mouth she understands. The boy has figured out that he has no place to go when he gets better. He can either wander homeless through the streets of Aleppo or be sent to one of the resettlement camps—and neither prospect offers much chance of survival. His best hope is the orphanage, and that means cutting several years off his age.

“But he is on the small side, frail, and very smart,” Akcam continues. “And, apparently, lucky. We don’t see a lot of teenage boys in the convoys. Usually they’re slaughtered with the men. But if he can last long enough in the orphanage, this war might be over.” He opens his binder and flips to a page, pointing to a specific line. She sees that beside the child’s name and city of origin Akcam has written his birth date. He has corroborated the boy’s age as nine.
When Nevart looks up from the binder, the doctor is smiling conspiratorially and his eyes have an uncharacteristic twinkle to them.

H
ATOUN FOLLOWS
S
HOUSHAN
to the sound of the boisterous Janizary music—the music of the sultans—the two of them racing down one of the narrow alleys that converge on the square beneath the citadel. Hatoun tries clinging to the girl’s fingers, but Shoushan runs like a rabbit; she leaps and darts and seems oblivious to stoops and garbage and even people. Soon she is just a smocked smudge that appears and disappears until, finally, they emerge in the square, and there is the Turkish military band. Hatoun sees that the musicians are soldiers and immediately halts. There is one man holding a heavy drum against his chest, but the rest are playing clarinets, cymbals, and the most beautiful crescents she has ever spied. Altogether she counts seven musicians. Around them are easily fifty or sixty people, mostly men, Turks all, some clapping, but most merely smiling and nodding.

Shoushan jumps onto the cobblestones and starts dancing between the musicians and the crowd, moving like a wild woman and occasionally beckoning Hatoun to join her. Hatoun watches enrapt, but she knows in her heart that Shoushan is playing a dangerous game and drawing too much attention to herself. The musicians seem only amused, however, especially when Shoushan tries to mimic a belly dance—no small endeavor since she has no belly at all. And the crowd seems to be enjoying her antics. But then a massive middle-aged fellow in a western suit and shoes and a fez emerges from the crush with two younger men, slimmer and stronger, beside him. Hatoun can’t decide if they are bodyguards or assistants of some sort. They are also in European dress. The older fellow studies Shoushan for a long moment, and Shoushan seems to grow even more animated, her dancing yet more suggestive, in the glow of this attention. And then—and it happens so quickly that for a second Hatoun is not precisely sure what she has witnessed—one of the two younger men lifts Shoushan up from behind and
starts to carry her into the crowd. The girl is screaming so loud to be released, to be put down, that she can be heard over the drums and the cymbals and the crescents, but no one is making any effort to stop the men. It’s as if this abduction is, like the music, a part of the entertainment. And so reflexively Hatoun runs after them, aware that some of the people are laughing now—laughing at the idiot orphan girl who has been scooped up and the idiot orphan girl who is chasing after her. She pushes her way through the throng and sees the men and her friend—still shrieking and flailing her arms futilely—halfway across the very same square in which Hatoun had curled up beside Nevart when they had first arrived in Aleppo. She runs even faster than she did a few minutes ago down the alley, and when she catches up to them Shoushan howls her name, one long ululation of despair. Hatoun tries tugging at her friend, pulling her from the man’s arms by her bony legs and then by her smock. The fellow can’t be more than twenty, Hatoun thinks, when the fat man says something she doesn’t understand, and his other assistant slaps her so hard on the side of her face—two of his fingers have thick, heavy rings—that she feels her head whip around as the stinging pain starts to register. Then she collapses, stunned, onto the cobblestones. She tries to stand, pushing herself off the ground with both hands, but she is so dizzy that her legs buckle. She looks up, her vision fuzzy, and watches as her wailing friend disappears with the men down another of the narrow streets that throb like veins in this terrifying city at the edge of the desert.

A
RMEN TRIES BREATHING
through his mouth and finds himself swallowing warm, wet dirt, which is like sludge on his lips and tongue. He moves his head back, barely, and spits, and the mud drools down his chin. He guesses that for a time he has been breathing only through his nose—though now that he’s conscious, he realizes this will not be pleasant. It will mean inhaling as well the stink of deep earth and rotting flesh. Somewhere far away (or, perhaps, not far away) he can also smell smoke. He tries opening
his eyes, but when he does dirt falls into them and stings. And even in that brief second when he widened his lids, he wasn’t sure he could see more than a bit of vague, hazy light. Is it possible he is blind now? It might be just that simple; maybe the Turks did him in with poison gas. He read about the gas in Ypres. But there is something more complicated going on, something different from blindness. He tries to comprehend what it is, but his mind is moving sluggishly. It’s as if whatever this weight is that is making it hard to breathe and is pressing against his chest is also making it difficult to think. Somewhere in the distance he hears the sound of Australians and New Zealanders, and it confuses him because he has a vague recollection of people yelling and then screaming in Turkish. Soldiers. He tries to make sense of the English, but the conversation has stopped. Or whoever was speaking is no longer within earshot.