The Sandcastle Girls (31 page)

He tries to stand, but he can’t. There is far too much earth on top of him and far too much … something else. He can move his fingers a bit, especially on his right hand, so he starts clawing at the dirt, crabbing his way toward his chest so he can try to determine what else is upon him. In a moment, he has found something, and he flinches. He has discovered cloth and an arm and an abdomen. Not his. He follows the shape of the corpse (assuming it is a corpse, and not someone—like himself—who is still, apparently, very much alive) with his fingers, pushing away the dirt as he goes, until he understands how he has been able to breathe. The other body is more or less perpendicular to his, and a part of the back is atop his chest, creating a cavity around his face. He runs his hand over the corpse (and now, it seems, it really is a cadaver), until he has found the head and the other arm. The body is intact.

He smacks his lips, thirsty. His throat is raw. The smell of smoke grows a little more evident, and he wonders what’s on fire. There is no gunfire, no shelling, no indication of battle. Is it a field kitchen? It smells like burning meat.

Clearly there was a fight. A battle. It starts to come back to him, slowly, as if he is waking from a dream. He had been in the
Turkish trenches—the trenches they had captured. It was dark but he hadn’t eaten yet, because they had to reset the firing platforms so they would face in the opposite direction. And then … then nothing.

No, there had been something. Had they been shelled? Or had there been an infantry charge? He honestly can’t recall.

He has the sense it is daylight now, if only because the world hadn’t been completely black when he briefly opened his eyes. Perhaps if he uses his right hand to clear this body off him, he can push away some of the dirt.

For the first time the idea crosses his mind that he may be badly hurt. Something has happened to his right leg. When he tries to move his foot or stretch his shin, a dagger of pain slices from his ankle to the back of his neck, and he winces. He recalls the wetness he had felt when his hand was creeping along the earth beside his abdomen and then along the body on top of him. He has to hope the blood that moistened the dirt there is from the dead man, but based on the agony that has left him nearly spasming here in the ground, he doubts it.

Regardless, he needs to start digging his way out. He needs to get this corpse off of him. It’s like …

It’s like Nezimi. That day in the administrator’s office in Harput.

You were my friend
, Armen had said, and clearly the Turk had understood where this conversation was leading. He started to open a desk drawer to his right, reaching for his pistol, so instantly Armen shoved the desk into the official as hard and as fast as he could, toppling Nezimi backward in his chair and into the wall. Climbing atop and over the desk, Armen leapt onto him. But Nezimi was strong and he was fast, and he wrestled Armen to the floor, his knee on Armen’s chest, and the weight was reminiscent of what he is feeling now.

No, that was more painful. That was a knee on his sternum. This is just … buried.

Buried. Had someone presumed he was dead and tossed him into this ditch? Some Turkish private? He worries that the smoke
is a pyre; they’re burning corpses. But he heard English. Which means, perhaps, that it was an Aussie soldier who tossed him here, presuming he was an enemy infantryman. Or maybe he has been here so long that it was the Turks who heaved him into this pit a day or two ago, and the Aussies have since recaptured this section of hill.

And maybe it isn’t a burial pit at all. Wasn’t his first thought that he was in a trench?

None of this matters. If he’s going to live, he needs to get out. And so—and, again, briefly he is back with Nezimi, struggling madly to lift the official off him—he uses his one free arm to push the body away, moving it half an inch or an inch at a time, the dirt always spilling onto him until, finally, the corpse is beside him rather than on him. Then he rests, listening.

Once again he hears soldiers speaking in English. They’re back. Or, perhaps, they’d never left.

He thinks of the rage he had seen in Nezimi’s eyes. And maybe that was the reason, Armen decides, he is alive now and the fellow who had betrayed him is dead. Nezimi had had good reason to feel guilty or scared that afternoon, but not angry. He—Armen—was the one whose fury was justified. He was the one whose wife and daughter had been sent into the desert to die by this administrative pedant who had vowed to protect them. He was the one whose wife and daughter were dead. Somehow Armen had gotten the official off of him. Had scrambled to his feet above Nezimi. Kicked him hard under his chin before the bastard could rise, perhaps severing his spine right then. Armen will never know. Because he grabbed the ceremonial scimitar that hung on the wall and cut the man’s throat.

He had expected to feel that sort of rage here in the Dardanelles. Isn’t that why he enlisted? But it has never been that personal here. He has never experienced anywhere near that level of hatred.

The smoke brings him back, and he starts probing straight up with his right arm, clawing against the loam. He uses his elbows to try to push his body ever upward, again moving in increments that
could only be measured in half and even quarter inches. Suddenly he has the distinct sense that his fingers have reached the surface and are moving like mice along the top of the pile.

“What the fuck?”

“Brian, what?”

The voices are clear now, two of them. Australian.

“Look! It’s a fucking hand!”

He feels the ground above him shuddering as they run toward him, and then they are using their hands and digging, digging, and in a moment there is sun and even a wisp of wind, and it feels so good that he almost chokes because he is breathing it all in so deeply.

“Good Christ, he’s one of us,” says one of the soldiers, as he and his partner lift Armen up under his arms and hoist him from the hole. The two men are on their knees, shirtless, inspecting him now. The second fellow glances at Armen’s leg and the massive red stain on the right side of his shirt.

“Looks like you’re going to Alexandria, mate. Egypt! You know that, don’t you?” the soldier says. “That wound’s your ticket off this bloody peninsula!”

Armen thinks about this, his breath raspy and hoarse. Over the soldiers’ shoulders he sees a bonfire, and two other men with masks heaving a dead Turkish private into the flames.

R
YAN
M
ARTIN STANDS
with his hands on his hips beside his young assistant, David Hebert, and gazes at the walls of the abandoned monastery. They are red this time of the day, as the sun sinks into the sands to the west. David has planted the blade of the shovel into the ground and stood it upright like a walking stick, resting both hands upon the tip of the handle. Orhan told Ryan to look for a solitary pine that is roughly twenty-five meters tall and has the face of a virgin in the bark.

“Is this girl happy she’s a virgin or spinsterish?” David asks. “Frankly, I see her as rather cranky about her predicament.”

“I think we can assume
virgin
in this case was merely a synonym for pretty and young,” he answers.

“Well, she can’t be happy about being trapped in a tree. I say we look for a girl with a scowl.”

Ryan sees a disorderly copse of pine near one section of the wall and a line of cypress beside another. He starts around the corner near what he guesses, based on the fact it is a rather squat section of rubble with a chimney, once was the frater—the monastery dining room. He marches over there and stands on the hillock. And there it is. A tall, single pine.

“I see the tree!” he calls back to David. “It’s over here.”

“Is she pretty and young? If we have to dig holes in this heat, at least give me someone pretty and young to look at while I work—and she doesn’t have to be a virgin, I assure you,” David says, speaking as much to himself as he is to Ryan. He pulls the shovel blade from the dry soil and starts over to the consul.

“So,” he adds, when he reaches him, “this is it?”

The branches begin about five feet up the trunk. Ryan can see clearly where, over time, the lower ones withered and fell. “It might be,” he says to David. “But I do not want either of us to get our hopes up.” He walks slowly around the trunk. There is one section where the hysterical imagination might see a face: a pair of knots, a stub from a dead bough. A horizontal fissure in the bark that, perhaps, does have a vaguely enigmatic, Mona Lisa–like smile. But it seems to Ryan to be an enormous stretch, and, on second thought, he can’t decide whether it’s even worth digging here.

Over his shoulder he hears David murmuring, “Good Lord. I have no idea if she’s a virgin, but I’d consider asking her out for tea.”

He turns to his assistant: “You see a face here? Really?” And he points at the section with the two knots.

“No, not there,” David says. He motions instead at a section a foot lower and to the right. “There. I’d point her out to you by touching her, but I fear she’d think I was rather forward. Besides, a finger in the eye is never pleasant.”

Ryan stares at the section of trunk and sees absolutely nothing; he sees no trace of a face at all. “Are you pulling my leg?”

“No.”

“You honestly see a face?”

“You honestly don’t?”

“I don’t,” Ryan admits. “But if you believe we should dig here, I’m game.”

“Did your Turkish friend say how deep the box is?”

“Three or four feet.”

“Okay, then,” David says, and immediately thrusts the blade into a patch of soil in front of the face on the pine—or, at least, on the side of the tree where David insists he has seen a face. He digs steadily, shoveling perhaps three feet into the earth before he starts widening the circle, expanding it steadily like the ripples flowing out from a pebble that has broken the surface of a still pond. At first the ground is sandy, but once he is two feet down it grows moist and dark, and he starts hitting rocks nearly the size of baseballs. The piles of dirt look to Ryan as if they have come from two different spots on the globe.

“Want a break?” he asks David. “Why don’t you rest for a moment and I’ll take over?”

The young man shakes his head. “I think I’ve found something.”

“You’re not serious?”

David tosses the shovel to the ground and kneels. Then he bends forward and starts digging with his long fingers. Ryan joins him and instantly feels a piece of relatively smooth, flat wood, and his heart starts to beat a little faster. Together they paw at the dirt, Ryan almost frantically, brushing it away until they have discovered the crate’s corners. Ryan stands and grabs the shovel. Moving so quickly that only barely is David able to get his hands out of the way, Ryan slides the blade in against one of the walls, using the shovel like a lever to angle one edge of the box almost onto its side. Then David is able to grab it and drag it over the lip of the hole and onto the ground. The crate is a cube, perhaps twenty inches
square, and Ryan recognizes it instantly from that afternoon when the Turkish soldiers had stolen it from the engineers’ quarters. He can’t read all of the German that is printed on the lid, but he can read enough that he knows the crate once held the photographic plates that Helmut had used in his camera. It seems likely that the engineer replaced the used plates back in the box, so he could develop them once he returned to Germany.

“Shall we open it?” his assistant asks him.

Ryan shakes his head forcefully. “No, absolutely not—not outside. There is almost certainly undeveloped film in here. I’m sure Helmut sealed it up well when he was finished with each pack, but if he didn’t, we’d ruin the images instantly.”

“In a box this size, how many photographs might there be?”

Ryan tries to do the math in his head, getting a little giddy as he crunches the numbers. The Germans were using a falling plate camera that held a pack of twelve plates. Each plate was roughly the size of a very large playing card. No doubt the crate also has inside it a changing bag (perhaps two), and the metal sheaths in which the plates were stored. It is all almost more than he could have hoped for. “This is a wild guess,” he says, “but I would estimate that this crate once held eighteen packs—or film for up to two hundred and twelve photographs. Now, that’s an approximation. And we know one pack was ruined when the brutes smashed the camera. What we won’t know until we open the crate is how many packs have been used and how many are still unopened.”

In the distance Ryan hears the muezzin and his eyes glide to the minaret of the mosque on this side of Aleppo. Not far from that mosque is an alley that leads to the center square where the deportees are often left by the gendarmes when they arrive in the city. He thinks of Nevart and Hatoun. It was there that Elizabeth Endicott had first ministered to the dying who had survived the desert.

“Feel the need to pray, do you?” David asks him, chuckling.

Ryan stares at him.

“Sorry,” his assistant says. “I didn’t mean to be disrespectful.”

Ryan realizes that he is so emotionally wrought by the idea
that they have found the crate that he only dimly understood what David had said. He glances back at the ruined monastery and, oblivious to David’s presence or his cynicism, falls to his knees before the tree that may or may not have the face of a virgin and thanks his God.