The Sandcastle Girls (32 page)

P
ETER
V
ARTANIAN WAS YOUNGER THAN
I
HAD EXPECTED AND
considerably more handsome. On the telephone the night before from my hotel in Cambridge, his accent and the considered way that he spoke had led me to imagine a fellow in his late sixties or early seventies. But he couldn’t have been more than thirty and he was easily six feet and change. He towered over me when we shook hands in the lobby of the museum in Watertown. He was wearing a navy blue cardigan instead of a blazer, and the combination of his long sweater and his rail-thin necktie made him seem even taller. His smile—like the smiles of many Armenians who focus on our history—was sad, and his eyes were deeply sunken behind his rimless glasses. There was something European about his manner, but I would learn as we sipped our coffee together that he was actually from Lebanon—another of the countries where my people had settled in the diaspora. (
My people
. I find it interesting that I have used that expression.
My people. You people
. Apparently, I have fallen more deeply under the sway of what happened to my family than I might have expected to when I first started this story, given the pride I have always taken in my writerly jadedness.)

We went to a conference room in a third-floor corner of the museum where the shades had been drawn against the morning sun. I understood instantly that this was done to protect the materials inside the archival papers box he had placed at the head of the
long mahogany table. He had set out a coffee service for two, and this felt like a bit of delightfully old world hospitality. The cups had saucers and the cream and sugar weren’t packaged in either plastic or paper. The former was in a pitcher and the latter a bowl.

“China?” I asked, motioning at the cups.

He smiled. “Faux Florentine. Barstow Pottery from Trenton, New Jersey. Sentimental value only.”

“None of my business, but why would cups and saucers from Trenton, New Jersey, have sentimental value to a man from Beirut?”

“My wife’s family is from Trenton. Her great-grandparents owned the Barstow factory.”

“Armenian?”

He nodded.

“Did they come here after the genocide?”

“They did,” he said. “At Ellis Island their name was Americanized—shortened, if you can believe it—to Barstemenian. And when my wife’s great-grandfather started the company, he shortened the name even more and gave it a little tweak. He had seen the name Barstow on a map of Route 66, and thought it would sound less exotic. More American.”

“He didn’t want to be exotic.”

“There are times when exotic is good and times when it isn’t.”

He found it interesting that I had been to this museum when I was in college but hadn’t thought to look through my grandmother’s papers.

“I didn’t know they were here,” I said, and I am sure I sounded a little sheepish and defensive. It was as if I had been derelict.

“Your grandparents never mentioned them?” he asked me. I noticed that his thick wedding band had Armenian lettering on it. The alphabet was completely incomprehensible to me.

“Not to me, they didn’t,” I answered. “My father never said anything either.”

He sipped his coffee and then said, a small smile on his face, “I guess I should have expected that.”

“You’ve read these papers?” I waved my hand over the boxes. “There’s a lot here.”

“I have. Obviously not every word. There is the public correspondence she wrote for the Friends of Armenia, as well as many of the letters she wrote your grandfather when he was in the British Army and your great-grandmother back in Boston. There are some to a roommate from Mount Holyoke. People wrote letters then with the frequency we tweet and text today—but with greater deliberation. And people were likely to save the letters they received.”

“I presume Elizabeth saved hers.”

“Many of them. But that box is far from a complete set. There are many letters Elizabeth wrote your grandfather that he probably never received or were lost when he was wounded. I see them going from Aleppo to Cairo to Port Said to Gallipoli. Then back to Cairo. Or Alexandria—where your grandfather was hospitalized. There were a lot of places for them to get lost along the way.”

“They’re that interesting?”

“No, of course not. Many are not that interesting at all. But some are. I’m writing my dissertation at Clark on the role that Aleppo played in the genocide. Your grandmother’s papers were a wonderful primary source.”

I stood up and warmed the coffee in my cup with some from the carafe. “Tell me something,” I said.

He parted his hands. “Ask.”

“Why would you have expected that my grandparents would never have said anything about the papers?”

For a long moment he remained absolutely silent. Then he rose to his feet and went to the box. He pulled off the lid, thumbed through a manila folder, and pulled out a photocopy of an old black-and-white photograph. “It begins here,” he said, and he handed me the portrait of Karine Petrosian that had brought me to Boston in the first place.

•   •   •

A
RMEN WATCHES THE
nurse turn away after tending to the dressings on the abdomen of the comatose soldier in the next hospital bed; she shakes her head and puffs her cheeks ever so slightly. The nurse has green eyes that always look worried, but Armen has the sense that this time her anxiety has cause. The soldier is going to die. Clearly. Since being moved to this ward a little more than two weeks ago, Armen hasn’t seen anyone die. Here sleep the men well on their way to recovery and either a return to the trenches or a discharge, depending on the severity of their wounds. They play cards and eat, and some flirt with the nurses. But there had been another attempt to penetrate farther up the Gallipoli Peninsula, and two days ago a hospital ship arrived in port with its decks filled with the lame and the maimed, and even the beds in this usually less nightmarish section of the hospital were needed for the desperately wounded. An Aussie has rechristened the nearby Nile the river Styx. Last night the sounds of the men who were losing at rummy were smothered by the wails of the men whose insides had been reduced to pulp and jam and whose very souls were bleeding out.

It was autumn now, but you wouldn’t know it here in Alexandria the way you would if you were in Harput or Van. This morning there were rumors that the British were thinking of pulling the troops off Gallipoli after this latest failed offensive. They would just pack up and sail away. Armen couldn’t decide what that would mean for him. If he wasn’t to be shipped back to the Dardanelles, would they send him to France to fight the Germans? He had no desire to be a part of that cause. He wasn’t even precisely sure what that cause was. He had joined up for reasons that were entirely personal and had everything to do with his own corner of the globe. The slaughter on the northwestern corner of the European continent? It might as well be on the moon. And, the truth is, his hatred was long spent. He took no pleasure from his small role storming what proved to be an insignificant beach and a meaningless ridge in the Dardanelles. He derived no satisfaction from the possibility that he may have widowed some woman he’ll never
meet or slaughtered some child’s father. Some mother’s son. Whatever blood lust had festered inside him had been spent months ago on a minor official in Harput. On Nezimi.

Nevertheless, he is largely healed—he is certainly much better now than he was a month ago—so the decision about where he will be sent next will be made for him soon. The fracture had never been that serious; boys break bones all the time. It was the physicians’ fear of infection and gangrene that had kept him in the other wing of the hospital for the first couple of weeks.

He sits upright in bed and reaches for the cane he looped over a rail. The splints and the puttees on his leg were removed two days ago and it was a relief to wander around without those battered crutches. His stitches were withdrawn, too. He’s not really sure he will even need the cane today. Yesterday it was mostly the weight of his loneliness that it buttressed.

“You are feeling better, aren’t you?”

He turns around and there is the Welsh nurse with freckles and hair a little reminiscent of Elizabeth’s.

“Yes, I am,” he agrees. “Thank you.” He sees she is holding a stack of letters as thick as a Bible, a piece of twine wrapped twice around them.

“Look what we have here,” she says. “Better than Boxing Day, no?”

He has absolutely no idea what she’s talking about when she says
Boxing Day
, but he smiles to be polite—and because he is beginning to understand that this pile of correspondence is for him, and there is only one person in the world he can imagine writing him a letter. He had almost given up hope. Now he stands so quickly that he almost topples over, but he steadies himself on the rail at the foot of the bed and takes the letters the way a starving man grasps a scrap of bread. Instantly he thinks of all the letters he has written Elizabeth this month here and before that on the cliffs and trenches of Gallipoli, wondering if any of them ever made it to Aleppo. He wonders if she is even still there.

“I think they’re from the American,” the nurse says, because he
has indeed told her of Elizabeth. “Unless you know other Americans in Syria.”

“No.”

“Imagine, nothing for weeks and weeks and then enough words to fill a small book!” A smile starts to form on her lips as she leaves him his mail, but instantly it is snuffed out when the soldier beside him spasms violently and she races to the man’s bedside. She yells for a doctor, but within seconds the patient is dead. Armen isn’t sure, but he believes that the fellow never once woke up in the two days he was here in Alexandria.

N
EVART GAZES UP
at the frail, wispy desert clouds. At the cerulean eternity that beckons just behind them. Were clouds ever like this in Adana? Probably. Likely, in fact. They may not have been at all like this in London, but Adana has more in common with Aleppo than, until lately, Nevart has been prepared to admit. She is braiding Hatoun’s hair here in the courtyard, surprised to find her thoughts roaming back to Adana. They rarely do. She thinks far more often of the march through the desert. And periodically she imagines the wealth behind these Americans’ generosity. In her mind’s eye she conjures a Boston based largely on her memories of London, that astonishing metropolis on the Thames.

She has noticed how over the last week or so—maybe even longer than that—Hatoun has strayed less from the compound. The girl still disappears once in a while, but only for brief intervals. Fifteen minutes one day, half an hour the next. And some afternoons she doesn’t go anywhere at all. She peers through the wrought iron grating on either side of the massive doors, or she stares out at the vast city through a second story window. But then she retreats to a table in the shade to complete her work with the abacus, or she goes inside, either to the kitchen, the library, or the
selamlik
, and does the reading and writing that Nevart has assigned to her. Nevart likes to believe that the child’s new domesticity—this slight behavioral transformation—has been brought about because she
has conveyed to the girl the profound dangers that exist beyond the compound. But Nevart isn’t convinced. There is something in the child’s manner that suggests there is more to her sudden disinterest in exploring Aleppo’s darkest recesses than merely the warnings (and pleas) that Nevart has expressed day after day after day. Nevart cannot help but fear that something happened, though Hatoun is characteristically circumspect whenever Nevart probes for even the vague outlines of a story. A reason.

As she finishes the girl’s braid, Elizabeth pushes open the double doors to the compound, her broad smile visible despite the shadow cast by the brim of her hat. She sits in the empty chair across from the two in which the Armenians are seated. “God is with those who patiently persevere,” she says first in Turkish, then in Armenian, and finally in English.

“You are becoming more fluent every day,” Nevart says.

“I know. I may be taking more pride in the accomplishment than is seemly. But I really am rather pleased.”

“I suppose Dr. Akcam taught you this latest proverb.”

“Indeed.”

“Soon you are going to become a Mohammedan,” Nevart tells the American lightly.

“Not likely. A Unitarian someday, maybe. But I believe that would be the extent of my radicalization. Still, I appreciate how the Qur’an encourages patience. It has helped to remind me that I can only do so much. It has advice in it that would have served my father well.”

“You seem to be doing fine in your father’s absence,” Nevart says. She believes, in fact, that the young woman is flowering without the older man’s shadowing presence. Silas’s intentions were sound, but he was so accustomed to getting his way that often his fundamental kindness would transmogrify into bluster. Still, Nevart understands well that Elizabeth has remained here in large part because of one man who, in all likelihood, will never return. But if she were in the American’s situation, she would stay, too. How could a woman not? If she did not know for a fact that
her husband had been machine-gunned with all the professional men from Adana—if she had not been forced by the gendarmes, along with the other widows, to file past the ravine into which the men had been herded to simplify the slaughter—undoubtedly she would have waited, too.