The Sandcastle Girls (33 page)

“I miss him. I miss my mother. But …”

Nevart waits.

“I am not unhappy here,” the American woman says finally.

Nevart focuses on the construction of the short sentence. “Does that mean you are happy?” she asks.

Elizabeth shakes her head. “It would be impossible to be happy here—not with all the starvation and sickness and meanness. The human degradation. The waves of misery are as relentless as the tides. But I like my work. I am doing things that matter. And I like so many of the people. You. Dr. Akcam. Ryan. And, of course, you, little Hatoun.” Then she leans over and presses her pale fingers against the child’s cheeks and kisses her on her forehead. Hatoun, at least on the surface, remains unaffected and typically reserved.

Abruptly Elizabeth sits upright and stares at a corner of the courtyard in which the stone tiles end so the date palms can grow. The soil is sandy there, at least the upper layer is. It is not as fine as the sand on Cape Cod, but at this time of the day it looks almost as white. She thinks of the small castles she once erected long ago on the beach and presumes that Hatoun must have built some in her life, too. In Adana, perhaps. Don’t all girls and boys try to construct such things? In the kitchen will be all the implements they’ll need: coffee and serving spoons, goblets, a pot. Forks. Water.

“I want to build a sandcastle,” she says to Hatoun, smiling. “I was never especially good at them, and so I will need assistance. Would you help me?”

This time the girl nods, and Elizabeth is confident that she has seen a glimmer in those dark, expressive eyes.

•   •   •

T
HE ONLY PLACES
in Aleppo where it might be possible to develop the German’s photographic plates are the newspaper offices and the local headquarters of the Ottoman Fourth Army. Obviously neither darkroom is a viable option. Ryan recalls urging the German engineer to give him the plates so he could ship them out of Syria, but now that he actually has them he realizes how difficult the task will be. The odds are good that the package would be opened and searched—and then its contents destroyed. He could send the plates via courier, but the very same outcome was likely, and in this case he would also be endangering the life of the messenger. And, of course, he could carry them himself across the border. But he hasn’t left the Ottoman Empire since war broke out last year, and consuls who have traveled have informed him that their bags were searched at the border. So much for courtesy and protocol.

Still, he has to find a way to get the plates into Egypt. Or, better still, the United Kingdom. Or France. Or, best of all, America. He has told people what he witnessed at Der-el-Zor and what he sees here in Aleppo every day, but it’s clear that they find this scale of civilian slaughter inconceivable. He can see in their eyes that they suppose he is exaggerating or that they presume he has led such a sheltered existence since the Spanish-American War that the realities of a modern conflict are too much for his diplomatic sensibilities.
Yes
, he can read in their faces or hear in the conciliatory, sympathetic tone of their voices,
it must be terrible. But it can’t possibly be worse than what the poor boys are enduring in the trenches
.

Meanwhile, the box of plates sits beside his desk in his office. Now, a little before midnight, the sky alive with constellations and stars, he smokes a cigarette and stares at the crate. He wonders what he should do. Because, of course, he has to do something.

It’s been two weeks since even a small convoy of refugees has arrived here in Aleppo. He wonders if the government’s deportation process has hit a snag or whether there are simply no Armenians left to banish and starve.

•   •   •

A
RMEN SITS ON
a dock, dangling his legs over the side, largely oblivious to the brawly stevedores who pass by within feet of him with their massive crates and boxes. The smell of the fish reminds him of the beaches in the Dardanelles, but otherwise the Mediterranean here in no way resembles the sea beyond the thin peninsula where he had lived and fought through the end of the summer. Alexandria is a booming port, and though his view of the warships in the harbor is not unlike what he might have seen on the water off Gallipoli, behind him—across the street from the dock on which he is sitting with Elizabeth’s letters—is a city that dwarfs Aleppo and drifts back far inland from the shore. The sea is black with oil and white with foam, and the sky is lined with the acrid plumes from a dozen ships’ funnels.

He has been reading and rereading the letters, almost without pause, since they arrived earlier that week. He has run his fingers over her script; he has tried to find a trace of her scent on the paper. He stares over and over at one single four-word sentence she has written, his heart throbbing, his head a murmuring swarm of memory and desire:
Come back to me
. She is still in Aleppo. At least, based on the dates of the letters, she was. She has written that she is not returning to America with her father and the mission team. And then there is her own injury.
I limp, but they tell me I will heal if I just stay off my foot
. In Gallipoli—and here in Alexandria—he has seen gangrene and amputation and all manner of death from infection. The doctors worried more about gangrene in his wound than anything else. He thinks of the cadaver-like, chloroformed men he saw on the tables in the hospital tent on the beach as their legs or their arms were cut away. The crude bone saws, the blades dipped in buckets of alcohol, the metal dull as tin. Here in Egypt he has seen the soldiers with their crutches and canes limping down the streets and struggling up (and down) stairs, one of their pants legs tied off where there once was a knee. He has watched the men in their rolling chairs with both of their legs gone. For all he knows, already Elizabeth has had a limb taken from her at the hospital in Aleppo.

No, not her. It can’t be.

But, of course, it could. He knows well how quickly it can all fall apart, how suddenly everything can be lost.

Behind him he hears laughter and looks up from the letter in his hands. There, emerging from the fish market in the salt white building at the end of the pier, is a young, light-haired couple, most likely British. He supposes she’s a nurse and he’s a diplomat. He’s dressed far too well to be a soldier. She is laughing at something he has said, the two of them positively shimmering with anticipation and confidence. They feel their future—either moments from now in a bed in a shuttered room, the light separating the slats and louvering the walls, or many decades from now in a Tudor house in the countryside beyond London, a raft of grandchildren at their feet—is assured. The fellow wraps his arm around her shoulders, pulling her into him.

Armen pushes himself to his feet, holding the packet of Elizabeth’s letters against his chest. He feels a pang where the stitches had been in his leg. He tries to convince himself that her father would never have left if her foot had turned gangrenous. He reminds himself that she had written of the two American doctors in the compound. Surely, she’s fine.

Surely.

But if she’s not? Perhaps, in the end, her father never did leave because his daughter was so badly wounded. He has no letters from Elizabeth that were posted after Silas Endicott had, in theory, returned to America. There is only the one that says he was planning to depart.

As Armen walks along the dock and then back toward the hospital, his limp all but gone, he decides it doesn’t matter whether Elizabeth’s foot is fine. It doesn’t matter whether she’s alone in that compound. He’s not going to France to fight. He’s not going to wait to see where they want to send him next. He’s going to return to Aleppo.

•   •   •

K
ARINE
P
ETROSIAN IS
on her hands and knees, drowsily scrubbing the floor of the office of the German consul, now that she has finished with the kitchen and the
selamlik
. Her thoughts move vaguely between the shapes and the shadows cast on the wooden boards and the elephantine thickness of the desk that rises above them. She is careful not to accidentally knock over the magnificent gramophone with the wild roses carved onto its walls. She knows it was a gift to the consul from the governor-general here.

Through her fingertips she feels footsteps down the corridor, and a moment later, over her shoulder, she hears the voices of Ulrich Lange’s two German assistants. Although she is already on the ground, she bows her head ever so slightly when they pass, but they are largely oblivious to her.

“It’s a shame,” one is saying, stepping around her to drop a sheaf of papers on Lange’s desk. “The Turks need all the engineers we can spare.”

“It’s more than a shame. It’s horrible and it’s tragic,” the other young diplomat says. “I knew the two of them—Helmut in particular. Awful scar, and nothing at all to do with the war. Imagine. I liked them.”

“Well, they did ask for it. Why they felt the need to photograph the Armenians is beyond me. It was ridiculous. I’m sure that friend of theirs, that Armenian engineer—Armen—talked them into it. He’s the one who cost them their lives. He killed them as surely as any British offensive.”

“Is he still here?”

“In Aleppo? No idea. Ryan Martin might know. He also has an … an agenda.”

They are just starting to walk past her when reflexively she starts to rise, blocking their way. The men pause.

“Can I help you?” asks the shorter of the two, a fellow she knows is named Paul.

There is a thrumming in her ears, a murmur of voices long dead, and it is taking her a moment to frame her question.

“She probably doesn’t speak German,” says his associate, Oscar.

“I do,” she manages to croak. “A little.”

But Paul resorts to Turkish anyway and repeats his question: “Can I help you?”

She tries to regain a semblance of her composure, but she is trembling.

“Go ahead,” he commands.

“We really don’t have time for this,” Oscar mutters to his friend, exasperated. “Let’s go.”

But she can’t let them leave, not yet. “You mentioned an Armenian engineer,” she says finally, her voice quavering. “You said his name was Armen.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know his last name?”

“No. Sorry,” he replies simply. Then, perhaps because her face must be a carnival mask of anguish and desperation, he adds, “Visit the American consul. Ryan Donald Martin. You never know, he might be able to tell you the Armenian’s full name.”

Then they disappear down the corridor, and the last thing she hears is one of them saying to the other, “Who knows why she wanted to know. Maybe she had a brother or cousin named Armen.”

Meanwhile, she collapses back onto the wooden floor and sits with her head in her hands. She tries to be calm. But her heart is racing, and she has a sense that something inside her is coming alive.

T
HE THIRD DEADLIEST EARTHQUAKE IN RECORDED HISTORY
occurred in Aleppo. It was August 9, 1138. We’ll never know the magnitude, but it was impressive. The death toll—and remember this was nearly nine hundred years ago, so view the figure the way we view old prices and currencies—was 230,000 people. Aleppo was Syria’s second largest city at the time. Buildings crumbled like dry cookies and rocks fell onto the streets like giant blocks of hail. The walls of the citadel seemed to melt, according to one witness. So did the fortress built by the crusaders in Harim. And the Muslim fort at Al-Atarib? Completely leveled. Contemporary accounts said the residents of Damascus felt the earth move, and Damascus and Aleppo are separated by 220 miles.

Peter Vartanian told me about the earthquake as I was leaving the museum with photocopies of close to one hundred pages of correspondence, private diary entries, and newsletter entries. He brought it up, I presume, because so much of our time together had been spent discussing Aleppo. But he may also have thought of the quake because of the number of dead. He had tried putting into context the murder of one and a half million people: Imagine an earthquake that kills nearly a quarter of a million people. Horrific beyond words. Well, that’s only a sixth or so of the number of Armenians who perished in our genocide. That, perhaps, was the subterranean thought that flowed beneath the story.

And, suddenly, I was sobbing in the back of the cab that was taking me to Logan Airport. The driver turned to look at me at a stoplight, and I put up my hands and tried to smile. I sniffled that I was fine, I was fine, and then I continued to cry. I cried all the way to the entrance to the terminal. I cried on the plane and in my own car as I drove to my daughter’s elementary school. I stood in the dark in the back of the auditorium beside Bob during Anna’s concert, and I cried there, too. I am confident that the assistant principal and the woman running the sound board supposed I was crying because our daughter was soon going to graduate and move on to middle school. The two administrators thought my tears were sweet.

Only Bob suspected the truth and understood that in reality I was crying for my grandparents. I was crying for Karine. I was crying for an infant named Talene who never lived to see her first birthday. I was crying over the deaths of one and a half million people, and a civilization in eastern Turkey that had been reduced to a mountain of bones in the ginger sands of Der-el-Zor.