The Sandcastle Girls (34 page)

But mostly I was crying for the losses and the secrets that Armen and Elizabeth had brought to their graves.

E
LIZABETH SITS ACROSS
from Sayied Akcam as the physician reaches for the tin pot on the table and freshens the coffee in her small cup. His office is really just a curtained-off corner of the children’s ward, but there is a thin window facing west, and sunlight cheers the nook this time of the day.

It took Elizabeth a few weeks to get used to the coffee here in Syria—so much thicker and darker than what she would drink in Boston—but now she cannot imagine ever drinking American coffee again. Last night Nevart had showed her how to use the hookah that had sat unused in the compound
selamlik
like a piece of treasured pottery. They had smoked tobacco after the staff and Hatoun were in bed, as if they were ungoverned adolescents. In America she would never even have smoked a cigarette.

“We are all much better telling somebody good news than bad,” Akcam says, after he has taken another sip from his own cup. “We find other words for bad news.” He is referring to his bedside manner, his work as a doctor. But Elizabeth knows there is a broader issue behind what he is saying.

“In some ways,” she says, “you would have an even greater need for euphemisms if these children had parents—or if these women had husbands or sisters or brothers. I would think most of your hedging is for the family. It’s for them you need to cushion the blow of bad news.”

He motions toward the rows of beds on the other side of the drape. “We edge toward death incrementally here. It affects our language. In the desert, too.”

“But not always,” she corrects him, recalling the way that Hatoun’s mother and sister were killed. “Sometimes they are murdered suddenly out there.”

“I know,” he agrees. “And, arguably, they are the more fortunate ones.” She has the sense he is about to teach her another proverb from the Qur’an. But then from the other side of the curtain they hear the sounds of a little girl starting to cry. Elizabeth suspects it is the seven-year-old from Van who was here months ago and then sent to the orphanage. She was brought back here last night because she had been unable to keep food down for three days.

Akcam exhales heavily. He makes a resigned pyramid of resignation with his thick eyebrows and pushes himself to his feet. She follows him out onto the ward.

H
ATOUN DOES NOT
recognize the woman who appears in the middle of the afternoon on the other side of the iron grate that borders the compound’s imposing wooden doors. The girl stands inside the courtyard, Alice’s small blond head in one hand, and looks up at the stranger. Clearly the woman is Armenian. At least Hatoun assumes that she is. Her skin hangs like Nevart’s, but she is no longer the sort of walking skeleton Hatoun recalls from the last
days of the long march or their days in the square near the citadel. Her hair is beautiful, thick and lustrous and newly brushed.

“Hello,” the woman says simply. When Hatoun says nothing in response, she continues, “I am looking for a man named Ryan Donald Martin. Is he here?”

Hatoun shakes her head no. The American prince and his assistant are both out. Only Nevart and the cook are with her in the compound at the moment. She is considering fetching Nevart, when the woman continues, “I’ll come back. Do you have a name?”

“Hatoun,” she answers simply.

“And hers?” the stranger asks, pointing at Alice’s head.

“Alice.”

The woman smiles, her lips a little crooked. For the briefest of seconds the grin reminds her of her lost friend’s—of Shoushan’s—in its slightly manic, slightly crazed edges. But there is also something maternal about it, something that makes Hatoun think of her own mother’s face. Of Nevart’s, too, when the woman kneels and embraces her, once she has returned here after playing somewhere far from the compound.

“My name is Karine,” the stranger says. “Hatoun and Alice are beautiful names.” She gazes into the courtyard and sees the remnants of the sandcastle beneath the date palms.

“Did you build that?” she asks Hatoun.

The girl nods. She wishes it hadn’t wilted in the night from dew and in the day from the sun. Earlier in the week it had looked better than it does now. Really, nothing ever lasts.

“It’s very impressive,” Karine says.

“Thank you,” Hatoun murmurs, sure that this woman is only trying to be polite. Then Karine turns and walks away, down the street and into the sun.

E
LIZABETH DOES NOT
tell Nevart at dinner that another girl died in the hospital that afternoon. She does not tell Hatoun that another
nun from the orphanage came by the ward asking about her. She sits between the two of them and eats her lamb and rice pilaf and describes for them instead the phantasmagoric shades of purple and yellow and red that mark the foliage when you leave Boston and venture out toward Concord in the autumn. She tries to convey the magic of the warm, sweet steam from a sugarhouse in the spring, and what it was like to watch sap boil down into syrup. She does not mention that the sugarhouse in her mind belonged to the family of a professor with whom she had entangled herself at Mount Holyoke. She tries not to think of him. But tonight she wants to talk of home because—as Dr. Akcam and she discussed that very day—sometimes the soul needs to talk only around the edges.

She wonders what her mother would think if she brought Nevart and Hatoun to Boston with her. If she brought home a hookah and smoked tobacco in front of her. Arguably, the idea of the tobacco and a pipe would be even more troubling and problematic for her mother than two “exotics” rescued from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Her mother might actually enjoy their presence in much the same way that she takes pleasure from her dogs. Still, it is a serious issue in Elizabeth’s mind. At some point she will book passage home to America. What then will happen to these two? They cannot stay forever in the American compound.

Meanwhile, as every day passes with no letter from Armen, the idea that she may be returning to America without ever seeing him again becomes more real. The possibility that he is long dead makes her wince. And yet her time with him was so short and so long ago now that it feels more like a dream than a series of linear experiences that actually happened. It’s as if she conjured him in the small hours of the night and only pretended to stand with him atop the citadel or stroll with him through the market. She glances now in the direction of the front door and the stairs to the second floor and recalls that morning when he had emerged from the shadows and surprised her. She wishes …

She is not precisely sure what she wishes. She knows only
that she had fallen in love with him in a way that she hadn’t with any man previously. Likewise, she is sure that she loves Hatoun more profoundly than she could ever love a niece or a nephew or a cousin. And she has feelings for Nevart that transcend the affection she believes she would ever have shared with a sibling.

Abruptly—at least it feels abrupt, because Hatoun speaks so rarely—the girl says, “A stranger came here today.”

Elizabeth and Nevart turn to her simultaneously. “Please,” Elizabeth says, trying to keep her tone even, the pang of concern quiet. “Tell us more.”

“A woman.”

“She knocked on the door?”

“She looked through the grate.”

“Was she Turkish? Armenian? European?”

“Armenian. She wanted to see the American prince,” the girl says, directing a measure of her response to the blond doll’s head that is resting on the table beside her plate.

“Did she say why she wanted to see Mr. Martin?” Nevart asks.

Hatoun shakes her head no.

“She’s probably heard that Hatoun and I are here and wants refuge,” Nevart says, sighing. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Elizabeth says. “If that’s why she was coming by, so be it.” Then she turns to Hatoun and adds, “If the woman returns, send her to me. No sense in bothering Mr. Martin unless absolutely necessary.”

K
ARINE LIES IN
repose like a sculpture atop a sepulchre, trying to calm herself so she might doze. But it is impossible for her mind to grow still. She does not know for a fact that her husband is alive, but suddenly it seems reasonable to hope. Perhaps this was why she was spared Der-el-Zor. Perhaps this was why a nun whose name she no longer knows found her work at the German consulate. So she might live and be reconciled with Armen. She imagines their reunion, two corpses brought back from the dead and given a second
chance together. She feels herself in his arms. He lifts her off the ground the way he did in Van when she said she would marry him. She wraps her arms around the back of his neck as he kisses her.

She tries to remind herself that she is getting ahead of herself. He may have left Aleppo by now. Most likely he has. Yet she should not lose sight of the fact that Aleppo is large, and it is possible—especially given the smallness of her own world, and how little time she spends anywhere but cleaning at the German consulate or mourning Talene (and, yes, Armen) in this small room—that he is somewhere nearby. Regardless, this Ryan Donald Martin might know. Or someone else at the American consulate.

She rubs at the phantom pains she presumes she will always feel where her shoulder meets her chest, the place where she had cradled her baby for days. She had pressed Talene against her there, unwilling to allow any of the other women to take the girl. They had decided that she was mad—that she was unaware the child was dead. But she had known. She had simply been unwilling to let her go. Now, once more, their pleas echo around her, punctuated by the occasional shouts of the gendarmes, so she raises her arms above her, palms open, and silences them. She pushes them all away. Then she returns her arms to her sides and, in an act of enormous will, thinks only of her husband, Armen. She visualizes their bed in Harput and the lake—seemingly bottomless when the sky was right—in Van. She takes in slow, deep breaths, and coddles in her mind the word
future
. She breathes life into it carefully, as if blowing flower petals into the wind.

It is almost light in her room by the time she finally falls asleep.

A
RMEN HAS HEARD
the rumors of a planned British offensive in the Sinai desert and Palestine. It might be in a week, it might be in a month. Now, in a crisp new army uniform, he prowls the marketplace in search of clothes he can wear that will both help him to pass as a Muslim and give him a fighting chance of recrossing the
vast ocean of sand between one civilization and another. He hopes to leave for Aleppo tomorrow, since he is going to be discharged from the hospital any moment now, and it will be much more difficult to desert from the expeditionary force barracks than from the considerably less disciplined world of the convalescing sick and the slackers.

As he is walking he sees an Australian named Adrian whom he met in the hospital. The fellow is moving gingerly with a cane. Like Armen, he is spectacularly fortunate. The bullets he took in his leg ripped through muscle and fat, but only nicked bone. It looked horrific, Adrian told him, but even as he was crawling back to the Anzac lines he was pretty sure his wounds were good for what would amount, more or less, to a month’s respite here in Egypt.

“Looking for anything special?” Adrian asks him, his voice as booming and good-natured as ever.

“No,” Armen lies. “Just passing the time.”

“I love the boredom here. Love it. Could play rummy with those poor, crippled bastards round us forever. I tell you, I am in no hurry to go back. I’ll go when it’s time. But I’m in no hurry.”

In one of the stalls is a fellow selling lambskin bonnets. Beside him is a boy offering scarves. Armen makes a mental note of the location, but otherwise keeps walking past them. He’ll return once he and Adrian have separated.

W
HEN
K
ARINE IS
not emptying the chamber pots or scrubbing the floors or changing the linens on the Germans’ beds, she is praying. She has prayed almost all the time now that she knows there is a chance that her husband is alive. How many Armenian engineers named Armen could there possibly be? She considers asking Ulrich Lange, the German consul, for more information, even though it’s clear that his two assistants know little and hold the Armenian responsible for the death of their two friends. But in the end she doesn’t dare ask him. Besides, she, too, had felt an unexpected
pang at the idea that the German photographers were dead. She remembers allowing the pair to take her picture when she had first arrived in Aleppo. They had asked, and she had agreed. Shrugged her bony shoulders and murmured fine. Answered their few questions about her past. The memory of the moment is as fuzzy as everything else that happened in those first days in the city. She had expected to die within hours.

And yet she hadn’t. She’d been among those who had been brought to the hospital, rather than left to die in the square or marched ever deeper into the desert.

She recalls what little she can of the day the German engineers had taken her picture. The rough wall of the building against which they had posed her, the scabrous stone against her spine. The patch of shade in which she collapsed. Her throat was too raw to speak above a whisper and her feet were imbrued with the miles and miles she had walked: they were swollen, awash in lesions and cuts, the smaller bones chipped and cracked. But the Germans were sympathetic and good-natured, and she felt that by leaving behind an image of her suffering she would give her death meaning. Not much. But some. Someone someday might see her emaciation and degradation and realize what the Turks had done in the desert. The photograph would never communicate the death of Talene, but it might convey the sadness that would, she thought, enshroud her people forever. Likewise, it wouldn’t incriminate the Turk who had claimed to be her husband’s friend and then, after she had renounced her faith, insisted she marry him. (How could he have asked unless he had known that Armen would never return to Harput? When she had refused his proposal, he had been the first of the men to rape her.) But the photograph would suggest the torture to which she had been subjected since she and her baby girl had been sent on a caravan into the wasteland, with nothing but the clothes she’d been wearing and the blanket in which Talene had been swaddled. The image would be a record and she knew the importance of records.