The Sandcastle Girls (37 page)

“I have to see the Sister,” he says, chuckling, and he pats the boy along the top of his back, a gesture that is somewhere between an endearment and a shoo. Then he shields his eyes from the sun with his hand and spots her. He waves when he sees her in a corner of the courtyard, a sentinel, and works his way through the children. One of the boys dives at his feet and hangs on to his leg like a dog. The consul leans over and peels the child’s fingers from his trousers, murmuring, “Now, now, I do need my leg. You seem to have a perfectly good pair of your own.” He bows ever so slightly when he reaches the nun. “Good day, Sister Irmingard,” he begins. “Your charges seem as … as energetic as ever.”

She smiles at him. She is confident that she knows precisely why he is here. He is going to ask her to take that mute little waif off his hands. Hatoun. And, of course, Sister Irmingard knows she will say yes. Because here at the orphanage is the best place for the child. It may not be perfect, but it is far more suitable than living at the American consulate with a horrifically scarred widow and a directionless young woman as surrogate mothers.

“This is the children’s favorite time of the day,” she tells him. “When they’re tired, they’ll nap. And then they will spend some more time on their studies before dinner.”

There is a shriek behind them when the boys fall upon the very child Ryan had spun in the air, pounding at him with their fists and kicking him with their sandal-clad feet. She is about to go and pull apart the scrum when Sister Geraldine dives in and separates the young brawlers.

“I have a favor to ask,” Ryan says. He pats at the dampness on his forehead with a handkerchief.

She nods, waiting. She knows what a sin pride can be, so she takes a small breath to calm herself as her mind forms the thought,
I knew this was coming. But anyone would. Everyone, in fact. It was obvious from the beginning the child would be back
.

“I have some pictures in my possession,” Ryan begins. “It’s a long story. But I want to get them out of Aleppo and I thought, well, that a nun might be able to help.”

S
AYIED
A
KCAM KNOWS
of the thousands of women who have killed themselves by hurling themselves into the deep waters of the Euphrates—a visiting Swiss physician told him how every day this past summer he had seen half a dozen bodies float past in the river—or by leaping from the cliffs of the rocky mesas in the desert, but he has been spared their corpses. Not today. The woman is still breathing, barely, but he doubts she will survive into the afternoon or open her eyes ever again. A German soldier and a German diplomat carried her here just after dawn. They discovered her at the foot of the eastern walls of the citadel. The diplomat recognized her—despite the fact that one of her cheeks had swollen like a soccer ball and a crust of blood had scabbed from her eye to her jaw—as the Armenian who cleaned the consulate and changed the linens on the beds. After determining that there was absolutely nothing in the world he could do for her, Akcam had her placed in
the bed of a girl who had been moved to the orphanage yesterday. The woman must have landed first on her legs, because the bones in her feet and her shins had been reduced to gravel.

He is not positive, but he believes the woman had been here at the hospital this summer. The faces tend to blur, but he prides himself on his memory, imperfect as it may be at his age. He recalls her almond-shaped eyes and—when he draws back one lid—the beautiful, elegant gray of her pupils.

Over his shoulder he hears laughter, and when he turns he sees Elizabeth and Nevart and Hatoun approaching down the corridor. He has noticed that lately Nevart has been more likely to bring Hatoun with her when she comes to the hospital to help. Sometimes the child sits at a small side table just outside his office and does the schoolwork Nevart has given her, or she walks behind the woman or one of the nurses and carries water to those patients who are well on their path to recovery.

“Good morning, Dr. Akcam,” Elizabeth says to him, her voice bubbly and her eyes alight.

He smiles at the three of them, but moves his body so that the girl, at least, is less likely to see the dying woman on the bed behind him. “You seem very happy this morning, Miss Endicott. It appears that yesterday’s rain agreed with you.”

“Maybe it rained all day, but it was sunny all night,” Nevart tells him.

“I don’t understand,” he admits, though it’s clear to him that the American has received good news of some sort.

“Elizabeth’s friend returned—healthy and unharmed,” Nevart says.

“Your Armenian friend? The engineer from Van?” Akcam inquires, hoping his tone doesn’t betray his utter astonishment. Elizabeth has told him stories of Armen, and he presumed the fellow had been forever lost in the maelstrom of war.

And this time Elizabeth herself answers, her grin so broad it’s almost a little wild. “Yes. At first I thought he was a Bedouin,” she admits, and then she laughs. “There he was, standing in front of
the compound last night: a Persian tribesman who had struggled in from the desert.”

Good news is so precious and rare that he considers embracing her, but fears that would be presumptuous. And so instead he only nods and bows ever so slightly. But as he moves, Hatoun peers around him, and he realizes that the girl has seen the dying woman in the bed. He takes her shoulders to steer her away, but the child is as immovable as a stone column. She stands there, rigid and staring, and although Akcam knows she has witnessed far worse, he doesn’t want her seeing this patient whose breathing is growing ever more shallow and weak. He is shocked the woman has lasted as long as she has, and he says precisely this to Elizabeth and Nevart. He tells them that she pitched herself from one of the ramparts at the citadel. Still Hatoun resists him, even shaking him off with her shoulders. Quickly Nevart scoots beside him and also tries pulling at the girl, murmuring that they should step back, but Hatoun surprises them all when she opens her mouth and says, “This is the woman who wanted Prince Ryan. This is the woman from the gate. Her name is Karine.”

Akcam has no idea what she is referring to when she says this patient once approached the American consul, but he finds it sweet that the child refers to her benefactor as a prince. The irony of a “royal” American is just starting to settle on him like a fallen leaf when he notes that the two women—especially Elizabeth—have grown alert.

“Hatoun, tell me,” Elizabeth asks, bending over with her hands on her knees so she is eye level with the girl, her face intense. “Do you mean this is the lady who came to the compound a few days ago?”

Hatoun nods, gazing at the woman in the bed.

“You’re positive?” Elizabeth asks.

“Yes.”

She stands up and looks at the dying woman in the bed. Elizabeth can feel both the physician and Nevart watching her. She isn’t positive, but she thinks it is at least possible that this was the
individual she had passed on the street yesterday just before she saw Armen. Had this refugee been on her way once more to see Mr. Martin? Or—and she finds herself agitated and unnerved by this possibility—had the woman been looking for Armen? She is shocked at how quickly her mood has darkened, and she tries to reassure herself that she is overreacting. “And you said her name was … Karine?” she asks, trying to control the unexpected quaver in her voice.
My God
, she thinks,
she saw us embracing
, and she tries desperately to bury the thought. “Did she say anything more? Did she say why she wanted to see the American consul? Did she give you her last name?”

“Oh, we know her full name,” Akcam says. He hopes this will comfort Elizabeth. “She worked for the German consul. I don’t recall her last name right this second, but I have it written down in my office. Let me go get it.”

Somehow he is able to guide Hatoun with him away from the side of the thin mattress, and as Elizabeth watches the man and the girl receding down the corridor between the beds, she knows already what the woman’s last name is going to be and why she leapt from atop the citadel last night. She knows this as surely as she has known anything in her life. Her fingers are trembling as she sits gently on the bed and strokes the side of the woman’s face that has not been broken by the stones at the base of the fortress. She is surprised at how cold the skin is, so she reaches for Karine’s hand and finds that it is almost like ice. She wonders if she should ask Nevart to run back to the compound now—
Go! Go now!
she hears herself pleading in her mind—to race as fast as she can and bring back Armen. But before she can decide what to do, before she can open her mouth, the woman’s body has one barely perceptible spasm—a twitch, really.

And then she is gone.

Somewhere—very far away, it seems—Nevart is asking her if she is all right. Elizabeth squeezes the dead woman’s hand and kisses her forehead. She takes a breath to try to compose herself, though the tremors that before had resided only in her fingers have
now traveled up through her arms and into her shoulders. But she makes a decision. She cannot bring back the dead; she can only resurrect the pain of longing and loss, the unbearable wailing of ghosts. Armen has shouldered Karine’s loss once already. He has borne the grief, the heartbreak, and the chasm-like hole in his soul. And finally—almost miraculously—he has started to heal. Should he now have to share in the guilt and the knowledge that Elizabeth suspects will color her sunsets forever? Should he have to carry that cross as well?

Maybe someday she will regret this moment and what she is about to do. Maybe not. She knows only that in an instant she has made up her mind. And so she blinks back her tears and finds within her a small, wan smile for Nevart.

“Yes, I’m fine,” Elizabeth says, forcing a resolute firmness into her voice. “It’s just so sad that we’ll never know what this poor woman wanted from Mr. Martin—or how he might have been able to help her.”

W
HEN
I
WAS RESEARCHING MY GRANDPARENTS’ STORY IN
2011, I had a cup of tea with a survivor of the Armenian genocide. It’s hard to believe, but there are actually some witnesses who remain on this planet. Remember that old television commercial in which an elderly couple in the Caucasus Mountains attributes their longevity to yogurt? Well, apparently we really do have extraordinarily resilient genes. This Armenian survivor was one hundred and two years old when we met. He worked as a butcher until he was ninety-one, retiring only a decade and change before we sat down together. He was born in a village near Zeitun in 1909, and at the age of six he was marched into the Syrian desert with his mother and three sisters. Two of his sisters died there, but he and his mother and one of the girls survived. Rather than remain in the Middle East after the war or immigrate to France or the United States like so many other walking skeletons, their mother brought them to Armenia. Not back to Zeitun in Turkey. To the fledgling independent nation born from the ashes of a cataclysmic and savage war, and the rubble of two dying empires: the Ottoman and the Russian. That nation didn’t last long. By 1922 Armenia was a republic in the Soviet Union.

Which brings me back to that one-hundred-and-two-year-old man. He was pressed into service to defend Mother Russia from
the Nazis in 1941, when he was thirty-two years old. In October of 1942, while fighting on the outskirts of Stalingrad, he was among a group of infantrymen overrun by German tanks and forced to surrender. He would spend the next two and a half years in a Nazi prison camp, treated—along with all the other Russian prisoners—as a Slavic subhuman. For the second time in his life he was nearly done in by starvation and disease. Briefly he was sent from the camp to Berlin, where he was the only man to make it back from his work detail removing unexploded American and British bombs from the debris in the city. Not long after he was rescued by his own army in April 1945, he learned that his wife and his son had died, though no one could tell him how. Initially he was treated as a coward for surrendering, and then as a collaborator for surviving. He expected he would be sent to a gulag. He wasn’t. Instead he was deported. Exiled. He has no idea why, but he shrugged when I asked him. “My luck had to change sometime,” he said simply.

He arrived in the United States in 1948, remarried in 1951, and fathered two more sons and two daughters, all of whom are still alive, too. His wife was with him when I interviewed him, because she is a mere eighty-three and has much better hearing. He has lived quite happily here in the U.S. for the last six and a half decades. There is no way to know this for sure, but I believe he must be one among a very small cohort: an Armenian who survived both the genocide and a Nazi prison camp.

T
HE OLD MAN
watches the child carefully balance the blond doll’s head on the side of his stall, on a plank overlooking his pickles and olives. He has figured out by now that she is not among the starving who appear and beg him for food, so he no longer drives her away. Somewhere in this city, he assumes, she has a mother or an aunt or an older sister. When the child arrives, she seems content to watch the bazaar from his spot, gazing quietly at the people who appear in great crowds in the morning and then dissipate as the day
progresses. She comes less frequently now than she once did, and her visits are shorter. He is not sure he has ever heard her speak. He wonders if they cut out her tongue.