The Sandcastle Girls (38 page)

For a time she had a friend with her, a difficult child—and this one, clearly, an orphan—who saw it as a game to try to steal a pickle each day, but the other girl seems to have disappeared.

“Is she yours?” a new woman asks him this morning as she makes her purchases, motioning with her head at the girl, and he tells her that she is just a stray who seems to like the view. After the customer disappears into the crowd he glances down at the child. Her eyes have grown alert. He would ask her what she sees, but he knows there wouldn’t be a point; the girl would never answer. So he follows her gaze, curious. There, perhaps two or two and a half dozen meters away, is a woman in the dress and blouse of a European or an American, but her hair is the color of a blackbird and she is almost certainly an Armenian. She has a basket draped over one arm, but from here he can’t tell what’s in it. He has never before seen her at his stall, which means either she has a cook or she gets her pickles and olives elsewhere.

“Your mother doesn’t know you play here, does she?” he says to this quiet girl, teasing her. Because he is quite sure the woman is her mother—or maybe her aunt. He is considering whether he should call out to the stranger that her daughter is here, right here, when he sees why the child has grown fixated and alert. Behind the woman, shadowing her, are two young hoodlums, sixteen or seventeen years old he would guess. A thought passes fleetingly behind his eyes: if he were younger or more courageous or simply more willing to get involved, he would cry out to the woman—tell her to run or turn around or drop her basket and bring her arms to her face. Perhaps he will take this risk anyway. But then the child beside him suddenly and unexpectedly finds her voice.

“Nevart!” this usually silent girl screams. “Nevart!” The voice cuts through the air like a horn, louder than all the bartering and debate from the stalls and the bells on the animals in the midst of the human throng. And then the child is sprinting in her sandals
toward this woman named Nevart, crossing the distance in barely a heartbeart. The lady crouches before the girl, her face transforming from preoccupation to surprise to relief. And then the two teenage boys are upon her. Not, the old man observes, upon both the woman and the child. Only upon the woman.

He watches enrapt, wondering if someone else—a younger or stronger man—will come to her aid, fully expecting that otherwise the thugs will beat her and then steal her basket. He can tell by their dress that they are not emissaries from a sheik or merchant who wants Nevart for his harem. Besides, she is pretty, but not pretty enough. Or young enough.

Then, however, he finds himself surprised a second time, this one even more pronounced than the small jolt he had received when the little girl had opened her mouth and cried out the name Nevart. Just as the girl starts kicking at one of the young brutes, the woman wraps her arms around him, not trying to resist him at all. Because he isn’t trying to harm her. He is embracing her, laughing. Both hoodlums are. And then the woman is crying, shaking her head and sobbing. She places her lips upon the girl’s cheeks and whispers something through her tears. The girl looks at the young men, a little quizzically and a little relieved. Around them a crowd starts to gather, and the old vendor leaves his stall and joins them.

He watches and listens and nods. He was correct that this woman was somebody’s aunt. Just not the aunt of this girl who has hovered for days at the bazaar. She’s the aunt of these teenage boys, who—like her, like the girl—have survived both deportation and the tumult that marks Aleppo.

He finds himself moved and wonders as he returns to his olives and pickles if he is getting sentimental in his old age. When he is back at his cart, he notices the blond doll’s head. He plucks it from the plank and starts back toward the child, but already she is walking down the center of the bazaar with Nevart and her nephews.

“You!” he calls out, wishing now that he had thought to ask the girl her name. “Young lady!”

The child turns to him. They all do. He holds up the doll’s
head. And suddenly feeling young and playful in a way that he hasn’t in decades, he grins and lobs it underhand to the girl. One of the teenage boys catches it for her, studies it for a brief moment, and hands it like a treasured orange to the child. She looks up at the young man and then at the vendor. Then—and he knows he has never before seen this from the girl—she smiles. She smiles and waves and puts the doll’s head in the pocket of her dress. He is certain he will never see her again. He isn’t sure how he knows this or why he is so confident. But he is positive, and the realization causes him a strange and unexpected pang of sadness. He shakes his head and tells himself he is getting soft. Then he turns his attention to the Syrian woman who has appeared at his stall and wants to buy olives.

I
N THE
S
ELAMLIK
after dinner, Ryan lights another cigarette and watches as Armen and Elizabeth share long draws from the hose on the hookah, the elegant bowl glowing between them like a firefly. The American woman has seemed alternately reckless and morose tonight—he can’t imagine she would be smoking even a cigarette were her father still here—but she insists that she’s fine. She’s fine, she has said, she is absolutely fine. She says she is simply still overwhelmed that Armen has returned safely to Aleppo. Now Ryan tries to take her at her word. But he finds himself watching her.

He is at once fascinated and appalled when Armen tells the two of them that there is little awareness of the Armenian situation among the Australians and New Zealanders he has met. “The British in Egypt know a bit more,” he says.

“How much is a bit?” Ryan asks the engineer.

“Survivors have started trickling into Cairo. Port Said. Alexandria. But the stories seem almost impossible to believe. And so while the British understand that some Armenians in Anatolia are dying as the Turks relocate them, the magnitude of the slaughter is unclear.”

“Do they see that it’s part of a plan?”

He shakes his head. “No, they don’t. They view it as … as something that happens in a modern war.”

“What did people say when you told them your story at the hospital?” Ryan asks.

“My story? I didn’t tell people my story. I was surrounded by men who were dying or crippled for life. Soldiers who were blind or had lost arms or legs. Or parts of their faces. A nose. A jaw. We all have our losses.”

The American consul appreciates the engineer’s stoicism, but is nonetheless frustrated. “You didn’t tell them of your daughter? Of your wife?” he asks, allowing his tone to express his incredulity.

Before Armen can respond, however, Elizabeth says, “We cannot dwell forever on our personal losses.”

“What?” Ryan asks her reflexively. He is surprised by what strikes him as her uncharacteristic callousness. He is about to elaborate on his short question, when she continues.

“What I mean,” she says, “is that a person can only bear so much heartache and gloom in this world. Really, how much sorrow are we expected to endure? How much?” Ryan watches as she looks almost pleadingly into Armen’s eyes. The engineer nods and gently cradles the young American’s hand in both of his. And Ryan begins to understand what she is thinking. He does not know everything. Far from it. But he understands that the spark he has seen between this pair is far brighter than the embers in the hookah they are sharing, and likely to be far more enduring. He rises, aware that her questions have no answers and that she expects none. At the sideboard, he half fills his glass with the last of the arak.

I
N THE SMALLEST
hours of the morning, the compound floats amid shadows and moonlight. Armen feels the mattress move and he opens his eyes. Blinks. He sees that Elizabeth has risen from the
bed and is silhouetted now in the window, her nightgown gossamer—phosphorescent—as if illuminated by the beam from an electric torch. Her breathing is silent; he hears nothing.

“What do you see?” he asks, sitting up.

She continues to gaze out the window, her arms folded across her chest. Then: “I am looking at the moon. I’m going to miss it in America.”

“As I understand it, you can see it there, too.”

“But I look at the sky here more than I ever did there,” she says, her voice tinged with wistfulness. “I’m not sure I knew there were stars in America.”

“I will remind you to look up now and then.”

“It won’t be the same,” she says. “Oh—” the word is little more than a small exclamation of surprise that she reins in before it can grow into a sentence. He sits up straighter, buttressing his back with his arms.

“What is it?” he asks, alert now.

“That cat. He just caught something, I think. Suddenly he was like a falcon and dove off the wall.”

He relaxes and she returns to the bed, sitting beside him with her bare feet on the wooden floor. She bows her head against his chest and he pulls her against him. He wonders what scars she will bring with her to Boston, how changed she will seem to her mother. She has seen the worst the world can do, been flung hard against a grim mural of madness and loss.

Meanwhile, in their bedroom on the other side of the floor, Nevart and Hatoun are asleep. Downstairs, Ryan Martin’s assistant slumbers, too. The American consul, however, lies awake in his bed in his room, once more staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. He comforts himself that tonight the ancient citadel looms over a city square empty of people, but still sleep remains elusive.

W
HEN
I
WAS ALMOST DONE WITH THIS BOOK
, I
DROVE DEEP INTO
the Syrian desert and to the mountain of bones called Der-el-Zor. I went there months after the season of Middle Eastern unrest and the government’s crackdown that would leave thousands dead, arriving in Syria in the autumn. It was still a sauna and I wondered constantly how my grandmother had endured it in corsets and stockings and high-collared dresses. I flew to Beirut and then drove into Syria, and I remember approaching the first checkpoint with my heart a jackhammer because my visa acknowledged that I was a novelist, and the previous April Syria had expelled all western reporters. It had crossed my mind as I was making my travel plans that there was a chance I would wind up the star of an Al Jazeera video or detained for months in the bowels of a Damascus police station while diplomats negotiated my release. My husband shared my anxiety. He wasn’t coming with me both because someone had to care for the children and because—and though this was meant as merely a little good-natured gallows humor between us, there was a subterranean current of truth to it—we didn’t want them to be orphans.

I went with two Armenians, one an American citizen who teaches at Hunter College in Manhattan, and one a Lebanese citizen who edits an Armenian newspaper here in the United States
and lives in Watertown. They were both in their early thirties, nearly a decade and a half younger than me.

It was actually an uneventful drive to Der-el-Zor, the landscape always desolate, but also panoramically rough and bleak and beautiful along some stretches. But, then, I was in an air-conditioned car and had a water bottle in my hands whenever I felt the slightest urge for a drink. I couldn’t imagine I would have made it far on foot. When we reached the city, my new friends took me by the hand and led me to the Armenian Genocide Memorial, the two of them—veterans of this pilgrimage—guiding me slowly along this passage into our ancestors’ shared inferno. When we went inside the church, we stood together before the Column of Resurrection that rises up like a missile from the center of the earth, and the bones of the martyrs that bear witness. I said nothing because there was nothing for me to say. Nor did I say anything in the museum. Silently, however, I seemed to be murmuring prayers wherever we went in the memorial complex at Der-el-Zor, and then when we wandered outside beneath the scorching sun and scratched at the soil to touch the fragments of rib and skull, the bleached remnants of a slaughtered civilization.

Now, I do not know for a fact that a German nun named Irmingard was responsible for bringing Helmut Krause’s photographs from Syria to the United States almost a century ago. But according to a newsletter story the Friends of Armenia published in January 1916, the woman was scheduled to speak that month at the Unitarian Church on Arlington Street in Boston. She was a guest of an American missionary named Alicia Wells. And I would find one of Krause’s images—not the devastating portrait of Karine Petrosian, which was most likely deemed too explicit for a newspaper reader’s gentle sensibilities then—on a microfiche of a story in
The Boston Globe
headlined “Barbarism in the Desert.” Consequently, I am going to presume that Sister Irmingard, perhaps in collusion with the formidable Miss Wells, brought the plates to America. It is clear that my grandmother thought little of both women—particularly Alicia Wells—but my sense is that the missionary and the nun
believed in their work, and when Ryan Martin needed them, they risked their lives to secretly squire the images to America.