The Sandcastle Girls (17 page)

And so he must balance a variety of issues: He must keep Berlin apprised of the nightmare that is occurring here in Aleppo. But he must simultaneously support the Turks, a German ally, as need be. This is his job. His duty. And yet he wants to be sure that he is neither linked to the Armenian slaughter nor held responsible for evidence of the atrocities filtering out to the rest of the world. This is self-preservation. Yet news already is leaching out. Just the other day his assistant, Kretschmer, told him of two well-meaning idiots—German engineers!—and their Ernemann camera.

By now that pair is well on their way to the Dardanelles. A few months in that bit of hell will teach them a lesson.

As the music comes to an end he rises, crosses his office to the column with the gramophone, and lifts the needle off the record. He hadn’t noticed this until now, but the music was recorded at the German studio in Constantinople.

He sighs.
Conscripted
. It will demand a deft hand to work with the Turks and try to mitigate the slaughter. Make sure that people in Berlin know that he is willing to follow orders, but he does not approve at all of what is occurring.

Still, he is confident that he can manage the correspondence and his reputation. He is, after all, a diplomat.

H
ELMUT STANDS UP
carefully as the train bounces its way through the last vestiges of the Cilician desert, somewhere between Adana and Zeitun, hoping that he can stretch the soreness from his lower back. He can’t decide whether it is the pain from sleeping on this primeval bench or the rising sun that has awakened him. Across the carriage Eric snores. So do a pair of Turkish businessmen.

He knows the math of these train cars well. When the army uses them for transport, they hold thirty-six soldiers. You can put six horses in one. Before leaving Aleppo, he was informed by the Baghdad Railway that they were successfully wedging eighty-eight Armenians on average into each carriage. The deportees would stand for hours like cattle, unable to move or raise their arms. He has heard stories that the very old sometimes asphyxiate on their feet and the crush of bodies keeps their corpses vertical until they arrive in Adana, Aintab, or Aleppo. One railroad official bragged that on occasion they have crammed the Armenians into the double-decker cars used to transport sheep—meaning that a person couldn’t stand, even if he wanted to. Sometimes, the dead have been thrown like garbage over the railroad banks.

He can’t believe how much rolling stock the Turks are wasting on the deportations. At any given moment the Turkish Army in the Dardanelles has barely a single day’s worth of food reserves. Why? Because the Ottoman Empire has an antiquated rail system
and the government is wasting precious rolling stock moving Armenians instead of military supplies and food.

He pulls his watch from his tunic pocket and is frustrated to discover that yesterday he failed to wind it. It stopped around two in the morning. But based on the way that the sun already is burning off the high wispy clouds in the east, it is probably six-thirty or seven. In the distance are rolling hills and wooded mountains. The train is passing through a landscape in which there are long patches of grassland and even the occasional copse of scratch pine. It is clearly cooler here than it was back in Aleppo. Thank God for that.

He thinks of the last refugees he had photographed before the gendarmes broke his camera. He thinks of the note he wrote about one particular woman. He scribbled notes about so many of the survivors: their names, their hometowns, perhaps a line explaining who they were. Not all, of course. But a good many.

He yawns, his breath rank with sleep, wishing once more there had been a way to find Armen after the fellow had set out. Eric had told him to let it go; there was nothing he could have done. But still …

He stares more closely out the window at a massive pile of tree limbs—a messy pyramid—no more than thirty or forty meters from the tracks. The branches have been bleached white by the sun on one half of the mound, but are blackened on the other side, as if someone started to burn them but the fire never quite spread and eventually burned itself out. He is wondering briefly why someone cleared the few trees in this stretch of land and chose this spot to incinerate them when he realizes they are not tree limbs at all, and his gaze grows transfixed. He wants to wake Eric but he can’t move; he can’t take his eyes off the pile. His fingers are pressed against the glass like a little boy’s.

In the end, it was the skulls that gave it away. Had he presumed at first that they were but a circle of stones designed to prevent the flames from inching into the yellowing grasslands? Perhaps. Or had he simply not noticed them, as he tried to make sense of the branches, some ivory and some ash black? The skulls had simply
rolled down the pile, he surmises now. Or maybe they belonged to the corpses at the bottom ring of the mound. He can’t imagine how many bodies it took to make the hillock. Hundreds? A thousand? More?

And then there is this mystery: why here?

In a moment the train is beyond them and the bones have disappeared into the landscape. Across the train carriage his lieutenant snores. The businessmen do, too.

I
COULD HAVE BEGUN THIS STORY RIGHT HERE, WITH THIS MOMENT
. I was standing in the kitchen of my own house in Westchester County—in Bronxville, just minutes away from the brick monolith on Winesap Road in Pelham where my Armenian grandfather and his Bostonian wife had lived and died—when the phone rang. It was my college roommate from my junior and senior years. I was forty-four years old. Matthew was in eighth grade and Anna was in sixth. It was the Saturday afternoon before Mother’s Day, and after watching Matthew play baseball, my family had separated into two cars. My husband and the kids went to plot some sort of Mother’s Day celebration on my behalf, and I went home.

“Laura?” my roommate began excitedly, the moment I said hello, “There’s an old picture of your grandmother in
The Boston Globe
this morning. At least I think it’s your grandmother.”

After I hung up I went online, expecting to see a photograph of Elizabeth Endicott. I presumed, based on the few things my roommate had said about the article, that it would be a story about the Boston-based Friends of Armenia. There would be a picture of Elizabeth and her father and, perhaps, Alicia Wells. In my mind I saw Elizabeth in one of her white dresses, that black straw hat in her hands. Her hair, in the black-and-white photo, would appear more dirty blond than red. I understood from my roommate that the picture had been taken in the Middle East, and so I half expected
to see the Aleppo bazaar in the background, or the high walls of the American compound.

In hindsight, I am not sure why in the world I expected any of that. There was absolutely no reason to assume that the image would have involved the Endicotts. After all, my last name was not Endicott when I was in college. It was Petrosian. That was the name that would have led my roommate to ring me.

In any case, there were three photographs in the newspaper, all of which I had seen a quarter of a century earlier when I had visited the Armenian Library and Museum in Watertown, and one of which I recalled vividly. The woman in the image obviously wasn’t my grandmother. But she was, according to the caption, named Petrosian. And she was from the city of Harput—another detail that had not been part of the caption when I had seen the photo for the first time years earlier. Her eyes seemed impossibly large and round, her cheekbones a ledge of emaciation. According to the story, the woman had carried her infant daughter for days after the child had died, unwilling to allow the other deportees to bury the girl in the sands that separated Harput and Aleppo.

But that wasn’t what the main part of the article was about. That wasn’t what the exhibit was about. This exhibit, called “The Apostates,” included images and documents from a variety of sources (including the German photographs I had seen in the Armenian Library and Museum), and was on display that month at Harvard’s Peabody Museum.

Obviously, we don’t use the words
apostate
or
apostasy
much these days. As a matter of fact, in easily one-hundred-plus magazine articles and six novels, this is the very first time I have written it. It is a word that has far more negative connotations than, for instance,
heresy
. There are a great many souls who have taken enormous pride in being branded a heretic, but history hasn’t given us a whole lot of self-congratulatory apostates.

No one has any idea how many Christian Armenians renounced their faith in 1915 and 1916, hoping to survive the slaughter. But
the practice was rare among adults. It was rare both because the Muslim Turks seldom offered the Armenians the opportunity to survive if they converted to Islam, and because Armenians are as stubborn as anyone. Small children, however, were another story. There are thousands of stories of Turkish families shielding neighboring Armenian children and then raising them as Muslims. But Armenian adults? They would sooner be flogged, stripped, scorched, shot, smothered, stabbed, starved, bayoneted, decapitated, drowned, crucified, asphyxiated, eviscerated, axed, hanged, garroted, quartered, pitchforked, impaled, and (if they were female) “outraged.” (This is another word you don’t hear often anymore, at least as a Victorian synonym for
rape
.) They would sooner succumb to dysentery, typhus, malaria, cholera, pneumonia, infection, sepsis, and the flu. These are all of the ways in which Armenian civilians died in the First World War—at least all of the ways I came across in eyewitness testimonies. Undoubtedly, there are more.

Usually the Turkish Army or a group of well-armed gendarmes—the provincial police or whatever male teens the Turks commandeered—would descend upon the Armenian quarter of a city or village to confiscate the Armenians’ weapons. There would be a house-to-house search. There would also be pillaging, theft, and random violence. For good measure, in most homes the gendarmes would ax a few armoires, smash a few cupboards, and rip up a few floorboards. They might toss goblets from the windows like rocks. Splinter mirrors and vases. They might outrage a few girls. If the gendarmes found weapons, that was considered proof that the Armenians were in rebellion; if they found none, it was evidence that they were hiding their arms … and proof of rebellion. Then, within days, the Turkish authorities would round up the men—again, moving methodically from door to door—and march them out of town, where they were likely to be massacred. If the Turks had machine guns at their disposal, they would use them. If not, they might gather a
chete
, or a killer band. Imagine an old-fashioned barn raising with all of your neighbors, except
instead of raising a barn you are using shovels and hatchets and knives to murder the people who have been living on the next block or in the adjacent village. By murdering the men first, the women and children were much easier to deport—and, if the spirit moved you, to outrage once again.

The justification for deportation was the Turkish concept of
hissetmek
, which gave the authorities the legal power to deport any person or any group they
sensed
might be a threat to the state. You didn’t need evidence; you just needed a
sense
. It’s also worth noting that the notion of
hissetmek
is not especially consistent with the rationales for the deportations that the Turks often offered foreigners at the time: they were either marching the women away from a war zone because they feared for the Armenians’ safety or they were marching them away because the Armenians were a threat.

At any rate, there weren’t a lot of Armenian apostates among the living or the dead in 1915 and 1916. But there were some.

Which brings me back to my family—to my Armenian grandfather and my Bostonian grandmother. Even as a little girl I noticed that my grandfather was far less involved with the Armenian Church than his Armenian friends were. My grandparents’ lives, in fact, seemed entirely void of religion, even on Christmas and Easter, which made them a real rarity in that community; Armenians of their generation often viewed the church as the fulcrum around which their lives would turn.