The Sandcastle Girls (18 page)

But not my grandfather. Not my grandparents. I would be exaggerating if I claimed that at the time I viewed this as a great mystery. I didn’t. The questions would only come later. But I did understand that for whatever reasons, they kept their distance from many other Armenians with whom they might have been friends, and they seemed to give the Armenian Church a particularly wide berth.

That Saturday afternoon before Mother’s Day, I printed out the three photographs from the
Globe
and the article that accompanied them. The woman who shared my last name when I was growing
up was an apostate—though it was the German who interviewed her in 1915 who had used that term. The Armenian had simply said that she had tried converting to Islam to save her baby’s life.

I decided I had to go to Boston to see that show, and then to Watertown to conduct a little research.

R
YAN
M
ARTIN SITS
in the civil administrator’s office in Aleppo, honestly unsure what to make of this latest official. This is a new post for Farhat Sahin; he only arrived here a few days ago. His head is perfectly shaved and his face is smooth, but for his thick black moustache and goatee. He is, like most Ittihad executives, outwardly calm and reasonable. Unflappable. Ryan has come here wondering if this new official will be more accommodating than his predecessor. So far, no Americans have been allowed to visit Der-el-Zor, but Silas Endicott has acquired food and medicine that he wants to bring personally to the refugee camp, and Ryan has decided that the worst Farhat Sahin can do is—like everyone else—say no.

Finally the Turkish administrator steeples his fingers across the blotter on the great plateau of his desk, and Ryan realizes the diplomatic pleasantries are over.

“I have concerns for your safety if you go to Der-el-Zor,” the Turk says.

“From the Armenians? What threat could they possibly pose to Americans bringing aid?”

“Oh, the Armenians want nothing more than American aid. Or visits from the Red Cross. Or assistance from any foreign nation. It’s a source of profound disappointment to me that they insist on looking beyond their nation’s borders for help. Frankly, it’s why on occasion we have to protect them from their own countrymen. It’s why they are so … alienated.”

It would be easy to point out the absurdity of the contention, but Ryan restrains himself. His goal is to obtain permission to
transport the aid that Endicott has gathered, and disputing the administrator will not help his cause. And so he asks simply, “What precisely are your concerns? From whom might we be in danger?”

“The desert is awash with unsavory characters. A line of wagons filled with food and medicine? That is very easy prey.”

“I am willing to take the chance. So is Silas Endicott.”

Farhat Sahin smiles. “Ah, yes. Your benefactor.”

“He is a very resourceful man.”

“And a friend to your Armenians.”

Ryan waves a single finger good-naturedly. “A friend to your citizens.”

“And you are quite certain you understand the risks?”

He nods. “Yes, we do. We all do.”

The Turk is silent for a long moment. Then he parts his hands and shrugs. “Very well then. I will draw up the permissions—a special passport—for your passage to Der-el-Zor. You understand there will be stipulations?”

Ryan waits. When Sahin remains silent, the American says, “I would expect that.”

“No photographing. No reporters. No interviewing the civilians we have resettled. No weapons.”

“We may not protect ourselves? You said it might be dangerous.”

“No weapons,” he repeats.

“All right.”

“How many of you will there be?”

He counts the party in his mind. “Six of us, plus the porters.”

“And how many wagons?”

“Seven to ten, I would estimate.”

“Oxcarts?”

“Horses, I presume.”

“Of course. You’re American,” the administrator says, and then stands. The meeting is over. “Eight wagons. Eight porters. Six Americans.”

“You are very gracious. Very kind. I am deeply grateful.”

“I’ll have the papers ready tomorrow. You may send a boy by for them.”

Ryan reaches across the desk and shakes the official’s hand. He hadn’t expected this victory. Sahin leans into him. “Consul?” he says, the single word the prelude to a question.

“Yes?”

“You will be careful, won’t you? You never know whom you might meet as you near Der-el-Zor.”

Something in the Turk’s tone disturbs Ryan, almost—but not quite—ruining the moment. Still, Ryan merely nods and reassures him that they will be vigilant.

“I
T SEEMS
I am finding ever more ways to be useful,” the American consul says lightly to Elizabeth later that afternoon as he strides across the library to the chaise on which she is resting before she returns once more to the hospital. “I have a letter for you. It arrived in the diplomatic pouch from Cairo.” He smiles a little knowingly as she thanks him for the envelope, and then continues on through the compound to his office.

She sits up, her feet flat on the carpet, and then remains very still as she gazes at the way Armen has written her name. This is not the first letter that she has received from him; one arrived three days ago that he had posted from Jericho through the regular mail. But this is the first one that—because of its source—indicates that he has made it safely across the border into Egypt. She sighs and says a small prayer of thanks that he didn’t die in the desert. Then, as if she were a little girl, she tears it open enthusiastically, setting free her giddiness and joy that he is alive.

Her happiness dissipates almost instantly, however, as her eyes scan the words he has written in thick pencil:

There were still children alive, and the older ones were wailing among the corpses. Witnesses said the younger ones were sitting silently, not mature enough yet to realize that the adults were never going to wake
up. They told me there were no infants in the pile because Talene and the other babies had been dead for days
.

Talene. The name stops her. She reads the sentences over and over, as well as the ones that precede that paragraph and the ones that follow.

I almost told you about Talene when we were together in Aleppo. It was not just Karine who I lost. It was Talene also. Our baby daughter
.

The idea leaves her devastated, her mind spooling back to the hours and hours she had spent with Armen and this burden he had shouldered all alone. She wishes he had told her, wishes it madly, and tries to imagine those moments when he had come closest to unleashing what had to have been torrents of loss.

In the corridor she hears her father and the two American physicians approaching, so she tries quickly to gather herself. She places the letter in her lap and brings her fingers to her eyes, wiping at the tears and calming the sadness that is welling up and threatening to leave her weeping. The men, she knows, have been inventorying the medical supplies they had shipped from Boston or acquired in Port Said and Cairo, and deciding what they will bring with them to the Armenian resettlement area in Der-el-Zor. (“Though bear in mind,” Mr. Martin had said last night at dinner, “people tell me that the term
resettlement area
is a euphemism at best.”)

Apparently, a great deal has been stolen between Port Said and Aleppo, and William Forbes has grown cantankerous. It is hard to glean what is rage and what is sunburn on his painfully red face. “The porter had the audacity to claim that sometimes things fall off the backs of the lorries,” he is saying to her father, “and sometimes shipments are ‘accidentally’ diverted. Please. We’re not simpletons.”

When he notices Elizabeth, he sits beside her, oblivious to the piece of paper in her lap. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I can see you, too,
are crestfallen by our losses. But please don’t be. Don’t fret. I did not mean to leave you troubled. We still have sufficient food and medicine to make the journey to Der-el-Zor well worth our time.”

She nods sheepishly. It is far easier to allow him to believe it is the theft alone that has shaken her, than it would be to tell him of the murder of an infant she’d never met, and why this particular child’s death—one death in the midst of so many thousands—has left her dazed.

W
HEN THE MEN
are gone, Elizabeth rereads Armen’s letter. He has instructed her to write back to him via the American consul in Cairo, who will have his forwarding address. But he has added that it might be a very long time before he will receive the correspondence, and without his having to explain, she understands why. He has enlisted in the British Army and is most likely a part of Anzac, the newly formed Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. The British Army had been his plan all along. Since he left, she has been reading about Anzac in the newspapers. He is probably one of the Armenians in what they are calling the “composite division”—a term that, one reporter wrote, meant that the officers contended daily with a bazaar’s worth of languages and dialects. It worries her, and not simply because she fears that orders under fire might be misconstrued by Indians, Aussies, and (yes) Armenians. She imagines poor Armen trying and failing to make sense of an Australian accent. He was fine when Americans and British spoke English, but didn’t the Australians have their own linguistic eccentricities?

While she had known all along that he was going to try to enlist, she still felt a rush of anxiety when she understood he had succeeded. According to one newspaper article, everyone in Anzac was being taught how to storm beaches, because it was no secret that soon Anzac was going to join the rest of the Brits and the French in Gallipoli. She recalls what it was like to race through the dunes on Cape Cod as a little girl, and how difficult it was to run
fast. A person can’t possibly outrun a machine gun, especially not on a beach. She closes her eyes. She fears that she is never going to see Armen again.

S
ILAS
E
NDICOTT IS
rather pleased with what he has accomplished when he surveys the long line of wagons and horses at the eastern edge of the city. The caravan has twenty-one strong animals and eight wagons, a testimony to his and Ryan’s hard work and negotiations—and, yes, to their willingness to discreetly offer what in Boston would most certainly have been called bribes. The roads on which they will travel, he has been assured, are just solid enough to support the weight of the wagons as they churn their way east through the desert.

He and Ryan watch in absolute silence for a long moment, the two Westerners squinting into the sun, as the shirtless boys in their baggy pants load flour, sugar, tea, and medical supplies into the wagons. This is American might, Endicott thinks to himself, though he knows this sort of self-satisfaction is unattractively smug. But how can one not take pride in American muscle? American ingenuity? Isn’t this what happens when civilized people roll up their sleeves to solve a problem? Of course it is. Tomorrow they will leave for Der-el-Zor. He can’t wait.

E
LIZABETH HAS FOUND
Nevart an absolutely invaluable interpreter on the streets of Aleppo and in the hospital. Elizabeth’s Armenian and Turkish both have improved enormously since arriving, but on many occasions she has been grateful that Nevart has been with her.

At the moment, however, another afternoon when the two of them and the American doctors are volunteering at the hospital, it is not Nevart’s skills as a translator or teacher that matter; it is her willingness to jump into a fray among small, violent animals, all of whom are adamantly refusing to nap and two of whom are engaged
in an out-and-out brawl. It is she who falls upon the thin boy and grabs both of his wrists, pulling him off a second child on the floor who is even tinier. They are wearing shirts and shorts that might once have been white, but now are the color of the dirt beside the rails along which the electric streetcars run in Boston. The cotton looks stained by ash. The shirts hide the skeletal protrusion of the children’s rib cages, but still their elbows look as sharp as the edge of a wood splitter. Their eyes are sunk so deep into their faces it’s as if each forehead is an escarpment, the sockets empty caves.

Nevertheless, the boys fight like ferocious, feral cats, and they have eaten just enough in the last few days that they are capable of energetically pounding each other into the floor between the long rows of beds and the entrance to the ward. It is a miracle that they have overturned neither tables nor the cabinet filled with linens and bandages. Elizabeth guesses they are seven or eight. They are ready to be sent to the orphanage, where invariably they will continue their scrapping.

When Nevart has finally parted them and is standing between them like a human buffer zone, she speaks so quickly and angrily in Armenian that Elizabeth has to repeat what she has heard in her mind to comprehend the specifics of the chastisement. She is in the midst of her translation when, from the corner of her eyes, she sees another boy sit up in bed, his arm raised and a water glass in his hand. He is no more than three or four years old, but he is smiling demonically.

“No!” she commands him, but it’s too late. He is hurling the glass as hard as he can at either Nevart or the boys, she couldn’t begin to say which, and so reflexively she throws herself in front of it, her hand extended, hoping to bat it into the air and away from her friend and the children flanking both sides of her. But instead Elizabeth bats it straight down, and it shatters against the top of her right foot, the glass splintering and one long piece daggering through the top of the lavender slipper she wears indoors. The room, which had been absolutely raucous only a moment ago, grows silent. Slowly she kneels and studies the triangular shard in
her foot. When she pulls it out, there is one tiny geyser of blood, then a more predictable stream. She removes her slipper and sees that her white stocking already has turned red, and she is reminded of a dining room tablecloth after someone has inadvertently toppled a goblet of wine. The stain is spreading before her eyes.