The Sandcastle Girls (35 page)

Until she had learned that Armen might be alive, she had tried
not to reminisce about him or their daughter. It wasn’t that she supposed memories would only make the healing take longer; rather, it was that thinking about what she had lost made her grieving unbearable. But slowly her health had returned. Her feet healed and she was able to put on a little weight. Most of the time she lay in her hospital bed with a surreal detachment, almost wishing she would succumb to an absolute mental breakdown—a collapse that would forever divide her from her past. But it didn’t happen.

And, perhaps, it didn’t happen because there was a God in heaven after all. Maybe he had spared her precisely because he had spared Armen. She assumed he had been killed in the fighting in Van or slaughtered by the sorts of mobs she had seen hatcheting and bayoneting the Armenian men in Harput. But maybe not. Maybe they were meant to find each other and start again. Have another child, start another family. Was that so very naïve? Of course not.

Tomorrow she will return to the American consul’s office. She will go the next day, too. And the day after that. And, if necessary, she will wait. Or, if she is feeling courageous, she may even ask where the consul is at that moment and go to him, wherever he is. She will be braver this time. She will find this Ryan Donald Martin and then she will learn what she can about her husband.

T
HIS AFTERNOON IT
is a boy who peers through the grate beside the double doors at the compound and stares in at Hatoun. She guesses he is a little older than she is—nine or ten, maybe—but it is hard to decide for sure because he is so scrawny and small. For all she knows, he’s twelve or thirteen. Or seven or eight. He’s all ears and eyes and skeletal fingers that are so dirty and thin they remind her of leafless winter twigs. She has never met this survivor before or seen him on the streets.

“It’s been weeks since I’ve seen Shoushan. Have you seen her?” he asks, and it is after he has spoken that she begins to get a better sense of his age. She decides he is a few years older than she is. Then she shakes her head no, she hasn’t seen the girl. Her friend,
she knows, is long gone. No one who played with her in the alley or square near the citadel will ever see her again.

“She said you lived here,” he continues, motioning with his head inside at the expansive courtyard behind her and the elegant white buildings with the ornate shutters on the windows. When she says nothing, he smiles and adds, “And you don’t like to talk. She said that, too.”

On the table on the patio is a bowl of figs. She glances back at it and then scampers to the table to retrieve it. She motions for the boy to make a cup with his hands. Instead he makes a basket with the bottom of his shirt, using those talon-like fingers of his as hooks, and she drops handfuls of figs through the bars and into his shirt.

When she is done, they stare at each other for a long moment. “I’m going to the orphanage,” he says finally. “It’s getting too dangerous out here. Too scary. Shoushan isn’t the only one who has disappeared. The orphanage can’t be any worse, right?”

She takes a deep breath through her nose, hoping to find the courage to say something in response—perhaps tell him that she had witnessed Shoushan being abducted and how none of the grown-ups had cared. How some had just laughed. Maybe she could tell him that she had been at the orphanage briefly and reassure him that it didn’t seem so bad. Yes, he would be giving up his freedom, but he would have food and he would indeed be safer there. Before she has opened her mouth, however, he says, “But I’d rather be at a place like this. Will they let you stay?”

Will they let you stay?
The words echo in her mind as she contemplates the notion that someday she won’t live here. Nevart would never send her away. Never. Neither would Elizabeth. But she understands that someday Elizabeth will go back to America to live. She is aware that a nun from the orphanage has been asking about her. And she knows that eventually that American missionary, Miss Wells, will return from Damascus. What then will become of her? What will become of Nevart and her?

“If you see Shoushan,” the boy says, “tell her that Atom said hi.
And if they send you to the orphanage, I won’t forget these figs. I’ll look out for you. Okay?”

“Okay,” she says softly.

He smiles. “See? You do talk. That wasn’t so bad, was it?” Then he turns and leaves her alone on her side of the grate in the courtyard. He hadn’t meant to unsettle her, but the resurrection of her memories of Shoushan coupled with the reality that someday she might need this Atom to protect her at the orphanage has left her anxious. She puts the empty bowl back on the patio table and races inside the main building to find Nevart.

R
EMEMBER THAT FAMOUS
A
RMENIAN CHESS PLAYER
? T
IGRAN
V
ARTANOVICH
Petrosian, known also as “Iron Tigran”?

My brother, Greg, is one of those chess nerds who plays the game online with other chess geeks around the world. He admits that his interest may have been fueled on some deep, subconscious level by Tigran and our shared surname. But he was in his mid-thirties when he took up the game in earnest, three decades after “Iron Tigran” was at the top of the pyramid, and so it may have been just a coincidence. Nevertheless, when I asked Greg to tell me something about the great Armenian player, he thought for a moment and then said that the fellow earned his nickname because his game focused largely on defense. He wasn’t a risky player, but he was relentless. He would wait for his opponent to make that one critical mistake.

Thus Tigran was, it seems to me, a very different sort from our grandfather. Armen took enormous risks, and I’m not sure if he ever thought more than one move ahead.

Moreover, he was a killer. I would not learn this until midlife, and even now I am not precisely sure how much my father knew. But, to be honest, I do not believe he knew much. Most likely he viewed his father as a soldier, one of the heroic defenders of Van, a volunteer member of Anzac. A Gallipoli grunt. My father certainly understood that his father had killed people, but in his mind it had
been with a rifle and at a distance. He saw his father the way we view the men who fought in most twentieth-century wars: they did the awful work that had to be done, and then they came home and got jobs and raised their families. Most of them (though far from all) managed to smother at least the most obvious manifestations of post-traumatic stress disorder. (Me? I would have been left a catatonic wreck at the kitchen table.) And that meant my father respected Armen’s privacy and was careful not to dredge up the traumatizing details of 1915. Until I told him, my father never knew that his father had murdered an official in Harput who had once been his friend, or that he had killed a pair of Turkish administrators in a train car. In both cases it was self-defense. But it was still personal and violent and savage.

Likewise, it was from me that my father learned that Armen had been befriended by three elderly Bedouins as he desperately worked his way north through the Sinai desert. They proved to be an eminently charitable trio, feeding and shielding him for four days as they traveled together, until he was well behind the Turkish lines and able to climb surreptitiously aboard a train he could ride back to Aleppo. Later he admitted to Elizabeth that he almost hadn’t revealed himself to them, fearful that they would shoot if he materialized from the dunes beside their small encampment. But in the end he had decided that despite the long rifles they kept near them as they ate, he would emerge peacefully from the dark and take his chances. He would ask for their help. Later he was glad that he had.

Now, did my father know that Armen Petrosian had lost a wife and a daughter in 1915 before he met a woman from Boston in Aleppo? Yes, he admitted he did. But he had never mentioned this part of my family history to me when I was a girl, and neither did my mother. Consequently, my brother and I grew up with the assumption that Elizabeth Endicott, our grandmother, had been Armen’s first and only wife.

•   •   •

“I
ALWAYS EXPECTED
to die, and I never expected to die. I know that makes no sense,” Armen tells the seemingly ageless Bedouin beside him as they watch sparks from their fire add stars to the night sky. The Bedouins have assured him that they will reach a railhead tomorrow and he will be able to finish his journey to Aleppo by train.

“It makes sense,” the old fellow says simply.

“The closest I came to giving up—just surrendering to fate—was the day before the night I saw all of you.”

This time the Bedouin waits for him to continue.

“Actually, it would have been surrendering to the desert. Not fate. Fate is too … imprecise. But I saw something in the desert. A mirage—and it turned out to be a bad one. I thought it was an omen and I thought I was done. The desert had won and I was not, in fact, ever going to make it back to Aleppo.”

“If you view the desert as an opponent, you will lose. No one defeats the desert. No one should try.”

“I agree.”

Another of the Bedouins breaks off a piece of the warm fetir bread with his fingers and chews it slowly. When he is done, he asks, “What was the mirage?”

How do you describe something as frivolous as a sandcastle to Bedouins?
Armen thinks to himself. The notion is ridiculous. What was that expression that the British sergeant had used when they had been training in Egypt? Bringing coals to Newcastle. Nevertheless, he tells them.

“I saw in the distance—in the dunes—a group of women and children playing. Mothers and daughters. They were building a castle in the sand. It was very elaborate. Far more ornate than one could ever build with the sand out here. There were at least a dozen of them—people, that is, not sandcastles. And one of the women was my wife.”

“You said she was dead.”

“She is. And one of the children was my daughter—which was
absurd, because my daughter, even if she were alive, would only have been a year and a half old. But she was five or six in this … mirage. And she and her mother started waving when they saw me, and so I started to run to them.”

“And what was it really? What did you find after all that running?”

He shakes his head and pauses. “A tree. A single, dead spiky tree.”

The older Bedouin sips his tea and shrugs. “Often,” he says, “you find nothing at all.”

H
ATOUN BREATHES IN
the aroma from the jasmine bouquet that Elizabeth brought back today to the
selamlik
in the American prince’s compound. The flowers are whiter than clouds and rest in a glass vase with baby angels carved into the sides. It’s hard to believe that anyone could find jasmine flowers this time of year, but the Americans seem capable of anything. For a moment she loses herself in the flowers—their fragrance, the shape of the petals, their sheer and simple cleanliness—and abruptly she is catapulted back to her mother and father’s bedroom. There is the atomizer with the pearl stopper on her mother’s dresser with one of her perfumes, jasmine. Her mother was getting ready to join their father at an elegant dinner somewhere, tying a lavender-colored sash around her dress. Hatoun and her sister were not going. The girls had sprayed some of the perfume into the air before them, and then lost themselves in the mist. Hatoun recalls noticing the long, squat bookcase across the room with her father’s history books, the middle of the three shelves bowing ever so slightly beneath the weight of the past.

Months later—or was it only weeks?—when the gendarmes and the mob came to the house, they threw all those books out the window, every single one, and then they took axes to the bookcase. A young man had carried the perfume bottles down the stairs,
cradling them against his chest, laughing at the haul and crying out to a friend that all this perfume was going to guarantee them both a little extra company that night.

Hatoun pauses now and sits back on the divan, looking up at one of the jasmine blossoms. She can see the back of her father’s head and the broad gray shoulders of one of his western suits. She can see the collar. The pinstripes. But, try as she might, she can no longer remember his face.

I
T RAINED IN
the morning and the air remained damp in the afternoon. The clouds never broke. The streets were cold and slippery and dark from the drizzle.

But Armen savors the cool twilight as he emerges from the train at the station in Aleppo with little in his satchel but Elizabeth’s letters and his service revolver. He glances at the cluster of Turkish soldiers standing and smoking beside their rifles and packs, but they have no interest in one more Bedouin in a white cotton tob and striped sleeveless coat. His headdress is held in place with a band made of camel wool and tin wire. In places like Van and Harput, winter is coming. There may even have been snow there by now. But here? Chillier than Egypt, but a far cry from northeastern Turkey. A far cry from, he presumes, Boston.

His first thought is how little the train station has changed since he left in the summer. Yet why would it? In the long months he has been away, certainly he has been transformed. But Aleppo? The people come and go, but—like the massive citadel that looms over everything—the streets and structures themselves succumb only to millennial consumption. They wither, but it takes a long, long time. Someone told him that centuries ago there was a devastating earthquake here. He doesn’t doubt it. Nevertheless, he can barely imagine such a thing.