The Sandcastle Girls (6 page)

Across the lake, however, was a boy with a small sailboat, and on my third day on the dock he took his Sunfish and tacked his way into the wind toward me. As he neared, I recognized him from the hallways at school. He was in my grade. Quickly I removed my headgear and waited, wondering. He was wearing a Miami Dolphins practice jersey and white tennis shorts, and when he was within a dozen yards of the dock he introduced himself to me as Berk. It was 1979. I presumed he was the son of Cuban émigrés—our neighborhood seemed to be filled entirely with people from New York, Michigan, and Cuba—and that Berk was a nickname. No, he would tell me, he was Turkish. His skin was copper, and rock stars would have killed for his hair. It was coal black and fell like a manic thrill ride over his shoulders. The next day, on the screened porch that covered my family’s small pool like a dome, we kissed for the first time.

When, some weeks later, it was clear to my parents that we were dating, outwardly my father seemed only bemused. But occasionally I would understand his feelings were at once deeper and more complex. One evening at dinner, after he had returned home from the video production company he ran, he asked me, “So Berk. Your new friend. Have you wondered how his grandparents and yours would have gotten along?”

My brother, who at the time was far more of a student of history than I was, answered, “Now? They would have played shuffleboard and been fine. But in World War One? Berk’s family would have either killed Grandpa or hidden him. But probably killed him.”

I understood he was only trying to be funny, but I was awash in
self-pity. Unlike my brother—who was on the junior varsity football team and fitting in rather nicely in South Florida—I had never been happy about the move. I had no close friends yet, and the last thing I wanted was the character of my new boyfriend impugned. After all, he had done nothing, and anything the Turks had done had occurred six and a half decades earlier. The genocide—there it is, there’s the word!—might just as well have occurred during the Peloponnesian War.

My mother took one of her typical, mannered rabbit bites of the chicken breast on her plate, chewed carefully, and said to my father, “Honey, does it really matter?”

“It’s true, Dad,” said my brother, and for the briefest of moments I thought I was going to be spared the toxins that usually spill from siblings over family dinners. Nope. After a pause he added, “I mean, if Laura and Berk want to suck face all afternoon at the pool when they come home from school, who cares? Beats doing homework.”

I started to deny we did anything of the sort, but my father gently raised one hand like a stop sign. “That’s not what this is about. This is about history and what your grandfather survived—and what he lost. You have no idea, and I just want to be sure that …”

He was being completely unreasonable. I hadn’t forgotten the bits and pieces of my grandparents’ stories that I had picked up over the years. But the only good thing I had at that point in my life, in my opinion, was a boy named Berk, and so I pushed myself away from the table and with spectacular melodramatic fury screamed at my father for moving us all to Miami, and went to my room, where I sobbed until I grew bored.

Then I walked over to Berk’s.

A
RMEN FINDS HIMSELF
describing for Elizabeth a picnic on a cliff overlooking Lake Van, just days after he and Karine were married. The next day he was going to return to Harput, and she was going
to be joining him there as his wife. But that would be tomorrow. In this memory, they are seated on a blanket on a moss-covered stretch of rock, and occasionally he plays something for her on his brother’s oud.

His mind is in two moments as he speaks with this American, as together they walk the streets of Aleppo. He is, ostensibly, showing her around: Here is the telegraph office, here is the post office, here is another café where she and her father might enjoy small cups of thick Turkish coffee. This street leads to the quarter of the city where the Turkish Army has rows of barracks.

In reality, however, this walk is merely an excuse to be with her. Perhaps because they are both staring straight ahead or at whatever point of interest they are passing, he is finding it easier to relive that picnic three summers distant. He tells Elizabeth of how warm the sun had felt on his forehead and the sound of the small but relentless waves in the water below. He does not describe for her the feel of Karine’s fingers on the palm of his hand, but the sensation returns with the clarity of a church bell. Her touch was so gentle as she ran the tip of her finger—and occasionally her nail—over the lines there that he found himself shivering. He feels it again now. This is why it seems to him as if his mind is moving liminally between two places at once.

“I had brought a bottle of pomegranate wine with me,” he tells Elizabeth. He recalls the aroma when he had finally uncorked it. “I am sure you have never had pomegranate wine.”

“It’s true. I’m not sure I have ever even tasted a pomegranate.”

At that picnic he had gone on and on about how much Karine would love the light in their bedroom when she joined him in Harput, and the view of the city they would have from the roof. His apartment was atop one of the western hills, and he was confident that she would love the vista. Now he says simply to this American, “I will show you how to enjoy them. The long market—the bazaar—is down this alley. Some days there isn’t much because of the war. But maybe today we’ll find a pomegranate.” She surprises him by hooking her arm through his at their
elbows, and that shiver he had felt in his palm long ago runs up his arm to the back of his neck.

“What did you like best about Harput?” she asks him as they reach the market. As Armen had predicted, many of the vats and bins are empty, or there are vacancies where there might usually have been different vendors’ canopies and stalls. Still, there is a crate with fava beans. There is one boy selling dates and another with a few rings of white bread left in his basket. An elderly man with a single eye is selling radishes and red peppers. But it’s clear to Armen that much of the food costs far more than anyone except the city’s most successful merchants or the foreigners or the vali himself can afford. There is no sign of pomegranates today, though one vendor offers to bring some pomegranate molasses tomorrow.

“I had so many friends in the city: Armenians and Turks. Germans and Americans,” Armen answers, though his mind is traveling up the stairs from a café where he spent hours with all of those friends to his apartment and the headboard of the bed he and Karine shared, the wood shellacked and inlaid with mother of pearl. At that picnic overlooking the lake, he had rambled on for easily fifteen minutes about the apartment, desperate to make Karine as comfortable as possible with the reality that he was uprooting her from her family in Van, when (finally) she had pressed one of her long slender fingers to his lips to silence him. She would be fine, she said. They would be fine. Then she had brought his hand to her mouth and kissed it.

“And Karine,” says Elizabeth. “You had her in Harput.”

They are standing before a vat with a few small blocks of white cheese in cloudy water.

“I did,” he agrees, and much to his dismay she unhooks her slender arm. It feels to him like an incalculable loss. But Elizabeth merely wants to buy all the cheese that remains and so she needs her purse—and it takes her two hands to unclasp the buckle at the top.

•   •   •

A
T NIGHT
A
RMEN
sleeps on a coarse blanket he has draped across straw, and inhales the smell of the camels and the sheep that, thank God, have finally stopped bleating. His eyes have adjusted to the dark, and he stares at the ceiling beams of his dank alcove in a dingy rooming house adjacent to a barn. The only furniture is a three-drawer dresser, but were it not for the Germans, he would have had nothing at all to put in it. They gave him extra clothes. A comb. A little money—though not enough that he was able to help Elizabeth buy the cheese that together they brought to the square. It was, in the end, a homeopathic offering only: the cheese was a barely detectable drop in an ocean of want.

Now, sleep just out of reach, he recalls the way Elizabeth waited for the vendor to wrap the cheese in paper, her lips parted ever so slightly. He recalls bowls of figs and tries to remember the blue-black silkiness of his wife’s hair, and then the scent of his infant daughter’s breath when she would sleep on his shoulder. His younger brother, Garo, told him to think of these things and use the memories to fuel his desire for vengeance. His older brother, Hratch, recommended just the opposite: excise those recollections as if they were a gangrenous limb; they would only cause him more pain.

Neither advice really matters, because he hasn’t a choice. He is never going to forgive and he is never going to forget, even after returning briefly to Harput last month. That’s why he is here in Aleppo, rather than in the Caucasus Mountains, perhaps fighting side by side with his younger brother. Instead, Armen went from Van to Harput to Aleppo. What he chooses to do with those memories from now on, however, is another matter. Garo, if he is still alive, is with the Russians and Hratch is dead.

Now, in Aleppo, he just waits for the convoys of women, always hoping to find a group from Harput in which there might be someone who can tell him something more about the day his wife and his daughter were herded into a convoy. He knows they are dead. He learned that when he returned to Harput. But still he finds himself hoping to find people who can share with him
moments of their last weeks or their last days. He wants to meet someone—anyone—who knew his wife and witnessed her smile before the world completely came apart.

He hears a dog barking outside and is reminded of the deportees near the citadel under their makeshift canvas roofs. They are there in some cases because there is simply no more room in the hospital, and in others because they are lost causes: they are going to die anyway and there is no point in trying to find room indoors. Since they arrived, he and Elizabeth have spent hours each day with them, even though there is really very little either can do. There is very little anyone can do.

Many of the women presume he is a coward or a collaborator. How else could he, a man in his late twenties, still be alive? He knows they imagine him bribing his way across the desert. Or betraying other Armenians in a show of traitorous camaraderie with the Turks. It was so much more complicated than that. Yes, he had trusted a Turk—a person who had once been his friend. Months later, he had killed that friend with the fellow’s own ceremonial scimitar. He had almost told a woman from Zeitun precisely that the day before yesterday, because a person from Zeitun would understand. He had almost told Elizabeth the story earlier this evening, because she was an American and would have found the Turk’s betrayal the stuff of dark fairy tales—something from that German named Grimm. But in the end what would she have thought of his cold-bloodedness? Of the Turk’s? Until this spring he had never imagined he was capable of such violence; he had never supposed he’d ever kill anyone. And yet was the murder really cold-blooded? In hindsight, he would never know for sure what his intentions had been when he had gone to Nezimi’s office.

Once he and Nezimi had been friends. There they are again—he and Nezimi and Karine—in one of the cafés at the edge of the college. Nezimi, already the brash young official, is regaling them with his visions of a modern Turkey and how in their lifetime Constantinople will rival Paris. This is what the Young Turks will do. He smiles at Karine and tells her how her children will be the
envy of Europeans, how they will have everything—even, thanks to her beauty, good looks. Then he teases Armen: “Her beauty trumps your ugliness,” he says, smiling and raising his glass. Then they had toasted, Armen recalls, though to what he can no longer remember. But Nezimi and Karine had each presented an origin behind the tradition of clinking goblets together. Nezimi had insisted it was so that whatever the sultans and kings were drinking would slosh into each other’s cups, preventing one party from trying to poison the other. Karine had suggested the practice had a far less Machiavellian foundation. A glass of wine already appealed to four senses: taste, sight, touch, and smell. The tinkling of the glasses appealed to the fifth—and final—sense: sound.

Now Armen’s mind, as it has every night since meeting Elizabeth, circles back to the American. The woman is paler than Karine, and her hair is reminiscent of terra-cotta, but she has precisely the same pronounced cheekbones and irresistibly silken skin along the nape of her neck. Karine’s pupils were gray and Elizabeth’s are the color of cornflowers, but both women’s eyes are as perfectly shaped as an almond. An Armenian with red hair, he thinks when he imagines Elizabeth, and he smiles ever so slightly. Like an albino tiger: rare but not impossible. She is not Armenian, of course. And maybe that’s why he contemplated telling her what happened in Harput for even a moment. As they had stood side by side in the ruined palace’s tower or when she had hooked her arm through his on their way to the bazaar, they were so close that he had been able to inhale the rose-scented powder she had sprinkled on her skin beneath her clothes. Once, when she smiled, words had failed him completely.

She was still so naïve—she had seen so little—that his story could not possibly have made sense to her. Besides, where would he begin? No, not where. He knows where. The issue is how. That is the dam that keeps the tale bottled up. And so he shared nothing with Elizabeth, just as he had shared nothing with the woman from Zeitun.

He recalls how the Armenian refugees were especially mystified
by him when he would wander among them with water or soup and he had the two German soldiers beside him. That is complicated, too. The women allowed their pictures to be taken when the gendarmes could not see them. They allowed the corpses of their dead children to be photographed, too.

Now Armen says a small prayer that the hunger and pain of the women and children in the square will not keep them from sleeping tonight, and that the doctors these Americans from Boston are waiting for—and their supposedly bountiful crates of food and medicine—will arrive soon.