The Sandcastle Girls

  And you’re worried about your wife. Your baby, Nezimi had said when Armen came to his office and sat across the desk from him that day. The administrator’s voice was so strangely deferential that afternoon it was cloying. He offered Armen coffee and they sipped it very slowly. Nezimi’s office always had the aroma of coffee. Yes, Armen had told him. I know you personally will do all that you can to protect my family. But one hears stories. The official had agreed: One does. And then he had told Armen that in the engineer’s case, the confiscation of his passport had been overzealousness; most likely Armen would be getting his back because he would be needed to help with the railroad spur near Van. The Germans had already been by his office. They wanted to be sure that the Turkish Army improved its supply lines there; the alliance couldn’t risk another fiasco such as the empire’s campaign against the Russians last winter. And my wife’s papers? Armen had asked, because Karine’s family still lived in Van. Nezimi had responded by murmuring her name almost wistfully. Karine. Was he recalling all the coffee and arak the three of them and their friends had shared together over the past months? The hours they had spent discussing politics and family and, yes, the war? Perhaps. Then the official had sat forward and folded his hands before him on his desk, his voice regaining its usual timbre, and brought up Darwin. Armen and he had discussed Darwin before, in the context of their two religions. But why now, Armen had wondered briefly? Why now? But then Nezimi had revealed to him how dire the plight of the Armenians was about to become—literally, the roundup in Harput would begin within days—and he had made Armen a proposition. Perhaps I can save your family in this world, Nezimi had said. After all, who really knows if there is another one?

  Who indeed.

  The desert breeze, which initially frightened Armen with a small twister, has disappeared, leaving the sand epoxied by sweat to his face and arms. He looks at the dunes, unmoved now by even the smallest waft. The air is perfectly still.

  “I HAVE NEVER been married. But I have been asked,” Elizabeth tells Nevart, answering her question. She takes pride in this fact, but wonders if it sounds boastful to say such a thing aloud.

  “A student from Mount Holyoke?”

  “No, Mount Holyoke only has women students.”

  “Very wise,” Nevart says, but Elizabeth can tell that she is being sarcastic. Still, she presumes that Nevart has only attended girls’ schools, too. Certainly the American schools in Armenia are segregated by gender. The two of them are drinking glasses of milk, and Hatoun is curled up in the doctor’s widow’s lap. The girl is gazing up at the stone wall surrounding the courtyard, holding her own small glass with both of her hands; she looks as if she is waiting for something. Then Nevart asks, “Was he from Boston, too?”

  “He was. He is.”

  “Why did you reject him?”

  Elizabeth almost flinches at the idea that she rejected him. It sounds cold, heartless. Cruel. No one in America ever used that word in the context of her choosing not to wed Jonathan Peckham. Now that she thinks about it, however, she decides that the Peckham family might have seen it that way. But Jonathan wanted her in Massachusetts and she wanted—her mother’s phrase, when she tried to make sense of the dismissal—a broader canvas. It had been awkward, because Jonathan was planning to work in her father’s bank and her father thought highly of the young man. Now he has gone to a competitor.

  “I wasn’t ready to be married. I wanted to travel. I wanted to see places.” Secretly, she had been relieved once she had told Jonathan no. The marriage made sense for the Endicott and Peckham families, but not for her. She had had suitors before Jonathan, including an illicit, profoundly inappropriate relationship with an English professor at Mount Holyoke, and she had every expectation that eventually she would find a man more comfortable with her wanderlust. Someone who—like her—wanted a world bigger than New England. There had been a man on the ship whose company she had rather enjoyed and who almost (but not quite) had convinced her to adjourn with him to his stateroom. And here she had met Armen. The world was filled with interesting men.

  Nevart raises one of her dark eyebrows. “So you chose to see this beautiful place—this oasis—in the desert?”

  “I chose to assist my father with his philanthropy,” she replies. She remains unused to such blatant cynicism and sardonic humor. She wonders where Armen is right this moment.

  Nevart starts to say something, when abruptly Hatoun scurries from her lap toward the stone wall. Elizabeth is reminded of the squirrels in the Boston Common. The child is pointing at the top of the wall, her arms bony twigs, toward the cat from last night that has returned. The cat eyes her warily, his tail thwapping back and forth like a metronome’s pendulum. But the animal doesn’t disappear up into the overhanging tree or back behind the wall. Hatoun turns to the women, smiling. It dawns on Elizabeth that she has never before seen the child smile. She ponders where in this dusty, crowded city—a world of refugees and the people who minister to them—she might find the girl a toy. Perhaps even a doll.

  THE NEXT DAY Armen sits in a train car nearly identical to the one from which he threw himself only yesterday, and almost as empty. Last night he had found himself a spot two-thirds of the way up the ridge, where he had slept fitfully. He considered himself fortunate not to have dreamt. Once, lit by the waning moon, he saw a group of men with camels traveling at the base of the hill, and he wondered whether they would give him water and food if he made his presence known. But he knew well what some Kurds had done to his people much farther to the north, and saw no reason to risk his life with these southern nomads. He saw the Bedouins’ long rifles. And so he waited. At different points in the night he had awoken, convinced that desert rats were crawling up the insides of his pants legs or about to start biting his ear. When he and his brothers had been with the men trying to hold the granary in Van against the Turks, he had found himself far more unnerved by the rats there than by the Turkish artillery. When he and Garo had gone outside to retrieve the body of a friend of his brother’s named Hrag—a mathematics teacher who prior to the siege had never fired a gun in his life—the bloated corpse was a giant rat’s nest. The animals had eaten their way in through the stomach and head wounds that had killed the fellow, and they dove from the body like bees from a shaken hive when he and Garo started to lift it.

  After a night and a morning on the ridge and over a day with nothing to eat or drink, he was nearly delirious when he finally saw a pillar of black steam curling into the sky in the distance. His head was throbbing mercilessly, and it seemed to take forever for the locomotive to come into clear sight and forever again for it to reach the ridge. The idea crossed his mind that perhaps he could have remained where he was yesterday and caught the train there. But that was an illusion. The engine actually was making rather good time until it was slowed by the hill. On the ridge, however, it began to labor so badly that it wasn’t all that difficult to hop on, even with a gimpy left ankle. Behind the engine there were three cars, and he jumped on between the last and the second to last, pulling himself onto the thin platform and then into the final car.

  The car had but a single man, a Turkish Army officer. A captain with hooded eyes and a deep cleft in his chin. Armen presumed—hoped, more precisely—that the soldier believed he had simply walked here from another car. Still, he worked hard to disguise his limp as he found his seat and he kept the pearl-handled pistol accessible at the very top of his pack.

  Now, as he sits on the wooden bench, he realizes that he is sweating copiously and his heart is thrumming relentlessly inside his head. He tries to remember what it had been like in the siege—really how scared he had been. There had been the moment of shock with Hrag’s rat-infested body. There had been the occasions when he would crawl to the trench just outside the ancient building and peer out at the Turkish lines through the box periscope someone had attached to a makeshift retaining wall. He recalls the surge of adrenaline he had experienced when the Turks had first begun shelling the Armen
ian district in the city and he had understood the old granary where he was stationed was a principal target. But mostly there had been only anger. And then hope. And, finally, vindication when the Russians had arrived.

  He thought he had not experienced quite the same euphoria that some of his friends had felt when the Turks had finally retreated, because by then he had witnessed his older brother perish and he knew that Karine was almost certainly dead. His baby girl, too. He guessed that was also why he had never felt the terror that he had expected would await him in battle. When it seems you have nothing at all to live for, death is not especially frightening.

  And yet he is scared now as he steals an occasional glance at the Turkish officer. The fellow must know that two regional administrators were murdered yesterday on a train along this very route. An idea comes to Armen: I am frightened now because I have, once again, begun to imagine a future. A life beyond the trenches at the tip of the Dardanelles. He thinks of Elizabeth Endicott. He thinks of the way a loose lock of her hair fell beside her ear and caught the early morning sun. He recalls the arc of her mouth in the moment before she would smile. Her lips were slightly parted in his mind, open in thought.

  Outside the train the sands stretch endlessly to the east and the west, and the sky, once more, is absolutely cloudless. He squints.

  “And where are you going, my friend?”

  Armen turns from the window to the officer. He cannot decide if the appellation was sarcastic. He feels for the outline of the pistol through the canvas of his bag. “Damascus,” he answers.

  “Me, too.” The officer studies him, his eyes ranging over his clothes. “You look tired,” he says. “You look like you’ve been through a lot.”

  Armen is aware of the stains on his pants. He has a two-day growth of stubble on his face and his own moustache—usually impeccably trimmed—must look as scruffy as his hair. “I’m fine,” he answers simply, and offers a small smile.

  “What will you be doing in Damascus?”

  Yesterday he had answered this question by fabricating a sister in Syria. He had claimed to be working on the Baghdad Railway. The lies had accomplished nothing. And so now? Really, what can he say now? With the sleeve of his shirt he wipes at the sweat on his brow. “My sister,” he stammers. He realizes that his hunger and thirst have made him weak.

  “There are lots of Armenians in Damascus—relatively speaking,” the captain says, and he nods as if this is a particularly sage revelation. Then he stands up and reaches for his luggage on the rack. He has a knapsack and an elegant black leather valise. From the knapsack he unclasps his canteen and walks across the carriage to Armen to hand it to him. “You look parched,” he says. “Drink.”

  Armen hesitates, but only for a second. Then he takes the canteen and allows himself a great swallow of the metallic-tasting water. It’s heavenly.

  “Drink more. Really, my pack is heavy enough as it is and, as you can see, I am traveling without my orderly.” Then he lifts the whole pack off the rack, sits down, and places it on the floor between his legs. From inside he pulls out a piece of smoked meat in wax paper and a thick slab of brown bread. “Here, take it,” he says, and when he senses Armen’s reluctance, adds, “Please.” Then he leans back in his seat, folds his arms across his uniform tunic, and closes his eyes. He doesn’t watch Armen devour the plenty; he doesn’t try to make further conversation. Within minutes, he is actually snoring.

  MY NAME IS NOT “YOU PEOPLE,” BUT AN ALIEN FROM ANOTHER world trying to make sense of some of the conversations I have had with virtual strangers over the years might suppose that it is. (I am not angry about that—only amused.) When I was growing up and when I was a young woman, I might meet someone for the first time, and he or she would understand instantly that I was Armenian because my last name is Petrosian: it ends in “ian.” Then, almost invariably, this person would say, “You people are so nice. I knew an Armenian family once in Ridgewood, New Jersey.” Or, “You people are so industrious. You always work hard and make money. I knew an Armenian family once in Rockford, Illinois. They were very wealthy.” Or—and this might be my absolute favorite—“You people are so artistic. There is a wonderful carpet store in Concord, Massachusetts, and I think all the rugs are made by Armenians.” (For this rug stereotype we can thank, in part, Herodotus. “The inhabitants of the Caucasus dyed the wool with a number of plants,” he taught us, “and they used it to make woven fabrics covered with drawings which never lose their brilliant color.” Of course, it is also possible that Herodotus was merely the first of many observers who would equate Armenians with rugs. The Armenian word for woven fabrics? Kapert.)

  Nevertheless, no one introduced to someone named “Alvarez” would ever dare begin a sentence, “You people.” Same when meeting a “Svensson.” Or a “Yamada.”

  But we Armenians represent well. We are exotic without being threatening, foreign without being dangerous. We are domestic; we make rugs.

  The fact that I am blond is a further source of interest to people when they try to make sense of who I am, and women may glance at the roots where I part my hair. “You people are usually dark, aren’t you?” They think Cher. The guys in System of a Down. My daughter, who is in middle school now, finds it a source of frustration that the only famous Armenians are likely to be found on reality TV shows or in People magazine. I try to remind her that the Kardashians are paid very well to simply show up at parties, and there are worse ways to make a living.

  Likewise, I try also to remind myself that there are far worse ethnic stereotypes than being nice, industrious, and capable of weaving an attractive rug.

  Nevertheless, I have to share with you one last moment with Berk—and, for better or worse, it is the last you will hear of him because we broke up the final time four months before we went our separate ways to colleges in New England and South Florida: he went to the University of Miami and I went to Amherst. Since then I have searched him out on various social networks (along with my college romances), but I only stalked; I never clicked “friend” or tried to make contact.

  It was April of our senior spring in high school and we both knew by then that we were going to be spending the vast majority of the coming year twelve states apart. Perhaps because—careful readers will recall—I had been introduced to “love’s illusions” at a very young age, I had no expectation that our relationship was even going to make it to Thanksgiving. Berk did. Our relationship was volatile even by the standards of a high school dalliance at least in part because Berk was a romantic. So it was one of those afternoons when we would join our small clique at the Friendly’s ice cream parlor after school and then retreat to his house or mine to listen to Blondie or Talking Heads and have headboard-thumping sex. By the time our parents or siblings would return, we would be clothed and sitting by the dock—outside in the fresh, wholesome air of a man-made lake in a Miami development. They might have assumed by our ruddy complexions that we had been up to no good, but there was never going to be any proof (especially since by the time our families joined us, we really were likely to be immersed in physics or AP English, and looking to all the world like ambitious, slightly nerdy high school seniors).

  As we sat on the dock at my house that April afternoon, he brought up the great elephant with us at the edge of the chemically treated, fungicide-rich water: our future. I was evasive because as much as I cared for him, I didn’t suppose we had a future. He would meet other girls and I would meet other boys. Good Lord, think of how young we were. But he was persistent that day. Cajoling. Even whiny. Perhaps, on some level, he wanted a fight. But he acted as if he simply couldn’t believe that I was not one hundred percent sure that we would still be together a decade from that day. Finally, after we had gone back and forth for perhaps half an hour, he said, “It’s because I’m Turkish, isn’t it? You people are never going to let that go!”

  By then I had heard the term “you people” plenty often. Consequently, I could not resist answering back, “My people?
What people do you mean? Northerners?”

  “You know exactly what I mean. Well, I had nothing to do with it. Nothing. We could be a—” and here he paused, trying to find the right term. Finally he continued, “a symbol. We could be all about … reconciliation.”

  “I promise you,” I told him, taken aback that he would presume I questioned our future because he was Turkish, “if we’re not married in ten years, it won’t be because of … that.”