The Sandcastle Girls

  “No.”

  “A young man roughly your age, according to witnesses—the Armenian criminal, that is.”

  “Did they catch him?”

  “Not yet,” he says, and he snorts dismissively. “May I see your papers? We work for the governor-general of the vilayet of Aleppo. And I also know Germans. Herr Lange is a very good friend,” he says, referring to the German consul in Aleppo.

  Armen guesses that each of the men is close to twice his age. They are in their early to mid-fifties. But they outnumber him and at least one of them is armed. He gazes at the carriage door and briefly considers his options. He has no papers, no passport—neither one for international travel nor even a teskere, the passport that allows him passage throughout the Ottoman Empire. Both were confiscated by the Turks months ago, the first step in the annihilation of his people. Still, if only to buy himself a moment, he makes a show of searching inside his satchel, standing and turning the canvas bag toward the window as if he expects the sunlight will help him to uncover a passport. And then behind him he hears one of the Turks warning, “Shoot him, he’s getting a weapon!” and instantly Armen realizes his mistake, but already it’s too late. He turns and the administrator has crossed the car and pulled out the pearl-handled gun, aiming it at his chest. So Armen raises his arms slowly and carefully. Then he slams the pencil as hard as he can into the left eye of the Turk, the point deflating the white orb like a balloon and spraying a warm, colorless gel onto the front of his hand and his face. The point penetrates deeply, the lead snapping off inside the brain at precisely the moment when the administrator reflexively closes his finger around the trigger and fires the weapon, his body pitching forward and then collapsing long after the bullet has grazed Armen’s ear and shattered the window behind him. And then, though Armen’s ears are ringing and he understands instinctively that the back of his head could be awash in shards of glass and splintered wood, he swings his bag into the other Turk, throwing himself upon him. He pins him to the floor of the railcar, accidentally banging his kneecaps hard on the wood there, and from the corner of his eye sees that the pistol is no more than four or five feet away. The pencil protrudes from the other man’s socket like a fencepost and the body is twitching spastically. He’s still alive, but he’s making no effort to remove the pencil from his skull.

  And so Armen dives for the weapon, and the Turk beneath him takes advantage of his freedom to lunge for it, too. But Armen reaches the gun first, and, though his own body feels strangely sluggish, he grabs it and fires point-blank into the face of the official, the world once more exploding in sound and rage, and it feels to Armen as if it is raining inside the train car.

  And then, in part because his ears have been stunned by the gunshots and in part because there really is only the sound of the metal train wheels spinning against the rails, the world seems to grow almost pleasantly hushed. He pushes the body off him and sits up. He notices the other Turk has stopped jerking.

  For a moment he sits against the legs of the wooden bench, catching his breath. He wonders if the Turkish soldiers in the other car heard the two gunshots, and—if they did—whether it was possible they mistook the sounds for backfiring within the steam engine. He decides he isn’t going to stay and find out. Quickly he gathers up the pistol and his satchel, opens the train car door, and dives into the sand, hurling his body as far from the rolling carriage as he can.

  • • •

  HATOUN CLINGS TO Nevart as the two Armenians trail behind Elizabeth, the young American leading them from the orphanage in Aleppo to the compound where the U.S. consul lives and his visitors are staying. Nevart finds herself fretting, sinking into a swamp of second thoughts. Yes, the Turks might close the orphanage; yes, it might be a world where some of the children are brutish and others are dying, where perhaps only a small percentage will emerge better off. Nevertheless, she worries that she is making an egregious and spectacularly selfish mistake with Hatoun. Why in the name of God should she presume that she can give this child a better life than the orphanage can? She knows nothing, nothing at all, about being a mother. She and Serge had failed to conceive a child in seven years of marriage. The two of them had come to believe they never would. For a time the reality had cast a pall over their lovemaking. But in the end? Her inability to conceive had been a disappointment, and eventually they had moved on. Sex, once again, had been about sex—not starting a family. The two of them were all the family they would ever have, other than their parents and siblings and cousins.

  “What did Hatoun like to eat before …” Elizabeth starts to ask, looking behind her at the two of them as she walks briskly down the street. Nevart has noticed that the woman has made a conscious detour away from the square where the remaining refugees are camped out. Finally she finishes, “before she left home? And you, too, Nevart? What can the cook prepare for you?”

  Nevart thinks back on the conversations she had with Hatoun before the child’s mother and sister were decapitated. Since then the child has said almost nothing. Did they speak of food? Surely they did. But it’s a fog. In her mind, she imagines them speaking of cucumbers, sliced and swimming in yogurt and dill. Lavash with handfuls of sesame seeds. Lamb and onions marinating in olive oil and red wine. Grape leaves filled with pine nuts and rice. Paklava, that sticky, scrumptious pastry rich with walnuts and sugar and cinnamon. The dough that was made with butter and flour and yogurt. The tahn, the watery yogurt they would drink with mint.

  A memory comes to her, something Hatoun’s mother had said as they had struggled on across the white-hot sand. Hatoun used to love to make köfte. She would stand on a stool by the counter beside the sink and grind the cloves and shape the bulgur wheat and ground lamb into meatballs the size of oranges. Usually she preferred sweet treats to meat, but supposedly Hatoun approached the preparation of the köfte as if it were an art project.

  “Name it,” Elizabeth is saying. “I am sure the cook can make anything.”

  In the square, women are dying. They’re starving to death. And those who can walk are about to resume their march to Der-el-Zor, a six-day journey on which they will succumb to the heat or dehydration or dysentery or—as they pass through a nasty stretch of swamp, which at first will seem like a relief—malaria. The malaria will be a surprise to many, a new way to perish.

  “Bread,” she says, her voice flat, aware of Hatoun’s fingernails pressing into the loose skin on her arm. “Let’s start with something as simple as bread.” The child beside her says nothing.

  ANCESTRAL BONDS HAVE A TENDENCY TO FRAY OVER TIME. OUR connections with the blood that once—generations past—was all that mattered become worn and snap.

  My husband is Italian. Or, to be precise, his great-grandparents were. They were Tuscan. But he is far more aptly described as a Vermonter. (Actually, if he were allowed to put any affiliation he wanted on his passport, I fear it would be Red Sox Nation. He is a corporate attorney, but still insists on decorating a shelf in his Park Avenue office with a row of Red Sox bobblehead dolls.) His full name is Robert Ethan Gemignani. His great-grandfather, Augusto, immigrated to America from Grosseto to cut stone and carve headstones amid the plummeting granite quarries near Barre, Vermont. Outwardly, however, my husband is about as Tuscan as I am. His friends from college still call him Bobby G. It was I who insisted that we visit Barre’s magnificent Hope Cemetery so we could see his great-grandfather’s masterwork among the mausoleums and headstones. He had never been there, even though he had grown up in Burlington, Vermont, no more than an hour away.

  Consequently, it was only when we were dating and he had just finished his second year of law school that together we spied for the first time the gravestones and the markers and the crypts for which Augusto Gemignani was justly renowned. The man left us not merely sculpted angels and seraphim, but lions (recall his first name), a baseball nearly the size of a Mini Cooper with an impeccably rendered autograph of the deceased, horses (two), a marble haystack and tractor, a lovesick swan
, infants (poignant and tragic and cherubic), and a man’s top hat and opera cloak. Apparently, the wealthier (and, occasionally, more eccentric) central Vermonters depended on him as their time neared.

  I mention this because as my interest in my grandparents’ history and what really happened in Aleppo grew from mere intellectual curiosity into a fixation, Bob would try to rein me in, reminding me that the past was precisely that: the past. He felt very little connection to Augusto and Alessandra Gemignani and worried that my obsession (his word, not mine, though arguably it would prove accurate) with Armen and Elizabeth Petrosian was unhealthy. I pointed out to him how I was a generation closer to Armen and Elizabeth than he was to Augusto and Alessandra, and how every day millions of people trawled such web sites as ancestry.com to learn more about their lineage. Nevertheless, he understood early on that this defense was disingenuous. What he missed—what we both missed, because at the time we did not know the truth—was how little Armen and Elizabeth had shared with even their own children, and the emotional toll those secrets had taken on their lives.

  THE PHRASE “starving Armenians” was originally coined by Clara Barton. The Slaughter You Know Next to Nothing About was actually common knowledge among some Americans and Europeans while it was occurring. The first massacres of Armenians—nothing like those of 1915, because a mere two hundred thousand perished, but still plenty grisly—were between 1894 and 1896, and Barton was furious. Much of the world was. Harper’s Magazine covered the story relentlessly and published massive, eleven- by sixteen-inch photographs. A Bostonian named Alice Blackwell founded the Friends of Armenia, the organization that later would become such an important part of Elizabeth and Silas Endicott’s lives. During the Great Catastrophe of 1915–1916, The New York Times published 145 stories about the atrocities and the massacres. There were Americans and Europeans who wanted to help.

  Now, nothing from The New York Times was a part of the exhibit I saw in Watertown while I was in college, because that display consisted entirely of images taken by Germans that were smuggled into Europe or America. You will not see my family’s last name among the stories or photo captions in the Times archives. It would be years later in another exhibit, this one at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, that my surname would be linked to an image and the dimly flickering light of my family’s history.

  In any case, when my brother and I were small children, our mother occasionally conjured that Clara Barton phrase, “starving Armenians.” My mother was an absolutely awful cook and used this expression as a last resort to try to convince us to finish whatever culinary experiment had gone awry. One time it was Swedish fare involving cold sausage made with ground herring. Another dinner it was French cuisine and included baked tomatoes smothered in parsley and so much garlic that the house reeked for days. And, invariably, there were other disasters of a more conventional nature: the spaghetti and meatballs in a sauce that was so watery it was like broth. The pork chops that were cooked so long they were tough as shoe leather. The scampi with more shell than fish. Part of the problem was that my mother simply didn’t enjoy cooking. If she had to be in the kitchen, she wanted to be sitting at the deacon’s bench with our dog, Mack, resting his snout in her lap as he dozed, while she smoked her Eve cigarettes and drank coffee that by today’s standards was most likely toxic. She wanted to be having a Scotch in the living room with my father when he returned home from work, not toiling by the stove. She was known for dinner parties where the booze would flow freely, but it was a crapshoot whether supper would ever be served. And when it came time to try to persuade my brother and me to finish a particularly awful meal, she would invoke the specter of the starving children of a distant Armenia—distant both chronologically and geographically.

  Until I was in college, I doubt I could have found Armenia on a map. I would have pointed vaguely at the eastern half of Turkey. I might have run my finger along the eastern shore of the Black Sea. I knew, at that time, that somewhere among the Soviet republics in the Caucasus was one called Armenia, and it was but a fraction of the size of the original nation. But the actual boundaries of Armenia then and now? Really, I hadn’t a clue. And the black moon that would occasionally block the sun in my grandparents’ marriage—the darkness that shadowed their life that was inexplicable to me and was never discussed—likely precluded me from asking very much about the Armenian world my grandfather had once known and my grandmother had once glimpsed.

  “Eat,” my mother would say to my brother and me. “You of all people should think of the starving Armenians.”

  “I don’t know of any starving Armenians,” my father observed at least once, his tone both offended and bemused. “Why do people still say that? Why not, ‘think of the starving Cambodians’? Or the ‘starving Bangladeshis’?”

  “It’s just an expression,” my mother replied defensively.

  Indeed. But at different points in American history—first in the 1890s and then again in the years after the First World War—it really was a rallying cry among human rights do-gooders. Americans were barraged with photos or illustrations of skeletal children in refugee camps and orphanages.

  For some survivors and for the Armenians of subsequent generations, however, especially men like my father, there was a taint of victimhood about the expression that they found slightly galling. Why did my Armenian grandfather have a lamb chop every morning for breakfast? Because he could. It was just that simple. Because he could.

  ELIZABETH’S FATHER STANDS with his arms folded before his chest in the dim corridor to his and Ryan Martin’s bedrooms and says to her after an excruciatingly long moment, his voice calm but firm, “We cannot bring them all into the compound. We cannot save everyone. Jesus Christ himself knew there would be poor always.” His lips are tight. His great, plumy eyebrows descend into a deep V. He sounds like he wants to discipline her.

  She starts to argue: “Other American missions in—”

  Abruptly his hand rises up as if spring-loaded at the elbow, and he points his index finger toward the ceiling. “This is not about what they have done in Bitlis or Van. We may never know the details of what happened there. But it seems people were being slaughtered right outside the gates. The missions and the consulates there had to let people in. I assure you, if the Turks or the Syrians start slaughtering the Armenians here in the streets of Aleppo, we will open our doors to them. But that has not happened and does not seem to be in the offing.”

  “Right now they are marching the last of the women into the desert.”

  “I was with them. I just spent three more hours with them in the hot sun. Yes, now the Turks are bringing them to a refugee camp. It may be in the desert, but it is where the Armenians are being consolidated.”

  “Mr. Martin says it is a horrible place.”

  “It very well may be. I hope we see it for ourselves. But we have neither the funds nor the people to save an entire race. We will do what we can with the resources we have.”

  His eyes are dark in this light. Normally they remind her of still-ripening blueberries. But she knows him well enough to be confident that he has no plans to turn away Nevart or Hatoun. And so she says, choosing her words as diplomatically as possible, “In the interest of everyone’s comfort, I would like to put Nevart and Hatoun in my bedroom. I can sleep in the room we have reserved for Miss Wells.” Alicia Wells is the missionary they are expecting with Dr. Forbes and Dr. Pettigrew.

  “I am sure Miss Wells was anticipating having her own bedroom. It is primitive enough here as it is.”

  “And I am sure she won’t mind sharing her room with me, given the reasons that we are asking her.”

  “And you’ve spoken to Ryan?”

  “Of course,” she says, a complete fabrication. She makes a mental note to find him the moment he returns to the compound—certainly before he finds her father—and tell him about their new guests.

  Her father rubs his eyes at the bridge of his nose, exasperated and defeated. “Well, do what you can to
make the child comfortable,” he says. “Make them both comfortable. And make it clear to them that we cannot accommodate any more of their friends. That’s what the orphanage and the refugee camps are for.”

  She nods and then—almost as if she were a child herself—skips down the corridor to show Nevart and Hatoun where they will be living.

  A BREEZE. It comes out of nowhere, and Armen blinks against the sand as it swirls like hungry insects around his face. He forces himself to sit up. He squints against the sun and the wind, and glances down at the lizard that races within inches of his fingers before disappearing. The world is entirely blue and entirely white. It is at once magic and terrifying. He has never felt more alone.

  His ankle throbs badly, but he is confident that it isn’t broken. Sprained, he guesses. He expects he can limp, though limping will do him no good if his plan is to continue on foot to Damascus. He won’t last out here nearly long enough to complete the journey. He has neither food nor water, and already he is reflexively, incessantly licking his lips. His throat is a dry pipe. He has no idea how the Bedouins do it. How in the world does a goat—much less a man—survive out here? His shirt is awash in red and so he strips it off and buries it. He pulls his other shirt from his pack. His sweat has rinsed the Turk’s blood from his face.

  Tomorrow there should be another train. Here the tracks move straight through the desert, and so the engine will be speeding along nicely—too quickly to try to climb aboard. In the distance, however, he sees a ridge, and the train will have to either go up and over it or wind its way around it. The tracks are a black ribbon that unfurls straight toward it. Either way, the engine will have to slow. He knows this as well as anyone; he knows what these engines can and cannot do. And he can, perhaps, jump aboard there. In the meantime he needs to find shade. He will travel to the ridge after dark.

  A memory comes to him: the ridge overlooking the government office in Harput and the melodramatic painting of Enver Pasha on the wall in the waiting room. The man was on a black horse the size of an elephant. It was in this office that Armen had gone to argue about the confiscation of his and Karine’s passports—both the ones for international travel and the ones for travel within the Ottoman Empire. He had Armenian friends who deluded themselves into believing that the government’s demand that Armenians turn over their passports was merely a bit of wartime paranoia, but he had begun suspecting the worst right away. After all, he worked for the Baghdad Railway and was employed by the Germans—and that was why the confiscation of his passport was so ominous. He supervised the design and placement of track, and right now the regime needed track desperately in the Dardanelles, the Middle East, and the Caucasus. Didn’t the Ottoman Empire want him traveling more than ever because of this war? And so he had ventured to the government offices to see what he could learn. He knew some of the officials, including a young administrator named Nezimi. He considered the official a friend. When Armen was in Harput, they played cards together, went to the cafés together, and often wound up at the steam baths together. Nezimi also fancied himself a man of science and a modernist—like so many of the Ittihad regime’s party functionaries—though he had no serious schooling outside of Harput. But he always seemed to enjoy discussing the railroads with Armen, because the railroads represented progress—the links to the civilized powers in the west and, someday, to the oil to the southeast. Until recently he had even seemed to need Armen’s approval.