The Sandcastle Girls (19 page)

Nevart kneels beside her and tries to make her smile. “The orphanage is even worse,” she says. “By the time the children get there, they’re healthy enough to behave like real barbarians.” Then she motions for the boys to return to their beds and, terrified by the idea that they have injured this grown-up, they obey. The tiny child who threw the glass has shriveled like a raisin beneath his sheet and hidden his face in his pillow.

“Tomorrow I am going to leave for Der-el-Zor,” Elizabeth says, but as Nevart helps her to roll down her stocking and pull it over her foot so they can see how badly she is cut, she hears a hollowness in her voice. In the corridor one of the nuns is calling for Dr. Akcam, and she bites the inside of her lip to fight back her tears.

“N
O
, I
DON’T
think you should go,” says Sayied Akcam, as he studies a small glass splinter he is holding between the tips of his tweezers. Elizabeth is sitting up on a gurney outside the hospital’s lone operating room. “There is the risk of infection, and you will be far from help if something happens. Besides, you should be off your feet.”

Over the Turkish physician’s shoulder, Elizabeth watches William Forbes. She knows what he is going to say even before he opens his mouth, and inside she is simultaneously relieved and infuriated.

“She’ll be fine,” Forbes says, and it is this element in his entirely predictable response that gives her comfort. He is going to lobby on her behalf to be sure that she joins them on their foray into the desert. It is what he says next that she finds so presumptuous:
“After all, I’ll be there to take care of her. And she will be off her feet all the way to the resettlement area.”

“For the last four and a half years, I have done, in my estimation, a reasonable job of caring for myself,” she tells Forbes. “But I appreciate your … enthusiasm.”

Forbes remains oblivious to the real meaning behind her remark. “I was speaking only as a doctor,” he tells her, grinning too boyishly for a man in his mid-thirties.

Akcam nods. “Maybe I worry too much. Maybe it’s fine for her to go. It takes five or six days to reach Der-el-Zor. She’ll be sitting in the carriage and healing.”

“Not a carriage,” says Forbes. “Far more primitive. I’ve seen what Silas has rounded up, and they are carts. Supply wagons.” It sounds to Elizabeth as if he is taking pride in their primitive accommodations.

“At least she’ll be seated,” Akcam says.

“And I will be certain that absolutely nothing happens to that pretty little foot of hers.”

“You make it sound like a pleasure trip,” Akcam tells the younger physician.

“No. I know it’s not.”

The Turk gently lowers her foot into the basin of soapy water. She flinches when she feels it sting. “Here is another verse from the Qur’an,” he says, trying to occupy her mind so she thinks less about the pain as he cleans her foot.

O
RHAN SITS IN
a patch of shade near the train station with a pair of gendarmes a year younger than he is, who, he has discovered, are from a village near his hometown. They all grew up no more than three hours by horseback from Ankara. The pair have just helped bring another group of Armenians into the city—easily two hundred and fifty women and children.

“This whole place is being overrun with Armenians,” says
one of the gendarmes. “There must be more Armenians here than Syrians.”

“And Turks.”

“How difficult was the march?” Orhan asks him.

He shrugs. “It was just … long,” the gendarme says finally.

“Tell me about the army.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s more interesting. Where were you before here?”

“Nowhere. This is my first posting,” Orhan says, but he tells them how his brother and his cousin have given their lives for the empire. “Why don’t you want to talk about the march?” he asks them when he has finished with his own family’s story.

“There’s nothing to say. You walk them and bury them. You walk them and bury them. We had orders and a schedule. You’re always hot and you’re always hungry and you’re always thirsty. It’s peasant work. It’s not the work of a real soldier.”

“We did learn one thing,” says the other, his voice just a little mysterious.

Orhan raises his eyebrows. “Tell me.”

“We wanted to see how many Armenians you could shoot with one single bullet.” He pauses. “The answer? If you take off their clothes and line them up tits to back, you can shoot ten. But you need a good rifle.”

Orhan tries not to reveal his disgust or his horror. He feels it would be unmanly to be aghast. Instead he tries to find words to ask the question that has been on his mind since he met these two guards, but the sentence hovers just beyond his reach. “Were there any girls you …” he begins, and then stops, unwilling to finish it.

“Any what?”

Orhan has heard stories about how the gendarmes sleep with any of the girls they want. Sometimes they will sleep with four or five or six different virgins in the time it takes to walk from Adana to Aleppo.

“Any what?” the gendarme asks him again, but his friend understands what Orhan is driving at and scoffs.

“Orhan wants to know if there were any girls worth fucking,” he explains. He shakes his head and crinkles his nose, trying to convey his utter disgust. “The Kurds took some. The prettiest. But that was before we had gone very far.”

“There was a young man who pretended to be a woman,” his friend adds. “A real Armenian dog. We took a collar off a sheepdog and made him wear it. It was the kind with spikes on the outside. You know, so a wolf can’t bite the dog’s neck.”

“Who was he?” Orhan asks. It’s so rare for there to be young men in the convoys. He wonders if the fellow was a priest or a banker or an official so important they had been afraid to kill him before they had set out.

“I told you. He was a dog. He was pretending to be a woman. He was married and his wife was there. And their baby.”

“Ah, he was trying to protect them,” Orhan says.

“No, he was just a dog. A coward,” the gendarme insists. Then he laughs and adds, “We stripped him and made him walk on all fours. He actually tried to keep up for maybe an hour.”

“Then?”

“When he couldn’t keep up any longer, we did what anyone does with a worthless dog. We took off his collar and shot him.”

The other gendarme pulls a cube of white cheese from his sack and studies it for a moment before popping it into his mouth. Then, almost contemplatively, he says, “We did fuck his wife. We all fucked her. That was the only time he did a really good job as a dog. Howled, I tell you. But usually we didn’t fuck the women. Most of them were stinking and dirty and dying by the time we got them. They all had diarrhea. We were too busy digging graves or burning bodies to fuck anybody.”

Orhan recalls the Germans’ photographic plates, which are still in his corner of the barracks, and the sickening condition of the refugees by the time they arrive here in Aleppo. Of course this gendarme is correct. Orhan wonders what he was thinking.

•   •   •

R
YAN KNEW INTELLECTUALLY
what they would see on their way into the desert, but on the third day of their journey he found himself on his knees, retching into the sand off to the side of the road. Their long caravan of emergency aid halted before the headless bodies of half a dozen women, hanged by their feet from branches in an oasis-like cluster of oak trees. Wild dogs had eaten away most of the flesh between their waists and their necks, and gnawed the arms completely off two of the cadavers. The next day, in the shadow of one of the buttes that rose out of nowhere every few hours in this long stretch of desert, they saw small mounds of earthenware bowls, cracked jugs, wooden utensils, and—most ominous—passports. Ryan insisted on retrieving the papers so there would be a record should these people’s bodies never be found, and then—for reasons he could not fathom—he had grown sick once again.

And each time he vomited, he had felt profoundly emasculated. He had—transparently, in his opinion, pathetically—reminded everyone that he was a combat veteran of the Spanish-American War. But even in battle he had seen nothing like those women’s corpses. Elizabeth, her bandaged foot elevated most of the way in one of the wagons, had accompanied them into the desert, and she had hobbled over to him and held his shoulders as he tried to regain a semblance of his usual dignity and assurance. He didn’t like Elizabeth seeing him this way; he didn’t like it at all. Alicia Wells was another story. As a missionary she had traveled widely and seen men in far more dire straits. Moreover, she was a workhorse: resolutely self-contained and independent. And, when he was scrupulously honest with himself, he could admit that the main reason he was less discomfited with Alicia seeing him in this condition was really rather simple: he did not find her in the slightest way attractive; she was more like a dependable sister.

Now, as the makeshift tents and the makeshift fences of Der-el-Zor start to appear in a valley in the distance, he pivots on his seat in the wagon and says to Silas Endicott, “I know I have told
you this before, but I cannot stress it enough. Your group has been very generous. But even if you had not suffered losses between Cairo and Aleppo, the foodstuffs were going to make a barely perceptible dent in the needs of these people. Know that going in, and you will be less disappointed when we leave. We are simply”—and he struggles a moment to find the right words, before giving up and continuing—“buying some of them time. Days, maybe.”

Endicott pulls the brim of his hat down a little lower on his forehead and nods. Even now, five days beyond Aleppo, he is traveling in a necktie. “I have never liked that expression,” he says to the consul.

“No?”

“As a banker I have always tried to remember what money can and cannot accomplish. And though rhetoricians and scholars might be able to argue the expression’s merits as a figure of speech, my personal belief is that we have on earth exactly the amount of time that has been allotted to us, no more and no less. We really have precious little control.”

“Have I insulted you, Silas?”

“No. But I would have chosen my words more precisely.”

“And what would you have said?”

He looks back at his daughter. She smiles at her father and then at the diplomat. “I would have said only that we are saving lives,” answers the older Endicott. “We won’t save all. I understand that. But we will save some.”

Ryan says nothing more because he knows an argument over semantics is a rather foolish waste of energy here in the middle of the desert. He also knows that Endicott doesn’t mean what he has just said; the wealthy banker actually does believe that he and his wagonloads will make a monumental difference in the lives of the refugees. The man is used to getting his way and accomplishing whatever goals he has set before himself. But the distinction of few or many really means very little at the moment; soon enough, Silas Endicott will see for himself how impossible it is to feed tens of
thousands of people in the bone-dry world of Der-el-Zor. Clean water alone will be difficult to find in anywhere near the quantities they will need to transform all that flour into bread.

“Is that the settlement?” Elizabeth asks him, sitting a little forward and motioning with one elegant finger in its direction.

“Yes. The Turks have built the sorts of pens you might see on a cattle ranch,” he says, turning to face her directly, “though there’s really no point. The fencing neither keeps the Armenians in nor keeps others out. And, besides, where would anyone go out here? Especially people this hungry and sick?” He recalls Elizabeth’s first day in Aleppo, and how the heat had compelled her to sit on a stoop moments before she got her introductory taste of the horrors that marked this corner of the Ottoman Empire: the arrival of that long column of naked, half-dead Armenian women. Now? She is a veteran. She may be stronger than he is, he decides, given the way that she had kept her composure beside that line of dangling corpses—human bodies allowed to bleed out as if they were wild game. Deer. Turkeys. Moose.

“I can’t believe they would settle anyone out here; it makes no sense,” she observes, but then squeezes his shoulder abruptly. At the same time he hears William Forbes yelling from the wagon just behind them.

“Ryan, Silas!” Forbes shouts. “Look—from the north!”

Horsemen are racing toward them from the side of the butte to their left, a dozen perhaps, their thundering animals leaving a brown cloud of dust behind them. The Syrian who has rented them these horses and is leading their caravan halts the wagons. Reflexively Ryan feels for the papers inside his jacket pocket, his permission to bring this aid to the camp.

As the riders near them he can see that a few are Turkish soldiers and some are very well armed gendarmes. The men who are not in uniform actually appear considerably more menacing, because they have great bandoliers of ammunition wrapped like sashes over their shoulders and across their chests. Ryan counts
eleven horsemen altogether, a few in their teens but most in their twenties and thirties. The leader of the group, a Turkish lieutenant with grainy skin and a moustache that droops over the sides of his lips as if wilting in the heat, rides up and down the length of their caravan before stopping beside the wagon with the American consul and the Endicotts.

His eyes are unexpectedly melancholy, and he stares for a moment at the three of them and the porter who is driving their wagon. He asks the porter if anyone other than him speaks Turkish. Before he can respond, Ryan jumps in and tells the officer that he does.

The lieutenant sits straight in his saddle, but he rests his hands casually on the small pommel. He is the only member of the party who does not have a rifle. Instead he has a German Luger, which remains snapped shut inside its black leather holster. The soldiers and gendarmes bring their horses to a standstill in a semicircle behind him, their gaze—in Ryan’s opinion—roaming lecherously between the great bags of foodstuffs and Elizabeth Endicott. “Effendi,” the lieutenant says to the consul, though despite the deferential address there is nothing especially courteous in his tone. “You have traveled very far to get here.” He speaks slowly, and despite those vaguely sympathetic eyes, there seems to be a threat looming in his words.