The Sandcastle Girls (5 page)

“Is this your camera?” Ryan asks the lieutenant.

“No. It’s Helmut’s,” he answers, extending his hand to Ryan. Then he bows slightly toward Elizabeth. “Good morning,” he says to her.

“The Turks cannot possibly be allowing you to photograph this,” the American consul continues excitedly. “You know it’s illegal to take pictures of the refugees or the deportations. You could be jailed. Court-martialed.”

“Obviously we have not advertised what we’re doing,” Helmut answers. “We have not put up posters asking for models.”

“Djemal Pasha himself has made it clear: photographing the Armenians is like photographing in a war zone. It’s espionage. It’s treasonous.”

“Well, then, please don’t tell him,” Eric says, his tone almost playful. Djemal Pasha is the commander of the Ottoman Fourth Army, the Turkish Army group in Syria and Palestine.

“How long have you been doing this?” Ryan asks Helmut.

“Two weeks.”

“And no one knows?”

“No one knows.”

“Except the victims,” Elizabeth observes, watching as the woman with the sores begins to wilt in the heat. She leans against the wall and modestly pulls her blouse back over her collarbone.

“Well, yes,” Helmut agrees. “There was a gendarme on the other side of the square. Is he still dozing?”

“I believe so,” Ryan says.

“Good. Just in case, we have these women shielding our work. Someday we’re going to bring the plates back to Europe. I’m not sure what we’ll do with them there,” Helmut explains. “Some Germans are as appalled at what is occurring as you Americans. But Turkey is an ally, and the government has other issues. The last thing Germany wants is to create a rift with an ally who is tying up Russians in the Caucasus and British and French in the Dardanelles.”

“Time is everything,” Ryan reminds them, his agitation causing his voice to grow a little desperate and shrill. “It’s up to us to get the word out—and bring help in. Can’t you ship the plates back now or send them to Germany via courier?”

“Oh, the Turks would never allow that,” the lieutenant says. “They would be confiscated and destroyed. You know that. You know how rigid the censorship is around the deportations.”

“Then give them to us,” Ryan says. “Give them to me. Maybe I can find a way to get them developed.”

Eric and Helmut glance at each other. “Let me think about it,” Helmut says. “I never planned on letting the material out of my sight until I had printed the photographs myself.”

“But you understand the urgency, don’t you?”

Helmut rubs the scar on the side of his face thoughtfully, but says nothing. Meanwhile, Elizabeth turns to Eric. “When we arrived, you were laughing,” she begins. “I thought … I actually thought …”

“You thought what?”

“Never mind.”

But he understands, nodding, and smiles boyishly. Once again he is in her mind a big jolly dog: “I was probably observing Helmut
here pretending that he’s an artist. There’s nothing more comic than when an engineer uses words like
composition
.”

Abruptly one of the standing women—part of the shield, as Helmut had described it—taps the photographer on the shoulder and motions behind her. The gendarme has awoken and is marching toward them with his rifle slung over his shoulder. As if the tripod with the camera is a bride on her wedding night, Helmut scoops it up off the ground with both arms, while Eric grabs the box with the photographic plates. The Germans smile at Ryan and Elizabeth—Helmut raises his eyebrows almost roguishly—and then disappear down the nearby alley without saying a word.

“The women were looking at that refugee’s neck,” Ryan says casually to the gendarme, a sleepy-faced young man with eyes that are lost to the bridge of his nose and lips that are scabbed over from days and days in the sun. The guard glances at the woman himself, shrugs, and without saying a word returns to the spit of shade beneath a tent flap where he had been napping. On his way there he sees the boy with the sack of bread and reaches in for a great handful.

A
RMEN RETURNS TO
the square, as he does most days, and gently washes the face of the girl with seashell-like ears because she won’t wash it herself. He presumes they will insist she bathe properly once the child is brought from this encampment in the center of the square to the orphanage. The water in the shallow bowl is warm; nothing here stays cold for very long. A nurse told him the temperature yesterday reached 115 degrees in the center of the city.

“Her name is Hatoun,” Nevart tells him. “She doesn’t like to touch her face.”

“Why not?” he asks her. He imagines that she had once been the sort of rough-and-tumble girl who outran and outfought the boys. He has a niece like that. Had. There is no reason to believe she is still alive.

But Nevart doesn’t answer. She seems about to respond, when Hatoun—who, he realizes, has not spoken a word—looks at the
woman and her eyes are defiant and charged. So instead of answering his question, Nevart simply shrugs.

L
ATER THAT DAY
Ryan Martin stands for a long, quiet moment in the afternoon sun on the steps outside the hospital and tries to clear his mind of the Armenian woman—the sheer razor ridge of her cheekbones—who had just died in her bed. Her clavicle was so pronounced that her corpse had reminded him of a bat. The skin on her stomach had hung in almost perfectly symmetrical ripples. A doctor had presumed he could save her; he had been mistaken. She mattered to Ryan because she was a music teacher who had gone to school at Oberlin and lived for seven years in Ohio before returning to Zeitun. Ryan himself had grown up in tiny Paulding, Ohio.

He dabs at his forehead with a handkerchief. He closes his eyes as a dagger of guilt pricks his heart: they all should matter to him. He reminds himself that they all do. But this woman? They had a friend in common from Oberlin. A classics professor there.

How in the name of God does a woman go from a conservatory in Ohio to this nightmarish hospital at the edge of a desert in Aleppo? How in the name of God did he wind up here? He thinks of his wife and wishes she were with him this summer, rather than tending to her ailing parents in America.

Viewing this Armenian’s body had felt to him a violation in a way that viewing the bodies of the myriad others did not. Those others had been strangers.

Back at the American compound he is handed a lengthy note from Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador in Constantinople. It seems that the Armenian patriarch there met with the grand vizier, but had left in frustration. The Turks are adamant that they will protect themselves from the Armenians and their collusion with the Russians. This is a war and they haven’t a choice.

•   •   •

E
LIZABETH STANDS BESIDE
Armen on a balcony, her arms resting on a stone balustrade near the top of the ruined, now uninhabited palace. It once was a part of the citadel here. Armen has brought her up the hill to the castle and then another 150 feet into the air. To reach this balcony, they crossed a moat, walked gingerly across a narrow bridge linking great mounds of rubble, passed through iron gates, and climbed a winding staircase in a tower that must have dwarfed most buildings in Boston. When he had taken her hand the first time to help her up and over the debris that littered the courtyard, she had trembled ever so slightly and felt her heart beat a little faster.

The fortress is millennia older than any structure in Massachusetts and rises from the city like a volcano. It is even more ancient than the Anasazi ruins she has heard about in the American southwest. She makes a mental note to add this detail to the correspondence she will be sharing with her mother and the Friends of Armenia. The stones and tiling, though largely faded and chipped, still have ghosts of their original, palatial grandeur. In her mind’s eye she sees extravagant tapestries and a lacquered ceiling studded with jewels, and an Ottoman sultan on a canopied throne. She envisions eunuchs and harem girls. Tasseled throw pillows and precious carpets. Tiles of turquoise and titian and cobalt blue. Once more she was unprepared for such beauty in the midst of such pain.

He smiles when she tells him of her imaginings and suggests that Massachusetts would seem exotic to him. She shakes her head and tells him of Boston and South Hadley. She describes for him her mother’s obsession with her two cocker spaniels, and her Mount Holyoke roommate’s immense gifts as a soprano. She shares with him stories of the voyage across the Atlantic: the old fellow on the ship who had been a student with Woodrow Wilson, the Frenchman who could not understand why the United States had not entered the war. She describes how much softer the sand in the dunes on Cape Cod feels compared to the grit here in Syria, and how she once built a sandcastle near Truro. She tells him she gets seasick. She prefers cats. She likes Dickens. She talks and talks
because whenever she is silent she finds herself looking at him and her breath grows a little short.

H
ELMUT
K
RAUSE KNEELS
on the floor and slides the carton with the last of the unused photographic plates under his bed. Beside them is a crate with the images he has taken already, and beside that is his Ernemann Minor falling plate camera. And alongside all of them is the wooden tripod, currently folded shut. It is a small production to find room for everything.

“Sometimes I think it would be easier for you to paint them,” Armen says to him, after exhaling a blue stream of tobacco smoke. He is referring to the Armenian deportees. After the haze has disappeared, he sits back and stares at the metal mouthpiece at the tip of the hookah.

“Paints and easels take up space, too. Besides …” Helmut pauses after he has stood up.

“Besides what?”

He stands and brushes dust off the knees of his pants. “You’ve never been to Italy, right?”

“Never,” Armen agrees.

“Well, a painting would be like the frescoes inside the Duomo in Florence. In the cathedral.” Helmut had studied the construction of Brunelleschi’s dome when he was in engineering school, and saw Vasari’s and Zuccari’s gruesome presentation of the damned in Hell. The frescoes were part of
The Last Judgment
. “The images of the people are horrible, but inconceivable. They are too ghastly to be moving.”

“Any gluttons?” Armen asks.

“Among the damned? Probably.”

He shrugs. “That’s different, too. I’d wager the dead in the Duomo at least have a little meat on their bones.”

Helmut allows himself a small, mordant laugh, but then grows serious once again. “Were any of the women in the latest convoy from Harput?” he inquires.

“No.”

“You asked?”

“I always ask,” Armen tells him. “I ask everyone.”

“Just because …”

“I understand they’re dead. I do. I understand what the women in the first convoy from Harput told me. But maybe someday I’ll know where. How.”

“And that would make you feel better?”

“Knowing is always better than not knowing,” he tells Helmut.

“I suppose.” He motions for Armen to pass him the hookah, and the German cradles the base in one hand and the hose in the other and takes a long drag. Then: “Someday I want to photograph you.”

“I’m neither starving nor sick. What could I possibly add to your portraits of a dying race?”

Helmut studies his face. On the stairs they hear the lieutenant taking the steps two at a time. A moment later Eric races into the room and throws his rucksack on a wicker chair.

“You Armenians have very big eyes,” Helmut says, almost oblivious to his roommate’s return. “Especially some of the girls. Huge round eyes. You must know that. They seem to absorb everything—the good and the bad. And your eyes are no exception.”

“Listen to him,” Eric says to Armen. “Let the man take your picture. You know he does very good work.” Then Eric grabs his shaving brush and razor from a thin shelf on the windowless wall, and smiles in a way that he knows is at once rakish and silly. “I just met a German girl. A missionary, but still: a German girl! You may go for those Armenian girls’ eyes, Helmut, but give me a girl from Cologne any day.” Then he is off to shave, and Armen is left wondering how much longer he will stay here in Aleppo and search the convoys of dying women for anyone who can tell him anything more about where and how his wife and young daughter most likely perished.

Y
OU THINK
I
WANT TO DEMONIZE THE
T
URKS
. I
DON’T
. I
HARBOR
no grudge.

The first boy I ever kissed—seriously kissed, that is, not dry, awkward pecks on the cheek or the lips—was Turkish. He knew I was Armenian. I knew he was Turkish. Hormones mattered far more than history.

Just before I started ninth grade, three years after my Armenian grandfather died, my family moved to Miami, Florida, from a suburb of New York City, and we moved there the Friday before Labor Day weekend. Then, on that first Tuesday, I went to my new orthodontist—a sadist, it would turn out, if ever there was one. (Just for the record, my brother has always had perfect teeth. This has never seemed fair. Why the female twin should have been the one cursed in adolescence with a ramshackle picket fence inside her mouth was always incomprehensible to me.) The doctor gave me some orthodontic headgear that looked like the business end of a backhoe, and I had to wear the device for four hours a day, no more and no less, which meant I could not wear it when I was sleeping. And since being the most awkward girl in Hialeah-Miami Lakes Senior High School—the girl with the excavating bucket cuddling her upper gums—was not high on my list of aspirations, I would come home from school, put in my headgear, and sit alone with my homework on the dock beside the man-made lake in our backyard.
There wasn’t much privacy, because the homes in the development were built side by side like Monopoly houses and the neighborhood was so new that there wasn’t more than a single palm tree in any backyard, but the only other teenagers on my street were two older boys who played varsity football and thus were at practice at that time of the day, and a senior girl who, as far as I could tell, was a queen bee who was never going to acknowledge the presence of an awkward ninth grader.