The Sandcastle Girls (9 page)

And she waits for easily ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. But she knows the cat is somewhere in the courtyard. She can sense him watching her. Earlier this week she saw him studying Armen and her from a corner behind a potted palm. He is an orange monster with matted fur and a face as round as the oil lamp. Finally she hears
him; he is atop the western wall, looking down at her, a Cheshire cat prepared to leap onto the tree branch that extends like a great gnarled finger above the stucco, and then disappear if need be. She makes kissing sounds with her lips. Slowly, so as not to scare him with a sudden movement, she presents the remains of the lamb like an offering, lining up the pieces on the ground beside her.

Then she waits some more. Once he turns his head quizzically to his side, as if he is trying to understand why she would do this. Unless he is all fur—which she doubts—somehow this animal finds plenty of food. She has two cats at home in Boston. She always had cats growing up. She knows the species well.

Finally, just when she is about to give up, he jumps down to the ground and crouches perhaps a dozen feet away. She takes one of the small pieces of fat and gently tosses it toward him. He sniffs it, takes it in his mouth, and disappears through a hole in the bottom of the wall. She gazes down at what could have been a feast for him, the bones from which he might have worked the last of the flesh. Sighing, she gathers up the scraps and drops them back into the can.

To the east the sky is just beginning to lighten. The birds are starting to sing. Soon she will hear the muezzin beckoning the faithful to prayer. She sits back against the legs of a chair and thinks of Armen, and the way the air seems to grow charged whenever they are together. She thinks of the starving in the square and the sick in the hospital. Outside the walls of the courtyard she hears something else. Footsteps. She blows out the blue flame atop the wick and sits motionless, waiting.

A
RMEN NEARLY HAS
to hop over the cat as the animal races around him, an orange streak that vanishes past his ankles, then across the street and down an alley. He reaches the American compound where Elizabeth and her father are staying and pauses with his hands on the bars of the wrought iron fencing beside the imposing double doors, a criminal in a cell in his mind, and peers into
the courtyard. He hadn’t planned on stopping here on his way out of town, but it was a detour of only a few blocks and he couldn’t resist. And so here he is, fixing his gaze on the table and chairs and potted palms, a vision of Aleppo that is the antithesis of the despair in the square or inside the hospital or the orphanage.

Which is when he sees her, sitting alone on the tile beside the chair, rather than in it. She is wearing a nightgown the color of an overcast sky, which she has curled around her feet. She is like a ghost. He wonders if she has noticed him yet in the predawn light, or whether there is still the chance to walk silently backward and disappear into the dawn. Begin his journey to the south. But her presence now is an unexpected gift: he is the boy at the birthday party who has found the one bowl of figs. Of course he wanted to see her. Gazing for a moment at her apartment—wondering which was the window behind which she was sleeping—would have been a consolation prize only, a comfort for someone who has lost everything and expects nothing.

She looks up and sees him, and for a brief second she appears alarmed. She doesn’t immediately recognize him through the slender wrought iron grate. But then her face transforms from apprehension to mere surprise. She rises to her feet and glides across the courtyard. She removes the bars and the thick wooden beam, briefly struggling beneath its weight, opening the doors and beckoning him inside. She informs him in one breathless sentence that her father and Mr. Martin are asleep and asks him what he is doing here.

“I am leaving Aleppo,” he says, aware as he speaks that this is the first time he has uttered this sentence aloud. He motions with his eyes at the pack draped over his shoulder. The words surprise him with their utter finality. In a couple of sentences he shares with her his plan to reach Egypt and join the British Army.

She takes his hand and leads him to the very table where they have sat other days. She tells him a story of a stray cat, and he senses she is sharing this with him because she wants to avoid for a moment the reality that he is leaving. If he could, he would reach
out and touch her cheek, the ridge below her eyes so reminiscent of Karine. He longs to wrap his arms around her waist. To rest his forehead on hers. But after what happened amid the shadows just inside the entryway, beside the stairway to the second floor, he doesn’t dare.

“I didn’t expect to see you,” he murmurs when she is finished, and he is struck by the uncharacteristic quaver in his voice.

“I didn’t expect to be awake this early myself,” she answers, and she smiles. “But even back home I seem always to be at the mercy of cats. They wake me when they want food. They wake me when they want more of the pillow. They wake me when my mother’s dogs are chasing them.” She hoists her drapes of red hair back behind her ears with her thumbs. “I wish I had a ribbon for it,” she says. “Or a brush.”

“It looks pretty,” he says.

“It looks a fright. I was sleeping.” She sighs. Then: “Why are you doing this?” The abruptness of the question stops him like thunder. “Is it because you know she’s gone? Because you’ll never learn any more of what happened to her?”

“That’s partly why.”

“Am I …” Her voice trails off, but he finishes the sentence in his mind.
Am I not enough to keep you here?
The truth is, she could be. She might be. In any other time, she would be.

“I need to do something,” he answers. “I can’t be a bystander to all this. I can’t die a sheep.”

“Vengeance? Well, trust me, bandages and good soup accomplish far more than male pride these days.” There is an edge to her voice that he has never heard before. She crosses her arms before her chest and looks away.

He tries to imagine the college from which she graduated only months earlier. She described for him the campus the other day. He presumes this is the sort of sentiment the women there, firebrands it seems, offered when they discussed the European boys being slaughtered across northeastern France, western Russia, or in the Dardanelles. The Americans wanted nothing to do with the European
carnage. And yet some, apparently, wanted to prevent further Armenian massacres. The two ideas were related in his mind: the Americans, most of all, wanted to be civilized. Above the fray.

“I hope it’s not only vengeance,” he tells her, though that is indeed the largest part of it—that and the rage he feels as a member of a people who have been reduced to victims. As a victim he has felt increasingly unmanned. He was unable to preserve his family. He was unable to protect his people. Still he is relieved now that he chose not to tell her about the Turkish official, about Nezimi.

“Nevertheless, revenge is an element. Men, you’ll die for it.” The disgust in her voice is evident. But then she offers him a glimpse of what else is driving her frustration. “I will never see you again, will I?”

“We don’t know that.”

“We,” she says, repeating the pronoun with thinly veiled abhorrence. “We do know that.”

“I have to come to Boston,” he reminds her. “You have to teach me to ice-skate.”

She is silent and the quiet hangs between them like fog. Finally he can stand it no longer and he leans into her, taking her cheeks in his fingers, and kisses her once again. When they pull apart, she breathes in deeply the clean smell of the early morning. Soon, when the sun is up and the crowds have emerged, the more rank odors will monopolize the air. But not yet. “Have you eaten?” she asks him.

“No.”

“Well, stay for breakfast. Let me or the cook fix you something,” she says, and then adds, “All of you shouldn’t starve.”

I
N THE MIDDLE
of the day Nevart leans against a tent pole and stares at the minaret of the nearby mosque, wondering what time this afternoon they will leave. A whole new batch of refugees arrived a few hours ago, another convoy.

Yesterday Hatoun was taken to the orphanage. Most of the
children are gone now. Either they have died or been brought to the hospital or the orphanage—or, most tragically, they have been picked up in the predawn hours by those despicable ghouls with their cart.

She recalls watching Hatoun and another child building a castle from sand one morning while everyone else was getting ready to resume their march. They were giggling when their mothers rounded them up. The next day Hatoun’s mother and older sister, a teenager, were among six females who were randomly chosen from the column, stripped naked, and bound to stakes the guards hammered into the ground, somewhere in the desert between Adana and Aleppo. The women were sitting upright, their legs straight before them and their hands tied to the stake behind them so the pole pressed hard against their spines. Then six gendarmes took their swords and mounted their horses, and each took a turn racing toward the captives at high speed, and—as if it were a mere cavalry exercise—decapitated one of the women. Hatoun’s mother had been the last woman to die, and so she had witnessed five heads fall into the hot sand like coconuts, including her older daughter’s.

At least none of the women had been crucified. Nevart has heard stories of other women who were crucified in the desert, their hands and feet nailed into whatever wood the gendarmes could find. She has also heard stories of women who were impaled on sharp stakes and swords, the pommel and grip planted into the ground so the blade rose like an exotic but lethal plant.

Nevart finds her loneliness without Hatoun almost unbearable; she misses the girl every bit as much as she feared she would. The child had not been among those who had howled when they were taken away to the orphanage, and in some way that had made the separation even harder for Nevart. When they had been together in the desert, after Hatoun’s mother and sister were dead, the orphan would curl up against her at night, the child’s small bony frame shivering in the cold. In the early morning, before they would resume their trek, Nevart would cradle the girl in her lap. She was
thirsty all the time. They were all thirsty all the time. But Hatoun, who was only eight, gamely walked on. She never complained, but only because she had stopped speaking. Now the girl has lost her surrogate mother, too, but apparently she has come to accept inconceivable loss as a part of her lot.

“Nevart?”

She turns at the sound of her name and sees the American. Elizabeth. The woman is smiling, but there is nonetheless something slightly manic in her gaze. She has a ribbon in her hair the blue of the iris that Nevart grew in her garden back home in Adana. She has no expectation that she will ever see that garden again. By now there are Turks living in that house.

“Good morning,” Elizabeth says. “How are you feeling?”

“A little better each day,” she answers. “It’s always good to be out of the sun. To be getting a little food and water.”

“There will be more, I promise.”

“We’re not staying.”

The American’s eyes grow vacant with surprise. Clearly this is news to her. “What do you mean?” she asks finally.

“They told us. Sometime today they’re going to move us. Maybe when the sun isn’t so high. They’re taking us to a resettlement camp near Der-el-Zor.”

“But we have people coming! We have … resources! My father won’t stand for it.”

“There will be others you can help,” Nevart says, aware of how mordant her tone is. “More arrived just this morning,” she adds, and she points at the newest group of refugees.

“And where is Hatoun? Did she … is she …”

“She’s alive. She’s in the orphanage.” Nevart imagines the child in a great room with other girls whose parents either were slaughtered before their eyes or simply swallowed by the miasma of deportation and war.

“I’ve heard about Der-el-Zor. Mr. Martin told me about it. You can’t go there.”

“I don’t think I have a choice, do you? I think those fellows over there with the rifles have their orders,” she says, and with a single finger points at two gendarmes.

“Their orders were to bring you to Aleppo.”

“And now their orders are to bring us to Der-el-Zor.”

Elizabeth knows what she is about to say is irrational, but the words are out there before she can stop them. Perhaps because she is in this strange, wild, and utterly foreign world, the sense of propriety that usually would rein her in has evaporated in the stultifying heat. Perhaps it has something to do with the loss of Armen. Perhaps it has to do with meeting Armen in the first place. No matter. “Stay with us,” she is saying. “You said you were a doctor’s wife. Well, we need all the help we can get.”

“It’s not possible.”

“Of course it’s possible!”

“And where would I sleep?”

“That’s easy, we have space. The apartments where we’re staying have room,” she says, though of course most of that space will be taken by the missionary and the two doctors who are joining them. Nevertheless, if necessary the woman could share Elizabeth’s bedroom.

Nevart gazes at the emaciated refugees under the canvas. Her immediate reaction still feels like the correct response. Truly, how could she leave these people? How could she desert them? What right has she to live when the others will, in all likelihood, perish in the next stretch of their trek across this torturous wasteland? It was simply that this American saw her first.

“I am serious, Nevart. You must stay here. Remain with us in Aleppo.”

“And when you leave?”

“I don’t know. But at least you’ll be alive. You’ll have regained your health.”

An idea comes to Nevart. She glances at the impeccable carriage of this American and her elegant skirt and blouse. The complexion that exudes good health and a life that has never wanted
for anything. “What really are the conditions in the orphanage?” she asks. “Do you know?”

“No. But we are going there to visit this afternoon.”

“May I join you?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I want to see Hatoun. If she wants to stay with me, then I’ll come with you. But you’ll have to take the two of us.”