Free The Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian Page A

are too weak to offer even a last embrace or so close to death that they are grateful that the soldiers and the nuns have come for their children. It’s all, in Nevart’s opinion, one more degrading station on their path to the cross.
    But, she reminds herself, the orphanage is Hatoun’s best chance for survival. And so now, amid the desperate wailing of the toddlers and the strident demands of the nuns and the gendarmes and the Turkish Army officers—a cacophonic jumble of German and Turkish and Armenian—Nevart kneels before Hatoun and places her hands firmly on the child’s gaunt upper arms. “You will be safe with the nuns,” she says. “You’ll have food and a bed.” The words catch in her throat and she looks down at the child’s bare feet. Nearby a teenage gendarme yanks at a rail of a boy who can’t be more than five and is clinging to his mother like a terrified kitten to a tree limb, oblivious to the reality that his mother has died in the night; as the gendarme pulls at the child, he inadvertently drags the cadaver along the stones in the square. At sunrise Nevart had vowed that she would not lie to Hatoun and give the child false hope that someday she would return for her. Now, however, it seems that this is the only way she will be able to let the girl go. She wishes Hatoun would speak—say anything that might reveal what she is feeling.
    “It’s for the best, my sweet,” she tells the child. “Do you understand?”
    The girl might have been about to say something, her lips just starting to part, when the German nun appears behind Hatoun like a mountain.
    “Are you her mother?” she asks in Armenian.
    “No. I am …” And the words drift off. The answer could be either I am merely a woman from the same city , or I am all that she has in the world . Both are equally as precise.
    “Are you an aunt? A family friend?” the nun persists.
    “I am … a family friend,” she answers.
    The nun takes down her name and Hatoun’s, but asks not a thing about the child’s likes and dislikes—her family, her history—and then says to the girl, “Do you have any belongings?”
    Hatoun, her eyes growing a little wide at the reality of the parting, shakes her head no. She is shivering ever so slightly, despite the midmorning heat.
    “Very well then. You’re prepared to come with me?”
    Suddenly Nevart can stand it no longer and she pulls Hatoun to her, squeezing the girl against her chest and closing her eyes tight against her own tears. Meanwhile, the child continues to tremble but says not a word.
    A T NIGHT A RMEN lies on his blanket atop the straw, grateful to Eric and Helmut for all they have done for him this past month. He is appreciative as well of these newly arrived, well-intentioned Americans. And he feels his heart yearning for Elizabeth, alive in a way he had not expected it would be ever again.
    Nevertheless, he has decided that tomorrow he is going to leave Aleppo and work his way south into Egypt. He has heard of Armenians enlisting in the British Army to fight the Turks. And so he will set off at dawn. He has stared long enough at the faces of the women who have been whipped and prodded across the desert, and it’s clear that the details of how his wife and daughter died will be forever lost to the sands. He will go to his grave knowing the approximate date when the column of refugees might have left Harput and roughly when those stragglers arrived in Aleppo. But he will never know where on the route Karine perished.
    Of course, volunteering to fight with the British means it is likely that soon enough he might be fighting Germans as well as Turks—perhaps men as cultured as his fellow engineers. He knows German officers are assisting the Turks in the Dardanelles. Heknows the Germans will join the Turks in any defense of the Ottoman Empire’s southern or northwestern flanks.
    He recalls the view of Aleppo from atop the ruined citadel. He is going to become one of those