Read Online The Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian - Free Book Online

she also sent me in part as a public service: she was a little shocked that I had never before been to Watertown or visited the museum.
    And so I borrowed my dorm advisor’s 1979 Ford Maverick and drove ninety minutes east to Watertown. I ate a pastry filled withapricot jam and a square of paklava that rivaled my grandmother’s. I rounded up the obligatory quotes from senior citizens, only one of whom as a child had grown up in the final days of the Ottoman Empire (and I didn’t press him for details, since I had already used up a lot of time at that wonderful bakery). All of the Armenians were predictably pleased that the House had passed the resolution and disappointed that the bill was in all likelihood going to die in the Senate. All of the non-Armenians agreed that the events had occurred so long ago it didn’t matter, and why risk alienating Turkey, a democracy and an ally in an otherwise absolutely chaotic corner of the world?
    Then, before leaving, I went to the museum, and it was there, no more than ten minutes from the moment after I had passed through the entrance, that I saw for the first time the photograph that, years later, would haunt me. It was part of a traveling exhibition called “German Images from the Genocide.” (That was indeed the display’s inadvertently confusing title. Was I the only visitor to the museum that month who presumed these would be photographs from the Holocaust? I doubt it.) I was too young or too self-absorbed at the time to understand the image’s full significance. I was too focused on being a freshman in college and loving my life at nineteen. Besides, my Armenian grandfather and his Boston-born wife had already passed away. But on some level I think I knew even then that eventually that photograph was going to be a game-changer.
    O NCE MORE , E LIZABETH takes Armen’s arm as they walk between the post office and the bazaar. “How did Helmut get that scar?” she asks. “Did he ever tell you?”
    “You’re imagining a bayonet charge or an artillery shell, aren’t you?” he says.
    “It wasn’t in battle?”
    “No.” He recalls the fragments from the Turkish mortar that riddled his brother Hratch’s body like the arrows that quilled SaintSebastian. Hratch had taken half an hour to die, not losing consciousness until the moment he expired. It had been horrific to witness. “Helmut and Eric have been fortunate. They’re too valuable to lose in battle. The Turks need to expand their rail lines, and they depend on engineers such as those two.”
    “And you,” she says.
    “Well, they did. Briefly. Obviously no more.”
    “So, his scar isn’t a war wound.”
    “Nor a duel.”
    She laughs and leans into him. “Do Germans still duel?”
    “I doubt it.”
    “Then how?”
    “Ice-skating.”
    “Are you serious?”
    “He was skating with his sister when they were teenagers, and somehow they both fell and the blade on one of her skates nearly took out his eye. Instead it merely gave him that scar.”
    “It’s frightful,” she murmurs, but then she stares up at the sun and her tone changes. “I rather love to skate. Do you?”
    “I never have, so I don’t know.”
    “Does Lake Van not freeze?”
    “Oh, it does. I just never happened to skate.”
    “In that case, I will have to teach you.”
    “Somehow I don’t see Aleppo ever growing cold enough for there to be ice.”
    “Then you’ll have to come to Boston.”
    He turns to her reflexively, unsure what to make of this American forwardness.
    “Or, after the war, you could take me to Van,” she continues. “But, trust me, there are plenty of Armenians in Boston.”
    An unexpected tremor of happiness ripples along his spine. As if she can sense it, she takes two fingers on her free hand and runs them over his cheek. “Promise me,” she says, “if you ever get a scar here, it will only be from an ice skate.”
•   •   •
    C ONSUL M ARTIN GAZES at the flame from the oil lamp through the