An Exclusive Excerpt From `The Sandcastle Girls’
asbarez
Friday, July 6th, 2012
Author Chris Bohjalian prepares to autograph his books
EDITOR’S NOTE: Chris Bohjalian’s latest book, `The Sandcastle Girls,’
will be released on July 17. Prior to that, on July 16 ANC-Grassroots
will kick off Bohjalian’s national book tour with a luncheon and a
public gathering. Bohjalian kindly provided an excerpt from his book
for publication in Asbarez. It is the Prologue to his novel, which is
about the Armenian Genocide. Please read and share.
BY CHRIS BOHJALIAN
When my brother and I were small children, we would take turns sitting
on our grandfather’s lap. There he would grab the rope-like rolls of
baby fat that would pool at our waists and bounce us on his knees,
cooing, `Big belly, big belly, big belly.’ This was meant as an
affectionate, grandfatherly gesture, not his subtle way of suggesting
that if we didn’t lose weight, we would wind up as Jenny Craig
testimonials. Just for the record, there is also a chance that when my
brother was being bounced on Grandpa’s lap, he was wearing a white
turtleneck shirt and red velvet knickers. This is the outfit my mother
often had him wear when we visited our grandparents, because this was
the get-up that in her opinion made him look most British – and he had
to look British, since she was going to make him sing the 1965
Herman’s Hermits pop hit `I’m Henry the VIII, I Am.’ The song had been
popular four years earlier when she had been pregnant with us, and in
some disturbingly Oedipal fashion she had come to view it as their
song.
Yup, a fat kid in red velvet knickers singing Herman’s Hermits with a
bad British accent. How is it that no one beat him up?
I, in turn, would be expected to sing `Both Sides Now,’ which was
marginally more timely – the song had been popular only a year
earlier, in 1968 – though not really any more appropriate. I was four
years old and had no opinions at all on love’s illusions. But I did,
despite the great dollops of Armenian DNA inside me, have waves of
blond spit curls, and so my mother fixated on the lyric, `bows and
flows of angel hair.’ I wore a blue mini-skirt and white patent
leather go-go boots. No one was going to beat me up, but it is a
wonder that a social welfare agency never suggested to my mother that
she was dressing her daughter like a four-year-old hooker.
My grandfather – both of my grandparents, for different reasons – was
absolutely oblivious to rock and roll, and I have no idea what he made
of his grandchildren decked out for American Bandstand. Moreover, if
1969 were to have a soundtrack, invariably it would have depended upon
Woodstock, not Herman’s Hermits or Judy Collins. Nevertheless, the
only music I recall at my grandparents’ house that year – other than
my brother’s traumatizing refrain, `Everyone was a En-er-e (En-er-e!)’
– was the sound of the oud when my grandfather would play Armenian
folk songs or strum it like a madman while my aunt belly danced for
all of us. And why my aunt was belly-dancing remains a mystery to me.
The only time Armenian girls belly-danced was when they were
commandeered into a sheik’s harem, and it was a choice of dying in the
desert or accepting the tattoos and learning to shimmy. Trust me, you
will never see an Armenian girl belly-dancing on So You Think You Can
Dance.
Regardless, the belly dancing – as well as my grandfather’s affection
for his chubby grandchildren – does suggest that their house existed
beneath a canopy of playfulness and good cheer. Sometimes it did. But
equally often there was an aura of sadness, secrets, and wistfulness.
Even as a child I detected the subterranean currents of loss when I
would visit.
That belly dancing may also give you the impression that my childhood
was rather exotic. It wasn’t. Most of my childhood was unexceptionably
suburban, either in a tony commuter enclave outside of Manhattan or in
Miami, Florida. But my grandparents’ house was different: My aunt
really did belly dance until she was forty, and there really were
hookah pipes (no longer used, as far as I know), plush Oriental
carpets, and thick leather books filled with an alphabet I could not
begin to decipher. There was always the enveloping aroma of cooked
lamb and mint, because my grandfather insisted on lamb chops even for
breakfast: lamb chops and a massive cereal bowl filled with Frosted
Flakes and Cocoa Puffs, eaten with yogurt instead of milk. My
grandfather loved American cereal, a culinary quirk that my
grandmother embraced because it made her life easier. After sautéing
the morning chop, my grandmother would refer to my grandfather’s
breakfast as a `king meal.’ My sense early on was that anything with
lamb was a `king meal.’
And yet despite beginning the day with a big bowl of Cocoa Puffs,
there was also a relentless formality to the house. My grandfather was
an immigrant who, like many immigrants from the early part of the
twentieth century, never quite mastered the art of Wasp casual cool.
He was the polar opposite of his Presbyterian in-laws from Boston (and
the genetic wellspring of my blond hair). Until he was a dying,
bedridden old man and his wardrobe had shrunk to pajamas and a Scotch
plaid bathrobe, I never saw him wearing anything but a shirt and a
vest and a tie. He might strip off his jacket when he would play his
beloved oud or trim the hedges or clean the oil burner in the
basement, but he was still very likely to be wearing a white dress
shirt. This is a guy who never owned a v-neck tennis sweater. When I
study the pictures of him in old family photo albums, my memories are
corroborated; in almost every snapshot, he is wearing a suit. There is
even a series of him on vacation at a bungalow by a lake in upstate
New York, sitting with his legs extended into the tall grass before
him, his back against a picnic table, wearing a gray pinstripe
business suit. In one of the images, he is at that picnic table with
other Armenian men in black and gray suits, and there is a cluster of
closed violin and oud cases on the wooden tabletop. The men look like
Prohibition era mobsters on the lam.
And it is interesting that even in 1928, when he was building the
elegant brick house in a New York City suburb that may have been my
favorite of all the houses anyone in my extended family ever lived in
when I was growing up, he looked almost as bald as the very old man I
knew in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I presumed until he died in
1976 and my father corrected me at his father’s funeral that the man I
called Grandpa had been born a senior citizen.
`No,’ my father said, `he wasn’t born old.’
That evening, when we returned home to Bronxville after the reception
that followed the internment, my father for the first time told me
small bits and pieces of my grandparents’ youth. Soon my grandmother
would tell me more. And so while I have begun this story with a moment
from 1969, the reality is that I could have begun in 1976. Or, like
all Armenian stories, I could have begun it more than a half-century
earlier. I could have begun it in 1915.
Nineteen-fifteen is the year of the Slaughter You Know Next to Nothing
About. The anniversary of its commencement – its centennial – is
nearing. If you are not Armenian, you probably know little about the
deportations and the massacres: the death of a million and a half
civilians. Meds Yeghern. The Great Catastrophe. It’s not taught much
in school, and it’s not the sort of thing most of us read before going
to bed. And yet to understand my grandparents, some basics would help.
(Imagine an oversized paperback book with a black and yellow cover,
The Armenian Genocide for Dummies. Or, perhaps, an afterschool
special.) Years ago, I tried to write about it, never even mentioning
my grandparents, and that manuscript exists only in the archives of my
alma mater – where my papers are stored. I was never happy with that
book and never even shared it with my editor. Only my husband read it,
and he came to precisely the same conclusion that I did: The book was
a train wreck. Didn’t work in the slightest. It was too cold, too
distant. Instead, he said, I should have shamelessly commandeered my
grandparents’ history. After all, they had been there.
He didn’t know the details of their story then; neither did I. Once we
knew the truth, years later, he would change his mind about whether I
had the moral authority to exploit their particular horror. By then,
however, I was obsessed and unstoppable.
And so now I am indeed telling their stories, once more focusing on a
corner of the world most of us couldn’t find on a map and a moment in
history that – though once known – is largely forgotten. I begin by
imagining the mountains of eastern Turkey, and a village not far from
a picturesque city and a magnificent lake called Van. I see a beach in
the Dardanelles. A townhouse in Boston’s Back Bay. And, most often, I
see Aleppo and the absolutely unforgiving Syrian desert that surrounds
it.
I am making my family’s history sound downright epic, aren’t I? I
probably shouldn’t. My sense is that if you look at anyone’s family in
1915 – an era we see through a haze of black-and-white photographs or
scratched and grainy silent film footage, the movements of everyone
oddly jerky – it will feel rather epic. And I honestly don’t view my
family’s saga as epic. If I were forced to categorize it, I would
probably choose romance. Or, when I look at the photos of me in my
miniskirt or my brother in his red velvet knickers in a living room
that looks like the Ottoman annex at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I
might even suggest comedy.
But for my grandparents in 1915 and 1916? Their sagas looked very
different. When they met, my grandmother was, quite literally, on a
mission. She was an essentially directionless young woman from what
had to have been one of Boston’s most priggish families, suddenly
witness to relentless slaughter, starvation, and disease. She had a
spanking new sheepskin from Mount Holyoke and a crash course in
rudimentary nursing when she accompanied her father into the inferno.
She could speak, thanks to Boston do-gooders in the Friends of
Armenia, a bit of Turkish and a smattering of Armenian.
Meanwhile, my grandfather, after enduring all of that slaughter,
starvation, and disease – after losing almost all of his family –
would finally fight back. He would enlist in an army, joining men who
knew little of Armenia and cared mostly about defeating a dying empire
for reasons that had nothing to do with a blood feud. And neither of
my grandparents would have seen anything romantic or comic at all in
the world that summer of 1915. If they had been forced to categorize
their stories at the time, I am quite certain they both would have
chosen tragedy.