Strand of a Thousand Pearls: A Novel

1 / Matti Azizyan's Birthday, Five-thirty in the Morning At last, the luminous match was struck and the day was lit. But Matti had awakened earlierbefore her father rose from his dreamless bed and went, sorrowful, to the sea; before her sister Sofia's blue baby awoke and shook the house with his cough; before her sister Lizzie returned from night shift at the hospital, her high heels clacking on the living room floor, revealing under her white nurse's smock a shimmering low-necked dress and colorless bruises. Matti woke up knowing she'd had a bad dream but could not remember what it was. Solly Azizyan, short, barefoot, got off the iron bed with the springs that moaned like a weary lover, remembered that his mother was dead, and walked very quietly down the corridor with the Indian gods. Without the creaking of her parents' bedsprings, Matti would not have known that her father's small shadow was moving across the statues' stone faces. Every morning at daybreak, as he passed from the iron bed to the bathroom, her father was able to move his body without churning the air with his limbs, without stirring the dust that had settled on the statues, or swirling the warm breath rising from his wife's and children's lungs. He passed among the particles of light that filtered in from the living room, his footsteps almost ethereally delicate, and only the burbling of water in the basin indicated that he had completed his route and would shortly be going down to the sea. Matti held her breath and her thoughts when her father's shadow stopped abruptly and a circle of light fell on his face as he stood in the doorway of the children's room. A smile flickered on his scorched fisherman's face, sprinkled with beads of water he didn't care to press into a towel. Matti's eyelids slammed shut and she pretended to be asleep, but she'd seen how much her father had aged in the six months she'd been away at boarding school. She noticed his new teeth that replaced the bad old ones, the white stubble sprouting amid the furrows of his face, and that the coppery glint of his hair was fading to a dull gray. Her eyeballs darted under the lids and her lashes quivered, but she did not stir. She let her father caress her face and hair with the forlorn gaze of parents who are unable to save their children, and waited for him to walk away. But he didn't want to move. Her father was full of longings, and not only for her. He missed his mother, Grandma Touran, who had died before Matti was sent to boarding school. He missed his wife, Iran, who had withdrawn from him into psalms and memorial candles. He missed his son, Maurice, who was sleeping, shut away and ill-humored, in the adjoining room. And he missed Matti's older sisters, Sofia, Marcelle and Lizzie, who had been cuddly, laughing girls and were now embittered, disappointed women. He missed the children he used to have years ago, when he was still able to comfort them with boiled milk that he poured from cup to cup till it cooled, and sweetened with lots of honey. Breathing lightly and furtively, Matti smelled the odor of salt on his clothes and kelp on his skin, and was almost tempted to open her eyes, jump up and sit on the edge of the bed, calling out, "Come, Daddy, come to me, I'm awake now!" But she stopped herself. The previous evening, when she'd come home from boarding school in honor of her birthday, her father had still been at sea, and she'd fallen asleep before he returned. She knew that this evening, when her birthday was over and she'd gone back to school, he would still be selling his catch at the stall in the wholesale market in Netanya. Solly was torn between his varioDorit Rabinyan is the author of 'Strand of a Thousand Pearls: A Novel', published 2002 under ISBN 9780375508110 and ISBN 0375508112.