Colette and the Silver Samovar Read online

  My mom usually picks me up after school. She teaches art to street people in a drop-in center near our apartment building, but she always makes sure she finishes in time to walk home with me. Once I overheard my dad telling her that she should get a real job because we could use the money, but she said she wanted to be able to meet me every day after school and walk me home and that no amount of money in the world would make up for her not being able to do that.

  Today she was wearing a bright red cape that made her look like a bullfighter. Her blond hair was gathered into a ponytail on top of her head. It pointed straight up like a spear of broccoli, and there was a paintbrush sticking out of it. She was leaning on the fence talking to Zain’s grandmother. She waved when she saw me, and her bangles tinkled like a wind chime. The smell of the incense that she burns in her art studio drifted across the air toward me. My father once said that my mother is a feast for the senses, and I agree with him.

  “We are going out for tea,” she announced. One day after school, we had a picnic. Another day, we went to the park and painted a picture of the sunflowers, and she framed it for me. And once we took the ferry to Toronto Island just for the fun of it.

  “It’s a perfect day for tea,” she continued as she tugged me along the sidewalk. “Smell the smoke in the air? That’s the smell of the bonfires that the fairies build to boil their special dyes. The ones they use to paint the leaves gold and crimson.”

  I looked at her dubiously. Dubious means doubtful. I am dubious about lots of things because, after all, my father is an engineer and he tells me that everything must be analyzed. But when my mother talks about things like fairies, I don’t want to be dubious. Secretly, I think that nine years, three months and ten days is too old to believe in the fairies and magic that my mother believes in. But when my mother’s eyes sparkle with the fun of it all, I don’t care that my father says we shouldn’t believe nonsense and that things have to be proven to be real. I want her to go on and on.

  “I know!” she said when she saw me looking at her. “When we get home, let’s draw a picture of the fairies painting the leaves!”

  “What do the fairies make the dyes from?” I asked her.

  She flung her cape over her shoulder as she waved at the sky. “From colors wrung from clouds that brush up against the sunset and sunrise,” she said. She picked up a rock and pointed at the burgundy and silver glints in the stone. “And from colors distilled from rocks. And from the petals of fallen flowers or the feathers of birds.”

  “Where do the fairies live?” I asked.

  “Ah,” she said. “No one knows. But on crisp fall days like this, when we can smell their bonfires, we know they are somewhere nearby.”

  We turned down a side street. The houses here were bigger and grander but more run-down than the other houses in the neighborhood. Many had been turned into boarding houses, and the fences along the cracked sidewalk were missing slats. A black cat sitting on a stone post watched us as we went by, its tail twitching. My mother’s voice dropped to a whisper. “This is a special kind of tearoom,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You’ll see.” She knocked at a bright red door covered with mysterious symbols.

  “The signs of the zodiac,” Mom said when she saw me looking. I knew what the zodiac was. I’d seen the horoscope book on her bedside table.

  “Superstitious hogwash” was what my father said about horoscopes.

  The door creaked open. A tiny person stood there. “Hello, Alice,” she said to my mother. “Is this your little one?”

  Since I was taller than she was, that seemed funny to me. The little woman grinned. She was draped in a long robe that looked like a curtain of moonbeams. As she led us up a set of narrow, creaking stairs into a small round room, she said, “Welcome to my turret.” She pulled herself up onto a seat that might have been a baby’s high chair and beamed at us. A brass teapot stood in the center of a round table, and two white china cups with saucers were set out in front of two chairs, one of which had a fat cat drowsing on it.

  “Sit,” the tiny woman commanded. My mother nudged the cat off the chair, and I sat on the other.

  The woman poured two cups of black tea. My mother took a sip and nodded at me to do the same. Normally I don’t like tea unless it has three spoonfuls of sugar and half a cup of milk in it, but this tea tasted smoky and strangely delicious. The walls of the room were dark blue, and there were paintings of stars everywhere.

  “My name is Soraya,” said the little woman. “Your mother told me that she named you Colette after a famous French writer because when she looked into your baby eyes, she knew you were a fellow artist.”

  “I knew you were going to be a writer,” my mother told me once. “I could see it in the way you studied the world. It was like you were just waiting to make up stories. I wanted you to have a name that reflected your destiny.”

  My mother handed her cup to Soraya, who swirled it around three times, then placed it upside down on the saucer. After a few seconds, she turned it right side up and set it down in front of her, making sure that the handle of the teacup faced my mother.

  “What’s she doing?” I whispered to my mother.

  “Reading my tea leaves,” she whispered back.

  “There’re only clumps of wet, brown stuff in there,” I said.

  “Just wait,” my mother answered.

  Soraya started humming. I took another sip of my tea.

  “Leave a little bit of liquid in your cup, my dear,” Soraya said, glancing at me. Then she pursed her lips and started shaking her head.

  “What is it, Soraya?” my mother asked.

  Soraya took my cup and began to swirl it. “Let’s do Colette’s first.”

  She placed my cup upside down, waited and turned it right side up, the handle facing toward me.

  Now she glanced back and forth between my mother’s cup and mine. She shook her head and started muttering.

  I wished my father was there to say that this was all silly superstitious nonsense.

  Finally Soraya spoke. “Both of your cups are showing change.” She pointed at a clump of glistening leaves on the rim of my mother’s cup. The leaves nearest the rim tell us about the future,” she said. “They form the shape of a dagger.”

  It did look like a dagger. It looked like a dagger I’d seen once in a museum, a dagger with a curved blade that was used by an Egyptian prince.

  “What does that mean?” my mother asked.

  “It means danger,” said Soraya, and then she stopped.

  “Danger?” my mother persisted.

  “You must be careful,” Soraya said. “Watch for the unexpected. Be cautious.”

  “What does mine say?” I asked.

  “These leaves are in the shape of an iceberg,” she said. “There is danger here also. It could be related to your mother’s reading. But,” she said, lowering her voice and pointing at another clump of leaves, “here we see an elephant. An elephant is a sign of wisdom and strength. It means you will know how to handle what lies ahead.”

  “That’s enough,” my mother said. She put twenty dollars on the table, and Soraya pushed it back toward her.

  “I won’t take that today,” she said. “Bring me one of your drawings the next time you come.”

  My mother leaned across the table and kissed Soraya on the cheek. She gripped my mother’s hand when she stood up.

  “And mind how you go,” she said.

  It was colder, and the leaves shone with a coating of rain. My mother’s red cape was like a moving flame in the dark night.

  When we got to our building, we entered the elevator in silence. In our apartment, I hung up my jacket, went into my room and pulled out my journal. I knew there was no point in asking whether or not we were going to draw pictures of fairies painting the leaves.

  The magic had suddenly gone out of the day.

  Chapter 3

  After the tea-leaf reading, I was glad when
my father came home and surprised us by cooking food that his mother made back in Iran. He made khoresht-e-fesenjan, which is chicken in a pomegranate and walnut sauce. It is one of my very favorite things to eat in the world.

  “It’s a celebration,” my father said. “Your mother and I have something to tell you.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “We have made a big decision about our life,” my father said. He reached across the table and touched my hand. “I am not happy working as a taxi driver. The dreams I had when I came to Canada have not come true. It is time for me to take action.”

  I thought of the little lady in the turret telling me that I would know how to handle what lay ahead. Is this what she was talking about?

  “Do not look so alarmed, Colette,” my father said. “I am simply going to Iran to talk to my family. I will ask them to help us and will only be gone a few weeks. I have put my pride aside. I will do what I have to do.”

  My mother sniffed. “What is wrong with you both?” he asked. “Did something happen today?”

  I wanted to shout, “The fortune-teller says there is danger here. You can’t leave us right now!” but my mother caught my eye and shook her head. Strands of hair drifted around her face like feathers dancing on the wind. My father smoothed her hair up toward her ponytail, but it came right back down. My mother put her hand over my father’s.

  “We’ll miss you,” she said.

  “I wish I could help you,” I said.

  “You do help me,” my father said. “You give my life meaning.”

  My mother beamed. My father says that when my mother smiles, she could light up the whole city of Toronto.

  “Hamid,” she said, “I know we talked this through, but are you sure things can’t wait? Just for a little while longer?”

  My father shook his head and sipped his chai tea. “Sometimes waiting and hoping for the best isn’t enough. You know that I have been trying for five years to begin a new career. Now it is time to act. My parents are expecting me, and my ticket is booked. Alice, we agreed on all this.”

  “When are you going?” I asked him.

  “I leave next week,” my father said. “I need to make peace with my father. I need to speak to my mother. I would like to become a teacher of mathematics. I have found out that I must go to school for two more years, and I am hoping my parents will lend me the money.”

  “You’re right, Hamid,” my mother said. “Of course you must go. You will make such a wonderful teacher.”

  “Can’t we go with you?” I asked. I remembered the photograph of the smiling people and how I thought they looked like they might be happy to meet me.

  “I wish that were possible,” my father said. “But I have enough money for only one ticket. Since I will not be earning anything while I am gone, the rest of our savings must be used for you and your mother to live on.”

  My mother gave me a gentle hug. “You must have faith,” she told me. “Everything will be all right.”

  “Your mother and I have some things to discuss,” my father said. “Why don’t you go to your room? You must have homework, no?”

  My father is always telling me to go and do my homework. My mother says education is fine, but experiencing things is good too. My father says education is the most important thing of all.

  I closed the door to my room and looked at the posters of Iran I had pinned to my wall. A few years ago, my father had brought them home for me. He said a travel agency was taking all their posters of Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan off their walls and throwing them away.

  My mother said that was like throwing away the baby with the bathwater. I laughed when I heard that, because it seemed like no one would ever do something that silly. But my father said that this is exactly what it was like and that sometimes English has very good expressions.

  One of the posters showed the dome of a beautiful mosque covered in blue tiles that sparkled in the sunshine. A flock of pigeons was resting on the top, and worked into the blue tiles were other tiles in white, forming a graceful lacy pattern of flowers. My father told me that this was the dome of a famous mosque in Isfahan and that people came to see it from all over the world. The other poster showed a marketplace called a bazaar. This poster showed a smiling man sitting behind giant bags of spices that were the colors of fall leaves. My father said that the spices had names like turmeric, paprika, cumin, black caraway, saffron and sumac. My father has some of these spices in our kitchen, and once he caught me sniffing the cumin jar. He laughed when I told him I was trying to find words to describe the smell. He sniffed at the jar with me and we made a game out of it. Smoky, he said. Musky, I said.

  I tried to imagine what it would be like in Iran. The air would be dusty and dry, because there is a lot of desert there. The pigeons on the dome would be cooing, like they were gossiping to each other. The people in the mosque would be quiet, because they’d be praying. A mosque is a church. I think someone would lead them in prayer, and maybe they’d be speaking, but there was so much I didn’t know. How could I ever write about it?

  My door opened slightly, and my father asked, “What are you doing?”

  I rolled onto my back. I pointed at my poster. “Thinking about what it is like where you are going.”

  He sat beside me. “I grew up near Isfahan, near that mosque. I come from a small family. My older sister is married and has two children. Their names are Mohammed and Fariba.”

  “How old are they?”

  “They are teenagers now. I haven’t seen them since I came to Canada eleven years ago.”

  I sat up and stared into my father’s face. “How come you haven’t gone to see them?”

  “I have been angry,” he said.

  “Why, Dad?” I asked.

  “Because they told me not to come to Canada. I was stubborn and I was young.” He smiled. “Well, younger, anyway. I thought I would be able to work in my profession. But when I arrived, I discovered that it is very difficult to become qualified without a lot of money. Then I met your mother and we got married. And then we had you!”

  “Did your parents ever meet Mom?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “They were angry with me for my stubborn head and for marrying without their blessing. Many things were said between us. These words have stood in the way for ten years, like stones in a wall.”

  “Do they know about me?” I asked.

  “Of course they do,” he said.

  “Do you think they would like to meet me?”

  He reached over and ruffled my hair. “It would be their greatest delight.”

  Again I wanted to tell my father that the tiny woman in the tearoom had told my mother and me that there was danger coming, but the look on his face stopped me.

  “When I was small,” my father said, “I had a nursemaid who told me wonderful stories, all about ancient Persia.”

  “Where’s that?” I asked.

  “Persia is what Iran used to be called,” he said. “It is a very old country, full of history.” He hugged me close to him. “Let me tell you one of my nursemaid’s favorite stories. It is called Bahram and the Snake Prince.”

  My father hardly ever talked about Iran. My mother once said he tried so hard to be a Canadian that he gave up thinking about where he came from.

  “There was a time and there wasn’t a time in the long ago,” my father began, “when a son named Bahram was born to a cocoon peeler and his wife.” My father’s voice was deep and rumbly with the hint of foreign places, just like the spices in our cupboard. “But Bahram’s father died, and his mother had to raise him alone, and she was very poor. Soon the day came,” my father went on, “when Bahram and his mother had one last thing of value to sell, and that was their samovar.”

  “Just like the one we have,” I said.

  “Yes,” nodded my father. “Very much like that one.”

  An Iranian friend had given the silver samovar to my father when he’d married my mother. It was our most precious
possession, used for brewing tea on only the most special occasions.

  “What happened next?” I asked.

  “Well, Bahram’s mother did what she had to do. Although it grieved her to part with it, the samovar was sold for three hundred dirhams.”

  “Is that a lot of money?” I asked.

  “It was a great deal of money. Especially in those days,” said my father. “And Bahram was old enough by then for his mother to give him some of the money and tell him to go and buy some cocoons and learn how to make silk the way his father had.”

  My mother poked her head in the door. When she saw that my father was telling a story, she came and sat on the floor beside the bed. She hugged her knees to her chest and rested her head against my father’s leg. “Go on,” she said. “I like to hear the stories too.”

  “So Bahram took a hundred dirhams from his mother and went to the bazaar,” continued my father. “While he was looking for cocoons to buy, he saw three men beating a bag with a stick. Bahram went to the men and asked what they were doing. When they told him that there was a cat in the bag, Bahram told them not to beat a poor animal and to let it go. ‘Why should we release a worthless cat?’ they jeered. ‘If your heart bleeds so much for this animal, then give us a hundred dirhams, and we’ll let it go.’ So Bahram gave the men his money and set the cat free. The cat rubbed against Bahram’s leg and said, ‘Kindness is always remembered.’ Then it walked away.”

  “What did his mother say?” I asked, thinking of the poor family with nothing to eat.

  My father said, “Bahram’s mother did not scold him. Instead, the next morning, she said that he had done well, because animals were in the world before people, and we must protect them. Then she gave him another hundred dirhams and sent him to the bazaar to find cocoons to start his business.”

  “I hope he does it this time,” I said.

  “On the way to the bazaar, he ran into some children dragging a dog to the top of the town wall to throw him down. ‘Don’t hurt the animal,’ Bahram pleaded. They said, ‘If your heart bleeds for this dog, give us a hundred dirhams and he will be yours.’ Bahram gave the children his money and untied the dog. The dog placed a paw upon his knee and said, ‘Those who have done a good deed will receive good in return.’ Then it ran away.”