The Little Teaspoons

The little teaspoons were so delicate — thin, graceful, silver, with the faint shimmer of gilding. They must have dated back to pre-revolutionary times and had appeared in our home when I was about five years old. I vaguely remember that someone — one of my parents’ friends — brought them as a gift. Most likely it was for some wedding anniversary, because the gift was symbolic: two teaspoons firmly tied together with a gilded ribbon and a little bow.

That evening the house was noisy and merry. Someone played the guitar, people sang, danced, and someone spent the entire evening drumming out a rhythm on a wobbly Viennese chair. As they say, the whole house was shaking. Since our entire home consisted of one narrow thirteen-meter room that my parents jokingly called “the streetcar,” there was of course no chance that I, lying behind a curtain in my corner, could fall asleep before morning. Through my drowsiness came fragments of old romances, the rattling drumbeat of the chair, and the clinking of glasses and teaspoons in tea cups.

For many, many years those teaspoons lived in our home. During that time we moved through several rooms and apartments; I grew up; my parents divorced and moved to different cities; I got married; my son was born, then my daughter; in turn I too divorced; and finally my little daughter and I set off for the other side of the world. But the spoons remained together in their special drawer, now in my grown son’s apartment.

In a foreign land, the first ten years are lonely and sad. There is no possibility of returning to see your loved ones, to walk the street you knew since childhood, to visit the birch grove outside Moscow, or to touch the familiar and beloved things that once surrounded you.

I was homesick too. Sometimes I asked my son to send me something with friends traveling back from home. That was how my father’s old books made their way to me, along with several paintings and albums filled with childhood photographs — of relatives, friends, and strangers alike.

After many years I finally managed to overcome countless obstacles and visit my hometown again. Everything seemed both the same and entirely different. The birds chirped differently, the lilacs smelled different, people on the streets spoke differently and dressed differently, and even the streetcar beneath my apartment windows rattled and rang differently. And my mother and father were gone. And the teaspoons were no longer in their usual place in the top drawer of the buffet.

“But where are the teaspoons?” I asked my son in dismay.
“Where?” he replied, surprised. “I sent them to you about five years ago with one of your friends over there.”

There was no point trying to reconstruct what had happened. The spoons had slipped away together with my former life. I would never hold them in my hands again. Well then — what could be done? One more loss to accept in a life already full of losses.

Several more years passed. My life gradually settled into place. I found interesting work, good friends and books, a beloved cat, a dear home, my comfort and peace. That heavy crushing feeling called nostalgia no longer dragged me unbearably toward the ground. And yet, every now and then — especially on weekends or on our old holidays — sadness and longing would return, and I would want to fly somewhere far away from my empty house.

And so, on one of those holidays — it was March 8th, a holiday the American people had never even heard of — a friend and I decided to cheer ourselves up with a little outing. We went, as we jokingly called it, “dumpster diving”: wandering through the little shops so common in small towns, proudly labeled “antiques” or “boutiques,” but really just secondhand stores.

The trip turned out rather dreary. The sky was gloomy. First a miserable rain drizzled down, then wet snow began to fall. The car kept skidding. Nothing interesting appeared on the cluttered shelves. Our mood did not improve. It was time to go home.

And then suddenly, in one tiny shop, from a dusty cardboard box crammed with useless junk, two delicate silver teaspoons peeked out at me, tightly bound together — not by a thin gilded ribbon, but by a thick plastic bag. My hands trembled as I reached for them, trying to see through the plastic:
“Mine? Not mine?”

No, most likely they were not mine. There was clearly a monogram engraved on them, one I did not remember — or perhaps had forgotten. But they were exactly, absolutely exactly the same: delicate, touching, long-forgotten teaspoons from my childhood.

Sitting in the car, I freed them from the ugly plastic bag and laughed as I held them close to me all the way home. My friend glanced at me in bewilderment from behind the steering wheel and finally said:
“And something this silly, bought for three dollars and seventy-five cents, can make you happy?”

But tears shone in my eyes, and in my head echoed the rhythm beaten out on that Viennese chair, the old forgotten romance, and the young voices of my parents.
At home I held the spoons out to my daughter, now already grown, who had stopped by for a moment. She looked at them with surprise — almost fear — and asked me in English:
“Mom… are you a witch?”
I laughed, but thought to myself:
“Well, perhaps I am. Who knows what the devil may be up to?”

And every morning the little spoons smile gently at me when I open the drawer of my kitchen table and the light and aroma of coffee fill my home.