Achaemenid Gold Earring

4

I hear something outside in the balcony.

Two doves, as white as snow, and beautiful, have perched on our railing. Doves often make me smile. They remind me of my childhood, and the long nights when my great aunt was visiting. Ezy, as we called her, was a great storyteller with a thousand tales. With her around we felt like the king in the  1001 nights. She was our own Shahrzad.

“Tell us another one”, we would plead.

Ezy never refused, never complained that she was too tired. We stayed up well past midnight while she told us story after story. Many of her stories included doves as part of the cast. The great white doves in her stories could speak, but only to each other. It was as if they were the storyteller’s special helper. It seemed the doves had a specific mission; they would offer us bits of information that the hero and heroines didn’t have access to, but were going to learn later in the story. A clever invention of the old storytellers, which made us feel smarter than the cast. The story doves always came in twos, and they were always sisters. Smart, clever, and intelligent sisters.

White Story Doves

5

Now, a set of white doves are sitting on our balcony, looking at me in that funny way only doves do, moving their tiny heads from one side to another. I stare right back at them.

“Hello”, I whisper, “Can you tell me what happened at our house that summer day in 1953?” I smile. “You could if you were Persian Story Doves. But you are not from the stories. You are just doves.” I smile. “You could if you were Persian Story Doves. But you are just doves,” I say to myself. “You can’t even understand me, which is fair since I can’t understand you either.”

“A long, long time ago, when people were still good and kind, they were able to understand the language of animals,” my grandmother would tell us whenever she told stories, not as often as Ezy.

“But I guess the world is now changed and is filled with bad people who are not good enough to understand your tongue,” I say to the doves.