Object No. 16 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Sam Means, has ended. Original price: $2.99. Final price: $26.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

After the death of his older brother, Yuri III, in 1328, Ivan I of Moscow took up the throne of the Russian Empire, as well as residence in the royal palace. Yuri had been a well-known lover of aquatic life, and Ivan found that the private quarters of the palace were home to a staggering array of fish, some already suffering from obvious neglect in the absence of their exalted caretaker. Ivan lived up to his epithet, “the moneybag,” and had the private aquarium moved to sumptuous new quarters in the city center and provided for in perpetuity, thus establishing the first public Aquarium on the continent.

Yuri’s love of fish had also influenced his decorating scheme, most of which Ivan changed to suit his own taste, but the younger brother kept a single, fish-shaped topiary in the royal gardens as a tribute.  When Ivan’s son, Simeon (“the proud”) succeeded him, he was unaware of the familial provenance of the fish-tree, but fond memories of a childhood spent playing in its shade, and spinning fanciful tales about its mystical powers, led him to maintain it through his own sweeping redesign of the palace grounds.

When they married, Simeon’s first wife, Eupraxia of Smolensk, brought as a dowry The Fire of Minsk, at the time the most celebrated ruby in existence. He was so enamored of the gem that, even after rejecting Eupraxia for her frigidity in the marital chamber and remarrying, he refused to return The Fire. Paranoid about theft, or a chivalric attempt by Eupraxia’s family to retrieve her birthright, Simeon decided to hide it. He hired a craftsman, whom he had exiled afterward, to cast hundreds of tiny replicas of Yuri III’s beloved topiary, fitting all but one with ingenious paste reproductions of the ruby as the fish’s eye. (It should be noted that the original topiary itself had no eye to speak of.) The last, marked in a way that only Simeon himself knew, contained the Fire itself.

Before his death in 1353, Simeon took monastic vows, renouncing all wordly wealth, and spread his tiny topiaries to every corner of the Empire, never intimating to a soul which one held the real thing or how to tell. The ruby’s location is still unknown, but many of the fish still survive in private hands, and any one of them could contain The Royal Fire of Minsk in its unblinking eye.

Object No. 80 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Mark Doty, has ended. Original price: $2.99. Final price: $76.]

As a young man I read a poem I’ve never run across again since. I found it in the school library. If you already knew what you wanted in this haphazard collection, you were sunk, but if you spent time pulling things off the high, not-much-visited steps, you could get lucky.

The poem was Anglo-Saxon, a riddle, and it had to do with cold armor that never clanked, with chain mail that moved with a strange fluidity, as if it were made of mercury – though I’m sure I’ve added that detail, in memory. The Anglo-Saxons didn’t have mercury, did they? Or maybe they did.

I think what I liked best about the poem was the feeling of things moving in darkness, beneath the surface, not at all troubled about being in the dark.  That and something about the allure of ancient silver, that there were mines, somewhere in the far mountains, and people had learnt the methods of refining the hidden ore and bringing the malleable shining stuff into the light.

Which does not exactly explain why I stole the spoons. It was an outdoor fair, at the end of September, in a field that belonged to the Kiwanis, rented out on weekends for carnivals or farmers’ markets or, this day, the big rows of tables on which the collectors had arrayed their stuff. It seems obvious now, but it had never occurred to me that practically everything here had belonged to someone, perhaps several people, and that most of those people were dead. It was all here to be redistributed to some new place, for a while.

I was fifteen, I didn’t have any money, but it would be false to say that’s why I took them. I never looked at the price tag. I acted on impulse; I saw them, from a few feet away, and felt as if I was suddenly a little off balance. I moved toward them directly, peripherally aware that the woman who minded the goods was turned in another direction, to help a customer who was considering the purchase of pottery jug. I put my hand over the cluster of spoons – they were nestled one into another, like silver fish who each had swallowed a smaller member of their tribe – and slipped them into my jacket pocket.

And then what? I couldn’t show them to anyone. I was a little ashamed of stealing them, but that feeling was not as strong as my pleasure, when I could lift them from the back of my sock drawer, and peel back the tissue paper I’d wrapped them in, and study this private token I’d come to possess.

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