Emmi Itäranta - Memory of Water

‘It will never be the same again,’ he muttered, his lips tense. ‘Wood like that is hard to find nowadays, and the expertise for building a teahouse doesn’t exist in any old village.’

In those days a silence wavered between my parents, dense with stirring, well-hidden fear and nameless, unspoken things. It was like a calm surface of water, extreme and unnatural: a single word dropped on it, a single shifting stone at the bottom would change it, create a circle and yet another circle, until the reflection was warped, unrecognisable with the force of the movement. We avoided talking about any but the most everyday things, because the presence of the soldiers grew invisible walls between us that we had no courage to shatter.

In the evenings I did not go to bed until I had privately checked that the soldiers hadn’t taken their screen-devices towards the fell, and in the mornings my heart was thick and heavy in my throat when I woke up to the thought that they might have expanded their search outside the house and garden. I couldn’t eat breakfast until I was certain this wasn’t the case. In my dreams I saw the waters hidden in stone, and in the middle of the night I would wake to the strangling feeling in my chest that somehow, impossibly, the sound of the spring carried all the way from the fell to the house. I listened to the unmoving silence for a long time, until sleep sank me again.

At first I thought my mother was faking an interest in the equipment of the water seekers to keep up appearances and to cover her nervousness. As the days passed, I came to understand that behind her behaviour there was a real interest that she had a hard time concealing. She was aching to know more about the equipment, to try it for herself, to learn the mechanisms and applications. It had been over fifteen years since she had worked as a field researcher for the University of New Piterburg, and military technology was more developed than anything civilians could access. She walked with the soldiers, asking questions about their machinery, and I could see on her face how she was making mental notes on things so she could write them down in the quiet of her study. My father noticed this, too, and his manner became curt and distant towards her. Everything that was left unsaid during those days tightened around us like a web that might suffocate and crush us, if we didn’t find a way out soon enough.

I wanted to talk to Sanja. I wished I hadn’t left her workshop so abruptly. I had sent her three messages and asked her to come over, but she hadn’t replied. I wasn’t sure what to make of this, because she didn’t tend to reply that often anyway. While my mother walked around studying the equipment of the soldiers, and my father stood by the teahouse, apparently hoping his presence would limit the damage caused by them, I carried books into my room and set up camp by them.

The recording on the silver-coloured disc was bothering me. I had always had a relatively clear idea of what the past-world had been like – or rather, of how little was known about the past-world. For all my winter daydreams and snow-longing, I had never questioned what I had been taught at school and what the books said. I had taken for granted that what was generally considered to be true really was the truth, and nothing beyond that mattered. But what if it wasn’t so? What if the stories that remained were just darkened and distorted shards of a mirror – or worse: what if someone had deliberately shattered the mirror in order to change the reflection? I know what you’ve done… And if I have anything to say about it, the whole world will know what really happened, the voice on the disc had said.

After I had spread the books gathered from the house all over the floor, I eventually found two large world maps in them. I placed them next to each other for comparison. One showed the past-world, the world of cold winters and skyscraping cities. The other showed the present-world.

I stared at the outlines of the continents and oceans, changed, barely recognisable.

So much lost to salt and water.

I looked at the places nearest to me. The White Sea, east of my home village and Kuoloyarvi, had not reached as far inland, as close to us as it did now. The lakes and rivers in the Scandinavian Union had merged into wider waters, and the old coastlines were long gone.

That was not all.

Drowned islands, coastal plains, river deltas turned salt-bitten; and large cities, now silent ghosts of lives past in their shroud of sea, everywhere, everywhere.

On the old map North and South Poles were shown in white. I knew this stood for the ice that had sometimes been called eternal ice, until it became clear that it wasn’t eternal after all. Near the end of the past-world era the globe had warmed and seas had risen faster than anyone could have anticipated. Tempests tore the continents and people fled their homes to where there was still space and dry land. During the final oil wars a large accident contaminated most of the fresh-water reserves of former Norway and Sweden, leaving the areas uninhabitable.

The following century was known as the Twilight Century, during which the world, or what remained of it, ran out of oil. With this a major part of the past-world technology was gradually lost. Staying alive became the most important thing. All that wasn’t considered necessary for everyday survival faded away.

I thought about the words recorded on the disc. The male voice had spoken about Trondheim, Trøndelag and Jotunheimen. They belonged to the Lost Lands, as the contaminated areas of the Scandinavian Union were called. If the Jansson Expedition was real, what had they been doing in the Lost Lands during the Twilight Century? How had it even been possible or safe for them to go there? I nearly wanted to believe in Sanja’s claim that the recording on the disc was just a story. It seemed true to me, but I knew that was what the best stories were like: you could believe in them, even if you knew they were imagination. Yet something about the disc didn’t quite convince me. The story on it lacked the structure of a designed, made-up story. It had the shape of reality and truth.

I closed the books and piled them on my desk, but not until I had folded the corners of the map pages.

Six days after the arrival of the soldiers, Sanja appeared unexpectedly at our gate. She had walked all the way from the village, and she carried a pile of empty waterskins strapped on her back. They were the same ones I had used to take water to her as a payment for the repair job a few weeks earlier.

‘Let’s go inside,’ I told her.

‘My father said you have a local invasion going on here,’ Sanja said as we got inside the house. ‘Why on earth?’

She took off her insect hood. I helped her unload the waterskins off her back and hung them from a hat rack on the entrance wall.

‘I guess they think we have a hidden well under the teahouse floor or something,’ I replied. My voice sounded calmer than I would have expected.

‘I should’ve known you’re hiding some dark secret,’ Sanja said and her expression dissolved into one of her lopsided grins. ‘Don’t they really have anything better to do? Maybe someone’s pissed with your dad and dropped them a false lead just to create havoc.’

I smiled, but my face felt stiff. It seemed she had no intention of mentioning our quarrel, and I felt no need to do so, either. Some rifts will close on their own, I thought. There was no reason to force them open again.

‘Are you in a hurry to go back?’ I asked.

Sanja shook her head.

I made ice tea for us in the kitchen. Ice lumps crackled in the earthenware cups, as I poured the pale yellow, lukewarm liquid over them. We sat down at the table, and I got some dried figs out of the cupboard.