Emmi Itäranta - Memory of Water

I have tried to remember what my mother did, find a confirmation in her tone of voice or her gestures that she did not understand more than she said then. At other moments I have tried to overturn this notion, find something to give me certainty that she did understand and knew that my father had begun to turn away from life. I cannot find either, no sign to verify this one way or the other. There is a distance between us that I can never cross, the distance of time and change and irreversible endings, the past that never shifts its shape. Because I cannot bridge the ravine, I must walk along its edge and let it be a part of my life, one of those shadow-filled cracks that I cannot deny and into which I can never bring light.

My mother knew. My mother did not know.

I remembered Sanja, who had been sauntering a few steps behind us and stayed outside the door. I left my parents at the entrance to stare at the soldiers turning the rooms inside out and went to walk Sanja to the gate.

I stopped on the veranda. I didn’t see Sanja right away, but then I spotted her. She was standing on the path to the teahouse. A blond-haired soldier I had often seen in Taro’s company and therefore assumed to be his closest petty officer was talking to her. I couldn’t hear their words and I didn’t see Sanja’s face clearly behind the insect hood, but her limbs were tense. The soldier told her something and Sanja moved uncomfortably. I walked to them. Sanja gave a start when she noticed me.

‘I should go,’ she said to me, or perhaps to the soldier.

‘Say hello to your father,’ the soldier said and started towards the teahouse.

‘An old school pal of my dad’s,’ Sanja told me as we were walking towards the gate. ‘He asked all sorts of weird stuff.’

Now that I think of Sanja, after all that has happened, this is one of the two images that emerge before my eyes uninvited, brighter than others that I have invited in vain: she is standing outside the gate, her black hair spilling to her forehead and cheeks, her body narrow and angular inside the rough linen fabric. The shadow of the insect hood is sharp on her face, and the tangled shapes of branches all around us are whisper-soft as they slowly carry her away from me.

I do not raise my hand.

I do not speak a word to forestall her.

I stand and watch the shadow-dance of the trees on her back, on her arms, I stand silent and still, and she walks away and doesn’t look behind.

Two days later the soldiers finally took their equipment and left our grounds. The short, bespectacled soldier came to give us a scant-worded explanation: the water had been found to be rain water gathered in an old underground well that hadn’t been used in decades. As the search continued, it became clear that there was no running water in the house or garden, other than the legal water pipe.

The last thing they did was to break the lock of the bookcase in the living room and pull out the three dozen or so leather-bound tea masters’ books. When they began to carry them out of the house, my father protested.

‘You won’t find anything important in them,’ he said. ‘They’re just personal family diaries. Besides, I could have given you the key, if you had asked,’ he added bitterly.

The soldiers carrying the books didn’t even stop to listen.

They left the garden full of holes, and their attempt at repairing the damage caused to the teahouse was nominal. My father marched to Taro.

‘Are you really going to leave the teahouse in this state?’ he asked. ‘Do you realise how difficult it will be to find someone to restore it?’

Taro’s eyes were black and hard and unmoving.

‘Master Kaitio,’ he said, ‘as the representative of New Qian I have the duty to investigate all possibilities that might lead to discovery of fresh water. It is not my fault if they turn out to be misleading.’

And so they left, without apologies, without compensation.

I had imagined that once the soldiers were gone, things would go back to the way they were, but the strange silence we had assumed persisted, an unnaturally calm surface of water around us.

I waited for a stone to shift.

When it did, it was in a way I didn’t see coming.

A couple of weeks after the investigation, I heard my parents talking to each other again in the kitchen.

‘They will come back,’ my mother said. ‘They’re not going to give up.’

‘They no longer have any reason,’ my father replied.

My mother was silent for a long time and said eventually, ‘I’ve made my decision.’

‘We must talk to Noria,’ my father said.

I had no time to get back to my room, so I pretended I was on my way out. My father came from the kitchen. I didn’t need to turn to look. I recognised his footsteps, and I knew he had stopped behind me.

‘Noria,’ he called softly. I stopped and looked at him. In the twilight of the hallway a web of shadows was lying on his face, a blue-grey dusk sifting through the windows. ‘Your mother wants to talk to you.’

I walked after him to the kitchen, where my mother was sitting at the table with an empty teacup in front of her. It was as if the shadows followed us and entwined around the large blaze lantern hanging above the table, dimming its light. I saw them on my mother’s face.

‘Sit down, Noria,’ she said.

I did. My father took a seat next to my mother. They were a unified front again, like on the edge of the excavation, two stone pillars, two tree-trunks intertwined.

‘Your father and I have talked,’ my mother said. ‘We both want to give you a secure life, but we have different opinions on how it should be.’ She was silent and looked at my father, who spoke in his turn.

‘Noria, if you don’t want to be a tea master, now is the time to say it. I’m convinced Taro will leave us alone now that he has searched the grounds. I doubt it will even cross his mind to look for the spring in the fell, and if it did, the spring is so well hidden that finding it is unlikely. We’re safe here. Unfortunately your mother believes differently.’

‘Taro will see through what he’s started,’ my mother said. ‘Life here cannot go back to the way it was. They got closer than you think already, Noria.’

‘But they didn’t go anywhere near the fell,’ I said.

‘There’s something you don’t know,’ my mother replied. ‘Tell her, Mikoa.’

‘You know we use more water than most families,’ my father began. ‘And you know that some of it is quota water, but some comes from the spring. You must have noticed the difference.’

The water used in tea ceremonies always tasted fresh, as if had been just drawn from the spring. It was part of the art of tea. My father had taught me to always taste the water used for tea and to choose the freshest, cleanest, if there was a choice. Otherwise we used the water coming from the water pipes, which at the beginning of the month always tasted stale and slightly fishy, as was the case with purified sea water. Near the end of the month there was a clear improvement in the taste. Unlike in most homes, we did not save water, and we never ran out of it or needed to buy overpriced water from merchants.

‘Do we use our water quota for the first few weeks of each month, and switch to the water of the spring when we run out?’ I asked. ‘But how do they come from the same pipe?’

‘It would be too hard to carry all the water from the fell to the house,’ my mother said. ‘It would also be suspicious. One would need a helicarriage and large water containers and frequent visits. Someone would notice sooner or later the tea master returning from the fell several times a week with full barrels. We weren’t the first ones to realise the impracticality of it. We don’t know when the water pipe was built, but it was already there in Mikoa’s father’s time. It’s not been recorded in any of the tea masters’ books. Whoever built it understood that it would be too dangerous to leave a written record of it. The pipe is skilfully constructed: it comes from deep inside the fell, is hidden in the earth and connects to the legal water quota pipe so far from the house that it can’t be traced by searching the tea master’s grounds. The only risk is that it needs to be opened and closed manually from the fell. We were lucky that it happened to be closed when the soldiers came.’