Emmi Itäranta - Memory of Water

I found my father raking the rock garden. The builders and gardeners he had hired had done a surprisingly good job. There were only small traces of the grass having been disturbed, and the rock garden was exactly as it used to be, save for the unmoving ripples of sand that had been brushed away.

The teahouse had taken the heaviest damage. Part of its floor had needed to be replaced with a different type of wood, and the contrast between the old and new boards was distinctive. Yet now the hut was whole and usable again. I’d reminded my father that imperfection and change belonged to the art of tea, and they must be given the same value as perfection and permanence. He’d looked at me and I’d seen the surprise in him.

‘You’ll be a better tea master than I know how to be anymore,’ he’d said.

He stepped off the rock garden and raked his own footsteps away. The sand rested in the middle of coarse stones like a deserted seafloor.

‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘We have a long day ahead of us.’

We walked to the fell along the same route as the first time, when he had taken me to the spring. On the side of the fell, just before reaching the boulder garden, we turned in a different direction. A little later my father stopped and pointed further down the slope. It was split by a long, ditch-like furrow, smooth-worn with stones and sand gathered at the bottom. Its rocky walls were smeared with lichen.

‘Do you know what that is?’ he asked.

I knew, of course. I had seen many enough before.

‘The channel of a dried stream,’ I said. ‘There’s been no water in it in decades, because so much lichen has grown on top of the rocks.’

‘You read the landscape well,’ my father said. ‘But there’s more you must learn. I should perhaps have told you about the secret essence of the tea master’s work much earlier. But it’s customary that the wisdom isn’t passed from master to apprentice until the day the apprentice becomes the new master. When we reach the spring, you’ll find out what I’m talking about.’

We turned back and my father asked me to show if I could find the way to the cave mouth shaped like a cat’s head without his help. The route was familiar to me from my childhood, so I found it easily. Again, on my father’s prompting, I sought the hidden lever at the back of the cave, opened the hatch on the ceiling and climbed ahead of him into the tunnel going to the spring. My father followed and handed me one of the two blaze lanterns, their light glowing in the dark. As we walked towards the roar of the spring, I saw humidity concentrated on the walls of the tunnel.

We reached the cave, where water sprang from the dark wall in bright threads into the pond before vanishing again inside the fell. I stopped at the edge of the pond. My father walked to the other side and lowered his blaze lantern close to the water. I saw on the stones the pale stain I vaguely remembered having noticed on my first visit. About half a meter above the throbbing surface of the water, a stout metal wedge covered in a worn layer of white paint was driven into the rock. It shone faintly in the half-light.

‘This is the side of the tea master’s work that remains invisible to everyone else,’ my father said. ‘Since ancient times, tea masters have been watchers of water. It is said that in the past-world each tea master had a spring they took care of on their grounds. The springs had different qualities: one produced water with healing powers, the water of another granted a longer life, the third spring gave you peace of mind. There were also differences in the taste of the water. People would come from far away to enjoy tea that was made with the water of a well-respected spring. It was the duty of the tea master to see that the spring remained clean and wasn’t overused.’ My father’s face was like sun-brittled paper on which the shadows of the cave and the light of the lantern fought for space. ‘As you know, in the present-world nearly all springs have dried up, and the rest have been claimed by the military. It’s possible there are secret springs such as this elsewhere, but I don’t know of them. It’s possible that this is the last one.’

The weight of his words and everything buried in them lay between us. He brought his lantern right to the surface of the spring and pointed at the water. Under the surface, near the bottom of the pond, I saw another white-painted wedge, nearly blurred invisible by the water.

‘Do you see that mark?’ my father asked.

I nodded.

‘If the surface of the water sinks lower than that, it means too much water has been drawn. The spring will need to rest and gather its strength. It’s the tea master’s task to see that it happens.’

‘How long?’ I asked.

‘Several months,’ my father said. ‘The longer, the better. The spring hasn’t been pushed too far in my time, but it happened twice in my father’s time. Both times he let it rest for nearly a year before it recovered completely.’

‘What about the other mark?’ I pointed at the wedge in the rock above the water surface.

‘It’s equally important at the very least, and requires constant monitoring,’ my father said. ‘If the water rises that high, more of it must be directed into the water pipe than usual, and fast, because it’s in danger of rising from underground into the dry channel we saw outside. This hasn’t happened in my time, either, but if we didn’t use water from the spring every month, it might.’

‘How quickly?’

‘I don’t know exactly, but I believe it would take about two months.’

I understood now why he came to the fell so frequently.

‘You need to learn to control the water levels and to use the pipe, Noria. I’ll not pass the task to you entirely yet, because from this day on we’ll be sharing the tea master’s responsibility in this village. But one day it will be placed in your hands, and therefore I’m teaching it to you now.’

My father took a few steps towards the cave wall. When he lifted his lantern, I saw a lever that had been turned to point to the left. He gestured for me to come closer.

‘This controls the flow of the water into the pipe we use in the house. It is currently closed, because we still have some of this month’s water quota left, and the water in the spring isn’t unusually high. Now is a good time to open the pipe, because we’ll need natural water for your graduation ceremony, and the month is in half. You do it.’

I took the lever and turned it to point to the right. The water in the pond stirred like a restless animal, and although I didn’t see much difference in its swirls, it seemed to me that alongside the roar there appeared another, slightly different one.

‘Water from the fell will now be flowing into the house pipe until this end is closed again. I usually close it after about two weeks, wait for two to three weeks and then open it again. The most important thing is to come here every week to check the water level and control the consumption of water accordingly. Next week it’ll be your turn.’

My father filled the two waterskins he had brought directly from the spring, and we each strapped a skin on our backs.

‘What would happen, if the spring dried and wouldn’t go back to normal? If it stopped giving water altogether?’ I asked when we had made it out of the cave and were walking towards the house.

‘We’d live by the water quota, like everyone else,’ my father replied. ‘It would be enough for us. The garden would suffer somewhat, but we’d be fine.’

He was quiet for a moment. The sun had crawled to the sky, already languid with autumn, but still hot. I rolled my sleeves down so the insects would have less to bite. My father was looking into the horizon and I saw that he wanted to tell me something.