Emmi Itäranta - Memory of Water

‘Do you like it?’ she asked, and her face was a little less pale than usual. It was strange to see her so uncharacteristically shy. ‘It’s for tea.’

‘It’s gorgeous,’ I said. ‘Thank you!’ I hugged her, pushed the box into my bag and handed the basket back. ‘Shall we?’

Sanja nodded. We started walking towards the central square of the village. A few stars shone glass-clear above, and the full moon glinted pale and sharp-edged as it cut its way higher through the thickening blue of the evening.

‘Look!’ Sanja said and pointed at the sky.

Initially I didn’t know what I was looking at, but then I saw it. Apart from the metallic moonlight, a flicker of fishfires brushed the dark outlines of the fells. It wavered slowly like a stretch of cloth in near-still water.

‘It’s only just beginning,’ Sanja said.

The sounds and scents of Moonfeast floated around us as we walked through the village. The backyards of the houses we passed were decorated with coloured blaze lanterns, and the rattle of occasional fireworks threw sparkles above the roofs. The smell of fried fish, vegetables and feastcakes wafted in the air. People were carrying harvest-meals and drinks to tables, and from some yards we heard music and buzzing voices.

From far away I saw the Moonfeast parade weaving its way around the village square. The Ocean-Dragon fashioned from junk plastic, plaited reed and waste wood glistened silver-white, swimming in the rhythm of the drums and chanting, as dancers carried it through the air. A group of children dressed up as fish and other sea-creatures followed the dragon’s movements, a shoal flashing their junk-plastic scales against the falling darkness. I played with the thought that the fishfires we had seen were actually lit by them, like in stories where the reflection of fish swimming with the Ocean-Dragons cast them to the sky. In the middle of the square a large full moon of painted wood was propped up on a high stand over the whole scene. When we came closer, I saw the eyes of the dragon glow with yellowish light. It took me a moment to realise that there must be a blaze lantern inside the head. In the haze the pale, narrow figure of the dragon was like a passing ghost, floating mute and otherworldly above all sound and movement.

I was beginning to enjoy myself. I felt Moonfeast drawing me in. Sanja was dragging me through the crowd towards a food stand. We bought roasted almonds and dried seaweed snacks. I saw Sanja twisting and changing her weight from one foot to the other while I paid for the food. I could guess where she wanted to go next.

‘Let’s try that one,’ she said to me and pointed at another stand near the entrance to an alley leading away from the square. As we made our way through the crowd, we passed a group of villagers talking in hasty, serious voices. One of them was listening to a message-pod.

‘It must be a fabrication,’ I heard someone say. ‘There hasn’t been anything in the news.’

‘You know how the news is,’ another one said, ‘and I wouldn’t put it past the Unionists. My brother-in-law says he knows some of them, and—’

‘My cousin saw it, that’s what he says,’ said the man holding the message-pod. ‘He was right there, and he says it’s complete chaos.’

It was a conversation that I would remember later, but back then I had other things in my mind.

Sanja was right: the stand had a small picture of a blue nymph painted in the corner of the canvas awning. Everyone knew what it stood for, and while it wasn’t strictly illegal, most self-respecting merchants refused to sell it.

‘We’d like four blue-lotus cakes, please,’ Sanja told the merchant, an elderly woman with large brown birthmarks on her face.

‘Aren’t you a bit young for that?’ the woman said, but Sanja gave her the money and she said nothing more, only dropped the cakes into the fabric pouch Sanja handed to her.

I looked into the sky. The fishfires had grown; they were spreading their thin veil across the night.

‘To the Beak,’ Sanja said. ‘It has the best view.’

The Beak was a sharp cliff jutting out of the side of the fell near the plastic grave. A narrow staircase climbed there from the edge of the village. It would be the best place to see the fishfires, unless we wanted to walk back to the tea master’s house and from there to the fell.

When we arrived at the Beak, we saw we weren’t the only ones to have thought of the place. A couple of dozen people were sitting there in small groups or isolated couples. We knew some of them from the village school and stopped to say hello, but Sanja whispered, ‘Let’s climb further up, there must be a less crowded place there!’

After a while we found a smooth landing of rock where we could see the sky clearly. Sanja spread her worn shawl on the ground. We placed our blaze lanterns on it and arranged a picnic meal of almonds and cakes around them. The fishfires above us reached all the way across the sky, wavering, calming down and rising again in high folds like the sea.

We didn’t talk much, yet the silence woven between us was not separating or empty, but a connecting silence where I felt at peace. Sanja was fumbling a cord of woven coloured seagrass on her wrist. I recognised the decorative ribbon sewn on the sleeve ends of her shirt and the long hem of her skirt. I had seen it somewhere before. An image of her mother sewing a ribbon to the edge of a tablecloth before Sanja’s Matriculation celebrations surfaced before my eyes. It had looked a little worn already back then. The ribbon had probably been attached to the sleeves and the skirt-hem to cover their tattered appearance.

I gnawed on my blue-lotus cake and waited for the drifting feeling of languor.

‘When the Ocean-Dragons roam, it means the world is changing,’ I said.

Sanja chewed on her roasted almonds and drank water from her skin.

‘It’s just a story, Noria,’ she said. ‘Fishfires are colliding particles caused by the closeness of the North Pole. An electromagnetic reaction, no more exciting than a light bulb or a glow-worm. There are no dragons living in the sea, no shoals of fish following them or the flashing of scales in the dark sky.’ She picked up a blue-lotus cake and tasted it. ‘These were better last year,’ she remarked.

‘I know what fishfires are,’ I said. ‘And I still see the dragons. Don’t you?’

Sanja looked at the sky for a long time, and I looked at her. Under the dim-green glow of the fishfires her face was different than in any other light, like a bone-smooth seashell veiled with algae. Her hands were two starfish in the abyss of the night. I could imagine them drifting away, being pulled into craggy mazes where daylight didn’t reach, where translucent, blind creatures didn’t make a sound or dream of another world.

‘Yes,’ she said after a long silence. ‘I see them.’

Sanja placed her hand on my arm. I felt its warmth through the thin fabric of my tunic, each line of her fingers as if they were drawn on my skin with sunlight. Blazeflies glowed quietly in the lanterns, Ocean-Dragons roamed and the world turned slowly, unnoticeably, unstopping.

In the still of the dawn I walked home with my new shawl wrapped tightly around me. The road from the village to the tea master’s house didn’t seem long, or the shadows of the trees tall. After passing through the gate I clinked the windchime hanging from the pine lightly with my fingernails. I could still taste the previous day’s meal and the night in my mouth, and I wanted to chew on mint leaves. I turned towards the rock garden instead of walking directly into the house.

I remember that grass stalks brushed my ankles, the cool humidity of the morning hour sticking to my skin.

Memory slips and slides and is not to be trusted, but I remember.