Emmi Itäranta - Memory of Water

Secrets gnaw at the bonds between people. Sometimes we believe they can also build them: if we let another person into the silent space a secret has made within us, we are no longer alone there.

I began to bring water to Sanja regularly. She accepted it without a word. Mist was dispelled from Minja’s eyes, her gaze was able to grasp things going on around her again. Words returned to her tongue. Her limbs were still thin as faded, winter-bare twigs, but her life was no longer in danger. Kira’s behaviour towards me was a mixture of gratitude and awkward, curt avoidance. Jan never mentioned the water at all when I saw him, which was rarely enough, but he asked me a few times if there was need in the tea master’s house or garden for repair or construction jobs that he could do. I always said no.

Meanwhile, I had reached a dead end in my search for more information about the Jansson expedition. Inspired by Miro’s last diary entry, I had leafed through all the rest of the tea masters’ books, but only found occasional, short notes, none of which told me anything I didn’t already know. The plastic grave guarded its secrets, if it had any. My visits produced no results save for a wound I got from a sharp piece of metal and a handful of components I put in my pocket for Sanja. Silence raised its wall against me everywhere. The light on the message-pod remained dark. Soft grass pushed mute stalks from the soil of the garden, and my father’s dust rested soundlessly in the shroud of the earth.

Then, one late spring morning, the silence was broken.

The day was like any other day leading to summer. The overcast sky arched in the colour of polished metal, and the tender flames of light-green leaves flickered on the branches of the sparse trees and bushes. The streets were quiet. I passed a house in front of which an aged couple was sitting under a seagrass sunshade. I saw tears streaming down the woman’s wrinkled cheeks. The man had put his arm around her shoulders. I turned my gaze away.

When I reached Sanja’s house with my waterskins, she was waiting for me at the door.

‘Have you heard?’ she asked. I saw her expression and my heart clenched.

‘What happened? Is everything alright?’

‘Yes. I mean, no.’ She paused and agitation crossed her face. ‘The grey-plastered house with the blue circle on the door. Near the medical centre?’

I remembered the blank windows and drawn curtains, the empty path across the front yard, the neighbours who averted their gaze on the street.

‘The residents had not been taken away, as everyone thought,’ Sanja said. ‘They were held inside for nearly two months under house arrest, guarded night and day. They couldn’t go anywhere, but the soldiers were bringing just enough water and food for them to stay alive. This morning they were forced out and…’ She tried to fit the word in her mouth. ‘They were executed.’

‘Are you sure?’ The bright blue circle surfaced before my eyes, glaring as a bruise against the chipped paint of the house, the colour of the sky reflected in water, the colour of military uniforms. I found it hard to believe, despite everything that had happened after last Moonfeast.

‘My father saw it,’ Sanja said. ‘He was on his way to the central square. He saw the soldiers drag the people out of the house and cut their throats in the middle of the front yard. Everyone passing on the street saw it.’

I tried not to imagine the scene, but my mind leapt ahead of me: the glistening metal pressing into the fragile skin and reflecting the colour of the earth, the movement of a blue-clad arm, the pool of blood spreading on the pale sand of the yard and the sunlight shattering in it.

‘Is this what it’s going to be from now on?’ Sanja asked in a tight, strangled voice. ‘Anyone can be executed in their own front yard or captured inside their own home any time?’

‘It will end,’ I said. ‘It must.’

‘And if it doesn’t?’ Sanja stared at me and I couldn’t remember ever seeing such bare despair on her face. ‘People won’t stop needing water. They’ll have to risk their lives building illegal water pipes. I—’

I realized what she was trying to tell me.

‘You haven’t continued building your water pipe, have you?’ I asked. She turned her face towards the ground, and her dark hair fell to cover it.

‘We can’t depend on your water forever, Noria,’ she said. ‘You’ll need it yourself.’

I thought of the past tea masters, their choices and their duties. I thought of Miro, who had done what he believed to be right, against all tradition. I thought of my parents, who were not here, and of Sanja, who was.

‘Come,’ I said. ‘I want to show you something.’

We walked into the fell as we had walked many times as children, playing wise and fearless explorers in a strange and wild landscape. Grave clouds were building a darkening wall on the horizon, gradually enclosing the sky. My feet knew the paths and did not slip on the stones. Behind the landscape there loomed another, bound in memory: its paths were wider and the fell-tops tall as distant mountains, boulders larger and harder to climb, dry riverbeds deep wounds in the sides of the rock. Compared to this image emerging from across the years, everything looked meagre and tame now; and yet I felt as if I was walking step by step further into a steep, dark, drowning landscape, even more overwhelming than the fell had been in my child-eyes. I could almost hear the stones of the path shaking behind me, its outlines crumbling into the sand. If I turned to look, I would only see desert and far in the horizon the sharp, dark-green tips of the forest, but the house and the village would be gone, all roads buried, and we’d have no choice but to continue towards the blind spot we were approaching.

Sanja didn’t ask where we were going, but followed me in silence.

When we reached the mouth of the cave, she said, ‘I remember this one! The headquarters of the Central And Crucially Important Explorers’ Society of New Qian.’

‘Follow me,’ I told her. I crawled to the back of the cave and sought in the folds of the rock the lever which my fingers found easily by now. The stone felt dry, coarse and cool. The hatch in the ceiling of the cave opened. The restless light of the blaze lanterns was reflected in Sanja’s eyes in the dusk, as if her thoughts were glowing and flittering.

‘What is this place?’ she asked.

‘The place that doesn’t exist,’ I said.

The familiar coolness of the fell poured slowly over us, as we walked deeper into its heart. I heard Sanja’s footsteps behind me, and the strange enchantment that had begun outside didn’t let go. The faint echo of the spring bounced off the walls in whispers, and I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that if I turned around, Sanja would disappear into the folds of the cavern, become a shadow among underground shadows. Our movements haunted the walls, thin as cobwebs. I didn’t stop until we reached the cave in which the water rushed from the rock into its pond.

I heard Sanja gasp behind me. She stepped next to me and grasped my arm. I felt the shaking of her hand and the narrow moon-slivers of her fingernails on my skin.

‘This,’ she said. ‘All this water. Is it yours?’

‘Yes,’ I said. The grip of her fingers tightened. ‘No,’ I corrected.

Sanja turned towards me, and a start ran through me. She was furious.

‘How could you?’ she spat out. ‘How could you hide this? The people in that house—’ Her voice was shaking. ‘Minja. She could have…’

Shame flooded my face. I couldn’t look her in the eye.

‘How could you?’ she repeated.

Fear coiled into a heavy knot inside me. I didn’t know what I had expected – gratitude? Relief? Perhaps excitement, because I had given Sanja a part in my secret? I had known I’d be putting myself in danger by bringing another person to the spring, but I had never thought the danger might come from her direction. Now I was no longer certain.