Emmi Itäranta - Memory of Water

‘You must promise you won’t tell anyone,’ I said more hastily than I had intended. ‘I can only help you if the spring remains a secret.’

‘You don’t have the right,’ she said. I still couldn’t bring myself to look at her.

‘Sanja,’ I said, and I could barely hear my own voice. ‘What do you think will happen if anyone finds out about this?’ She was still holding on to my arm. I raised my gaze.

Shadows thickened on her face and her body was tense. Then something moved behind her eyes. Her shoulders relaxed, her expression softened, and her voice was quiet again.

‘It’s still not right,’ she said.

‘I know,’ I replied.

It was cool in the cave, as always, and the humidity crept into my bones, but Sanja’s face was flushed from walking. Her tolerance of cold had always been better than mine.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked. She had begun to take off her clothes. She dropped her cardigan on the stones, pulled the shirt over her head and undid her shoelaces.

‘Do you know how long it’s been since I last bathed in clean water?’ she asked. She shrugged off her remaining clothes and stepped carefully to the edge of the pond. She found a place where the rock was worn even and sloped into the water. I saw her shudder, when she pushed her feet into the spring, but she edged herself into the water without stopping, until it was up to her waist. She waded deeper and squatted.

The water enveloped her like a smooth stone thrown into it. She surfaced, shivering, black hair against her skull, and in the wavering lantern-light she was so pale and narrow that she seemed almost translucent: a water spirit caught on the edges of reality.

‘Is it cold?’ I asked.

‘Come and try for yourself,’ she said.

Secrets carve us like water carves stone.

If we let another person into the silent space a secret has made within us, we are no longer alone there.

I took off my clothes and stepped into the spring. I hardened myself against the piercing chill of the water, letting it settle on my skin, even as it cut into my limbs and pinched along my back. The pebbles at the bottom of the cave were polished round and slippery, and I couldn’t see through the water where I was stepping in the semi-darkness. My foot slid, and Sanja reached out her hand to support me.

I took it. I closed my eyes.

Time trickled on somewhere far outside the cave, wind swept over rocks and light changed slowly, and we were silent and still.

On the surface nothing will shift, but slowly our life settles around the things we cannot tell anyone, moulds itself into their shape.

Eventually Sanja let go of me and stepped back. She took one step, then another. Her eyebrows knitted into a confused crease. She lowered her gaze, trying to see into the spring through the water in the twilight. She swept the bottom with her foot. I stepped closer and felt something smooth and even under the sole of my foot, like a plate made of some hard, shiny material.

‘Noria,’ Sanja said. ‘What’s this?’

The box was of polished wood, and there was a thin layer of dark, slippery algae on the surface. It was as thick as maybe two or three tea master’s books placed on top of each other, but more oblong. Two wide leather belts were tightened around it, holding it closed. There was no lock on the box. We turned it in the light of the blaze lanterns. I began to unbuckle one of the belts.

‘Are you sure it’s safe to open this?’ Sanja asked.

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘But don’t you want to know what’s inside?’

Sanja nodded and began unbuckling the other belt.

Inside the box there was another, metal one, tightly sealed, but that one wasn’t locked, either. Water had seeped through the outer layer, but there was no humidity inside the metal box. It held a thick, plastic wrapping through which we could see a knot of fabric. I peeled the plastic away and unfolded the cloth, which turned out to be a faded-brown shirt. We stared at the contents of the knot, speechless.

In the folds of the fabric rested six smooth, shiny, silver-coloured discs.

That night it rained, rained until the dust of the earth foamed mud-dark, and narrow brooks ran across stones and yards and withered tree-trunks. People opened their mouths and drank directly from the sky and thanked nameless powers. Water rattled into buckets and tubs and onto roofs, and its sounds enclosed the landscape within their soft fingers, stroking the soil and grass and tree roots.

I sat with Sanja on the veranda of the tea master’s house, watching the languid glow of the blaze lanterns on the walls and floorboards. I felt the warmth of her skin next to me.

Seven silver-coloured discs glistened on the wooden table.

Night came quietly, and nothing needed to be otherwise.

‘Could you play that last bit again?’ I asked.

Sanja pressed the button with two arrowheads pointing to the left on the past-tech machine. My wrist was aching from writing. I shook my hand while reversed words chirruped in the loudspeakers. Sanja took her finger from the button, and a voice said, ‘—until we have confirmed all results. It is nevertheless clear that at least Saltfjellet-Svartisen, Reivo and most of the land between Malmberget and Kolari belong to the areas where the water resources are partly potable already, and according to our estimates, will be entirely so in less than fifty years.’

‘Stop there,’ I said. Sanja paused the disc, and I wrote the last sentence down in my notebook.

We had arranged everything in a neat circle on the workshop floor: the past-machine, the discs, the books I had brought from my mother’s study. I reached for the heavy volume which included a map of the Lost Lands from the past-world era and traced the place names with my finger. Reivo was the first one to catch my eye. I drew a circle around it, and when I leaned back, the muscles in my neck and back tightened to painful knots.

‘I think I need a break,’ I said. We’d been sitting for hours.

Sanja shrugged.

‘You’re the one who wanted to write everything down. I’ll go get some tea.’

While she stood up, I continued to look for the places mentioned on the recording and marking them on the map.

‘I still don’t understand what you’re going to do with the info, though,’ she remarked on her way out.

‘Neither do I,’ I said, but that wasn’t entirely true.

The silver-coloured discs were laid in a row on top of the fabric they had been wrapped in. Numbers from one to seven were painted on them. We had been able to determine their order by the dates mentioned at the beginning of each. So far we had listened to four of the discs in full, and I had written the contents of each one down so I could try to organise them into a coherent story. However, there was a problem: occasionally the words were hard to discern, time had worn the sound threadbare in places and some sections were so badly scratched that the machine skipped them every time. On top of this long parts were missing, days and whole weeks between the log entries. I suspected there had originally been ten discs, perhaps more.

I was now certain that all the discs had come from the same place. There were two distinct male voices on them, and one was clearly the same we had heard on the first disc. I was also convinced that the mysterious group of explorers Miro had kept safe in the Twilight Century was what had remained of the Jansson expedition, and that he had hidden them in the cave in the fell. I couldn’t think of another explanation for how the discs would have ended up in the spring. I still hoped to be able to trace the route of the explorers, but listening with the notebook and map was agonisingly slow, and I knew already the story could never become complete and whole. There was too much time between our reality and the Jansson expedition, too many details blurred by years and images swept into the dust of the world that no longer was. We could only summon an indistinct shape whose features and outlines the distance dimmed down.