Emmi Itäranta - Memory of Water

‘Come on, when we get out you’ll just be happy your clothes are cool and wet,’ she said with an innocent face.

‘Then I’m sure it’s not something you’d want to miss,’ I said and pulled her under the spraying water. She spluttered, wriggled herself free from my hold and closed the pipe from the lever. I was still wringing water from my tunic, trousers and hair, when she opened the hatch from the other lever and slipped through it into the cave.

‘I’ll be there in a second,’ I called out to Sanja. She was quiet, and I didn’t see her on the other side. I thought I heard a faint crashing noise. ‘Sanja?’

I filled the small skin I had brought with me and lowered it into the cave. Then I slid through the hole carrying two blaze lanterns and my soaked insect hood. When I raised my eyes, my voice fled.

Sanja was standing near the mouth of the cave with her back turned towards me, holding one blaze lantern. The other one was lying in shards on the rock floor next to her insect hood. At the cave entrance stood a man’s figure, outlines sabre-sharp against the jagged light of the day. In the pale-grown glow of the lanterns I discerned his features.

‘This is something we don’t see every day in this village,’ Jukara said. ‘Two young women appearing from the folds of the fell dripping wet.’

Sanja turned her face towards me then, and in my mind I have tried to read her expression thousands of times, to understand its every detail. The memory slips and slides and shatters, but of two things I was sure then, and am still now: Sanja was as surprised as I was, and yet under her surprise another feeling was surfacing.

She looked guilty.

We didn’t have any kind of cover story to offer to Jukara, of course. The mistake seemed ridiculously childish and careless afterwards, but it had been made, and neither of us knew how to correct it. We had been so certain of the security of the hidden cave that we had never stopped to think how we would explain our presence in the fell, if someone found us there. I guess we could have said we were just having a picnic, if the situation had been different. But Jukara had seen the hatch, and the gushing water, and our dripping clothes. We had no way of convincing him that there was no water nearby.

He didn’t ask, or threaten, or blackmail. He didn’t need to. It was obvious that if I didn’t offer water to him and his family, the cave would be teeming with soldiers the next time I went there – if there would be a next time.

‘It’s my fault,’ Sanja said later that evening, when Jukara had left the tea master’s house with five full waterskins. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t know this would happen.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I asked.

‘I had to go to see Jukara last week,’ she said. ‘I ran out of patching plastic, and I didn’t know of anyone else in the village who might have some to sell. He charged a high price and behaved oddly. Asked stuff about you.’ She looked at me.

‘What did he say?’ I asked, now wary.

‘Complained that you never take repair jobs to him anymore, even though your father was his best customer.’

It was true. Even before my father’s illness I had usually taken repair jobs to Sanja in secret, and after his death I hadn’t had anything repaired by Jukara.

‘He also said things about your father,’ Sanja continued. ‘He said he’d always wondered how your father had so many waterskins to repair, even though he wasn’t supposed to have more water than anyone else in the village. He…’ A flush rose to Sanja’s cheeks and she went quiet.

I waited.

She continued, ‘He asked me if I thought your family had a secret well or some other water source.’ Sanja raised her hands to cover her eyes. ‘Noria, I didn’t mean to give anything away! I was just so surprised I dropped the box of plastic patches he had sold me, and they scattered all over his workshop floor. I didn’t say anything, and neither did he. But he must have suspected something before, and when he saw me startled, he must have decided to follow us into the fell…’ Sanja’s voice faded.

I didn’t know what to say to her, so I said, ‘It wasn’t your fault. If he suspected something, I’m sure he would have followed us anyway.’

Later, when Sanja had left, I unfolded my maps and opened the notebook in which I had written the contents of the discs. I looked for roads that had been in use in the Twilight Century, and others that might still be good enough for travelling. I began to connect place names I had heard on the discs, and draw a route towards them from my home village.

Once the silent space around a secret is shattered, it cannot be made whole again. The cracks will grow longer and wider, reaching far and branching out like an underground network of roots, until it’s impossible to say where it started and if it will come to an end.

I still don’t know for certain how the word spread in the village. I don’t believe Jukara meant for it to happen. Access to the spring was too great a privilege and gave him too much power. He wouldn’t have given it up voluntarily. I understand this now, because somewhere beyond words and light, in a place I could not see myself, I had felt the same: the spring was my privilege, a compensation for a duty that would have otherwise gone unrewarded. I had not yet realised that one cannot expect rewards for all actions.

Perhaps Jukara told Ninia. He must have, because he couldn’t have come up with endless stories about officials who had suddenly turned more open-handed and explanations for his visits to the tea master’s house, not with a wife like Ninia. And telling her was the equivalent of summoning a village meeting and announcing the news there. Whispers welled and grew into chatter, until even those who had not been present heard it.

In the end it doesn’t matter how the rest of them found out about the spring. It did not change the outcome. When a woman with greasy hair and unwashed clothes appeared at the gate with three sharp-boned children and asked in a frail voice if I could sell her some water on credit, I could not turn her away. After her came others, a wide-eyed young boy who said his parents were too ill to work, an old man who kept muttering about his son who had disappeared in the war, and more women – young women with babies, old women with dry wombs and a strained walk and weary eyes, middle-aged women asking for water for their parents or spouses or children.

I coiled a leather strap around Mai Harmaja’s arm to keep the waterskin in place.

‘Is it too tight?’ I asked.

‘No, you can tighten it up a bit more,’ Mai said. I pulled the strap tighter. ‘Feels steadier now,’ she decided. The waterskin was already fastened to her upper arm by the pit, and it seemed to me that her skin was turning purple around the leather band. Mai rolled her sleeves down and wrapped a thin sun-shawl over her shoulders, and nothing showed that there were five skins under her loose garments: two tied to her thighs, two to her upper arms and one to her waist. Water sloshed slightly, when her feet fell over the creaking boards of the veranda. Mai was one of the volunteers at the village medical centre, and my third water guest of the day.

‘Someone’s coming!’ Mai’s son Vesa called from near the gate. His footsteps sent small dust clouds flying, stains in the brightness of the day, as he came running towards the house. He was nine years old and feeling important, because we had given him the task of watching the road leading from the village to the tea master’s house and letting us know immediately if he saw someone on it. ‘They have a helicarriage.’

‘Go into the teahouse,’ I told Mai. ‘Wait for me there.’ She nodded. ‘You too, Vesa.’ Mai started walking towards the teahouse along the stone slabs of the path, and Vesa rushed after his mother in a galloping half-run.