Emmi Itäranta - Memory of Water

In that world, which perhaps was not this one, Muromäki bowed and took the tea I offered, and I didn’t need to label him a friend or foe in my mind.

In this world, I bowed to him at the end of the ceremony and walked out through the tea master’s entrance. The illusion of a space where power didn’t exist crumbled in the dusk of the teahouse. I walked Muromäki and Liuhala to the gate and didn’t know if I had just served a friend or foe.

Those weeks surrounding the summer solstice, when water flowed in secret from the fell to the tea master’s house, and villagers found myriad ways of transporting it to their homes – under their clothes, inside hidden compartments in carts, under scrap wood and furniture and garments I pretended to be selling or sending for repairs, and so on – I spent every moment I could spare behind the closed door of my room, examining maps and notes. I looked into place names, I looked into roads, estimating their usability, measuring distances, researching the terrain and guessing at the time it would take to travel by helicarriage from one place to the next. I spent a week calculating the hours and days it would take to journey to the Lost Lands and back, I estimated the amount of food and water the helicarriage could accommodate, and how much slower the weight carried would make the travelling. I captured a handful of blazeflies inside a lantern and began dropping fruit pieces for them in order to see how long they would live and produce light, if I didn’t let them go.

Eventually, on a cloudy day when Midsummer was already half a month behind, I told Sanja about my plan.

We were sitting on cushions on the floor of her workshop. I had an open notebook in my lap. A large fly trapped inside buzzed up and down the mesh wall, moving from the floor to the ceiling and back again. Sanja was fitting a silver-coloured disc with the number seven painted on it into the past-machine. The other six were piled in the box where we kept them. This was the only one we had not finished listening to.

‘Sanja,’ I began. ‘Have you wondered what it’s like in the Lost Lands now?’

‘Why would I?’ she asked and pressed the lid of the indentation on the machine closed. I shrugged, but didn’t reply. She raised her gaze and stared at me. Her eyes narrowed. ‘You can’t be serious,’ she said.

‘Why not?’ I think I only understood then how serious I was. I dug up a map from my bag that I had packed earlier to bring with me.

‘Noria,’ Sanja said. ‘You’ve got nothing but a few fragments of the past. Even if the expedition was real, we don’t have the whole account of their journey. If there was clean water in the Lost Lands in the Twilight Century, there’s no guarantee whatsoever that there is some now. And how would you ever get there?’

‘By the roads.’ I spread open the map on which I had drawn the possible route. ‘Rovaniemi is on the border of the Lost Lands. I think I’ll be able to get a helicarriage, which will be easy to drive all the way there. I’ve researched these maps, and these old books, and the notes, and current news, too. I’m fairly certain that there are several unguarded roads crossing the border north of Rovaniemi. Past-world roads were wide and well-constructed, they were made for fast vehicles. Many of them must still be usable, because there are people living in those areas, just outside the Lost Lands. The Jansson expedition used the past-roads, we can follow the same route they—’

‘Wait a minute,’ Sanja interrupted. ‘What do you mean, “we”?’

I realised I had spoken without thinking. I blushed.

‘I thought maybe you’d like to go with me,’ I muttered, embarrassed.

Sanja stared at me, and I realised I had never imagined I’d be going alone. In all my daydreams she had been there with me, reading the map, navigating by the stars, climbing the mountains and exploring the caves with me. I hadn’t really considered the possibility that she might not want to go, or what I would do if my only chance would be to go alone.

‘Noria,’ Sanja said, and her face was soft despite her words when she spoke to me. ‘How could I go? Mum and dad and Minja can’t make it here without me. I can’t leave them. Besides, all the roads are being watched. How could I even get to Rovaniemi, let alone further? I don’t have a fake passpod like you.’

‘You said you could maybe hack another one,’ I reminded her.

‘Maybe,’ Sanja sighed. ‘There are too many maybes in your plan. And if, if we could somehow make it to the Lost Lands, and there wasn’t any water there after all? It would all be a waste of time.’

‘I know there is water there,’ I said. ‘There must be.’

Sanja would not give in.

‘Even if there was,’ she said. ‘Then what?’

She was right, of course. Even if we did find water – if I did, I corrected in my mind – I’d have no way of bringing it to the village. How many villagers would be willing to leave for a strange land only with a vague promise of water? And even if some of them were desperate enough to look for a new place to live, the Lost Lands were forbidden, inaccessible. One or two travellers might be able to make their way there, but the more people making the journey, the more difficult it would be.

It felt insufferable to give up the plan that had been taking shape for weeks and months, but I might perhaps have been ready to try, to bury it under impossibility and quietly let go of it, if that day had taken a different course, if what happened next had not happened.

Sanja switched the past-machine on. The disc began to spin in its nest and a male voice recited the date, which I had already written down earlier. It spoke of research results and weather. I followed my notes, and began scribbling down what he was saying when the recording reached the part we had not listened to before. After half a page or so of new notes, the voice suddenly stopped mid-word. There was a click, then humming, and then a female voice sounded in the loudspeakers. It said, ‘Another try. Nils, if you hear this, I’m sorry to record over your log, but this is more important.’ She went quiet for a moment.

I glanced at Sanja and saw that she, too, had recognised the voice. I had lately been so concerned with the travel route of the Jansson Expedition that I had nearly forgotten the woman whose tale had been cut short at the end of the first disc. It had not appeared on any other discs. Yet this was undoubtedly the same voice, and excitement wriggled inside me like a fish in a net. The gap between this moment and the Twilight Century had unexpectedly closed. I held my breath, as the woman’s next words flowed into the room.

‘It’s hard to know where to begin,’ the woman said on the disc. ‘History has no beginning and no end, there are just events that people give the shape of stories in order to understand them better… And in order to tell a story one must choose what not to tell.’

She continued to speak, and we listened, and all words that were not hers vanished from us. Outside clouds were covering the sky, and behind them the sky was the colour of deep summer, even if we did not see it. Grass grew, people breathed, the world turned. But inside, in this workshop, in these words everything changed: changed what we knew, changed what we felt, changed like a sea that rises and swallows all streets and houses, will not withdraw, will not give back what it has claimed.

When the disc was finally spinning hollow silence into the room, breath fluttered wildly in my lungs. Something had shifted within me, within us, and when I looked out, it was as if I had opened my eyes for the first time and seen everything more sharply: the jagged stone in the middle of the backyard, the spiky limbs of a dried shrub, a cobweb broken on the hinge of a door.