Emmi Itäranta - Memory of Water

‘You think this counts as an extreme circumstance?’

She was smiling, but I could see the underlying seriousness, when she replied, ‘If it doesn’t, I don’t know what will.’

I looked at her. She caught my eye and nodded slightly. She took the box from me and held it. I turned the lid of the box, until the lacquer seal we had carefully melted over its edge cracked and broke. Inside the lid was painted a date from ten years earlier. We had been eight years old when we had collected treasures for this time capsule. We bent our heads to examine the contents together. There was a small, rust-stained metal lock and a key which didn’t fit in it, a yellowed page full of small print – I must have torn it from one of my mother’s books – a few smooth stones and a pair of old, scratched eyeglasses with one broken stem. The lenses were tinted with different colours: one red, one blue.

‘I remember those,’ Sanja said. ‘The Magic Glasses.’

I too remembered the game we had played with the glasses: as explorer-spies we had taken turns to wear them, look through walls into hidden places and describe to each other what we saw.

‘Should we take something with us?’ I suggested. ‘For luck?’

‘Every gram of extra weight will slow us down,’ Sanja remarked, and was right, of course. I put the glasses back in the box and was about to close the lid, when she stopped my hand and said, ‘Not yet.’

She handed the box to me, untied a worn-thin seagrass bracelet from around her wrist and placed it on top of the other items.

‘You too,’ she said.

‘Have you got your penknife?’ I asked.

Sanja searched for the knife in her pocket and handed it to me. I placed the box on the dashboard, drew the thin blade out of its sheath and cut loose a long strand of my hair.

‘It’s all I’ve got,’ I said and gave the knife back to Sanja.

I twisted the hair into a coil around my fingers, pulled it into a loose knot and placed it inside the seagrass bracelet. The knot loosened and unravelled a little, and settled against the bracelet, within its uneven loop: my dark hair and the dried grass of the sea that Sanja had carried around her wrist, together in an unbroken circle with no beginning and no end. Sanja closed the lid, taking care to fit the broken edges of the seal against each other.

It felt like a precaution against mortality, as if we had cast a spell that could not be undone. If we didn’t come back, something would be left of us – even if it was only nameless, childish and without value, but something we had chosen to be preserved, a trace that we had left behind.

That was what I thought.

I believed that was what she thought, too.

I still want to believe this.

When we left the plastic grave, Sanja said, ‘I’ll see you tonight.’ Her body was narrow and angular inside the rough linen fabric. The shadow of the insect hood was soft on her face. She walked away and did not look behind.

After Sanja had gone, I trudged across the uneven ground to the helicarriage to check once more that everything was in order. The underbelly of the bridge smelled of crumbling earth and decaying rubbish. I went through the contents of the wagon towed behind the helicarriage. I had calculated carefully the amount of food and water and added a little extra to be safe, but not too much. I didn’t know how accurate my estimates of our journeying speed would turn out to be, or what the actual condition of the roads might be once we crossed the border. Although my hopes were high, I had not dared to rely completely on finding water, so most of the space was reserved for carrying drinking water.

I moved the sacks of dried fruits, sunflower seeds and almonds in order to make space for one more waterskin, which I had carried on my back. The problem of transporting water had been our biggest headache, because we knew that we would certainly be stopped if we tried to openly carry several weeks’ worth of drinking water with us. We had gone through all the devices of water fraud and smuggling plans we had developed over the past weeks when the villagers had been taking water to their homes from the tea master’s house. Sanja had made some carefully planned adjustments to the helicarriage, and the result was her masterpiece: she had removed the seats, moulded a lockable empty space under them and concealed it again so meticulously that it was impossible to tell the carriage had been modified. You could fit a week’s worth of waterskins under the fake bottom of the cart, and furthermore we had built different secret compartments and containers in the food chests. To cover the cart, we had tightened a double plastic-and-canvas awning over a frame which would protect the contents and under which we could sleep.

One of my worries were the blazeflies. I didn’t know how many we would manage to find along the way – those we would take with us when we left the tea master’s house would not live until we came back. It was late summer, and daylight still stretched across nearly all hours of the day. Yet in just a few weeks’ time the nights would be growing darker again, and before two full moons passed, Moonfeast would turn the year towards winter. While our plan was to return to the village well before that, the fading of the blaze lanterns might become a problem and slow down our journey. The thought of their faded glow also made me uneasy for another reason: I didn’t know how deep in the veins of the earth the water was hidden, or what kind of darkness we would need to descend into in order to find it. Sanja had fixed two solar-powered past-torches for us, but their light was dimmer than that of the blaze lanterns, and one of them kept buzzing and hiccupping. ‘I couldn’t get good enough wires,’ Sanja had said, miffed, and we’d had to settle for that.

She hadn’t told anyone about our plan, not even her parents. She said she didn’t want them to worry. I suspected that she might not have been able to hold on to her decision to go with me if they had asked her to stay.

I spread a cracked plastic tarpaulin to cover the helicarriage and the wagon and piled dry branches and junk on top of it. When I was happy with the camouflage, I walked out into daylight. We had filled the mouth of the cavernous space with rubbish that was lying around, and I blocked the gap behind me so that it looked closed.

The sky was the colour of rock and lichen, and fresh bruises. The first drops fell on the linen fabric of my shirt at the edge of the village, spreading into large, uneven stains and soaking their wetness onto my skin. By the time I reached the road leading to the gate of the house, my trouser bottoms were dripping with water and the sand darkened into mud was tarnishing their light fabric. The crisp, wooden scent of wet seagrass floated in the rain-dimmed air.

Out of habit I had carried the rain-containers into the garden in the morning after I had looked at the sky, even if I had no reason to use them. Let the villagers take the rainwater with them when they come tomorrow and find the house empty, I thought. It is the last thing I have to offer them in a while. Jukara would lead them into the cave in the fell before I returned, I was sure of it; I suspected he already went there in secret sometimes, even though I had asked him to avoid it, because a sudden increase in fell trekking among the villagers would not go unnoticed by the soldiers.

I closed my eyes and stood in the rain. I stepped out of my sandals onto the grass. The slippery blades shifted and flattened, drawing latticeworks on the skin of my soles. Water streamed to the back of my neck from my hair, wetting my back and my arms, dripping from the tip of my nose. I shed my clothes like an old skin, and felt raw and fresh and ready.

The wooden gathering-bucket I had placed next to the veranda steps was nearly half-full.