Emmi Itäranta - Memory of Water

I walked into the house, changed into dry clothes and sat down on the floor.

Until now, I had tried to keep the house at least superficially as it had been in the time of my parents, despite the fact that I noticed how it wished to bend out of shape under change. I still made the effort to do the same, but my reasons were different. I wanted to be sure that when the villagers came here after we had left, nothing in the rooms would tell them that I had gone far and might stay away for a long time. I left clothes on the backs of chairs, as if I had put them down only to pick them up a moment later. There was an open book lying face down on the living room sofa that I had no intention of taking with me. Half of my morning tea was still left in the cup on the kitchen table; I didn’t clean it away. I wanted to leave behind a still frame of a life in progress: the illusion of unchanging quality would conceal the big change. I wished to delay the suspicions of the villagers for as long as I could.

Until the night, or another morning.

Everything was ready.

I locked the door and swept the stone slabs that formed the path to the teahouse. The rain-soaked leaves and blades of grass clung to the bristles of the broom. I placed it against the wall on the teahouse veranda.

I walked to the edge of the rock garden where the three tea plants grew. The rain had stopped, and water drops glistened on their narrow leaves. My father’s grave was covered by grass, and nothing distinguished its outline from the rest of the lawn now. I wanted to say something to him, but my mouth held only silence.

The sand of the rock garden was ragged with rain. I picked up the rake from the ground and raked it until it was neat. The traces of the metal teeth undulated among the boulders like water that flows in the darkness of the earth without slowing or quickening its pace.

The notebooks weighed in my bag, and in the garden the shadows were thickening, when I closed the gate behind me.

When I reached the bridge, everything seemed as it should. The blocked opening was covered in junk, and there was nothing to suggest that the place had been visited after I had left it earlier in the day. I thought she had not made it there yet. I moved a broken armchair and a roll of useless cable to the side in order to manoeuvre myself into the hiding place.

I didn’t immediately understand what I saw. It took a while before my eyes adjusted to the dim space under the bridge, and it took longer before I could comprehend what they were telling me.

The helicarriage and the four-wheeler with their contents were gone.

Breath caught in my chest, and a heavy lump formed at the back of my belly. I felt as if I had swallowed a large, sharp block of ice.

I sent a message to Sanja’s message-pod, then to her family’s pod. There was no reply. Not knowing what else to do, I began walking towards her house. I took a shortcut across the plastic grave, where my feet slipped over the rain-soaked surfaces and dark crannies opening into the very core of the buried past. I passed a few people who had been drawing mud-stained water from the small brook near the edge of the grave. Some of them were trying to catch rain from the sky into their skins and buckets. I passed houses, and saw people letting the water falling from clouds wash over their thirsty faces and bodies and hands.

I turned to the street where Sanja’s family lived and stopped.

There were soldiers in blue uniforms outside Sanja’s house. The door was open, and I’m certain of this: there was no blue circle on it, only the washed-out grey colour that it always wore. I didn’t see Sanja or her parents, but the soldiers kept coming and going out of the door, and I saw two of them walking towards the backyard and Sanja’s workshop.

One tall soldier was standing in the front yard, and when he turned his head, I recognised him despite the distance. It was Muromäki, Taro’s blond-haired second in command.

I turned around and forced myself not to run. My feet swelled heavy on the mud-tainted road, and the clouds hung low, brushing the dark fell-tops and bursting with the weight of their water.

In this landscape where everything had shifted and the world had fallen out of joint, I walked back into the tea master’s house, and I waited.

No one moved on the narrow road. The lights of my message-pods did not switch on. The world did not spin slower or faster.

After midnight I went into my room and lay in bed in the grey-blue dusk of the sunless night, and I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t move. Near the morning I fell asleep for a short while, and when I woke up, it was difficult to breathe. I went to the veranda for some fresh air.

The clouds had withdrawn. The brightness of the morning slashed my eyes. I walked over the moist grass to the gathering-pool that rested in the middle of the garden. When I bent down to drink from it, I saw my own reflection on the surface of the water briefly before it shattered.

I heard the door close itself slowly with creaking hinges.

I turned to go back inside.

The blue circle on the door was still glistening moist with paint, shining in the luminous morning like a ring cut from the sky.

Water is the most versatile of all elements. It isn’t afraid to burn in fire or fade into the sky, it doesn’t hesitate to shatter against sharp rocks in rainfall or drown into the dark shroud of the earth. It exists beyond all beginnings and ends. On the surface nothing will shift, but deep in underground silence, water will hide and with soft fingers coax a new channel for itself, until stone gives in and slowly settles around the secret space.

Death is water’s close companion, and neither of them can be separated from us, for we are made of the versatility of water and the closeness of death. Water doesn’t belong to us, but we belong to water: when it has passed through our fingers and pores and bodies, nothing separates us from earth.

I see it clearly now, the dark and narrow figure standing next to the rock garden, by the tea plants, or walking among the trees. The face is patient, and not unfamiliar. It has been the same face from the beginning. I think it may have been waiting for me all along, even when I did not understand it yet.

I can feel water wanting to leave me. I can feel the weight of my own dust.

A few days passed before I understood my situation.

That first morning, after I turned and saw the blue circle on the front door of the house, I stood still for a long while. The rainwater I had drunk from the gathering-pool trickled down my chin and neck, seeped inside the collar of my tunic. I wiped it on the back of my hand. Tree leaves fluttered in the light wind, and I thought of the wings of blazeflies brushing against the glass walls of a lantern. I stared at the endless loop of the circle, which provided no way out. The ground was still steady under my feet and the sky where it should be. The world carried on with life beyond the invisible barrier that had been raised around me: people were thinking their thoughts, walking on the roads, talking to those they loved. For a moment reality wavered around me unclear, crumbling on the edges and split in two. Some part of me is still walking outside these boundaries, I thought, living the life that was to be. She is on her way to the Lost Lands, and she is nearly as real as I am, in some moments more real, perhaps, but she is looking the other way, and she is not coming back.