Emmi Itäranta - Memory of Water

‘As you wish, Master Kaitio,’ he replied.

I left him on the lawn and walked into the house. After making sure that the curtains were tightly closed, I took the tea master’s ceremony outfit from my wardrobe and put it on. It was softer and more familiar than it had been one distant Moonfeast day that now belonged to another age and life, when I had first worn it. Yet there was still something alien about it, as if I was wearing a skin that wasn’t my own, but merely borrowed. Dressing up in the master’s outfit was an irrational and pointless thing to do: I knew Taro didn’t expect it from me. But the unchanged form of the tea ceremony bound to the unbroken chain of masters was the only tangible bridge I could build between my own vulnerability and the inviolability of a tea master. The outfit offered a shield behind which I could take cover.

There were several tea sets in the teahouse, and I had swept and aired the hut daily, even washed the floors a few times, so I only needed to carry the water. Ten minutes later I stepped out of the house wearing my outfit and holding a waterskin I had filled from the kitchen tap.

I did not see Taro right away. Then I noticed that he was standing outside the teahouse and sprinkling water on the lawn from the stone basin in front of it. Moistening the grass with water marked a symbolic purification of the teahouse and its surroundings, and no one besides tea masters and their apprentices was permitted to do it. Anger rose bitter in my throat and behind my eyes. The soles of my sandals slapped softly on the stone slabs as I walked to the hut.

‘I’m afraid you will have to crawl through the visitors’ entrance again,’ I said. ‘We didn’t change its height when we repaired the teahouse.’

Taro wiped his moist hands on the thick fabric of his trousers and smiled his sharpened smile. The look in his black eyes shifted like a movement flickering in a mirror in a dark room.

‘I thought so,’ he replied.

Neither of us bowed. I walked around the teahouse to the master’s entrance.

When I had started the fire, poured the water into the cauldron to heat up and placed the tea set on a tray, I slid the door of the visitors’ entrance slightly open. A moment later Taro entered on his knees. He had left his insect hood outside. Without any thought, directed by my muscle memory, I bowed to him. A smile spread on his face again, and he bowed back. It seemed to me that he exaggerated the gesture with scorn, but so slightly that I couldn’t tell for certain. Blood rushed to my cheeks. I took a deep breath and thought of water: water that carried and chained me, water that separated me from dust, water that had not deserted me, not yet.

There were ten bubbles at the bottom of the cauldron.

I prepared the tea and offered the cup to Taro. He took it unhurriedly, blew into it, did not sip, because the tea was still too hot, and placed it down on the floor.

He was watching me steadily, and I knew I was being assessed. The weight and coldness of his intent terrified me. He had come here with a goal in his mind. I did not know what it was, but as he was sitting there, unmoving and soundless, I knew nothing could disrupt it, nothing break or even scratch its glistening, hard surface. He was not in a hurry. He could wait and look for my weak spot until he found it.

Eventually, after a long silence, he said, ‘You’re not afraid of me, Noria. Why not?’

I noticed that he had dropped the titles and used my first name, which was a deliberate breach of etiquette, a disrespectful way of addressing the tea master during the ceremony. I did not reply, and he did not take his eyes off me.

‘You do realise I could hurt you if I wanted to?’ he continued. His expression did not change. ‘Or I could order someone else to do it, and watch.’

I understood it, of course. Everyone knew of the things taking place in darkness, those from which it was easier to avert your eyes. I had thought of them, maybe too much. Of my mother, the walls around her, perhaps thicker and closer than those that held me; of unbending metal that might be grazing her delicate, fragile skin. Of Sanja. I pushed her from my mind, again, because my boundaries began to shake and crumble, and I couldn’t let this happen, not now.

‘Yet you speak defiantly and do not bow to me,’ Taro said. ‘Why?’

I said the only thing I knew to say in that situation, and as the words left my mouth, I realised they were true.

‘You can no longer do anything to me that matters.’

Taro lifted the cup to his lips, blew into it again and took a drink.

‘Nothing at all?’ he asked. The same evaluating look remained in the blackness of his eyes. ‘What if I said I can give you your life back?’

‘I wouldn’t believe you,’ I replied.

‘I know about the spring,’ Taro said. ‘But I’m sure you had guessed that already. It would have been wise to tell about it. I understand your father was stubborn in the matter, and transferred the same stubbornness to you. The worn-out traditions of tea masters are tedious from my point of view. But of course it was only a matter of time when my suspicions would be confirmed.’ Taro ran his finger along the round rim of the teacup. My mother had taught me to sound a drinking glass using the same movement: when you brushed the rim with a moistened finger, it created a strange, high-pitched sound which echoed and filled me with restlessness like an escaping thought I couldn’t catch. My mother had told me that if you played the glass for too long, it would break. I hadn’t dared to brush out the sound from a single glass since.

‘Even most tea masters have forgotten this,’ Taro continued, ‘because they have been living in cities for many generations now, but the hidden core of the profession pertains that tea masters were once guardians of springs. Your father trusted his luck too much. A backwater village tea master who has been able to resist the temptation of the cities, whose garden is flourishing and whose tea tastes better than the tea of those who buy the best-quality water? It was obvious which secret he was guarding.’

Taro’s fingers stopped on the rim of the cup. I had listened to him speak with growing restlessness, and I couldn’t contain myself.

‘What do you know about the alliance of tea masters and water?’ I asked, more hotly than I had meant.

Taro’s smile was like the sound of ringing glass.

‘There’s no need for you to look so worried. Your father was not lying when he told you it was hidden knowledge,’ he said. ‘It’s true. Only those who have been trained as tea masters know.’

I nearly asked how many of them he had tortured in order to gain this secret information, but words stopped in my mouth and something in my memory stirred.

From the beginning, there had been a distinct deliberateness about Taro’s way of breaching the etiquette of the ceremony. I had met tea guests who made mistakes because they were not familiar with the etiquette, or because they had forgotten part of it. Their errors were coloured either by confusion or ignorance: they were embarrassed that their unlearned background was revealed in their mistakes, or they didn’t even know there was an exact etiquette to be followed, and cared little. Taro, however, had already on his first visit given the impression that had he wished to, he could have followed the etiquette perfectly, but breached it on purpose just because he had the power to do so. He was familiar with the tea ceremony down to every detail as much as I was, and because of this, he knew precisely how to offend the tea master and other guests.

Every memory I had of him revealed itself in new light: how he turned his first tea visit into a cross-examination, how he ordered the teahouse to be taken apart, knowing that rebuilding it in the same way would not be possible, how he had the tea masters’ books confiscated from the house although he must have known no tea master would leave a written record of a secret spring behind. How he had sprinkled water on the grass despite the fact that it was the task of the tea master and apprentice alone, and would mean contaminating the ceremony if performed by anyone else.