Emmi Itäranta - Memory of Water

‘Goodbye, Commander Taro,’ I said eventually. ‘There’s nothing more I can do for you.’

I did not bow farewell. Yet Taro bowed to me, and this time I did not see contempt or jeer in his gesture, although I did not see respect, either. I waited until he had crawled out of the hut and I could no longer hear the steps of his boots on the veranda or on the stones of the path.

That evening I counted the lines I had drawn on the door, and I counted the days I knew had passed in other water-crime houses between the appearance of the blue circle and the execution of the inhabitants.

When I went out to fill my night lantern with blazeflies, I saw a dark, narrow figure by the corner of the teahouse, where the shadows were thickening. I couldn’t see the face, not yet, but I sensed that the figure was looking directly at me before turning around and vanishing behind the teahouse, beyond the boundaries that I had been granted.

It was still dusky outside when I rose to make my morning tea. The water pipe was acting up, as it had been nearly every day for the past three weeks: first the water burst out into the pot in a rushing fall, then waned into drops and eventually settled into a narrow trickle. The metal of the pipes stretched and the sound ebbed away in the innards of the house. I placed the teapot under the dripping water.

There wasn’t much time left now.

While the teapot was filling, I went to draw a new line on the door. It was the sixth of the seventh row. Just over a week had passed since Taro’s visit. My arm felt heavy, and the blade was reluctant to move and break the painted surface; but even if I stopped the movement, left the seventh row blank, I wouldn’t be able to hold the hours running out around me.

I returned to the kitchen and saw that the trickle of water had drained completely. I peered into the teapot: it wasn’t even half-full. I emptied the remaining drop of water into it from the next-to-last skin that still had something in it. I’d need to try to fill the skin later, if the pipe would consent to working. I didn’t turn the tap off, but put a large pot under it. I would hear if the water started to run again. My ears had had time to grow sensitive to the sound which had previously been so commonplace that I hadn’t paid any attention to it.

I buttoned up my cardigan, pulled woollen socks on my feet and picked up my shawl from the rack on the wall at the entrance. The morning was cold, much colder than most mornings of the eighth month of the year. I opened the door and drew in the scent of the garden recovering from its night-rawness. My breathing clouded in the outside air.

As I bent down to pick up the food tray from the step, I saw the water-glow of a swelling half moon over the fell. Moonfeast was drawing near. Soon the villagers would be baking sweet, sticky feastcakes and hanging blaze lanterns painted in myriad colours from the eaves of their houses. The Dragon had been built ready for the parade, and the plastic grave would be bustling, as people were looking for accessories for the feast decorations and children’s fancy dresses. This year there probably wouldn’t be fireworks; they would be considered too dangerous, with no water to spare for putting the sparks out. Light would have to be found in other fires. Perhaps on Moonfeast night Ocean-Dragons would wander again and cast their glowing reflections across the dark vault of the sky.

Perhaps someone would sit on the Beak and watch them. Perhaps there would be someone sitting next to her, placing a hand on her arm, and nothing would need to be different.

A sound from the direction of the gate caught my attention. Someone was speaking softly. I turned to look, but only saw a stretch of blue disappearing into the copse. Yet the voices were still floating in the dawn: two soldiers were talking. One of them laughed.

They would walk into the village later this afternoon, or whenever their watch ended. They would polish their boots and buy bread or perhaps blue lotus at the market, and they would sleep through the night or stay awake without counting the hours of their lives. Wind would tug at their insect hoods and the sun would shine on their knuckles, and they wouldn’t even notice the refreshing coolness or soothing warmth.

I didn’t know their names, or where they came from, or how they looked, and I had never hated anyone like I hated them at that moment.

The tray was light. There was nothing on it except a handful of dried beans in a small earthenware bowl. My steps were only slightly shaky when I carried it inside and closed the door behind me.

I was surprised at the strength of the anger that gripped me. I was surprised at the movement of my arm, and at the sound the bowl made when it crashed and broke against the wall.

The fabric of reality rearranged itself around me in a way from which I could not avert my gaze. Threads of life wove their way across and around each other, they intertwined and grew apart again, forming a web that held existence together. I could see the cracks in it clearly, the strands coming loose and slipping away from me. The world still grew and throbbed with stories, but I no longer had a foothold in them.

And behind it all was a void I could almost touch now: a cold space of silence and nothingness, a place we reach when we vanish from the memory of the world.

The place where we truly die.

I wanted to turn away, but I was held still by the chain of events that had brought me here, the past that lay behind me set in stone and would never give in, never break, never shift its shape. I would be looking towards it until I would no longer be looking at anything at all. Stories about it might bend this way and that, but the truth behind them could not be transformed. It bowed to no power but its own.

The burn rose from somewhere deeper than my throat and chest, and broke from my mouth in a heavy, ragged sob. My breath clutched and my whole body curled around anger and grief, and then the sobs were dragged from me in such rapid succession that I couldn’t withhold them any more. I collapsed against the door and let them come.

Dust floated quietly in a shaft of light against the grey dusk of the house. My limbs were heavy. I was lying on the floor. Tight, salty streaks were drying on my cheeks and in the corners of my eyes, and I tasted hot metal in my mouth.

I could stay here, I thought. The soldiers will come tomorrow. The skins are nearly empty. I could stay here until my water flows away.

Silence thickened on my skin. I wanted to give in to it. I closed my eyes.

Something moved in the dead, bone-dry hush.

If only that fly would stop buzzing, I thought. Then I could sleep.

But it didn’t: it kept thumping against the glass, unable to understand why it couldn’t break into the free air outside. I opened my eyes and saw its shadow bouncing in the narrow space between the window and the curtains covering it.

Something stirred deep in my memory: another fly, its heavy body glistening green and black, its wings whirring as it sought its way up and down a tight mesh wall, looking for an opening.

I turned my head and saw my seagrass bag, which I had left leaning against the wall below the clothes rack. Through its woven surface I discerned the rectangle of my notebook.

The memory unfolded further. The fly gave up on the mesh wall and landed on a table covered with tools and pieces of cable. The surface of the silver-coloured disc spilled with light as Sanja placed it in the dent of the past-machine and pressed the lid closed. The loudspeakers rustled. A stream of words that would not leave me alone drifted in the hot, still air.

My mind was trying to grasp something, an invisible strand that ran through years and ages and lives.