Emmi Itäranta - Memory of Water

Everything is ready now.

Each morning for seven weeks I have swept the fallen leaves from the stone slabs that form the path to the teahouse, and forty-nine times I have chosen a handful among them to be scattered on the stones again, so the path wouldn’t look too much like it had been swept. That was one of the things my father always insisted on.

Sanja told me once the dead don’t need pleasing. Perhaps they don’t. Perhaps I do. Sometimes I don’t know the difference. How could I, when they are in my blood and bones, when all that is left of them is me?

I haven’t dared to go to the spring in seven weeks. Yesterday I turned on the tap in the house and held the mouth of the waterskin to its metal. I spoke to it in pretty words and ugly words, and I may have even screamed and wept, but water doesn’t care for human sorrows. It flows without slowing or quickening its pace in the darkness of the earth, where only stones will hear.

The pipe gave a few drops, perhaps a spoonful, into my waterskin.

I know what it means.

This morning I emptied the rest of the water from the skin into the cauldron, brought some dried peat from the shed into the teahouse and placed the firestarter next to the hearth. I thought of my father, whose wishes I had violated, and my mother, who didn’t see the day I became a tea master.

I thought of Sanja. I hoped she was already where I was going.

A guest whose face is not unfamiliar is walking down the path, offering me a hand I’m ready to take. The world will not spin slower or faster when we have passed through the gate together.

What remains is light on water, or a shifting shadow.

Water is the most versatile of all elements. So my father told me the day he took me to the place that didn’t exist. While he was wrong about many things, he was right about this, so I still believe. Water walks with the moon and embraces the earth, and it isn’t afraid to die in fire or live in air. When you step into it, it will be as close as your own skin, but if you hit it too hard, it will shatter you. Once, when there were still winters in the world, cold winters, white winters, winters you could wrap yourself in and slip on and come in to warm from, you could have walked on the crystallized water that was called ice. I have seen ice, but only small, man-made lumps. All my life I have dreamed of how it would be to walk on frozen sea.

Death is water’s close companion. The two cannot be separated, and neither can be separated from us, for they are what we are ultimately made of: the versatility of water, and the closeness of death. Water has no beginning and no end, but death has both. Death is both. Sometimes death travels hidden in water, and sometimes water will chase death away, but they go together always, in the world and in us.

This, too, I learned from my father, but I now believe I would have learned it without him just as well.

I can pick my own beginning.

Perhaps I will pick my own end.

The beginning was the day when my father took me to the place that didn’t exist.

It was a few weeks after I had taken my Matriculation Tests, compulsory for all citizens the year they came of age. While I had done well, there was never any question that I would remain in my current apprenticeship with my father instead of continuing my studies in the city. It was a choice I had felt obliged to make, and therefore, perhaps, not really a choice. But it seemed to make my parents happy, and it didn’t make me miserable, and those were the things that mattered at the time.

We were in our garden behind the teahouse, where I was helping my father hang empty waterskins to dry. A few of them were still draped on my arm, but most were already hanging upside down from the hooks on the metal rack. Sunlight filtered in veils through their translucent surfaces. Slow drops streaked their insides before eventually falling on the grass.

‘A tea master has a special bond with water and death,’ my father said to me as he examined one of the skins for cracks. ‘Tea isn’t tea without water, and without tea a tea master is no tea master. A tea master devotes his life to serving others, but he only attends the tea ceremony as a guest once in his lifetime, when he feels his death approaching. He orders his successor to prepare the last ritual, and after he has been served the tea, he waits alone in the teahouse until death presses a hand on his heart and stops it.’

My father tossed the waterskin on the grass where a couple of others were already waiting. Mending the skins didn’t always work out, but they were expensive, like anything made of durable plastic, and it was usually worth a try.

‘Has anyone ever made a mistake?’ I asked. ‘Did anyone think their death was coming, when it wasn’t time yet?’

‘Not in our family,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard of a past-world master who ordered his son to prepare the last ritual, settled to lie down on the teahouse floor and walked into his house two days later. The servants thought he was a ghost and one of them had a heart attack. The tea master had mistaken the servant’s death for his own. The servant was cremated and the master lived for another twenty years. But it doesn’t happen often.’

I slapped a horsefly that had landed on my arm. It darted off just in time with a loud buzz. The headband of my insect hood felt tight and itchy, but I knew taking it off would attract too many insects.

‘How do you know when your death is coming?’ I asked.

‘You know,’ my father said. ‘Like you know you love, or like in a dream you know that the other person in the room is familiar, even if you don’t know their face.’ He took the last skins from me. ‘Go and get two blaze lanterns from the teahouse veranda, and fill them for me.’

I wondered what he needed the lanterns for, because it was only early afternoon, and this time of the year even the nights didn’t drown the sun in the horizon. I went around the teahouse and took two lanterns from under the bench. A stiff-winged blazefly was stirring at the bottom of one. I shook it into the gooseberry bushes. Blazeflies liked gooseberries best, so I kept shaking the branches above the lanterns until there was a handful of sleepily crawling flies inside each. I closed the lids and took the lanterns to my father.

He had lifted an empty waterskin on his back. His expression was closed behind the insect hood. I handed the lanterns to him, but he only took one of them.

‘Noria, it’s time I showed you something,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’

We walked across the dried swamp spreading behind our house to the foot of the fell and then up the slope. It wasn’t a long walk, but sticky sweat glued the hair onto my scalp. When we reached the height where the boulder garden began, I took my insect hood off. The wind was so strong that there weren’t as many horseflies and midges here as around the house.

The sky was pure and still. The sun felt tight on my skin. My father had stopped, perhaps to choose his route. I turned to look down. The tea master’s house with its garden was a speckle of floating green in the faded landscape of burned-out grass and bare stone. The valley was scattered with the houses of the village, and on the other side rose the Alvinvaara fell. Far beyond its slopes, where the watering areas were, loomed a stretch of dark-green fir forest. Yet further that way was the sea, but it couldn’t be seen from here even on bright days. In the other direction was the slowly decaying trunk tangle of the Dead Forest. In my childhood there had still been occasional birches that didn’t grow higher than to my waist, and once I had picked a whole handful of lingonberries there.