Memory of Water

CHAPTER FOUR

I lay on my bed and listened to the occasional slow clicking of the blazeflies against the glass walls of the lantern. There was no real need for the lantern, for the sun was still an orange-gold globe hanging in the horizon, heavy with late evening. The sky around it was translucent, and light trickled into my room through the insect net on the window. At the other end of the house I could hear my parents’ faint voices, their words hidden, stifled; obscured by the distance. I had heard them speak like this nearly every night since Major Bolin and Commander Taro had visited us, and afterwards my mother stayed up much later than she usually did. She tried to be quiet, but I heard her movements as she wandered between her study and the kitchen, and I saw the soft glow of her lantern through the crack under my door when she passed back and forth.

I was holding in my hand one of the old books that remained in the house, a tale of a journey through winter. I knew it by heart, and the words flowed elusive across the pages before my eyes, evading the grip of my thoughts. I wasn’t thinking of the story. I was thinking of the world in which it had been written.

I had often tried to imagine how winters had been in the past-world.

I knew the darkness: every autumn around Moonfeast, night met day in order to swap places and the year turned towards winter. During the six twilight months, large blaze lanterns burned in each room of the house at all hours, and solar lamps were lit beside them in the ink-deep black of the evening. From the top of the fell one could see the glow of the cities in the dark skies: the distant but clear halo of Kuoloyarvi in the east, where the watering areas and the sea lay, and the near-invisible spark of Kuusamo far in the southern horizon. The ground lost its scant greenness. The garden waited for the return of the sun, mute and bare.

Imagining the coldness, on the other hand, was hard. I was used to wearing more layers of clothing during the dark season and carrying peat from the drained swamp for the fireplaces and braziers once the solar power ran out, usually soon after the Midwinter celebrations. But even then the temperature outside rarely dropped below ten degrees, and on warm days I walked in sandals, just like in summer.

When I’d been six years old, I had read in a past-world book about snow and ice, and asked my mother what they were. She had picked one of her thick and serious-looking volumes from a shelf that was too tall for me at the time, shown me the pictures – white, shimmering, round and sharp shapes in strange landscapes, luminous like crystallised light – and told me that they were water that had taken a different form in low temperatures, in circumstances that could only be artificially produced in our world but that had once been a natural part of seasons and people’s lives.

‘What happened to them?’ I had asked. ‘Why don’t we have snow and ice anymore?’

My mother had looked at me and yet through me, as if trying to see across thoughts and words and centuries, into winters long gone.

‘The world changed,’ she had said. ‘Most believe that it changed on its own, simply claimed its due. But a lot of knowledge was lost during the Twilight Century, and there are those who think that people changed the world, unintentionally or on purpose.’

‘What do you believe?’ I had asked.

She had remained quiet for a long time and said then, ‘I believe the world wouldn’t be what it is today if it wasn’t for people.’

In my imagination snow glowed with faint, white light, as if billions of blazeflies had dropped their wings, covering the ground with them. The darkness turned more transparent and lighter to bear in my mind when I thought of it against the silvery-white shimmer, and I longed for the past-world I had never known. I pictured fishfires flashing on the sky above radiant snow, and sometimes in my dreams lost winters shone brighter than summer.

I once did an experiment. I filled a bucket with water and emptied all the ice I found in the freezer into it, sneaked it into my room and locked the door. I pushed my hand into the icy wrap of water, closed my eyes and summoned the feel of past-world winters about which I had read so many stories. I called for white sheets of snow falling from the sky and covering the paths my feet knew, covering the house that held the memory of cold in its walls and foundations. I imagined the snowfall coating the fells, changing their craggy surfaces into landscapes as soft as sleep and as ready to drown you. I called for a glass-clear crust of ice to enclose the garden, to stay the greenness of the blades of grass and stall the water in barrels and pipes. I imagined the sound frozen branches of trees would make, or stiff waterskins hanging from the rack, when wind beat them against each other.

I thought of water, ever-changing, and I thought of the suspended moment, the movement stopped in a snow crystal or a shard of ice. Stillness, silence. An end, or perhaps a beginning.

The blunt, heavy blade of the chilled slush cut into my bones. I opened my eyes. The day outside the window burned with a tall, bright flame, turning the earth slowly into dust and ashes. I pulled my hand out of the water. My skin was red and numb, and my fingers ached, but the rest of my body felt warm, and I was no closer to past-world winters. I couldn’t imagine a cold so comprehensive, so all-encompassing. Yet it had once existed, perhaps existed somewhere still. My mother had told me that in the midst of the Northern Ocean, where the day lasted six months and the night governed the other half of the year, where the bloodiest battles of the oil wars had taken place, there might still be small islets of ice, floating across the deserted sea, quiet and lifeless, carrying the memories of the past-world locked within, slowly giving in to water and melting into its embrace. They were the last remnants of the enormous ice cap that had once rested on the topmost peak of the world, like a large, unmoving animal guarding the continents.

As I grew older, I often sought more books on the tall shelves in my mother’s study, hungry for anything that might help me understand and imagine the lost winters. I spent days and weeks studying their unfamiliar maps and pictures and strange old calendars that measured time by the cycles of the sun, rather than by the moon. Many of them spoke of temperatures and seasons and weather, drowned land and oceans that had pushed their shorelines inland, and all of them spoke of water, but the books didn’t always agree on everything. I asked my mother once what this meant. She called herself a scientist. If scientists didn’t agree with each other, I asked, did this mean that nobody really knew? She thought about this for a while and then said that there were different ways of knowing, and sometimes it was impossible to say which way was the most reliable.

Little by little I learned that for all their diagrams and strange words and detailed explanations, my mother’s books did not tell everything. I wondered how snow would feel on my palm just before melting into water, or what ice would look like on a winter’s day in a sun-glazed landscape where the outlines of shadows are sharp-drawn, but those stories I had to seek in other books. I was disappointed with the tall bookshelf and its contents, which promised so much and yet ignored what was most important. What good was it to know the composition of a snow crystal, if one couldn’t resurrect the sensation of its coldness against one’s skin and the sight of its glimmer?

The conversation of my parents drifted into my ears louder than before. My mother was using her sensible voice and my father’s answers were concise. I got up to close the door. The wooden floor creaked under my footsteps. I could smell the scent of pines in the cooling air streaming through the window. A large horsefly was buzzing between the glass and the insect net.

Just as I was pulling the door closed, I heard the message-pod beep my own identification sound further down the hallway. I walked to the entrance, where the light of the pod was flashing red. To: Noria, the text on the screen read. I lifted the message-pod from the wall rack and placed my finger on the screen in order to log in. Sanja’s family name appeared: Valama. I was slightly surprised. Sanja seldom used the message-pod. Her family had only one shared account, and their pod had been bought secondhand. It was out of order more often than not despite Sanja’s persistent tuning attempts, or possibly partly as their result. I chose the Read option on the screen and waited for the message written in Sanja’s bouncy handwriting to appear. Come tomorrow, she wrote, and bring all the TDKs with you. Possible DISCOVERY!!

‘Discovery’ was one of the most important expressions in Sanja’s vocabulary. It usually meant she had come up with a use for something looted from the plastic grave. I wasn’t always entirely convinced that the uses she invented were in accord with the original purposes of the things, but I was nevertheless curious to see what she had discovered. I picked the pod-pen up from the wall rack, wrote Before noon in reply on the screen and sent the message.

I was closer to my parents’ voices now. They rattled behind the gap of the kitchen door. A faint smell of seaweed stew floated in the air. As I was turning to go back into my room, my mother’s words caught my attention.

‘… If you told them now, when it’s not late yet?’

I couldn’t make out my father’s murmured reply.

‘He’d see to it that we’d be left alone,’ my mother continued. ‘If the military learns about—’ She lowered her voice and the end of the sentence faded away.

I heard my father pacing back and forth in the kitchen. When he replied, his voice was tight and unflinching.

‘I only trust Bolin as much as one can trust a soldier.’

This was not unexpected. My father believed most army officers were thieves, and I didn’t think he was wrong. Yet my mother’s reply surprised me.

‘You trusted him more once,’ she said.

My father was quiet for a moment before answering, ‘That was a long time ago.’

I only had an instant to wonder about the meaning of those words before my mother said something in a soft voice, and then I caught my own name.

‘It is her I’m thinking about,’ my father replied. ‘Would you rather she became one of the tea masters of the cities? They’re nothing more than sell-outs, pets of the military. Besides, many still believe it’s against the teachings to let women practise as tea masters. She belongs here.’

‘She could learn another profession,’ my mother said.

What about me, is anybody asking what I want?

‘Are you suggesting that I break our family line of tea masters?’ My father’s voice was sharp with disbelief.

I couldn’t hear the words in my mother’s response, but her tone was harsher.

‘This isn’t really about Noria, or even the spring.’ My father sounded angry now. ‘This is about your research. You need their funding.’

I took a slow step closer to the kitchen door, taking care not to make a sound. This was getting interesting.

‘I’m not on their side. But perhaps I need them to believe that I am,’ my mother said. ‘The water resources of the Lost Lands haven’t been properly investigated since the disaster. This project, if it were to be successful—’ The words lost their shape again as she lowered her voice, and I only heard the end of the sentence: ‘… less important than your age-old beliefs and empty customs?’

My breathing sounded so loud in my ears that I was afraid they might hear it. I tried to exhale slowly and soundlessly.

‘They may seem empty to you, because you are not a tea master,’ my father said quietly, and every word fell heavy through the air. ‘Yet some things run so deep we can’t stop their flow. It’s ignorance to think that earth and water can be owned. Water belongs to no one. The military must not make it theirs, and therefore the secret must be kept.’

The silence stretched through the still, dusky air, between the two of them and me standing on the other side of the door. When my mother spoke again, there was no crack in her glass-clear voice.

‘If water belongs to no one,’ she said, ‘what right do you have to make the hidden waters yours exclusively, while whole families in the village risk building illegal water pipes in order to survive? What makes you different from the officers of New Qian, if you do what they would?’

My father said nothing. I heard my mother’s footsteps and turned hastily towards the message-pod as she walked through the kitchen door. When she saw me, she stopped in her tracks.

‘I was just reading my message and some pod-news,’ I said. Without looking back I turned, walked through the house into my room and closed the door behind me. Outside the sun was brushing the horizon among golden shreds of light on the smoke-blue sky. I had barely made it back to bed when the floorboards creaked in the hallway, and then there was a knock on my door. My mother peeked in, a questioning look on her face. I nodded to her and she stepped into the room.

‘There’s no need to pretend you didn’t hear us talking, Noria,’ she said and sighed. ‘Perhaps it’s a conversation we should have had with you in the first place. I sometimes don’t know.’ She seemed weary. ‘You know what we were talking about, don’t you?’ She pulled a wooden stool for herself from under my desk and sat down on it.

‘It was about the hidden spring,’ I said. She nodded.

‘The times are getting harsher,’ she said. ‘But whatever happens, whatever decisions we take with your father, you must always remember that we’re doing everything with your best interests in mind.’ I wasn’t looking at her. I pretended to be searching in my book for the paragraph I had been reading. The pages felt stiff and reluctant.

‘How would you feel about living in one of the cities?’ asked my mother. ‘In a place like New Piterburg, or Mos Qua, or even as far as Xinjing?’

I thought of the only two cities I had seen: Kuoloyarvi in the east, and Kuusamo in the south. I remembered my initial excitement at the crowded streets, vault-shaped, large buildings covered with solar panels and whole building tops turned to giant blaze lanterns with transparent glass walls and greenery inside. I had been fascinated by the Qianese market stalls on the narrow alleys selling strange foods and drinks, their strong, spicy and sometimes unpleasant scents perceptible from several blocks away. I had wandered with my mother through the Danish quarters of Kuusamo, buying small bags of coloured sweets to take home with me, and the day I had taken my Matriculation Test I had been treated by my father to a meal in an expensive restaurant with a selection of imported natural waters from around the world.

Excitement flared in me again, but then I remembered the high walls and checkpoints dividing the streets, the ever-present soldiers and curfews. I remembered the exhaustion that had settled on me after only a couple of days, the pressing need to get away from the crowds, the longing for space and silence and emptiness. I could see myself loving visiting the cities, and I could see myself loathing living in one.