Memory of Water

CHAPTER FIVE

I passed through the open gate of Sanja’s house and stopped the helicycle by the fence. Sanja’s mother Kira was standing in the middle of a patch of tall sunflowers, cutting a heavy flower head off the thick stem. At her feet there was a large basket, into which she had already gathered several flower heads, ripe with chubby seeds. Sanja’s little sister Minja was sitting on the sandy ground, trying to make a flat stone stay on top of three wooden blocks piled upon each other. The insect hood she had inherited from Sanja swayed on her head, oversized, and the stone kept slipping off her fingers time after time.

‘Noria!’ Minja said when she saw me. ‘Look!’ The flat stone rested forgotten in her hand for a moment as she pointed towards her construction site with her other hand. ‘A well.’

‘Pretty,’ I said, although the assembly did not resemble a well in any shape or form that I knew.

Kira turned around. The dust-coloured front of her dress was scattered with the yellow of dry sunflower petals. Her face was weary and pale in the frame of black hair that looked unwashed under the insect hood, and the clothes hung loose on her narrow figure, but she was smiling. At that moment she looked a lot like Sanja.

‘Hi, Noria,’ she said. ‘Sanja’s been waiting for you all morning.’

‘My mother baked a pile of amaranth cakes yesterday,’ I said and pulled a seagrass box out of my bag. It felt heavy in my hand. ‘She sent these. There’s no rush with returning the box.’

I caught the momentary stiffness on Kira’s face before her smile returned.

‘Thank you,’ she said and took the box. ‘Send my best to your mother. I’m afraid we don’t have anything to give back.’ She dropped the freshly-cut flower head on top of the pile in the basket. The lush, dark-green scent of the stems wafted in the air.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

Kira didn’t look at me when she took Minja’s hand. I felt awkward.

‘Sponge-bath time, Minjuska,’ she said. ‘You’ll get to play with the pirate ship if you’re good.’

Minja squealed, got up to her feet and dropped the flat stone on top of her well construction site. The blocks crashed to the ground, sending dust flying around them. Kira started towards the house, holding the cake box in one hand and Minja’s hand in the other.

‘See you later, Noria,’ she said. I waved goodbye to Minja, but she was only interested in the promise of the pirate ship.

I walked around the house. Through the insect-net walls of the workshop I saw Sanja sitting on a stool at the table and fiddling with something. When I knocked on one of the pillars supporting the roof, she looked up and waved her hand. I stepped inside, closed the door behind me and took off my insect hood.

The machine on the table in front of Sanja was the same she had found in the plastic grave a few weeks earlier. I recognised its angular shape, the dent embedded in the front panel, the strange numerical combinations and another dent on top. Two power cables ran from the machine to the solar generator sitting at the corner of the table.

‘Did you bring them?’ she asked. She had pulled hair back from her face with a worn scarf and two red spots were burning on her cheeks. I thought she must have woken early out of sheer excitement and fluttered restlessly around the workshop all morning. I placed my bag on the table and dug out my wooden box, from which I produced the TDKs.

‘I don’t understand what you want these for,’ I said.

Sanja disappeared under the table to rummage around. She emerged a moment later, holding a black plastic rectangle. I remembered seeing it a few weeks earlier when I had come to get the waterskins repaired. When she picked up a TDK from the table, I realised how much the objects resembled each other. The biggest difference was in their size.

‘I tried to think of what on earth this thing had been used for,’ she said. ‘I knew it must have been for listening to something, because it had loudspeakers, just like a message-pod – completely different size and much older, of course, but the basic principle is the same. As I was fashioning a new lid for that rectangular dent in the front, I noticed that there were two spindles inside it, and one of them turned. Those plastic blocks,’ she pointed at the larger rectangle, ‘were lying about next to it, and as I kept looking at them, it occurred to me that it was as if the dent was made for such a piece, with the spindles fitting in the cogged wheels in the middle. Even the shape was right … but the size wasn’t.’ She tapped with her finger the plastic block that bore the letters ‘VHS’. ‘It’s as if these were made for a similar but far bigger machine. Bloody bad luck: the right machine and the right changeable part, but wrong scale. But then I remembered you tend to keep all sorts of peculiar things, and I realised you had the TDKs!’

I began to understand what she was getting at. She smoothed one creased TDK tape as much as she could, knotted the shredded ends together and rolled the tape back inside the plastic shell until it no longer hung loose.

Then she tried the TDK in the dent of the loudspeaker machine.

‘It doesn’t fit,’ I said, disappointed, but Sanja turned the TDK upside down and it clicked into place.

‘Ha!’ she said, and I, too, felt a smile growing on my face.

Sanja closed the lid and turned the switch on the solar generator. A small, yellow-green light that made me think of glow-worms was lit on the top panel of the machine, next to the numerical combinations.

‘Now we just need to figure out what to do with all these switches,’ she said and pressed a button with a square on it. The lid on the front panel opened. Nothing else happened. Sanja closed the lid again and tried a button with two arrowheads on it. The machine began to rustle. Sanja brought her face close to the rectangular dent and her eyes narrowed as she stared at it, alert.

‘It’s rolling!’ she said. ‘Look!’

I peeked and saw that she was right: the machine was spinning the tape inside the plastic TDK so fast it was difficult to tell its direction. After a while it clicked and churned in place for a moment before clicking again and turning mute.

‘Did it break?’ I enquired cautiously. Sanja creased her brow.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Maybe there’s just no more tape left.’ She pressed another button with only one arrowhead on it. The machine began to buzz faintly. Then the loudspeakers crackled. Sanja jumped and turned to look at me.

‘Listen!’ she said.

The speakers rustled and hummed and then continued to hum.

And hummed some more.

The smile peeled off Sanja’s face like paint chipping in the sun while time stretched on between us, and the humming reached further, into another age and world whose secrets it wasn’t ready to reveal. Eventually Sanja pressed the square button again and the tape stopped. She opened the lid, took the TDK out and replaced it with another one after tying the broken ends of the tape together.

There was still nothing but warbled whirring from the loudspeakers.

She tried all three TDKs several times, spinning the tapes back and forth and turning the TDKs from one side to the other, but all we heard were ghosts of sounds sunken in time and distance, a near-silence that was more frustrating than complete soundlessness. If the tapes had once held something comprehensible, earth, air, rain and sun had worn the past-world echoes thin a long time ago.

Sanja stared at the machine and turned one of the TDKs in her hands.

‘I’m sure I’m right,’ she said. ‘These parts fit in the machine, and it translates sounds from them into the loudspeakers. The device and the TDKs must have been used exactly like this. If only we could find a TDK that still had sound left on it …’

Sanja’s fingers were tapping the plastic surface of the TDK. I heard Minja’s shrieks from inside the house, and Kira’s faint voice soothing Minja. I followed with my gaze a small black spider that was spinning a web in the corner above the solar generator.

‘Perhaps … perhaps there are more somewhere in the plastic grave?’ I offered. ‘Or maybe they weren’t meant to last in the first place. Past-world technology was fragile.’

Sanja’s expression changed, as if the outline of her face had become more focused. She lifted the square lid on the top panel of the machine and felt the round indentation under it with her fingers. Then she looked at my wooden storage box that was open on the worktop. Her eyes were fixed on the silver-coloured disc with a hole in the middle. The disc looked exactly the right size for the round indentation of the listening-device. Sanja looked at me and I saw my own thoughts on her face.

‘May I?’ she asked.

I nodded.

Sanja took the disc from the wooden box and fitted it into the indentation. It seemed made for the machine. The round knob in the middle of the indentation fit right into the hole in the middle of the disc. Sanja pressed the disc into it, and it clicked lightly into place. She closed the lid and pressed the arrow button. Through the plastic window I saw the disc starting to turn.

We waited.

There was no sound from the loudspeakers.

I saw Sanja’s expression and felt disappointed myself. Then she reached out her hand to fiddle with the switches on the top panel. The first one she touched caused the glow-worm light to go off and the rotation of the disc to slow down, so she switched it back to the original position. Another one did nothing at all. When she moved the third switch, the loudspeakers gave such a loud crackle we both jumped. It was followed by a short stretch of silence, and then a male voice which said clearly in our language:

‘This is the log of the Jansson expedition, day four. Southern Trøndelag, near the area previously known as the city of Trondheim.’

While the voice went on to record the day, month and year, Sanja cheered and I laughed. The voice continued:

‘We started the day by measuring the microbe levels of the Dovrefjell waters. The results are not complete yet, but it seems that there is no discrepancy with the Jotunheimen results. If this turns out to be the case, our estimations about the spontaneous biological recovery and reconstruction process taking place in the area have been far more modest than the reality. Tomorrow we are going to plant purifying bacteria in the waters and then we’ll continue towards Northern Trøndelag …’

The day outside grew into a thick, burning shell that surrounded the workshop, and horseflies climbed on the insect web walls, and we listened to the voice of the past-world. At times it would wither almost entirely, jump a little, or get stuck, until the sound found its flow again. Sanja didn’t stop it, and didn’t try to skip the boring bits. It had waited on the disc through generations. It was a part of a story that had nearly been lost in the plastic grave. We didn’t speak, and I don’t know what Sanja was thinking; but I thought of silence and years and water that ran ceaselessly, wearing everything away. I thought of the inexplicable chain of events that had brought this voice from a strange landscape and a lost world into this dry morning, into our ears that understood its words, yet comprehended little.

The voice spoke of exploration of waters, microbe measurements, bacterial growth, landforms. There was an occasional lengthy break in the speech, and we began to discern separate sections. At the beginning of each one the voice announced a new date: the recording moved from day four to day five and so on. After day nine the voice stopped altogether. We waited for a continuation, but it didn’t come. Minutes passed. We looked at each other.

‘Too bad there wasn’t more,’ Sanja said. ‘And too bad it wasn’t more exciting.’

‘I’m sure my mum would disagree,’ I said. ‘She’s crazy about all sorts of scientific—’

The speakers made a loud noise. We stiffened, listening. A female voice spoke now.

‘The others don’t think I should do this,’ it said. ‘But they don’t need to know.’ The woman paused and cleared her throat. Then: ‘Dear listener,’ she continued. ‘If you’re military, you may rest assured that I did everything in my power in order to destroy these recordings instead of letting you get your hands on them. The fact that you’re hearing this probably means I failed miserably.’ The voice took a moment to think. ‘But that won’t happen until later. Right now I have a story to tell and you’re not going to like it one bit. I know what you’ve done. What you’re going to do. And if I have anything to say about it, the whole world will know what really happened, because—’

The talk was cut unexpectedly short. The disc continued to turn, but now the past-world voice was irrevocably gone. The recording was over.

Sanja and I stared at each other.

‘What was that?’ I asked.

Sanja tried to move the recording back and forward, she even tried the other side of the disc, but it was clear we had heard everything there was to hear.

‘What year did the man mention at the beginning?’ I asked.

Neither of us had paid attention to the year. Sanja started the disc from the beginning again. As we listened, I could see on her face that she had realised what I had. Without giving any more thought to it, we had imagined that the disc was from the past-world.

We had been wrong.

‘It’s from the Twilight Century,’ I said.

‘It can’t be for real,’ Sanja claimed, but she sounded unconvinced. ‘It’s just a story, like one of your books, or those suspense stories that one can buy to listen to on the message-pod, one chapter at a time.’

‘Why would it have an hour of dull science stuff first, and the interesting bit only after that?’

Sanja shrugged.

‘Maybe it’s just badly written. Those pod-stories aren’t always that great, either. My dad has a few.’

‘I don’t know.’ I was trying to think feverishly where in the plastic grave I had found the disc.

Sanja took the disc from the machine with determination, placed it in the wooden box and snapped the lid closed.

‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘We’ll never know what that woman had to say. At least we got the machine to work.’

But I was thinking of unknown winters and lost tales, I was thinking of the familiar language and the strange words that were left smouldering in my mind. I thought of rain and sun falling on the plastic grave and slowly gnawing everything away. And of what might still remain.

I was almost certain I could remember where the disc had come from.

‘We could look for more discs where we found that one,’ I suggested. I was getting excited about the idea. ‘We could try to make the story whole. Even if it’s just a story, wouldn’t you still want to know how it ends?’

‘Noria—’

‘We could go for all day tomorrow, take some food with us and—’

‘Noria,’ Sanja interrupted me. ‘You might not have anything better to do than serve tea and poke around the plastic grave,’ she said. ‘But I do.’

Somewhere inside the house Minja had started to cry.

The distance had grown between us unexpectedly. We had known each other since we were learning to walk on the village square, holding our mothers’ hands as we took our first tentative steps. If someone had asked, I would have told them Sanja was closer to me than anyone else, save for my parents. And yet she sometimes withdrew into her shell, turned away from me, slipped out of my reach, like a reflection or an echo: a mere trace of what was only a moment ago, gone already, beyond words and touches. I didn’t understand these moments, and I couldn’t deny them.

She was far away from me now, far as hidden waters, far as strange winters.

‘I have to go,’ I said.

I shoved the wooden box into my bag. The feeling that we had found a secret passageway through time and space into an unknown world had faded away. The day had burned it to cinders.

I pulled the insect hood over my head and stepped out into the blazing heat.

On my way home the strap of the bag gnawed on my shoulder and I was weary. Sweat trickled down to my neck and my back, and my hair clung to my skin under the insect hood. The words recorded on the disc were bothering me. The Jansson expedition. It sounded like something out of my mother’s old books. And the woman from across all this time – unexpected, hidden in the travel log – had considered her story so important that she had dictated it in secret and been ready to destroy the whole recording rather than letting the military have it.

I wanted to know what had meant so much to her.

I could see from far away that there were unfamiliar transport carriages outside our house. I wondered if we had received tea guests on short notice, and hoped this wasn’t the case. My father hated visits for which he had no time to prepare well, and was cranky for days afterwards.

I turned the helicycle towards the woods from the road, and I tried to see between the tree trunks into the garden.

Breath curled into a knot between my throat and chest when I saw the blue military uniforms. There weren’t just one or two, but many more.

A familiar helicarriage was parked outside the gate under the seagrass roof. When I came to the front yard, I saw approximately ten soldiers who were carrying complex-looking machinery to and fro. Some of the instruments reminded me of pictures I had seen in my mother’s books. A makeshift fence had been raised around the teahouse, and in front of it a soldier with a sabre hanging from his belt kept watch. My parents stood on the veranda of our house, and a tall soldier wearing an official’s uniform was talking to them, his back turned towards me. When he heard my footsteps, he turned and I recognised the face behind the insect hood.

‘Good afternoon, Miss Kaitio. It is a pleasure to meet you again,’ Commander Taro said and waited for me to bow.

CHAPTER SIX

They called it a routine investigation, but we knew there was nothing routine-like about it. Routine investigations were carried out by two soldiers and they lasted a few hours at most. Instead, a highly ranked official stayed on our grounds for nearly two weeks with six soldiers, two of whom took turns to guard the teahouse while four were exploring the house and its surroundings. They walked carefully planned, slow routes from one end of the garden to the other, back and forth, examining each centimetre. They carried flat display screens in their hands. The multicoloured patterns that took shape on them bore a slight resemblance to maps, with their ragged edges and varying, overlapping forms.

From my mother’s books I had a vague idea of how the machines worked. They sent radio waves to the ground that the screen interpreted, with the patterns indicating the density and humidity of the soil. The soldiers also carried different drilling and measuring devices. One of them, a woman whose expression I rarely saw change, walked with two long metal wires crossed in her hands. Occasionally, she would stop with her eyes closed, then stare at the wires for a long while, as if waiting for something. My parents told me that the teahouse was isolated and an intensive search was being executed there because the metal rod of the wire woman had on the first day twitched to point at the ground on the veranda.

My father stared sadly at the plank pile growing in front of the teahouse while the soldiers were taking the floor apart.

‘It will never be the same again,’ he muttered, his lips tense. ‘Wood like that is hard to find nowadays, and the expertise for building a teahouse doesn’t exist in any old village.’

In those days a silence wavered between my parents, dense with stirring, well-hidden fear and nameless, unspoken things. It was like a calm surface of water, extreme and unnatural: a single word dropped on it, a single shifting stone at the bottom would change it, create a circle and yet another circle, until the reflection was warped, unrecognisable with the force of the movement. We avoided talking about any but the most everyday things, because the presence of the soldiers grew invisible walls between us that we had no courage to shatter.

In the evenings I did not go to bed until I had privately checked that the soldiers hadn’t taken their screen-devices towards the fell, and in the mornings my heart was thick and heavy in my throat when I woke up to the thought that they might have expanded their search outside the house and garden. I couldn’t eat breakfast until I was certain this wasn’t the case. In my dreams I saw the waters hidden in stone, and in the middle of the night I would wake to the strangling feeling in my chest that somehow, impossibly, the sound of the spring carried all the way from the fell to the house. I listened to the unmoving silence for a long time, until sleep sank me again.