Memory of Water A Novel by Emmi Itaranta

Author:Emmi Itaranta
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2014-03-10T22:00:00+00:00

The pungent smell of the plastic grave floated towards me. I passed a place where people were trying to fill waterskins and buckets from the shallow, murky-watered brook that ran near the edge of the grave. My parents had always warned me to never drink from it. They said the water was contaminated by the toxins of the grave and would make me sick. Villagers had tended to avoid it in the past, but lately whenever I came here I saw someone trying to draw from it. I had once told an elderly woman the water was not good for drinking.

‘What would you have me drink, then?’ she had said. ‘Air, or sand, perhaps?’

That was the last time I had spoken to anyone at the brook.

I nearly stopped when I recognised a red-lipped face behind the insect hood among the handful of water-seekers. Ninia was crouched at the edge of the brook, filling a transparent skin with yellow-brown water. There really was something cockroach-like about her stubby figure, brown clothes and laboured movements, but just as this image took shape in my mind, I also felt a stab of shame. What is she doing but trying to survive as best she can? What is any one of us doing but that? I guessed Jukara’s employers weren’t paying quite as well as she had suggested. She turned her face away from me, and I couldn’t tell if she had not seen me or if she chose to pretend she hadn’t.

I walked past without stopping.

In the ever-changing, eye-betraying terrain of the plastic grave it was hard to discern landmarks, but I knew my way. Near the centre of the grave concrete elements twice as tall as me stuck out of the rubbish mountain. I stopped next to them and looked towards the edge of the grave, until I spotted an ancient, rusted-through carcass of a large past-world vehicle. The places where the wheels had been were still visible, as was the dead dashboard, but the seats and all still-usable metal parts were long gone. No one seemed to ever move this piece of dead weight, because it would have required the strength of at least five people, and there didn’t seem to be much to find in this corner of the grave. I walked to the skeleton of the vehicle.

Out of habit I pushed my hand through a hole in the dashboard and felt around until I reached the smooth surface of a plastic box approximately the size of a saucer. I didn’t need to take it out: it was enough to know that it was there. It was one of the time capsules Sanja and I had hidden in our favourite places when we were younger. They contained things like pebbles, dried flowers, homemade seagrass wristbands and treasures found in the plastic grave. We had always painted the date on the inside of the lid of each capsule, then dipped our fingers in paint and pressed our fingerprints next to it.

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